Champlevé furniture or cosmetic box plaque with a griffin and a floral frieze ca. 9th-8th century B.C. Assyrian This slightly curved, rectangular plaque depicts a sun-disc crowned griffin, a fantastic animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body and tail of a lion. The griffin stands on its hind legs, resting its left foreleg on a papyrus flower and raising its right foreleg. Found in a large storeroom at Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign, this piece was probably used to decorate a round cosmetic box or as an inlay for a piece of wooden furniture. It is carved in the champlevé technique, characteristic of the Phoenician style, in which recessed spaces cut into the ivory would have been filled with colored inlays. Traces of Egyptian blue, a vibrant artificial pigment made of silica, lime, copper, and alkali, survive in the recesses cut for the griffins body and the petal