Register a SNAP EBT card with Amazon


Try Amazon Fresh



Umayyad or Abbasid Ivory Plaques, mid-8th century AD, Humaymah, Jordan


FIGURE 3. The Humaymah ivory plaques, each approximately 30 x 10 x .03-.05 cm. See: Rebecca Foote, “An Abbasid Residence at al-Humayma,” in Byzantium and Islam. Age of Transition 7th -9th Century, ed. H.C. Evans and B. Ratliff (New Haven & London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 221-23. Photo courtesy of Rebecca Foote.

A more remarkable find was made in the late 1990s at the Byzantine/Umayyad site of Humaymah, some 60 kilometres north of Aqaba. Here, remnants of three furniture panels with ornately carved depictions of male figures in military dress were excavated and identified as elephant ivory, dated to the mid-8th c. C.E. (Fig. 3).26
Source: p.6, "From Tusk to Town. Ivory Trade and Craftsmanship along the Red Sea" by Ashley Coutu, Kristoffer Damgaard in Studies in Late Antiquity, Vol. 3 No. 4, Winter 2019; (pp. 508-546)

Back to Umayyad or Abbasid Ivory Plaques, mid-8th century AD, Humaymah, Jordan