Ivory Furniture Plaque: Female Sphinx with Hathor Style Curls in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August 2008

Furniture Plaque: Female Sphinx with Hathor Style Curls
Ivory (hippopotamus)
Central Anatolia, probably Acemhoyuk
Old Assyrian Colony period, 1870-1740 BC

Accession # 36.70.11

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.

and

Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Colony Period

In the early second millennium BC, Assyrians established a trade route from Ashur in northern Mesopotamia to central Anatolia. At cities like Kultepe (ancient Kanesh), Acemhoyuk, and Bogazkoy (ancient Hattusha), they created market centers, or karums, where they exchanged valuable tin and textiles for silver. Despite periods of destruction, this long-distance network survived for almost two hundred years.

A group of hippopotamus-ivory carvings attributed to Acemhoyuk and give to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1930s demonstrates the combination of local and foreign traditions found in material excavated at the trading centers of central Anatolia. The ivories exhibit Egyptian and Near Eastern characteristics that persisted over several centuries in the art of the following Hittite period.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art plaque.