Openwork furniture plaque with winged sphinx ca. 9th-8th century B.C. Assyrian This ivory plaque was found in a storage room in Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign. It depicts a sphinx, a fantastic creature with the body of a winged lion and a human head, in profile facing right. The sphinx wears an Egyptian-style headdress called a nemes headcloth, topped by the Egyptian double crown. A patterned apron hangs down over the sphinxs chest. Parts of the wings and crown, and all of the tail, have broken off the delicate plaque, which is carved in the openwork technique, in which the background is cut away and remaining elements are carved in the round. A tenon projects from the bottom edge of the frame and would have been inserted into a slot in a separate frame, probably as part of a piece of furniture. Carved ivory pieces such as this were widely used in the production of elite furnit