Search

A. Introduction Ivory carving is the craft of creating objects and mechanisms from animal tooth materials, specifically elephant dentine from the front upper tusks of the Asian and African elephants, which are rooted in oval bone recesses in the upper jaw. African and Asian ivories were both traded and worked in Byzantium, but African was preferred, since the Asian elephant has smaller tusks and the female only has embryonic tusks (‘tushes’), which are of limited value in manufacturing. Ivory has long been high…