"The tusks vary in length up to six feet and over, and are in themselves magnificent specimens of ivory, speaking eloquently of the peaceful life which the elephants must once have lived, in order to produce such tusks. The ornamentation to which the large tusks have been subjected while preserving their form is in two grades: the one is severely plain, and the other extremely ornate and decorative in effect. The former consists of a series of three to five incised bands of a plait pattern, a design very common in West Africa, placed at intervals, the bands diminishing in width as they approach the tip of the tusk. The embellishment is consequently plain, but elegant, and does not call for further remark.
"The other grade consists in covering the whole tusk with a succession of boldly carved grotesque figures—human, animal, and symbolic—giving the tusk a rich embroidered-like look, the thick ends being finished off with a suitable diamond pattern belt and the tip finished with an equally appropriate series of carvings in the shape of a mascle studded foolscap, or a capsule supported by elongated cowries. The back appears to be cut to a uniform depth, and in spite of the multiplicity of figures there is neither overcrowding nor overloading."
There is another piece of carved ivory which appears to Ling Roth to be a piece of symbolic sculpture and which was probably used as a scepter. Roth says of this:
"The execution of the detail is rough—more rugged perhaps than the carved tusks—nevertheless there is considerable originality of design, and it is especially remarkable as showing an earlier stage of the application of hammered metal to carved work."[19]
Among the carved works in ivory are many splendidly carved armlets. Ling Roth gives a description of one which is particularly interesting as showing the ingenuity of the Negro artisan.
"While at first sight it appears to depict only one carved armlet, it is really two armlets, one being carved inside the other out of the same piece of ivory with only the space of a knife-blade thickness between them. When moved, the two armlets rattle against each other. The ornamentation consists of four figures: a king or chief belonging to the outer armlet, and four sets of two hands placed between the human figures belonging to the inner armlet. The whole shows skill and ingenuity on the part of the artist who planned this difficult piece of work, so remarkable from a technical point of view. But although the beauty of design is not its chief attraction, it is nevertheless a piece of work which can not fail to be admired from the artistic standpoint also."
Another object of interest described by Ling Roth is a highly ornate fragment on an article which originally had the shape of a brass sistrum, consisting of two bell forms, a large and a small one, grafted onto one handle. Its delicate treatment is described as differing somewhat from the rugged workmanship of the objects above described, but it is said to err in its excessive elaboration.
"Yet there are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an essential like the bust of the Negro, all of which betoken a fair amount of artistic feeling. The craftsman who probably designed execution of the smallest detail."[20]
It is the opinion of collectors that there existed in Benin at one time a very large amount of carved objects in wood, but, unfortunately, most of these must have been destroyed when the British burned the city in 1897. Very little of such work, therefore, has survived. What it may have been like cannot be definitely said, yet some hint might be gained from a few specimens that escaped the fire, though these specimens are probably modern in their execution.
One such object is a wooden casket in the form of a bullock's head, with two hands jutting out of the forehead and grasping the horns of the animal. The casket is supported by a pedestal of appropriate size and is decorated to represent cowries. "The ears of the bullock's head are covered with embossed brass work, and there are strips of brass of scroll pattern running down the bullock's face and fastened on with small brass staples."[21]
In this connection it might be mentioned that there are some carved coconut shell in which the Negro carver often expressed his ingenuity. These represent in their carving a varied number of forms, including human beings, animals and plants. The interest in these carvings, as Roth tells us, "lies in their demonstration of the adaptability of the native to perform creditably on a material very different from ivory. Fair ingenuity is displayed in the manner in which the figures are grouped on a confined surface without overcrowding. In fact, the feature of the work is the careful distribution and general freedom of treatment. The details of the carvings are throughout in low relief, remarkably clean and neat and of a uniform depth."[22]