[400] As soon as these ivories arrived at the British Museum, the learned keeper of the Oriental Antiquities was struck by their Egyptian character. A paper which he published at the time may be consulted with profit (Birch, Observations on two Egyptian cartouches, and some other ivory ornaments found at Nimroud, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, second series, vol. iii. pp. 151–177.)
[401] Layard, Discoveries, p. 195.
[402] Layard, Monuments, first series, plate 24.
[403] Ibid. plates 55 and 56. In the second stage of reliefs, counting from the bottom.
[404] Among the ivories in case C of the Nimroud Gallery there is a kind of blackish ivory egg, which may have served as the knob of a sceptre. In an oval crowned by the uræus between two feathers, we find an inscription which appears to be Phœnician. It has been read as the name of a king of Cyprus. Loftus, in a letter addressed to the Athenæum (1855, p. 351), speaks of other ivories from the south-western palace at Nimroud. They are the remains of a throne, and were found in a deposit of wood ashes. He says there was a shaft formed by figures placed back to back and surmounted by a capital shaped like a flower. There was also, according to the same authority, a Phœnician inscription.
[405] See Vol. I., pp. 299–302.
[406] My researches were not confined to the ivories in the cases. I also went through the thousands of pieces in the closed drawers which are not shown, in some instances because of their broken condition, in others because they are merely duplicates of better specimens in the selection exhibited.
[407] The feet found by Sir H. Layard at Nimroud must, as he conjectured, have belonged to one of these tripods (Discoveries, pp. 178–179).
[408] We should also mention another vase, shaped like the muzzle of a lion, which was used to take liquids out of a large crater set upon a stand (Botta, Monument de Ninive, vol. i. plate 76. See also M. Botta’s plate 162, where the chief examples from the bas-reliefs are figured).
[409] Layard, Discoveries, p. 197.