Panel with a tree pattern ca. 8th century B.C. Assyrian This piece of ivory furniture 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 was probably part of a bed or couch, judging from the long strips of ivory inlay associated with it, which are also in the Metropolitan Museums collection (59.107.2a, b). Nineteen other similar furniture pieces, probably chair backs, were stacked in orderly rows in the same storage room. They are rare examples of ancient ivory furniture still in its original form; usually, the wooden frames holding the ivory pieces together have disintegrated by the time they are excavated, but since these chairs and couches were buried after the sack of the Assyrian palaces in 612 B.C., their arrangement was preserved. Set in a modern wood frame, this piece combines plain flat strips of ivory with three vertical rows of plant forms, each border