Decorative Plaque: Man; and Griffin in Combat (900–800 BCE): Art, History and Details

Decorative Plaque: Man; and Griffin in Combat (900–800 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This small plaque was executed in the Phoenician style with symmetrical compositions, elongated figural proportions, and Egyptian subjects and motifs. Examples have been found throughout the Middle East, but thousands come from Nimrud where most were excavated in the storerooms of a military arsenal built by King Shalmaneser II (858-824 bc). When the Nimrud palace was sacked in the 7th century bc, these ivories were thrown into a well, where Sir Max Mallowan (the husband of Agatha Christie) discovered them in 1951. The monumental wall relief (1943.246) was found at the same Assyrian palace at Nimrud.

Object facts

• Title: Decorative Plaque: Man; and Griffin in Combat
• Date: 900–800 BCE
• Culture: Phoenicia, Iraq, Nimrud
• Type: Ivory
• Technique: ivory
• Dimensions: Overall: 6.5 x 3.9 cm (2 9/16 x 1 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Near Eastern Art
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1968.45

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1968." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 56, no. 1 (1969).
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1991.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.