Ladies Entertained by Dancers (1–200 CE): Art, History and Details

Ladies Entertained by Dancers (1–200 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This ivory carving was made to sheath wooden furniture made in India for trade along the Silk Road, which stretched from Rome to China. Indian ivory-faced furnishings--along with lacquer boxes from China and painted glass from Rome--were found in an extraordinary deposit of luxury goods at a site called Begram. The wood on which the ivory and lacquer were affixed has long disintegrated, and only the small pieces remain.

Object facts

• Title: Ladies Entertained by Dancers
• Date: 1–200 CE
• Culture: Afghanistan, Begram, Kushan period
• Type: Ivory
• Technique: ivory
• Dimensions: Overall: 7.5 x 17 cm (2 15/16 x 6 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1985.103

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hackin, Joseph. Nouvelles recherches archéologiques à Begram, ancienne Kâpicî, 1939-1940; rencontre de trois civilisations, Inde, Grèce, Chine. Paris: Impr. nationale, 1954.
• Czuma, Stanislaw J., and Rekha Morris. Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.
• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1985." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (1986): 26-71.

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.