Inlays

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These three pieces of carved shell take the form of a slightly curved disk decorated with a cutout crescent and smaller disk. Traces of a silver band are visible around the outer rim of one piece. Found in a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store luxury goods, these disks may have been inlaid as decoration into elaborately decorated furniture made of carved ivory. Ivory plaques, strips, and other furniture elements were often inlaid into a wooden frame using joinery techniques and glue, and could be overlaid with gold foil or inlaid with pieces such as these disks to create dazzling contrasts in color and luster. When the royal buildings at Nimrud were sacked during the fall of Assyria in 614 and 612 B.C., looters stripped the gold inlay from the ivory furniture and left the broken pieces behind, so how these disks were originally used is not known.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.

Metropolitan Museum of Art