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IVORY IN CHINA

BY

BERTHOLD LAUFER
Curator of Anthropology

Anthropology
Leaflet 21

FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
CHICAGO

1925

The Anthropological Leaflets of Field Museum are designed to
give brief, non-technical accounts of some of the more interesting
beliefs, habits and customs of the races whose life is illustrated
in the Museum's exhibits.

LIST OF ANTHROPOLOGY LEAFLETS ISSUED TO DATE

1. The Chinese Gateway $ .10

2. The Philippine Forge Group 10

3. The Japanese Collections 25

4. New Guinea Masks 25

5. The Thunder Ceremony of the Pawnee 25

6. The Sacrifice to the Morning Star by the

Skidi Pawnee .10

7. Purification of the Sacred Bundles, a Ceremony

of the Pawnee 10

8. Annual Ceremony of the Pawnee Medicine Men . .10

9. The Use of Sago in New Guinea 10

10. Use of Human Skulls and Bones in Tibet ... .10

11. The Japanese New Year's Festival, Games

and Pastimes 25

12. Japanese Costume . . . . * 25

13. Gods and Heroes of Japan 25

14. Japanese Temples and Houses 25

15. Use of Tobacco among North American Indians . .25

16. Use of Tobacco in Mexico and South America . . .25

17. Use of Tobacco in New Guinea 10

18. Tobacco and Its Use in Asia 25

19. Introduction of Tobacco into Europe 25

20. The Japanese Sword and Its Decoration 25

21. Ivory in China 75

D. C. DA VIES

DIRECTOR
FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
CHICAGO, U. S. A.

Field Museum of Natural History

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Chicago. 1926

Leaflet Number 21

Ivory in China

Ivory occupies a very prominent place in the art
of the Far East, and Chinese carvers in ivory have
always stood in the front rank of their craft. But
those who have hitherto written on the subject have
merely treated it as an art industry, extolling Chinese
mastery of technique, skill in execution, and grace of
design. Correct as this judgment may be, it is based
on more or less modern productions which are dis-
tinguished for technical ingenuity rather than for ar-
tistic merits. The archaeology of ivory and the older
real works of art created in this substance have almost
wholly been neglected. The object of the present study
is to fill this gap, to set forth the importance of ivory
in the early antiquity of China, to trace the sources
of supply and the development of the ivory-trade, and
to interpret the art of ivory in its relation to Chinese
life and culture. This essay is divided into five chap-
ters dealing with the elephant in China and the trade
in elephant ivory, folk-lore of the mammoth and trade
in mammoth ivory, trade in walrus and narwhal
ivory, ivory substitutes, and objects made of ivory. It
is occasioned by a collection of ivory carvings made
by me in China in 1923 (Captain Marshall Field Ex-
pedition) and recently placed on exhibition, and may
serve as a guide to this collection.

2 Field Museum of Natural History

THE ELEPHANT IN CHINA AND TRADE IN
ELEPHANT IVORY
The fact that the elephant was known to the an-
cient Chinese may come as a surprise to many readers.
The former existence of the animal on Chinese soil
is well authenticated by linguistic, pictographic, his-
torical, and archaeological evidence. Not only have the
Chinese an old, indigenous word for the pachyderm,
but they also possess this word in common with the
eastern branch of the family of peoples to which they
belong and the languages of which are closely related.
The ancient Chinese designation of the elephant was
dziang or ziang; in the modern dialects of the north
it is sicmg, in Shanghai ziang, in Canton tsong, in
Hakka siong, in Fu-kien ch'iong. In Burmese we cor-
respondingly have ch'ang, in Siamese chang, in Shan
tsan or sang, in Ahom tyang, in Mo-so tso or tson, in
An garni Naga (Assam) tsu. This fact of language
warrants the conclusion that all these tribes must have
been acquainted with the animal from ancient times
and even in a prehistoric period when they still formed
a homogeneous stock. The Tibetans, akin to the Chi-
nese in language, are outside of the pale of this devel-
opment and designate the elephant as the "great bull"
or the "bull of Nepal" (in the same manner as the
Romans when they first saw elephants in the war with
Pyrrhus spoke of "Lucanian oxen"), thus indicating
that they made its acquaintance only in late historical
times on coming in contact with India and Nepal (sev-
enth and eighth centuries A.D.).

The written symbol for the elephant was con-
ceived in ancient China in that early epoch when writ-
ing was still in the purely pictographic stage. The
primeval pictogram denoting the elephant unmistak-
ably represents it with its principal characteristics, —
the trunk, a large head with two protruding tusks, and
body with four feet and tail (Figs. 1, 3-6). In Fig. 1

The Elephant in Ancient China

Fig. 1
Archaic Forms of the Written Symbol for the Elephant.

w[rv

Fig. 2
Elephant from a Bell of the Shane Period, about 1500 B.C.

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Symbols of the Elephant from Inscriptions on Bronzes of the Chou Period.

Fig. 6

Elephant from a Bronze Beaker of the

Chou Period.

Fig. 6
Elephant from a Bronze of the Shang
Period, applied to a Seal of Later Date.

i^J

Fig. 7
Elephant Head in the Pictographic Writing of the Mo-so.

4 Field Museum of Natural History

seven different old forms of the character are repro-
duced ; these finally led to the stage in No. 7 in about
a.d. 100, which approaches very closely the modern
form (Fig. 13 on p. 21).

In the inscriptions cast on the archaic bronze ves-
sels of the Shang (1783-1123 B.C.) and Chou dynasties
(1122-247 B.C.) the symbol of the elephant is not in-
frequently represented. Fig. 3 is reproduced from the
Po ku t'u lu (chap. 2, p. 24), the catalogue of bronzes
in the possession of the Sung emperors, published by
Wang Fu in a.d. 1107; it occurs on a bronze tripod
vessel ascribed to the Chou period. Fig. 4, of the same
type, is from a vessel of the same period in a Japanese
collection. Fig. 5 is taken from a bronze beaker in the
Imperial Museum of Peking. Fig. 6 represents an
elephant figure applied to a seal and said to go back
to the Shang period. Fig. 7 is the sign for the ele-
phant in the pictographic writing of the Mo-so, an
aboriginal tribe in Yiin-nan Province.

The most remarkable representation of the ele-
phant in the Shang period (1783-1123 B.C.) occurs in
a bronze bell discovered in Shan-tung Province and
inscribed with the name of an emperor who reigned
1506-1491 B.C. The rim of this bell is decorated with
a row of elephants of naturalistic style (Fig. 2; cf.
L. C. Hopkins, Development of Chinese Writing, 1909,
p. 15) . Under the Chou we usually meet the hieratic,
strongly conventional forms, but also very artistic ap-
plications of elephant designs to the decoration of
bronze vessels (Figs. 8-9).

In the ancient Rituals (Li ki and / li) are men-
tioned two types of ceremonial vessels designated as
"elephant goblets." The Chinese commentators have
exerted their ingenuity in explaining what these ves-
sels are. One says that they were adorned with ivory ;
another holds that the entire vessel was made in the
shape of an elephant; another interprets that it was

The Elephant in Ancient China 5

decorated with the picture of an elephant ; others again
take the word siang in the sense of "form, image, pic-
ture" and conclude that the goblet was adorned with
the design of a phoenix. Considering the archaeolo-
gical facts, i.e., the bronze vessels which have come

Fig:. 8
Elephant Head Projecting from the Side of a Bronze Beaker.

down to us from the archaic period of the Shang and
Chou dynasties (1783-247 B.C.), we find a goodly num-
ber of these provided with feet shaped into elephant's
heads terminating in a trunk, the latter forming the
foot of the vessel. This motive is particularly con-

Fig. 9

Elephant Heads aa Decorations on a Bronze Vessel.

spicuous in the tripod colanders (called hien) which
represent the combination of a stove with a cooking-
vessel used for steaming grain and herbs in ancestral
worship ; a charcoal fire was built in the hollow tripod
base which is separated by a hinged grate from the

6 Field Museum of Natural History

upper receptacle holding the articles to be steamed. A
good example of a vessel of this type is on exhibition
in the centre of Case 1, Blackstone Chinese Collection.
The artistic motive of the elephant-foot in bronzes has
persisted in Chinese art throughout the centuries down
to the K'ien-lung period (1736-95) ; it is likewise vis-
ible in the Han mortuary pottery (206 B.C. — a.d. 220) .
In the monuments of the Han period there are
highly naturalistic representations of the elephant in
scenes carved on tomb sculptures. One of these illus-
trated in Fig. 10 is depicted on one of the eight stone

Fig. 10
Elephant on Bas-relief of the Han Period, First Century a.d.

slabs forming the remnants of a mortuary chamber
and found on the hill Hiao-t'ang-shan northwest of the
city Fei-ch'eng in western Shan-tung. The elephant
mounted by three mahouts equipped with iron hooks
is shown in a long procession of figures forming the
retinue of a "barbarian" prince. It is certain that the
elephant did not exist in Shan-tung at that time, but
it is equally certain that the Han artist must have
drawn the animal from life.

In the beginnings of history the Chinese were re-
stricted to what is now northern China in the valley
of the Yellow River, and physical and climatic condi-

The Elephant in Ancient China 7

tions of the country then were to some extent differ-
ent from what they are at present: the mountain-
ranges were still crowned by dense forests haunted by
great numbers of wild beasts among which were ele-
phants. As the farmers (and the Chinese were a
nation of farmers) gradually advanced and cleared the
jungle, the elephant gradually retreated farther south,
or was exterminated. This may have been accom-
plished by the beginning of the first millennium B.C.,
but the recollection of the animal survived in the
minds of the people for many centuries later. By the
middle of the first millennium B.C. the habitat of the
elephant became restricted to the Yang-tse Valley, ex-
tending from far-west Se-ch'wan to the sea, and the
regions still farther south and west, as will be demon-
strated hereafter in detail.

An ancient saying, presumably of proverbial char-
acter (recorded in the Tso chwan under the year 548
B.C.) was to the effect that the elephant has tusks
which lead to the destruction of its body, because of
their use as gifts.

In the old Book of Songs, the earliest extant col-
lection of Chinese poetry, an allusion is made to ele-
phant-tusks brought as tribute by the wild tribes
bordering the river Hwai, which flows through the
provinces of An-hui and Ho-nan and empties its waters
into the Hung-tse Lake.

Elephant-teeth and rhinoceros-hides were among
the products sent as taxes by the two provinces Yang-
chou and King-chou, — the former covering the terri-
tory south and north of the Yang-tse delta ; the latter,
the present area of the provinces of Hu-nan and Hu-
pei.

In early antiquity elephant ivory was perfectly
known and wrought into articles of every-day use like
spikes or pins for scratching the head and tips for the
ends of bows. Ivory ranked next to jade and gold.

8 Field Museum of Natural History

The emperors of the Chou dynasty (1122-247 B.C.) had
five kinds of chariots of state, three of which were cov-
ered with leather. In the first the ends of the prin-
cipal parts were decorated with jade; in the second,
with gold; in the third, with ivory; while the fourth
was of plain leather; and the fifth, of wood. The
ceremonial leather cap worn by the emperors was
adorned with jade ornaments of various colors, and
in the place where it fitted over the nape of the neck,
had a foundation of ivory. Confucius is said to have
possessed an ivory ring five inches wide.

Memoranda or writing-tablets (hu) used by the
feudal princes and great prefects were made of ivory,
while the emperor had the prerogative of using a pol-
ished jade slab for the same purpose. This example
shows again that ivory ranked next to jade in value.
The ivory tablet of the feudal princes was rounded at
the top and straight at the bottom to symbolize that
they should obey the Son of Heaven. The tablet of
the great prefects was rounded both at the top and
bottom to express the idea that they had only superiors
to obey. Such tablets were carried suspended from
the girdle, and were used as memoranda or for jotting
down notes. An official, when he had an audience at
court, inscribed his report on the tablet and recorded
the emperor's reply or command. At a later time they
were reserved for the organs of government and be-
came emblems of dignity.

Chopsticks were originally made of bamboo or
wood, but in the time of the Chou dynasty (1122-247
B.C.) were also carved from elephant ivory. Accord-
ing to an ancient tradition, the man who first con-
ceived this innovation, was Chou, the last emperor of
the precedig Yin or Shang dynasty, notorious for his
debauchery. He was remonstrated for this extrava-
gance by one of his relatives who said, "He makes
chopsticks of ivory! Next he will doubtless make a

Archaic Ivory Carvings 9

cup of jade, finally he will think of the precious and
extraordinary objects of distant countries, and will
have them carted to his place. From that moment he
will crave in ever increasing numbers chariots and
horses, mansions and palaces, and there will be no
way of keeping him off."

Fortunately we now have at our disposal also a
few ivory carvings of the archaic epoch. The veteran
Chinese archaeologist, Lo Chen-yii, made a few of these
known in one of his illustrated works in Chinese. They
are of the same character as the four objects illus-
trated here in Plate I. That in Fig. 1 is in the collec-
tion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
the photograph being due to the courtesy of Mr. Bosch-
Reitz, curator of the Oriental Department. It evi-
dently is an implement used for untying knots; cor-
responding implements were made from jade (cf.
"Jade," pp. 238-242). It is firmly and handsomely
carved with a running animal, a conventionalized ani-
mal's head and an eye, all set off from a background
formed by a composition of square and triangular
spirals. This implement was worn suspended at the
girdle, being regarded as a token of maturity; it be-
longed to the equipment of one growing into manhood
and indicated his competency for the management of
business, however intricate; it accordingly symbolized
a man's ability to solve knotty problems. The objects
shown in Figs. 2-4 were obtained by me at Peking in
1923. The plaque in Fig. 2, though bone-like in ap-
pearance, is decomposed and calcined ivory ; it is deeply
incised at both ends with a band of geometric designs.
The ivory character of the object in Fig. 3 is unmis-
takable; it is carved on both sides with designs which
are identical with those found in the contemporaneous
bronze vessels. This observation also holds good of
Fig. 1. Fig. 4 shows the hilt or top of a knife or
dagger engraved on both sides with a double row of

10 Field Museum op Natural History

angular spiral designs. These examples of ancient
ivory carving differ radically in style and technique
from any later works in ivory. They certainly do not
go to prove that the elephant existed in ancient times
in northern China; for it might be argued that the
ivory of which they are made was imported as well.
The ancient Greeks wrought ivory long before they
became acquainted with the elephant. Considering,
however, all available evidence, the conclusion may be
hazarded that the objects in question were made of
indigenous ivory ; at any rate, they are good witnesses
in confirmation of the ancient records.

While the ancient Chinese were acquainted with
the elephant and used its ivory for various purposes,
it must be stated, on the other hand, that they do not
seem to have taken a deeper interest in the animal. It
played no role whatever in their mythology and gave
no rise to religious conceptions. It may even be ques-
tioned whether the elephant was hunted by the Chinese
themselves. We have several ancient descriptions of
hunting-expeditions, but none of these alludes to the
chase of the elephant. The passage in Mong-tse, that
Chou Kung, who died in 1105 B.C., "drove far away the
tiger, leopard, rhinoceros, and elephant to the great
joy of all people" is the only one from which occa-
sional elephant-hunting on the part of the Chinese
might be inferred. It is more probable that the ele-
phant was usually hunted by the aboriginal "bar-
barous" tribes, who sold the ivory to the Chinese or
with it paid their taxes to the imperial government,
and that much of the ivory obtained by the Chinese
was "dead"- ivory (of animals which' died a natural
death in the jungle). Han-Fei-tse, a philosopher, who
lived in the fourth century B.C., observes that men
but rarely see a live elephant, but usually encounter
the bones of a dead one. Above all, — and this obser-
vation bears out the point in question, — the ancient

The Elephant in Ancient China 11

Chinese never made any effort to tame or train the ele-
phant, as was done by the nations of Indo-China, Java,
Ceylon, and India. It was only in 121 B.C. that the
first tame elephant was sent to the court of the em-
peror Wu of the Han dynasty from Nan Yiie ; that is,
the country in the southeast, at that time inhabited by
tribes of Annamese origin. The commentator of the
official Annals of the Han Dynasty, Ying Shao, feels
obliged, with reference to this passage, to define what
a tame elephant is, "It is docile, can make obeisance
and rise again, and quickly grasps man's intentions."
This, accordingly, was something entirely novel to the
Chinese. Subsequently such gifts of trained elephants
from the south are mentioned frequently; they made
salaams and would even dance, or draw a carriage.
Plutarch {Of Fortune) writes, "What is bigger than
an elephant? But it also has become man's plaything
and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to
skip, dance, and kneel."

There is an old tradition that when the emperor
Shun was buried at Ts'ang-wu, elephants trampled
down the earth around his tumulus, so that the land
looked like a ploughed field. Ts'ang-wu then was a
territory abounding in elephants; it was situated in
what is now the district of Ning-yiian in the prefecture
of Yung-chou, Hu-nan Province. In ancient times it
was part of the state of Ch'u, which was inhabited by
a non-Chinese population, presumably a member of
the widely diffused Tai stock. It was a warlike and
aggressive nation settled in the area now occupied by
the two provinces of Hu-pei and Hu-nan on both banks
of the middle Yang-tse. In opposition to the Chinese,
the inhabitants of Ch'u seem to have tamed the ele-
phant to a certain extent, and elephants were kept at
the court of their king. There is one instance on
record to the effect that they were even used for pur-
poses of war. In 506 B.C. the kingdom of Ch'u was

12 Field Museum op Natural History

invaded and temporarily overrun by the army of the
king of Wu, a state on the lower Yang-tse. Defeated
in the field, the prince of Ch'u, in order to detain his
pursuers, launched against the enemy a flock of ele-
phants with lighted torches tied to their tails. This
isolated occurrence does not prove that in ancient
central China elephants were really trained and cus-
tomarily employed for war: the act of the defeated
king was rather a counsel of despair resorted to as a
last stratagem; had he actually possessed war-ele-
phants, he would have turned them to more effectual
use right at the opening of the engagement. The fact,
however, remains that in early times the Yang-tse
Valley swarmed with elephants, that they were hunted
for the sake of their ivory and hides, and also that
they were caught, partially tamed, and kept.

The elephant must have survived in the Yang-tse
Valley at least until the end of the tenth century a.d.
Isolated occurrences of elephants in the ancient ter-
ritory of Ch'u are still on record during the middle
ages : thus we are informed in the Annals of the Sung
Dynasty that in A.D. 962 elephants were seen in the
district of Hwang-pei (lat. 30° 56', in the prefecture of
Han-yang, province of Hu-pei), and subsisted on the
crops of the people; at the end of the following year
they were captured in the district of Nan-yang (lat.
33°06', in the province of Ho-nan), and their teeth
and skins were sent as a gift to the throne. Again,
in a.d. 964, elephants appeared in the same locality,
Nan-yang, and were slain by foresters ; teeth and skins
were dealt with as in the preceding case. In the same
year elephants were observed in the districts of Li-
yang (lat. 29° 37') and An-hiang (lat. 29° 22'), in the
province of Hu-nan ; others were noticed crossing the
Yang-tse and entering the district of Hwa-jung (lat.
29° 30', in the prefecture of Yo-chou, province of
Hu-nan), and others even reached the northern part

Elephants in China during the Middle Ages 13

of the city of Li-yang. In A.D. 966 elephants arrived
spontaneously at the capital.

In the western part of the empire, the present
province of Se-ch'wan, formerly styled Shu, elephants
are noted in early records, and survived there at least
into the period of the two Han dynasties (206 b.c.-a.d.
220), during which they were sent as tribute by the
native chieftains to the court of the emperor at
Ch'ang-an, where they were kept in the imperial ani-
mal-park. The Han emperors were exceedingly fond
of curious and exotic animals and plants, and organized
a sort of natural history museum in their palaces.

The present province of Yun-nan was originally
inhabited by a stock of peoples designated as Tai or
Shan, the forbears of the Siamese. They formed a
powerful kingdom which was destroyed by the Mon-
gols in a.d. 1252. The Tai were a warlike and chival-
rous nation, and had a highly organized army. Mili-
tary service was compulsory, and every adult was a
soldier. The capital, Ta-li, was the centre of the mili-
tary industry, where harness and helmets were manu-
factured from elephant skins.

As early as the second century B.C. an unsuccess-
ful Chinese mission, sent out for the exploration of the
southwest, received a dim knowledge of an "elephant-
riding nation" living farther to the south and west.
This was the ancient Tai kingdom, where the elephant
played an important part in the life of both rulers
and people, in court pageantry, as a riding and draught
animal, and as a beast of burden. The elephant was
native to this region and plentiful. Fan Cho, who in
a.d. 860 wrote an interesting account of the aboriginal
tribes of Yun-nan (Man shu), says that elephants
occurred there in large numbers, and were caught by
men who kept many of the animals to draw their
ploughs. The same is also reported by subsequent
authors, for instance, by T'an Ts'ui in 1799. Liu Sun,

14 Field Museum op Natural History

who lived toward the end of the ninth century and who
wrote an interesting work on the products of southern
China (Ling piao lu i) , observed in Yiin-nan that e very-
family kept elephants for carrying loads over long
distances, exactly as oxen and horses were used in
China.

The Chinese received their first knowledge of In-
dia when Chang K'ien, during his memorable mission
to the western countries, sojourned a year in Bactria
in 128 B.C., and was informed that the people of India
rode on elephants to fight in battle. Subsequently the
Chinese also learned the fact that war-elephants were
employed in Persia and Camboja, the latter country
being reported to have two hundred thousand of them.
The introduction of fire-arms put an end to the use
of elephants in war, and the Chinese themselves de-
monstrated the futility of this mode of military tactics.
In a.d. 1388, while Mu Ying was governor of Yiin-
nan, he gained an overwhelming victory over the Bur-
mese, his cannon and powerful crossbows proving too
much for the mailed elephants; and in the following
year Burma acknowledged the suzerainty of China. In
Yiin-nan the elephant survived longer than anywhere
else in China, and it may still occur here and there
in outlying jungles. The native tribes use bracelets
and large ear-rings of ivory.

In the two southeastern provinces, Kwang-tung
and Kwang-si, elephants have always been numerous
and persisted through many centuries. The provinces
of Kwang-si and Yiin-nan are still given in the Ko ku
yao lun (written by Ts'ao Chao in a.d. 1388) as pro-
ducing ivory. The same work lists Tonking and the
countries of the Southern and Western Barbarians
(Siam, Burma, India) as sending ivory to China.
The ivory of the Southern Barbarians is extolled as
long and large; that of Kwang-si and Annam is de-

Elephants in Southern China 15

scribed as small and short, and a kind yielding a red
powder when cut by a saw was regarded as very ex-
cellent.

In the seventh century a.d. the animal was still
plentiful in Tonking, as well as in the prefectures of
Ch'ao-chou, Hui-chou and Lei-chou of Kwang-tung
Province, and was captured by the natives who re-
garded its flesh, especially that of the trunk, as a
great delicacy. The tusks of the Kwang-tung variety
are described as small and red, very suitable for ivory
tablets. Chinese writers, further, emphasize the fact
that their elephants were all dark or black in color,
while white elephants are ascribed to the distant lands
of the Arabs, of Fu-lin (Syria), and India. A white
elephant was sent to China from Gandhara in A.D. 509.
It was kept in a special building near the capital Lo-
yang in Ho-nan Province. A white elephant was sent
from Burma to Hui Tsung, emperor of the Sung dy-
nasty, in a.d. 1105.

At Canton elephants were employed as late as the
tenth century in putting criminals to death. P'eng
Ch'eng, who lived in the first half of the eleventh
century, writes in his Mo k'o hwi si, "In the district
of Chang-p'u (lat. 24° 070 in Chang-chou fu (Fu-
kien) , which is adjoined to Chao-yang fu (in northern
Kwang-tung), there are still numerous elephants usu-
ally encountered in herds of ten, yet they are harm-
less. Solely the rogue elephant pursues men and
tramples them down till their flesh and bones are
reduced to a pulp. Of all elephants, the rogue elephant
is the most ferocious."

Chou Ta-kwan visited Camboja in a.d. 1295-97,
and in his Memoirs on the Customs of Camboja writes,
"The ivory from the tusk of an elephant killed by
means of a pike is considered best; next in quality is
the ivory of an animal which was found shortly after

16 Field Museum of Natural History

it died a natural death, while least esteemed is that
discovered in mountains many years after the animal's
death." This observation, which the Chinese learned
from the Cambojans, is quite correct ; and the Chinese
have adopted this rule until the present day. Even
in their materia medica the tusks of slain elephants
are preferred to those who have died of a disease or
otherwise. It has been noted that the "dead ivory"
(taken from a dead animal some time after its natural
death) is always dull, and when used, will be covered
with brown spots of irregular size and very opaque.

The Chinese have also preserved much curious
folk-lore in regard to the elephant. It was believed
that the designs in elephant tusks were formed when
the animal was frightened by a peal of thunder, while
the patterns in the horn of the rhinoceros were sup-
posed to be produced when the animal was gazing at
the moon. This notion has reference to the "engine-
turned" pattern (similar to that on the back of a
watch-case) which ivory displays in cross section. It
is probably due to this peculiarity of internal structure
that it possesses the high degree of elasticity which
forms one of its most valuable properties.

Pliny writes that the elephants, when their tusks
have fallen out either accidentally or from old age,
will bury them in the ground. The ancient Chinese
told a similar yarn, according to which the animal
would shed its tusks regularly and hide them in a
hole dug by itself for this purpose; in order to take
them away, it was necessary to leave a pair of wooden
teeth in their place, so that the animal would not notice
the theft. In regard to the rhinoceros it was also
believed that it annually sheds its horn and that a
wooden horn must be deposited in lieu of the real one
when picked up. These notions were naturally
prompted by the observation that detached tusks and

Ivory Trade during the Middle Ages 17

horns were occasionally found in the wilderness, which
suggested to the people a natural process akin to the
shedding of cervine antlers.

During the middle ages ivory was imported into
China, chiefly by the Arabs, from several states in
the Malay Peninsula, from Java, Borneo, the eastern
coast of Sumatra, southern India, and from the Somali
Coast of eastern Africa. The Chinese of the twelfth
century knew perfectly well that the African ivory
was best of all, and speak of African tusks as reaching
a weight of over a hundred pounds. Ivory then was a
sort of government monopoly in China inasmuch as
the merchants who desired to import it required an
official license for tusks weighing thirty pounds or
over. The tusks imported by the Arabs are described
by a contemporary observer as being straight and of
a clear, white color, with patterns displaying delicate
lines. In weight they varied from fifty to a hundred
pounds, whereas the tusks coming from Tonking and
Camboja were small, weighing only from ten to twenty
or thirty pounds, and had a reddish tint. The African
ivory was designated as "great ivory" (Ling wax tai ta,
written by Chou K'ii-fei in 1178). In the African
species both sexes are furnished with tusks of large
size, while in the Asiatic species they are generally
restricted to the males, and even then are but poorly
developed. Masudi, an Arabic geographer (a.d. 983),
informs us that Arabic ships brought the ivory of the
Zenj, as the Negroes were called by the Arabs, into
the country of Oman on the east coast of Arabia,
whence the traders transhipped it to India and China,
adding in a tone of regret that ivory would be plentiful
in the Musulman countries were it not directed to
foreign ports. He further states that the tusks en-
tirely straight or but little curved are held in high
esteem by the Chinese and that these serve for the
manufacture of palanquins for persons of high rank;

18 Field Museum of Natural History

no important official would dare present himself in
the palace of the king in a chair made of another
material than ivory. Masudi writes also that the
Negroes themselves made no use of ivory and did not
understand, like the Hindu, to tame the elephant. It
is noteworthy that the large straight tusks command
the highest price in China even at the present time.

Kubilai (a.d. 1214-94), the great Mongol sover-
eign of China, was famed for the large number of
elephants in his possession." The nucleus of his stock
was formed by two hundred animals captured in a
fierce battle of the Mongols against the Burmese in
a.d. 1277. The king of Burma, as Marco Polo informs
us, opposed the invaders with two thousand elephants,
"on each of which was set a tower of timber, well
framed and strong, and carrying from twelve to six-
teen well-armed fighting men." The elephants could
not withstand the force of the Mongol arrows, but
turned tail and fled. In another chapter Polo relates
that the Great Khan's elephants amounted fully to
five thousand and that they were exhibited on the
New Year's festival, all covered with rich and gay
housings of inlaid cloth representing beasts and birds,
while each of them carried on its back two splendid
coffers filled with the emperor's plate and other costly
furniture required for the court on the occasion of
New Year. On his hunting expeditions the Great
Khan was carried upon four elephants in a fine cham-
ber made of timber, lined with plates of beaten gold,
and covered with tiger skins.

The Manchu emperors still maintained an ele-
phant stud, and the emperor K'ien-lung (1736-95) had
sixty of them. When the emperor, on the evening be-
fore the winter solstice, proceeded to the Altar of
Heaven to offer sacrifice at dead of night, he mounted
a carriage drawn by an elephant.

Elephants under the Mongols and Manchus 19

E. Ysbrants Ides, envoy of the Russian czar to
the emperor of China in the years 1692-95, reports,
"The emperor's life-guards were clothed in red calico,
printed with red figures, and wore small hats with
yellow feathers. They were armed with scimitars and
lances. There were eight white saddle-horses for show.
In the third court of state were four extraordinarily
large elephants, one of which was white. They were
all covered with richly embroidered cloth, and their
trappings were ornamented with silver gilt. On their
backs was a finely carved wooden castle spacious
enough for eight persons. Being taken out of the
court, I mounted one of the emperor's two-wheeled
carts, and was drawn to my apartment by an elephant.
There were ten persons on each side with a rope in
their hands fastened to the elephant's mouth to lead
him; and on his neck sat a man with an iron hook
to guide him. He walked at his ordinary rate of
speed, but this obliged the men to run, in order to
keep up with him. In the emperor's stables there were
fourteen elephants: they made them roar, sing like a
canary, neigh, blow a trumpet, go down on their knees,
etc. All these elephants were extraordinarily large,
and the teeth of some a full fathom long. The man-
darins told me that the king of Siam annually sends
several by way of tribute."

John Bell of Antermony, when he was at Peking
in 1721, observed, "After dinner we saw the huge
elephants richly caparisoned in gold and silver stuffs.
Each had a driver. We stood about an hour admiring
these sagacious animals, who, passing before us at
equal distances, returned again behind the stables,
and so on, round and round, till there seemed to be
no end of the procession. The plot, however, was dis-
covered by the features and dress of the riders: the
chief keeper told us there were only sixty of them.
The emperor keeps them only for show, and makes no

20 Field Museum of Natural History

use of them, at least in these northern parts. Some of
them knelt and made obeisance to us; others sucked
up water from vessels, and spouted it through their
trunks among the mob, or wherever the rider directed."

The Earl of Macartney, when sent as ambassador
of Great Britain to the emperor of China in 1792, still
saw the elephants in the imperial palace, and remarks
that they were brought to China from the neighbor-
hood of the equator, and a few of them were bred to
the northward of the Tropic. The Chinese elephants,*
he says, are smaller than those of Cochin-China, and
of a lighter hue; they are literally granivorous, being
generally fed with rice and millet, though the food of
that animal in its wild state consists more frequently
of the tender leaves of trees and shrubs than of the
seeds or blades of corn or grass.

In a description of Peking inserted in the Chinese
Repository for 1834 it is said that at that time not
more than eight or ten elephants were kept in the
Siang Fang ("Elephants' Palace") and were used to
increase the pomp of some processions and ceremonies
of the emperor. When I visited the building in ques-
tion in 1901, there were no more elephants there.

While it is not the object of this article to survey
the whole development of the elephant motive in Chi-
nese art, which would require a profound study of
Indian-Buddhistic subjects, a few remarks may be
added here in order to assist the reader in a better
understanding of some representations of the elephant
in the Museum collections. The Po ku t'u lu of Wang
Fu (chap. 7, p. 8) and the Si ts'ing ku kien (chap. 9,
pp. 25, 26), the catalogue of the bronzes of the em-
peror K'ien-lung published in 1749, which follows
Wang Fu's authority, illustrate and describe bronze
figures of elephants carrying a vessel on their backs
and assign these to the Chou period. This date, how-

The Elephant as a Motive in Art 21

ever, is merely prompted by the fact that "elephant-
vases" (siang tsun) , as already mentioned, are spoken
of in the ancient Rituals. The art of the Chou, in
fact, represented the elephant only in a strongly con-
ventionalized, hieratic form, but never in that realis-
tic manner manifested by the elephant-vases of the two
Chinese catalogues. These obviously exhibit the style
of the Indian-Buddhistic elephant with smiling eyes
and harnessed with neat trappings. These objects,
therefore, cannot be older than the age of the T'ang
(a.d. 618-906) , and this type has ever since been favor-
ite with the bronze founders and potters. The Museum
has a good elephant figure of this type of cast bronze
coming down from the Sung period (Fig. 14). For
comparative purposes are added two elephant designs
of the T'ang period (a.d. 618-906) in Figs. 11 and 12,

Fig. 11 Figr. 12 Fig. 13

Brass Chessmen with Designs of Elephants. Ivory Chessman bearing

T'ang Period (a.d. 618-906). Written Symbol of Elephant

(Modern Form).

which appear on brass chessmen; these are as large
and as flat as coins and, on the obverse, bear the char-
acter siang ("elephant"), in the same manner as in
the modern ivory chessmen (Fig. 13), which are solely
provided with the characters for the men, not with
their figures as was customary under the T'ang.

In the K'ien-lung period (1736-95) the elephant
was a favorite art-motive. Many good examples of its
application to bronze vessels may be seen in Case 24
of the Blackstone Chinese Collection. In a censer
shown there both the three feet and the two handles

22

Field Museum of Natural History

are formed by realistic figures of elephants ; the cover
is surmounted by the figure of a recumbent elephant
on which astride is a turbaned Mohammedan. In an-
other censer the elephant on the cover carries on its
back a basket filled with coral branches, jewels, and
rhinoceros-horns intended as gifts for the emperor.
There is also a set of five altar-vessels in which the

Fig. 14

Bronze Figure of Elephant Followed by Mahout. Sung Period (a.d. 960-1278).

Specimen in Blackstone Chinese Collection.

elephant is the leading artistic motive ; the ornaments
in the animal's caparison and trappings are indicated
by inlaid coral and turquois beads. In Fig. 15 the
bronze figure of an elephant of the period is shown.

In India the elephant was modelled in art at an
early time. In the Museum's collection of Gandhara
sculptures (Case 37, Hall 32) may be seen a small

The Elephant as a Motive in Art

23

stone figure representing an elephant of naturalistic
style (first 01 second century A.D.).

Live elephants were transported from India to
Samarkand and Khotan and thence overland to China.

Fte. 15

Bronze Figure of Elephant (K'ien-lun* Period).

Specimen in Blackstone Chinese Collection.

Images of elephants were brought along the same
trade route, and were distributed over Central Asia,
Siberia, and Russia. In this manner peoples who had
never before seen an elephant became familiar with its

24 Field Museum of Natural History

likeness through models distributed from India. Small
elephants of metal have been found ir Russian soil,
one of bronze in the Government of Yekaterinoslav and
another of silver beyond the Ural, worshipped by the
Ostyaks as an idol. The former i? decorated with a
purely Indian ornament, the so-ca]ied grivatsa, an em-
blem of Qiva, which has become widely known also in
China. It must hence be inferred that this bronze
elephant found in Russian soil is of Indian workman-
ship, and was imported into Russia.

The elephant is quite capable of standing cold
climates. The trip of an elephant to the northern-
most part-t)i Sweden (lat. 64°) is on record in the
Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (Vol. 47, 1905,
p. 517).

FOLK-LORE OF THE MAMMOTH AND TRADE
IN MAMMOTH IVORY
The ancient Chinese had a certain knowledge of
the mammoth (Elephas primigenius) , though blended
with marvelous details and embedded in the ground
of folk-lore rather than based on correct observations.
The interesting point is that Chinese traditions re-
garding the animal show a striking resemblance to
those of Siberian tribes. The Shen i king, a book of
wondrous tales, traditionally ascribed to Tung-fang
So, minister to the emperor Wu of the Han dynasty
(140-87 B.C.), contains the following passage: "In
the regions of the north, where ice is piled up over a
stretch of country ten thousand miles long and reaches
a thickness of a thousand feet, there is a rodent, called
k'i shu, living beneath the ice in the interior of the
earth. In shape it is like a rodent, and subsists on
herbs and trees. Its flesh weighs a thousand pounds
and may be used as dried meat for food ; it is eaten to
cool the body. Its hair is about eight feet in length,
and is made into rugs, which are used as bedding and

Folk-lore of the Mammoth 25

keep out the cold. The hide of the animal yields a
covering for drums, the sound of which is audible over
a distance of a thousand miles. Its hair is bound to
attract rats. Wherever its hair may be found, rats
will flock together.".

Another term for the mammoth was fen, a name
which refers properly to a species of mole (Scapto-
chirus moschatus) ; it was also called "the hidden
rodent" (yin shu). Hence T'ao Hung-king (a.d. 452-
536), a distinguished physician and celebrated adept
in the mysteries of Taoism, and Ch'en Ts'ang-k'i, who
wrote a materia medica in the beginning of the eighth
century aj>., speak of two animus of the name fen and
discriminate between fen as a sn^ll mole and the fen
of the size of a water-buffalo, which may be identical
with the mammoth. The earliest definition of the
animal fen, as given in the ancient dictionary Erh ya,
is that of "an animal which moves in the ground."
As the same was supposed in reference to the mam-
moth, it is easy to understand how the name was trans-
ferred from a burrowing mole to a creature apparently
resembling it in subterranean habits. It is striking,
however, that in none of the Chinese traditions any
allusion is made to the ivory-furnishing tusks.

To some extent the Chinese were also acquainted
with fossil ivory. Their materia medica registers two
famous articles known as "dragon's bones" and "drag-
on's teeth," offered for sale by drug-stores. The
former have been examined microscopically by D.
Hanbury (Science Papers, p. 273) and proved to be,
at least in some cases, fossil ivory. Fossil bones of
Stegodon orientalis of Swinhoe are brought from Se-
ch'wan Province in large broken masses, showing the
cancellous structure of the large fossil bones of pro-
boscidians. Portions of limestone matrix bearing the
impressions of these bones are sold together with these
genuine fossils. They are powdered and used in ague,

26 Field Museum of Natural History

fevers, hemorrhages, and fluxes. The "dragon's teeth,"
usually found in marshy ground of Se-chVan, also in
Shen-si and Shan-si, consist of foss;l teeth of Rhino-
ceros tichorhinus, Stegodon sinensis and Stegodon
orientalis, horns of Chalicotherw/m sinense, teeth of
Hyla sinensis, and molars of horses, mastodons, ele-
phants, and hippotherium. They are supposed to act
on the liver and to be of great service as cordial or
sedative remedies. In a lot of dragon's teeth obtained
by me for the American Museum of Natural History,
New York, in 1902, were found one tooth of a mas-
todon, five teeth of a rr inoceros, two molars of an hip-
parion, and one tooth of an undescribed hipparion.
Dragon's bones from T'ai-yiian in Shan-si and Tsin-
chou in Chi-li are mentioned as early as the T'ang
period (a.d. 618-906).

The Chinese, moreover, possess a certain num-
ber of accounts which allude to the discovery of fossil
animal-bones, particularly in Yun-nan and Se-ch'wan,
and which are explained by the people as the remains
of saints or fairies, in the same manner as we have
the giants' bones in European folk-lore. These notices
are so vague, of course, that it is impossible to deter-
mine the character of these bones. There are other
Chinese descriptions of fabulous animals found in
Chinese soil which led some European writers to the
conclusion that the Chinese of historical times were
personally acquainted with the mammoth. This, how-
ever, is extremely doubtful and, at any rate, is of no
interest to archaeology, as it is not known that the
Chinese ever made any industrial use of mammoth or
any other fossil bones. The "dragon's bones" and
"dragon's teeth" were employed medicinally, but for
no other purpose.

In the years 1712-15, a Chinese embassy traversed
Siberia on its way to the Volga for the purpose of
inducing the Torgut, a Kalmuk tribe who had settled

Chinese Knowledge of the Mammoth 27

there under Russian protection, to return to their old
homes on the Chinese frontier. The Manchu Tulishen,
the envoy, writes in his Memoirs in reference to Yenis-
seisk, "In the coldest parts of this northern country is
found a species of animal which burrows under the
ground, and which dies when exposed to the sun and
air. It is of enormous size and weighs ten thousand
pounds. Its bones are very white and bright like ivory.
It is not by nature a very powerful animal, and is
therefore not very ferocious. It generally occurs on
the banks of rivers. The Russians collect the bones
of this animal, in order to make cups, saucers, combs,
and other small articles. The flesh of the animal is
of a very cooling quality, and is eaten as a remedy in
fevers. The foreign name of this animal is mo-men-
to-wa [i.e. mammoth] ; we call it k'i shu." The tran-
scription is based on Russian mamontowa (scil. host,
"bone"). It is interesting to note that this Manchu
official, apparently well read in the literature of China,
had wit enough to identify the earth-wanderer of an-
cient lore with the mammoth of whom he heard in
Siberia. The Ts'e yuan, a modern Chinese cyclopaedia
published by the Commercial Press of Shanghai, quotes
a portion of his text in proof of the fact that the
word fen denotes the mammoth.

In 1716 the emperor K'ang-hi, who was fond of
natural history, wrote, "The books say that in the
very cold regions of the north ice forms to a thick-
ness of a hundred feet and melts not even in the spring
or summer. This region is now known actually to exist.
Again, the Yuan kien lei han contains the following
statement : The k'i shu, which is described as reach-
ing the weight of ten thousand pounds, is found even
at the present day. In shape it resembles the elephant,
and its tusks are like those of the same beast, but the
ivory is yellowish in color.' In both these points, the
ancient books are confirmed." Again, in 1721, in the

28 Field Museum of Natural History

sixtieth year of his reign, the venerable sovereign re-
curred to the same topic in an address to his minis-
ters, "While all the assertions found in books are not
to be implicitly believed, there are, on the other hand,
statements which, however false and absurd they may
seem, are nevertheless perfectly well founded. Thus,
for instance, Tung-fang So relates that in the regions
of the north ice is formed to a thickness of a thousand
feet, and does not melt either in the winter or sum-
mer. ♦ When the Russians presented themselves at our
court this year, they stated that in their country, at
a distance of something over twenty degrees from the
Pole, there is what is called the Polar Sea. The ice
lies frozen there in solid masses and prevents the ac-
cess of human beings. Thus, for the first time, the
truth of Tung-fang So's assertion has been confirmed.
Again he states that in the northern regions, under
layers of ice, is found a large animal of the kind of
a rodent, the flesh of which weighs a thousand pounds.
Its name is fen shu. It burrows under the ground
and dies when it sees the light of the sun or moon.
Now, in Russia, near the shores of the northern ocean,
there is a rodent similar to an elephant, which makes
its way under ground and which expires the very
moment it is exposed to light or air. Its bones re-
semble ivory, and are used by the natives in manufac-
turing cups, platters, combs, and pins. Objects like
these we ourselves have seen, and we have been led
thereby to believe in the truth of the story."

In 1666, the learned Hollander Nicolaus Witsen,
who subsequently became mayor of Amsterdam, paid
a visit to Moscow, where he collected the materials for
his work "Noord en Oost Tartarye," which appeared
in 1694. This work introduced for the first time the
name mammoth to western Europe. Witsen describes
how elephants' teeth are found in large numbers on
the banks of Siberian rivers, and adds, "By the in-

The Mammoth in Siberia 29

landers (the Russian settlers in Siberia) these teeth
are called mammouttekoos (for Russian kost, "bone"),
while the animal itself is called mamout." Ludolf
(Grammatica russica, p. 92, 1696) writes that the
Russians believed the teeth of the mammoth to belong
to an animal living underground, larger than any above
ground. They used it in physic in lieu of and for the
same purpose as unicorn's horn (narwhal tusk). The
more sensible among the Russians affirmed these teeth
to be of an elephant, brought thither at the time of
the deluge.

The etymology of the word mammoth is obscure.
The Russian form is mamont or mamut. It has been
suggested by Strahlenberg that the word is derived
from behemoth (see below, p. 63) through the medium
of an Arabic mehemoth. Howorth has accepted this
theory, but it is by no means convincing. Byron (The
Deformed Transformed, III, 1) has confronted the
two animals:

When the lion was young,

In the pride of his might,
Then 'twas sport for the strong

To embrace him in fight;
To go forth with a pine

For a spear, 'gainst the mammoth,
Or strike through the ravine

At the foaming behemoth;
While man was in stature

As towers in our time,
The first born in Nature,

And, like her, sublime!

According to the conception of the Samoyeds, the
mammoth is a gigantic beast which lives in the depth
of the earth, where it digs for itself dark pathways
and feeds on earth. They call it "stallion of the earth"
or "the master of the earth." They account for its
corpse being found so fresh and well preserved by as-
suming that the animal is still alive. Death, however,

30 Field Museum of Natural History

they contend, is the fate of any one who has the mis-
fortune to meet on his way the bones of the master of
the earth ; and if he is to ward off this penalty, he must
sacrifice a reindeer to the demons. This entitles him
to the possession of the bones and to using or selling
them as he pleases.

In the country of the Ostyaks on the Irtysh mam-
moth-bones are sometimes found in the slopes of steep
banks after a landslip. Some of the Ostyaks look
upon them as water-sprites, others regard them as
sacred animals living under ground and call them
"earth-oxen." They cannot bear the daylight and must
die when reaching the surface of the earth (cf. the
similar Chinese notion above) . Pieces of mineral coal
which occur on the banks of some rivers are regarded
as the livers of mammoths. They subsist on tree-roots
and hence dig up the earth, so that they undermine the
river-banks and finally cause their collapse. They are
also fond of residing in the depth of streams and lakes,
and their presence is announced by the agitation of
the water and whirlpools. Such places in rivers which
are looked upon as abodes of mammoths are consid-
ered sacred, and nets must not be cast into the water.
They do not even like to draw there water for drink-
ing. In the winter the animals sometimes rise to the
surface of the water, break the ice, and cause a tre-
mendous noise. They are harmless to man and cannot
grant him luck in his enterprises or health; yet the
offerings made to them during a journey insure its
successful completion by guarding against landslips
and ice-breaks. Other animals when grown old may
undergo a metamorphosis into mammoths; elks and
reindeer, even bears, may change their status for a
life in the depth of the waters when mammoth-horns
will grow on them. Old pikes are said sometimes to
choose the deepest spots of lakes where moss will grow
on their heads and horns on their front, whence it is

Folk-lore of the Mammoth in Siberia 31

concluded that old pikes also are gradually trans-
formed into mammoths. In this form they are called
pike-mammoth.

The Samoyeds designate the mammoth "earth-
bull" or "earth-stag." The former epithet is applied
to it also by the Wogul, a Finno-Ugrian tribe. The
Mongols and Manchus speak of the "ice-rodent."

The Buryats, a branch of the Mongols living
around Lake Baikal, call the mammoth arslan ("lion")
or arsalyn zan ("lion-elephant"). They believe that
its bones represent a smashed dragon (hi). When the
dragons have grown old, they take refuge in the earth.
The animal is further connected with the Biblical story
of the flood : it boasted that it could not perish on ac-
count of its size, and refused to enter the ark. It
swam around for several days, but was finally drowned.
Hence its bones are now found in the ground. The
Russians of Transbaikalia have a similar story, add-
ing that while the mammoth was floating, birds perched
on its "horns," as they could not find a dry place ; for
a long time it struggled against the flood, but the birds
increased to such a number that its strength finally
dwindled, and it perished after a few days.

In 1611 an English navigator, Jonas Logan, visited
the land of the Samoyeds and returned to London with
an elephant's tooth which he had bought from them.
This presumably was the first mammoth tooth that
came to England. The Scotch traveller, Bell of Anter-
mony, observed in most of the towns which he passed
between Tobolsk and Yenisseisk many mammons'
horns, so called by the natives. Some of them were
very entire and fresh like the best ivory in every cir-
cumstance excepting only the color, which was of a
yellowish hue; others of them mouldered away at the
ends and, when sawn asunder, were prettily clouded.
The people made snuff-boxes, combs, and diverse sorts
of turnery-ware of them. "I brought a large tooth

32 Field Museum of Natural History

or mammons' horn with me to England," he adds, "and
presented it to my worthy friend, Hans Sloane, who
gave it a place in his famous museum, and was of
opinion also that it was the tooth of an elephant.
This tooth was found in the River Obi at a place called
Surgut." The Russians developed a lively trade in
mammoth ivory from the latter part of the eighteenth
century when Liakhoff, a merchant, discovered vast
stores of mammoth bones between the rivers Khotanga
and Anadyr and obtained the exclusive right to dig
for them. The quantity of fossil ivory which was
sent from Siberia to the European markets was enor-
mous. In 1821, an ivory-hunter from Yakutsk brought
back twenty thousand pounds of ivory, each tusk
weighing on an average about a hundred and twenty
pounds. In the London market as many as 1,635 mam-
moth tusks were sold in a single year, averaging 150
pounds in weight; of these 14 per cent were of the
best quality, 17 per cent inferior, while more than half
were useless commercially. The total number of mam-
moths represented by the output of fossil ivory since
the Russian colonization of Siberia is estimated as
not being far from forty thousand.

Vague allusions to the mammoth loom up also in
the writings of the Arabs of the middle ages. Thus
al-Beruni (a.d. 973-1048), in his discussion of the
substance khutu, which, as will be seen in the follow-
ing chapter, applies in the main to walrus ivory, re-
marks that it is the frontal bone of a bull who lives
in the country of the Kirgiz. In an Arabic chronicle,
written in a.d. 1076, are mentioned teeth resembling
the tusks of elephants which were obtained in the
country of the Bulgars who at that time lived on the
Volga. These teeth were thence exported to Kharizm
(now Khiva), where they were wrought into combs,
boxes, and other objects. Abu Hamid, who visited the
country of the Bulgars in a.d. 1136, observed there

Mammoth Ivory in Russia and among Arabs 33

"a tooth four spans long and two spans wide and the
cranium of the animal resembling a dome ; teeth were
also found in the ground like elephant's tusks, white
like snow, one weighing two hundred menn; it was not
known from what animal it was derived; it was
wrought like ivory, but was stronger than the latter
and unbreakable."

It is possible, as is assumed by several scholars,
that the question is here of mammoth tusks ; but it is
equally possible that it was simply elephants' tusks.
P. S. Pallas (Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des
russischen Reichs, Vol. I, p. 140, 1801) found in the
Volga territory several bones and even the cranium
of an elephant on the banks of a rivulet; at Simbirsk
he saw some objects wrought from the ivory found
there and which could not be distinguished from
"healthy" ivory; only the tip of the tooth had under-
gone a certain degree of calcination. Another ele-
phant's tusk found on the bank of that rivulet he de-
scribes as having assumed an intensely yellow color.
Similar discoveries may have formed the source of
supply for the Bulgar ivory.

The Chinese were acquainted with Kharizm as
early as the Tang dynasty and emphasize the point
that it was the only country of western Asia, where
carts drawn by oxen were to be found and that the
merchants travelled around in these vehicles. In A.D.
751 a prince of that country sent an embassy to China
with gifts. The ancient capital of the country, Urgenj,
was captured and destroyed by the Mongols in A.D.
1221. Khiva, the present capital of Kharizm or the
Khanate of Khiva, is situated about a hundred miles
southeast of ancient Urgenj. If Kharizm was a centre
of the mammoth-ivory industry during the middle
ages, we receive in this manner a clew as to how this
material may have found its way to China.

34 Field Museum of Natural History

In the work of the learned Philipp Johann von
Strahlenberg, which appeared at Stockholm in 1730,
we are informed that great quantities of white mam-
moth tusks were carried from Siberia for sale to
China. Strahlenberg was a Swedish officer in the
service of Charles XII, was taken prisoner by the
Russians in the battle of Pultava, and resided in Si-
beria for thirteen years. It is only surprising that
Strahlenberg characterizes these teeth exported to
China as white, while in the same breath he describes
mammoth tusks as yellow, some as brown as coconuts
and even black-blue. It has therefore been suggested
by Ranking that the teeth in question were walrus
teeth.

"In the northern part of Siberia, so great is the
abundance of mammoth tusks, that for a very long
period there has been a regular export of mammoth
ivory, both eastward to China and westward to Eu-
rope" (N. N. Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters, p. 183).
This view, however, must be adopted only with cer-
tain reservations. As far as the last three centuries
are concerned, it is without any doubt correct, but
going beyond the seventeenth century, the matter be-
comes one of uncertainty, and we have no definite
evidence either archaeological or historical. The
archaeology of Siberia is fairly well known, and
no ivory has as yet been discovered there in any
grave or otherwise. The notices of the Arabs
given above refer to tusks found in the territory
of the Volga, but the Arabs never had any knowl-
edge of the Siberian mammoth. As will be seen in
the following chapter, what the Arabs traded was
chiefly walrus ivory. In regard to the Chinese we are
confronted with a puzzling fact: they have ancient
traditions and certain notions of the mammoth as an
animal, but they never allude to its tusks or ivory.
Only as late as 1716 the emperor K'ang-hi learned from

Trade in Mammoth Ivory 35

the Russians that the animal furnishes ivory, and
about this time the same fact dawned upon the envoy
Tulishen when he was in the heart of Siberia. Pre-
viously, however, the Chinese, if we rely on their lit-
erature, possessed no knowledge of mammoth ivory.
Howorth argues that "from early times mammoth
ivory was sent from Siberia to China, that the Chi-
nese had a knowledge of Siberia and its products from
a very early time, a fact not otherwise improbable,"
and he adds that the throne which Carpini describes
as having been made for the great Mongol Khan
Kuyuk by the jeweller Cosmas out of ivory was doubt-
less made from fossil ivory, showing it was well known
in Mongolia in the thirteenth century. Carpini, in his
Latin text, uses merely the word "ivory" (ebur), and
considering the vast number of elephants kept in the
empire of the Mongols (above, p. 18), there is no
reason why Kuyuk's throne could not have been made
of plain elephant ivory as well. True it is, as Howorth
says, that from an early date the Chinese were well
acquainted with the peoples and products of Siberia;
in fact, nearly all we know about this subject in times
prior to the Russian occupation we owe to the official
annals and other records of the Chinese. They tell
us a great deal about the fine Siberian peltry like the
sable, marten, fox, lynx, beaver, but never mention
any ivory used by a tribe of Siberia or imported from
there into China. This silence surely is not fortuitous,
it is ominous. Considering the movements and migra-
tions of the former peoples inhabiting Siberia, it is
most unlikely that the northernmost parts of the coun-
try were inhabited in very early times. These inhos-
pitable regions were only the refuge of weaker tribes
who were gradually pushed northward by more power-
ful neighbors. It was in the tundras and along the
littoral of northern and northeastern Siberia that most
of the remains of the mammoth were discovered, and

36 Field Museum of Natural History

this was possible only in times after the northward
movement of the tribes.

There is another reason why a history of the trade
in mammoth ivory cannot be written with an absolute
degree of certainty or cannot be given, so to speak, a
clean bill of health. The accounts we have are con-
fused, and in many of them the tusks of mammoth,
walrus and narwhal, and even fossil rhinoceros-horn,
are hopelessly mixed up. These various products are
all comprised in Siberia under the commercial term
"horn." The Yakut, for instance, indiscriminately
designate mammoth and walrus ivory as "horn"
(muos). To us who have a clear notion of the ani-
mals this lack of discriminating faculty may seem
strange at first sight, but looking into the conditions
under which the said animal products are found in
Siberia we find it easy to gauge the situation. Im-
mense deposits of mammoth and rhinoceros bones are
accumulated together with masses of stranded wal-
ruses and fossil narwhal tusks along the northern
littoral, and are collected promiscuously by the treas-
ure-hunters. Walrus and narwhal as live animals are
familiar solely to the maritime tribes, and totally un-
known to the inland peoples. Again, the mammoth
and the rhinoceros, which occur there only in fossil
remains, are unknown as animals to any of them, and
their bones accordingly are not distinguished. It must
further be taken into consideration that in many cases
it is not a complete tusk or horn which is traded by
the ivory hunters, but merely fragmentary pieces;
rotten and hollow portions are cut off as useless, as
soon as the best-preserved pieces have been picked out,
and the remainders if still of a considerable size may
again be sawed into smaller portions to be rendered
fit for transportation on pack-horses. The distant
trader who will buy up this cargo and the consumer
still more remote from the place of provenience hardly

Trade in Mammoth and Walrus Ivory 37

have any means of obtaining a clear idea of the true
origin of the product, still less of the character of the
animal from which it may have come. The door was
thus thrown widely open for fabulous speculations of
all sorts in regard to the "horn." This term is en-
countered everywhere in Europe, among the Arabs,
in China, Korea, and Japan, with reference to walrus
and narwhal tusks, as the following chapter will
demonstrate.

TRADE IN WALRUS AND NARWHAL IVORY
The trade in walrus and narwhal ivory is a verit-
able romance in the history of commerce, and it is not
generally known that in times long prior to the dis-
covery of the Arctic shores of North America and
long before the two animals were described in our
natural history, a lively traffic in this kind of ivory was
carried on all over Asia and Europe. As this subject
has never been clearly set forth in any book and is
based on researches almost entirely my own, I hope
that a somewhat detailed digest of the matter will be
welcome. Those desirous of knowing the original
sources and the exact texts of the documents may fall
back on my previous studies of the subject cited in
the Bibliographical References at the end ; on the other
hand, much new information is given here.

In the zoological system the walrus belongs to
the order Pinnipedia which consists of the three fami-
lies, Otariidae (eared seals), Trichecidae (walrus),
and Phocidae (seals). The genus Trichecus (walrus)
consists of two species, — T. rosmarus and T. obesus.
The former occurs on the coast of Labrador northward
to the Arctic Sea, along the shores of Greenland, and
in the polar areas of the eastern hemisphere to western
Asia. The latter inhabits the northwest coast of
America, the Arctic Sea and Bering Strait, as well as
the northeastern coast of Asia. The most striking

38 Field Museum of Natural History

characteristic of the animal is formed by the pair of
tusks corresponding to the canine teeth of other mam-
mals; they descend almost directly downward from
the upper jaw, sometimes attaining a length of twenty
inches or more and a weight of from four to six pounds.
The tusks do not form a solid mass throughout, but
are hollow about two-thirds of their length, so that
large objects and billiard-balls cannot be carved from
them. The outer layer of the tooth has a dark colora-
tion, and is not smooth as in elephants' tusks, but is
fluted and hard as glass. The tips of the tusks yield
a hard and solid mass which is evenly yellowish white,
and in a cross-section, displays speckled designs. The
lateral portions, likewise yellowish white, are crossed
by fine yellow lines, or are interspersed with large,
yellow, flamed spots. When exposed to the atmosphere
or to moisture for a long time, the tusk will lose its
whiteness and assume a yellow tobacco color.

The walrus was formerly styled "sea-horse"
(Latin Equus marinus), its tusks "sea-horses' teeth"
(e.g. John Ray, Synopsis methodica animalium quad-
rupedum, p. 193, London, 1693). Likewise such de-
scriptive terms as sea-ox, sea-cow, sea-elephant were
in use. In earlier literature also morse, mors (de-
rived from Russian morzh, a word of unknown origin,
through the medium of French morse) appears occa-
sionally: thus William Baffin ("Relation of his Fourth
Voyage for the Discoverie of the North-West Passage,
performed in 1615") speaks of "peeces of the bone or
home of the sea unicorne, and divers peeces of sea
mors teeth." Jonas Poole (in Purchas), in 1610,
writes mohorses, with adaptation to horse.

The narwhal (Monodon monoceros) belongs in the
zoological system to the order Cetaceae. Our word is
derived from Old Norse nahvalr, Swedish-Danish
narhval; hvalr or hval means "whale," the origin of
the first element of the word is obscure. The animal

Walrus and Narwhal 39

frequents the icy circumpolar seas, and is rarely seen
south of 65 ° N. latitude. It resembles the white whale
in shape and in the lack of a dorsal fin. Its peculiar
characteristic lies in the absence of all teeth, save two
in the upper jaw, which are arranged horizontally side
by side. In the male, usually the left tooth and occa-
sionally both teeth are strongly developed into spirally
twisted, straight tusks which pass through the upper
lip and project in front like horns. They frequently
reach a length of about seven feet; that is, half, and
even more, that of the entire animal, which in the state
of maturity may attain to fifteen feet. Its life-history
is but little explored, and the biological function of the
tusk is conjectured rather than accurately ascertained ;
it is supposed to serve as a weapon of defence, for
breaking ice in order to breathe, and for killing fish.
The ivory yielded by the tusk, which is hollow in the
interior, possesses extreme density and hardness and
in this respect surpasses elephant ivory; it is of a
dazzling whiteness, which does not pass into yellow,
is easily wrought, and easily receives a high polish.
Along the northern shores of Siberia are also accumu-
lated fossil tusks of the narwhal together with enor-
mous masses of mammoth and rhinoceros bones.

In the eighteenth century a narwhal was observed
cast adrift at the mouth of the Elbe, and another at
the estuary of the Weser. Caxton, in his Chronology
of England, has an entry under the year 1482, "This
yere were take four grete fisshes between Erethe and
London, that one was callyd mors marine." This is
the earliest instance of the occurrence of the term
morse for the walrus in English literature.

The first acquaintance of England with the wal-
rus, however, was much earlier and dates from the
latter part of the ninth century, and is connected with
the daring exploits of the Norseman Ohthere from
Helgeland in Norway, who in a.d. 890 undertook

40 Field Museum of Natural History

several voyages, rounded the North Cape, and
reached the Kola Peninsula. He reported on this en-
terprise to King Alfred the Great of England (848-
901), who embodied Ohthere's narrative in his Anglo-
Saxon translation of Paulus Orosius' History of the
World. The passage with reference to the walrus
runs thus : "The principall purpose of his travelle
this way, was to encrease the knowledge and discoverie
of these coasts and countreyes, for the more com-
moditie of fishing of horse-whales, which have in their
teeth bones of great price and excellencie : whereof he
brought some at his return unto the king. Their
skinnes are also very good to make cables for shippes,
and so used. This kind of whale is much lesse in
quantitie then other kindes, having not in length above
seven elles. And as for the common kind of whales,
the place of most and best hunting of them is in his
owne countrey. Whereof some be 48 elles of length,
and some 50, of which sort he affirmed that he himselfe
was one of the sixe which in the space of 3 dayes
killed threescore. Their principall wealth consisteth
in the tribute which the Fynnes pay them, which is all
in skinnes of wild beasts, feathers of birds, whale
bones, and cables, and tacklings for shippes made of
whales or Seales skinnes. The richest pay ordinarily
15 cases of Marternes, 5 Rane Deere skinnes, and one
Beare, ten bushels of feathers, a wat of a Beares
skinne, two cables threescore elles long apiece, the one
made of Whales skin, the other of Seales."

The Anglo-Saxon word used in this text is hors-
hwael, from Old Norse hrosshvalr ("a kind of whale")
and rosmhvalr ("walrus").

In the sixteenth century when walrus ivory
reached England from North America, it was paid for
at double the rate of elephant ivory. Thomas James
of Bristol, who visited the island of Ramea near New-
foundland in 1591 and who gives a description of the

Walrus Tusks in England 41

walrus he encountered there, writes that its teeth were
sold in England to the comb and knife-makers at eight
groats and three shillings the pound weight, whereas
the best ivory was sold for half the money; the grain
of the bone, he remarks, is somewhat more yellow than
the ivory. He also tells a curious story about his
friend Alexander Woodson of Bristol, an excellent
mathematician and skilful physician, who showed him
one of these beasts' teeth brought from Ramea and
half a yard long, and who assured him that he had
made trial of it in ministering medicine to his pa-
tients, and had found it as sovereign against poison
as any unicorn's horn. Gerat de Veer ("The First
Navigation of William Barents, alias Bernards into the
North Seas," 1594) speaks of "sea-horses being a kind
of fish that keepeth in the s*ea, having very great teeth,
which at this day are used instead of ivory or ele-
phants teeth." Martin Frobisher (Voyage in 1577)
relates, "They found a great dead fish, round like a
porpoise, twelve feet long, having a horn five feet ten
inches long, growing out of the snout, wreathed, and
straight like a wax taper ; and might be thought to be
a sea-unicorn: the top of it was broken. It was re-
served as a jewel by Queen Elizabeth's commandment
in her wardrobe of robes, and is still at Windsor to
be seen."

From the ninth century onward walrus tusks
formed an important article of trade in the north-
eastern part of Europe, and this was the case long
before the discovery of Greenland. In Russian his-
tory they are known as "fish-teeth," as in bygone days
the walrus was classified among fish everywhere in
Europe and Asia. In old Russian tales are mentioned
precious chairs of fish-teeth, and these fish-teeth ap-
pear as highly priced objects. At Novgorod they were
traded like marten and squirrel skins and accepted as
monetary values. In 1159 the grand-duke Rostislav

42 Field Museum of Natural History

presented to the prince Svatoslav Olgovich sables, er-
mines, black foxes, polar foxes, white bears, and fish-
teeth. During the period of Mongol and Tartar sway
over Russia frequent demands for this product were
made from Asia, and in 1476 Ivan Vasilyevich re-
ceived a fish-tooth as a gift from a citizen of Novgorod.

S. von Herberstein, who, in 1549, published his
work "Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii," a pri-
mary source for the history of Russia, and who was
ambassador to the Grand Prince Vasily Ivanovich in
the years 1517 and 1526, gives the following account:
"The articles of merchandise which are exported from
Russia into Lithuania and Turkey, are leather, skins,
and the long white teeth of' animals which they call
mors, and which inhabit the northern ocean, out of
which the Turks are accustomed very skilfully to make
the handles of daggers; our people think they are the
teeth of fish, and call them so. The ocean which lies
about the mouths of the river Petchora, to the right
of the mouths of the Dwina, is said to contain animals
of great size. Amongst others, there is one animal of
the size of an ox, which the people of the country call
mors. It has short feet, like those of a beaver ; a chest
rather broad and deep compared to the rest of its
body; and two tusks in the upper jaw protruding to
a considerable length. The hunters pursue these ani-
mals only for the tusks, of which the Russians, the
Tartars, and especially the Turks skilfully make
handles for their swords and daggers, rather for orna-
ment than for inflicting a heavier blow, as has been
incorrectly stated. These tusks are sold by weight,
and are described as fishes' teeth." Von Herberstein,
accordingly, identifies the commercial label "fish-
teeth" with the zoological term "morse"; that is, the
walrus.

Richard Chancelour, in "The Book of the Great
and Mighty Emperor of Russia" (1553), writes, "To

Walrus Ivory in Russia 43

the north parte of that countrey are the places where
they have their furres, as sables, marterns, greese
bevers, foxes white, blacke, and redde, minkes, ermines,
miniver, and harts. There are also a fishes teeth,
which fish is called a morsse. The takers thereof dwell
in a place called Postessora, which bring them upon
hartes [reindeer] to Lampas to sell, and from Lampas
carie them to a place called Colmogro, where the hie
market is holden on Saint Nicholas day."

Farther on, he gives somewhat more detailed in-
formation on the same subject, as follows: —

"The north parts of Russia yeelde very rare and
precious skinnes: and amongst the rest, those princi-
pally, which we call sables, worne about the neckes of
our noble women and ladies: it hath also martins
skinnes, white, blacke, and red foxe skinnes, skinnes
of hares, and ermyns, and others, which they call and
terme barbarously, as bevers, minxes, and minivers.
The sea adjoyning, breedes a certaine beast, which
they call the Mors, which seeketh his foode upon the
rockes, climing up with the helpe of his teeth. The
Russes use to take them, for the great vertue that is
in their teeth, whereof they make as great accompt,
as we doe of the elephants tooth. These commodities
they carry upon deeres backes [reindeer] to the towne
of Lampas: and from thence to Colmagro, and there
in the winter time, are kept great faires for the sale
of them. This citie of Colmagro, serves all the
countrey about it with salt, and salt fish. The Rus-
sians also of the north parts, send thither oyle, which
they call traine, which they make in a river called
Una, although it be also made elsewhere: and here
they use to boile the water of the sea, whereof they
make very great store of salt."

Anthony Jenkinson, who travelled in Russia and
Turkestan from 1557 to 1571, was well familiar with
the life of the Russians and their use of walrus ivory.

44 Field Museum of Natural History

"When he rideth on horse backe to the warres, or any
iourney," he writes, "he hath a sword of the Turkish
fashion, and his bowe and arrowes of the same man-
ner. In the towne he weareth no weapon, but onely
two or three paire of knives having the hafts of the
tooth of a fishe, called the Morse" (E. D. Morgan,
Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by
A. Jenkinson, p. 40).

On his return from Persia in the autumn of 1564,
Jenkinson's efforts were bent toward organizing a
voyage to Cathay by the northeast passage; and in
pursuance of this plan he addressed on the 25th of
September, 1565, to the Queen of England a "petition
relating to the north-east passage." In this memorable
document he presents the following argument in which
walrus teeth play a prominent part in favor of his
contention that Cathay could be reached in that man-
ner: "At my beinge in Scythia and Bactria, I divers
tymes talked and conferred with dyvers Cathayens
[Chinese] who wer there at that present in trade of
merchanndyse towchinge the comodyties of their coun-
trey, and how the seas aborded unto them, I learned
of them that the said seas had theire course to certen
northerly regions with whom they had traphyque by
seas. Also havinge conferrence with th'inhabitantes
of Hugarye [Ugria] and other people of Sameydes
[Samoyeds] and Colmackes whose countreys lye very
farr northerly (and nere whereunto I gesse the said
passage to be) whiche people sayle alonge the saide
coastes fysshinge after the greate fyshe callyed the
Morse for the benefyte of his teathe. Of whome I have
learned that beyonde them the sayde lande and coastes
trenche and tende to the east and to the southwarde,
and that the corrauntes and tydes runne east south-
easte and west northweste very vehemently, whiche
manifestly arguethe a passage. Further this laste
yere at my beinge in th'emperoure of Muscovia his

Walrus Ivory in Siberia 45

Coorte, yt chaunced that there cam thyther certen of
th'inhabitantes of the foresaid countryes to present
unto the said prince a certen straunge hed with a home
therein, whiche they had fownde in the Ilonde of
Vagatts [Vaigats, separated from the Siberian main-
land by Yugor SRar, called Pet Straits], whiche is
not farre from the river of Obbe and the mayne land
of Hugarye. And for that th'emperoure neyther any
of his people knewe what yt was for the straungenes
thereof he commaunded that soche straungers as wer
though te to have any judgement therin shold see the
same, and be asked there opynion what they thoughte
it to be. Amounge whome yt was my chaunce to be.
And so was it fownde, by the reporte of them, that
before had seane the lyke, to be the hedd and home
of an Unycorne, which is in no smalle pryce and
estymacion with the saide prynce. Then I imagynyd
with my self from whence the said hedd sholde come,
and knowinge that unycornes are bredde in the landes
of Cathaye, Chynaye and other the Orientall Regions,
fel into consideration that the same hedd was broughte
thyther by the course of the sea, and that theire muste
of necessytie be a passage owt of the sayde Orientall
Occean into our Septentrionall §eas, for how elles
cowlde that hedd have come to that Ilonde of Vagatts."

This argument is alluded to by Martin Frobisher
in his First Voyage of 1576, "That voyage was then
taken in hand, of the valiant knight, with pretence to
have gone eastward to the rich countrey of Cataya,
and was grounded briefely upon these reasons. First,
bicause there was a unicornes home found upon the
coast of Tartar ia by the river Obij, which (said he)
was like by no other ways to come thither, but from
India or Cataya, where the saide unicornes are only
found, and that by some sea bringing it thither" (R.
Collinson, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher in

46 Field Museum op Natural History

Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the
North-West, 1576-78, p. 39).

Anthony Marsh, a factor for the Moscovie Com-
pany of England, wrote in his Notes concerning the
Discovery of the River of Ob in 1584, "Not farre dis-
tant from the maine, at the mouth of Ob, there is an
island, whereon resort many wilde beasts, as white
beares, and the morses, and such like. And the
Samoeds tell us, that in the winter season, they often-
times finde there Morses teeth."

Giles Fletcher, who, in 1588, was sent as ambas-
sador of Queen Elizabeth to Theodor, emperor of
Russia, has the following report in his "The Russe
Common Wealth," also entitled "The Native Commodi-
ties of the Contrey:" —

"Besides these (which are all good and substan-
tiall commodities) they have divers other of smaller
accompt, that are naturall and proper to that coun-
trey: as the fish tooth (which they call Ribazuba)
which is used among themselves, and the Persians and
Bougharians that fetch it from thence for beads,
knives, and sword hafts of noblemen and gentlemen,
and for divers other uses. Some use the powder of it
against poison, as \he unicornes home. The fish that
weareth it is called a Morse, and is caught about
Pechora. These fish teeth some of them are almost
two foote of length, and weigh eleven or twelve pound
apiece."

R. Stevens of Harwich ("Voyage to Cherry Island
in 1608." This island, named in honor of Sir Francis
Cherry, lies south of Spitsbergen) writes, "The ninth
day we got one tierce of morses' teeth, besides four
hundred other teeth. We brought a young living
morse to court, where King James and many honour-
able personages beheld it with admiration. It soon
died. It was of a strange docility, and very apt to be
taught." In 1610 the Russia Company took possession

Russian and English Trade in Walrus Ivory 47

of Cherry Island, and that year they killed a thousand
morses and made fifty tons of oil (John Harris, Voy-
ages and Travels, 1764, Vol. II, p. 389).

In 1652, Deshneff sailed down the Anadyr as far
as its mouth, and observed on the north side a sand
bank, which stretched a considerable way into the sea.
A sand bank of this kind is called in Siberia korga.
Great numbers of sea-horses were found to resort to
the mouth of the Anadyr. Deshneff collected several
of their teeth, and thought himself amply compensated
by this acquisition for the trouble of his expedition.
Another expedition was made in 1654 to the Korga,
for the purpose of collecting sea-horse teeth. A Cos-
sack, named Yusko Soliverstoff, was one of the party.
This person was sent from Yakutsk to collect sea-horse
teeth for the benefit of the crown (W. Coxe, Account
of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and America,
pp. 318, 319, London, 1780).

An important contribution to the subject is fur-
nished by the Jesuit father Avril, who in the latter
part of the seventeenth century gathered the following
information from the Russians : "Besides furs of all
sorts, which they fetch from all quarters, they have
discovered a sort of ivory, which is whiter and
smoother than that which comes from the Indies. Not
that they have any elephants that furnish them with
this commodity (for the northern countries are too
cold for those sort of creatures that naturally love
heat), but other amphibious animals, which they call
by the name of Behemot, which are usually found in
the River Lena, or upon the shores of the Tartarian
Sea. Several teeth of this monster were shewn us at
Moskow, which were ten inches long, and two at the
diameter at the root: nor are the elephant's teeth
comparable to them, either for beauty or whiteness,
besides that they have a peculiar property to stanch
blood, being carried about a person subject to bleeding.

48 Field Museum of Natural History

The Persians and Turks who buy them up put a high
value upon them, and prefer a scimitar or a dagger
haft of this precious ivory before a handle of massy
gold or silver. But certainly nobody better under-
stands the price of this ivory than they who first
brought it into request ; considering how they venture
their lives in attacking the creature that produces it,
which is as big and as dangerous as a crocodile."
Farther on, Avril quotes a story told him by the Voye-
voda of Smolensk about an island at the mouth of the
great River Kawoina, beyond the Obi, that discharges
itself into the Frozen Sea. "This island is spacious
and very well peopled, and is no less considerable for
hunting the Behemot, an amphibious animal, whose
teeth are in great esteem. The inhabitants go fre-
quently upon the side of the Frozen Sea to hunt this
monster; and because it requires great labor and as-
siduity, they carry their families usually along with
them." Avril, accordingly, confirms the fact that the
Russians hunted the walrus along the shores of the
Arctic Sea, and that the animal's tusks were conveyed
to Moscow and traded to the Persians and Turks.

The Arabs, as we learn from al-Beruni (a.d. 973-
1048) in a treatise on precious stones written by him,
prized walrus ivory highly and called it khutu. They
received it from the Bulgars, who then resided on the
Volga and who brought from the northern sea "teeth
of a fish over a cubit long," which were wrought into
knife-hilts. The Arabs traded them even to Mekka.
The Egyptians craved them and purchased them at a
price equal to two hundred times their value. Maqdisi
or Muqaddasi (about A.D. 985) mentions fish-teeth
among the exports from Bulgar into Kharizm (Khiva) .
The Jesuit Avril, as quoted above, observes that the
Persians and Turks bought up walrus teeth at a high
value and preferred a scimitar or a dagger haft of
this precious ivory to a handle of massive gold or

Walrus Ivory Among Arabs and Persians 49

silver. The Persians adopted both the foreign term
khutu and the designation "fish-tooth" (danddn mdhi,
also shir mdhi, "lion-fish"), and turned combs and
knife-hilts out of it, which were transmitted to India.
In the second volume of his Memoirs, the emperor Ja-
hangir tells how delighted he was when he received
from Persia a dagger whose hilt was made of a fish-
tooth. He was so much impressed by this hilt that he
despatched skilful men to search for other specimens
in Persia and Transoxania. Their instructions were
to bring fish-teeth from anywhere, and from any per-
son, and at any cost. A little later a fine specimen
was picked up in the bazar of his own capital of Agra,
and was brought to him by his son, Shah Jahan.
Jahangir had the tooth made into dagger-hilts, and
gave one of the craftsmen an elephant as a reward,
and bestowed on the other increase of pay and a
jewelled bracelet. The idea that this ivory was be-
lieved to be an antidote to poison, and also to reduce
swellings, added greatly to its value. From a state-
ment in the history of Akbar the Great, known as the
Akbarnama, it appears that about 1569 a Raja in Mala-
bar, who probably was the Raja of Cochin, sent Akbar
a knife which had the property of reducing or remov-
ing swellings, and that Akbar told his secretary that
it had been successfully applied in more than two hun-
dred cases. Probably this knife was made, wholly or
in part, of walrus ivory, which could easily have been
brought to Cochin by sea.

At present India still has a kind of ivory known as
"fish-tooth" (mahlika-dant) . This is always of a dirty
(oily) yellow color with the texture looking as if
crystallized into patches, which is characteristic of the
interior of the walrus tusk. The significance of being
called in every language and dialect of India "fish-
tooth" at once suggests a common and, most probably,
foreign origin for the material. An inquiry made by

50 Field Museum op Natural History

George Watt disclosed the fact that it was more highly
valued for sword and dagger hafts and more exten-
sively used for these purposes than is ivory. It is put
through an elaborate and protracted process of curing
before being worked up. The crude fish-tooth is
wrapped up in a certain mixture and retained in that
condition for various periods, the finer samples for
as long as fifty years. The advantages are its greater
strength, finer and smoother surface, and greater re-
sistance (less liability to slip in the hand) than is the
case with ivory. According to Watt, the fish-tooth of
Indian trade is mainly, if not entirely, the so-called
fossil ivory of Siberia — the ivory of the mammoth;
but he thinks it equally possible that a fair amount
of walrus ivory finds its way into India by passing,
like the Siberian ivory, over land routes to India. And
from the antiquity of some of the swords, found in
the armories of the princes of India with "fish-tooth"
hafts, it would seem possible that there has existed
for centuries a traffic in carrying this material to
India.

A Turkish work on mineralogy, written in a.d.
1511-12 by Ibn Muhammad al Gaffari, contains the
following account : "On the Khutu Tooth. The khutu
is an animal like an ox which occurs among the Berber
and is found also in Turkestan. A gem is obtained
from it; some say it is its tooth, others, it is its horn.
The color is yellow, and the yellow inclines toward red,
and designs are displayed in it as in damaskeening.
When the khutu is young, its tooth is good, fresh, and
firm; when it has grown older, its tooth also is dark-
colored and soft. The padishahs purchase it at a high
rate. Likewise in China, in the Magrib, and in other
countries it is known and famous. It is told that a
merchant from Egypt brought to Mekka a piece and
a half of this tooth and sold it on the market of Mina
for a thousand gold pieces. Poison has no effect upon

Walrus Ivory in Turkey 51

one who carries this tooth with him, and poison placed
near it will cause it to exude. For this reason it is
highly esteemed."

Pierre Belon (1518-64), a prominent French
traveller and naturalist, wrote in 1553, "The Turks
have this custom in common with the Greeks that they
carry their knives suspended from their belts. These
knives are commonly made in Hungary with very long
handles; but when the merchants of Turkey buy them,
they turn them over to artisans to add to them a butt
which is commonly made of Rohart tooth [walrus
tooth]. There are two sorts: one is straight white
and compact, resembling the tooth of the unicorn
[narwhal], and is so hard that steel will hardly affect
it unless it be well tempered. The other tooth of
Rohart is curved like that of a boar: we might have
believed that it was the tooth of a hippopotamus, had
we not observed this animal alive which had no such
teeth." The French word rohart (also rohar, rohal)
refers to the walrus, and is connected with Old Norse
horshvalr (Norwegian rohal, roshal). In the Latin
translation of Belon's work prepared by the botanist
C. Clusius (1589) the name "morse" for the animal
has been added.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
Company of the Greenland Merchants of England
shipped to Constantinople a "horn," as it was then
called, found by an English sea-captain in 1611 in the
ground on the coast of Greenland, and the sum of
two thousand pounds sterling was offered for it. The
Company, however, in the hope of a better price, de-
clined to sell and sent it on into Muscovy, where ap-
proximately the same price was bidden. Hence the
tooth was transported back into Turkey, where a much
smaller sum was then proffered than before. The
Company therefore decided that the tooth would sell
more easily in pieces than entire, and had it broken up.

62 Field Museum of Natural History

The single pieces were finally disposed of in different
places, but the proceeds amounted to only twelve hun-
dred pounds sterling (account of Pietro della Valle in
1623; the complete text is given in "Sino-Iranica,"
p. 567).

Quite independently of Europe, the Chinese re-
ceived walrus ivory from the northeast of Asia through
the medium of numerous tribes settled in this region.
Beyond the boundaries of Korea, in the east conter-
minous with the ocean, the northern limit being un-
known, there was from remote ages the habitat of
the Su-shen, who have greatly stirred the imagination
of Chinese and Japanese chroniclers, and who are fre-
quently mentioned in the Chinese Annals. They were
the Vikings of the East, raiding on several occasions
the coasts of northern Japan and engaging in many a
sea-battle with the Japanese in the seventh century.
For a thousand years earlier, the Chinese were ac-
quainted with this nation and its peculiar culture.
They used flint arrowheads, usually poisoned, which
were preserved as curiosities in the royal treasury of
China. They lived through a stone age for at least
fifteen hundred years down to the middle ages when
they were merged in the flood of roaming Tungusian
tribes. They availed themselves of stone axes which
played a role in their religious worship, and of hide
and bone armor for defence. In a.d. 262 they sent to
China a tribute consisting of thirty bows, wooden ar-
rows, three hundred stone crossbows, twenty suits of
armor made of leather, bone, and iron, respectively,
as well as a hundred sable-skins. This enumeration
of objects brings us into close contact with the state
of culture that partially still prevails in the northern
area of the Pacific, and the main representatives of
which at the present time are the Koryak, the Chukchi,
and the Eskimo. In this area still occurs that peculiar
type of bone plate armor composed of rows of over-

Walrus Ivory in China 63

lapping ivory plates, and the plates in this type of
armor are commonly carved from walrus ivory, pos-
sessing as it does a higher degree of elasticity than
any ordinary kind of bone. The Su-shen, accordingly,
appear to have been in possession of walrus ivory, at
least prior to A.D. 262, and probably wrought it them-
selves into plates for armor.

A product of the nature of walrus ivory first be-
came known in China during the reign of the T'ang
dynasty (a.d. 618-906) under the name ku-tu kio
("horn of the ku-tu," the latter being a non-Chinese
word derived from some native tribe of northeastern
Asia) . Ku-tu is given in the T'ang Annals among the
taxes sent from Ying-chou in Liao-tung, and this was
the domicile of the Kitan and other Tungusian tribes.
It is also mentioned as a product of the Mo-ho,
likewise a Tungusian tribe, whose country abounded
in sables, white hares, and white falcons. The Mo-ho
were settled to the north of Korea and extended east
of the Sungari River as far as the ocean. They lived
in close proximity and intercourse with the Liu-kwei,
a people briefly described in the Annals of the T'ang
Dynasty. The geographical position of the country
of the Liu-kwei is clearly enough defined to lead us to
Kamchatka. The culture of this people, as character-
ized by the Chinese, plainly reveals a type that is still
found in the North-Pacific area. These cultural traits
are, absence of agriculture, economy essentially based
on the maintenance of numerous dogs, subterranean
habitations, utilization of furs as winter costume, em-
ployment of fish-skins as clothing in the summer, and
transportation on snow-shoes. The Mo-ho entertained
a lucrative commerce with the Liu-kwei by way of the
sea, the voyage lasting fifteen days; and when the
latter in a.d. 640 sent a mission to China, their envoys
travelled across the Mo-ho country. One of the three
interpreters with whom they arrived at the Chinese

54 Field Museum of Natural History

Court appears to have been a Mo-ho, and the extract
in the Annals is doubtless based upon a report made
by the Mo-ho. The latter, accordingly, were in inti-
mate contact with a people that had the walrus and
its product within easy reach; and from the descrip-
tions of Steller and Krasheninnikov, which represent
the principal sources for our knowledge of the ancient
Kamchadal or Itelmen who are now almost extinct,
we know surely enough that these tribes hunted the
walrus and utilized its ivory for industrial work.

Hung Hao (a.d. 1090-1155) was sent as an am-
bassador of the Sung to the court of the Kin dynasty
which belonged to the Jurchi or Niiichi, a tribe of
Tungusian origin. He remained there for fifteen years
(1129-43), and in his memoirs (Sung mo ki wen) has
this note: "The ku-tu horn is not very large. It is
veined like ivory, and is yellow in color. It is made
into sword-hilts, and is a priceless jewel." In the
History of the Liao or Kitan Dynasty (Liao shi, chap.
116), which ruled from a.d. 907 to 1125, the word
ku-tu-si is defined as "the horn of a thousand years'
old snake," the" word tu-na-si being added as a syno-
nym. These evidently are words belonging to the na-
tive language of the Kitan, although the Kitan on their
part may have derived them from peoples living
farther to the north. In the Annals of the Kin Dy-
nasty (Kin shi, chap. 64) are mentioned daggers with
hilt of ku-tu-si of the ancient Liao. Hung Hao also
wrote in 1143 or shortly afterwards, "The Kitan hold
the ku-tu-si in esteem. The horn is not large, but it
is so rare that among numerous pieces of rhinoceros-
horn there is not a single ku-tu-si. Unlike rhinoceros-
horn, the latter has never been wrought into girdles.
It has designs like those in elephant ivory, and is yel-
low in color. Only knife-hilts are made from it, and
these are considered as priceless. The emperor T'ien
Tsu (reigned a.d. 1101-19, died in 1125) had a girdle-

Walrus Ivory in China 55

pendant (t'u-hu) made from this substance." This
was an exceptional case, for the girdles of the Kin
dynasty were made of jade, gold, rhinoceros-horn,
ivory, bone, and horn, and were graded in the order of
these materials. This point bears out the fact that
ku-tu-si represents a category of its own, and can have
been neither elephant ivory nor rhinoceros-horn, which
were the common articles for the girdles of the Kin
or Jurchi. Moreover we know the Jurchi terms for
elephant ivory and rhinoceros-horn, and these are dis-
tinct from ku-tu-si, which refers to walrus ivory.

Chou Mi (a.d. 1230-1320), a celebrated and pro-
lific writer of the Sung period, alludes to ku-tu in two
of his works. In one of these he cites the opinion of
Sien-yu Ch'u, a poet and caligrapher, who possessed
two knife-hilts made of this substance, to the effect
that "ku-tu is a horn of the earth," which may pos-
sibly mean a horn found in the ground or under-
ground. This might be construed to allude to mam-
moth tusks, although the evidence is not conclusive in
view of the fact that walrus and narwhal tusks are
likewise found in and under the ground along sea-
shores. In another book Chou Mi writes that "ku-
tu-si is the horn of a large snake and that, being
poisonous by nature, it is capable of counteracting all
poisons, as poison is treated with poison." This
poison-curing property is a notion transferred to ku-tu
from the ancient beliefs in the efficacy of rhinoceros-
horn. The Chinese fondly entertained the idea that
the rhinoceros feeding on brambles swallows all sorts
of vegetable poisons which penetrate into its horn, so
that in accordance with the principle that poison can
neutralize poison, the horn or a cup carved from it
becomes an efficient antidote. In 1320, Pi-ming, a son
of Sien-yii Ch'u, was still the owner of the objects of
which his father had spoken to Chou Mi thirty years
earlier, and Ye Sen who saw them in his possession

56 Field Museum op Natural History

wrote an additional note on the subject which is em-
bodied in Chou Mi's work. He observes that the natu-
ral designs displayed in the two knife-hilts of ku-
ta-si resembled the sugar-cakes then sold in the
markets ; there also were white 'spots somewhat like
those on candied cakes and pastry. "When touching
this substance with your hands," he concludes, "it
emits an odor like that of cinnamon; when after rub-
bing it no odor is perceptible, it is a counterfeit."
Walrus ivory, on being rubbed, indeed emits a certain
odor. Ye Sen's remark shows that the fakers were
no less busy in China six hundred years ago than at
present and that then also certain sleights were per-
formed to test the genuineness of an article.

During the Mongol period the Chinese learned the
fact that walrus ivory was found among the products
of the western countries. In A.D. 1259 Chang Te was
dispatched by the Mongol emperor Mangu as an envoy
to his brother Hulagu, king of Persia. On his return
to China he published a diary of his journey in which
he mentions, among the products of the west, ku-tu-si
as the horn of a large snake which has the property
of neutralizing every poison. It is an interesting co-
incidence that the Kitan-Chinese term ku-tu has mi-
grated westward and that for the first time it makes
its appearance in a mineralogical treatise of the great
Arabic traveller and scholar, al-Beruni (a.d. 973-
1048) ; subsequently it recurs frequently in Arabic,
Turkish, and Persian authors. Al-Beruni writes that
khutu is much in demand, and is preserved in the
treasuries of the Chinese who assert that it is a de-
sirable article because the approach of poison causes
it to exude, and that it was wrought into knife-hilts.

In the age of the Mongols we receive an inter-
esting bit of folk-lore which has been recorded by
Haithon, king of Armenia (1224-69), in the narrative
of his journey to the Mongols written by Kirakos of

Walrus Ivory in China 57

Gandsak. Haithon relates the universal legend of the
country of the dog-heads, where the men have the
shape of dogs, but the women have the human form
and are endowed with reason. These fabulous crea-
tures were located by the Chinese in an island of the
northern Pacific, and Haithon adds, "There is also a
sandy island there where is found a precious bone in
the form of a tree, called fish-tooth; when it is cut,
another bone will shoot forth at the same spot, in the
manner of deer's antlers." The question is here of
walrus tusks: the tusk was regarded as a "horn" (cf.
p. 36) ; and in the same manner as the stag sheds its
antlers, so also the "horns" of the marine mammals
were believed to become detached and to grow again.

Toward the latter part of the seventeenth cen-
tury, when the Russians established commercial rela-
tions with China, they traded chiefly two articles —
seal-skins and walrus tusks, the latter being styled in
the Russian documents of the time "bones of walrus
tooth." A contemporaneous Chinese book (the Pa
hung yi shi written by Lu Ts'e-yun in 1683) contains
a brief description of Russia under the name A-lu-su
(based on the Mongol name of Russia, Oros) and men-
tions the fact that in the reign of K'ang-hi (1662-
1722) the Russians presented fish-teeth, black sables,
gyrfalcons, a striking clock, glass mirrors, and other
objects. It is perfectly obvious that the "fish-teeth"
of this text, as corroborated by the coeval Russian
documents, represent walrus tusks.

Gerbillon, one of the old Jesuit missionaries work-
ing in Peking (in Du Halde, Description of the Empire
of China, Vol. II, p. 263, 1741), speaking of the trade
of the Russians, mentions "the teeth of a sort of fish,
which are much finer, whiter, and more precious than
ivory. With these they drive a great trade to Peking,
though scarcely any people but the Russians, who are
poor, and inured to cold and fatigue, would take so

58 Field Museum of Natural History

much pains for so little profit." In a footnote it is
added, "They are those called Mamuts teeth, found
lately to be the teeth of elephants." But as already
remarked by J. Rankin (p. 454), this is an addition
of the translator, and the term "fish-teeth" used by
Gerbillon, as well as the emphasis laid on the white
color, demonstrates plainly that the question is of
walrus tusks.

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, in
the era of K'ang-hi, the Chinese have gradually be-
come acquainted with the walrus. In the dictionary
Cheng tse t'ung it is designated "sea-horse" (hai ma),
defined as "a fish or seal with teeth as strong and
bright as bone and adorned with designs as fine as
silk, — workable into implements." A curious descrip-
tion of the animal is also given in the Hai lu ("Records
of the Ocean"), a small book published in 1800 by
Yang Ping-nan and containing accounts of foreign
nations from information received through a friend
who had spent fifteen years voyaging to different parts
of the world.

Besides the Russians, the Gilyak also, who are
settled at the mouth of the Amur and on the island of
Saghalin, traded walrus ivory to the Chinese on the
Sungari. The Gilyak, on their part, received the Arc-
tic product through the medium of the northern ad-
joining tribes in times prior to the Russian colonization
of the Amur territory; the animal itself is known to
the Gilyak solely by name. From 1853 they purchased
its tusks from the Russian-American Company of
Nikolayevsk and bartered them with the Chinese of
the Sungari in a profitable trade for other articles.
Vladivostok, prior to the war at least, received a share
of walrus ivory from Gishiginsk and Baron Korff's
Bay, a region inhabited by the Koryak. The Chukchi
in the farthest corner of northeastern Asia, are great

Walrus Ivory in China 69

walrus-hunters, and formerly carried on an enormous
trade in the tusks.

In the K'ien-lung period (1736-95) walrus ivory
was carved into snuff -bottles, dishes, stems for tobacco-
pipes, and covers for cricket-gourds. As a rule, the
material was stained a bright green by means of verdi-
gris to lend it the appearance of jade; but it must not
be inferred from this that any ivory thus treated is
that of the walrus and that ivory kept in its natural
colors is necessarily that of the elephant. The hand
of the back-scratcher shown in the case, for instance,
is white, but of walrus ivory.

Finally, America came to the fore in the exporta-
tion of this article. It was during the nineteenth cen-
tury that walrus ivory under the name hai-ma ya ("sea-
horse teeth"), by which it is still commonly known in
Canton, was imported into that city in large quantity
from California, Sitka, and other parts of western
America. The first American ship that reached China
was the "Empress of China" which arrived at Canton
in 1784, mainly with a cargo of ginseng. A company
in Boston sent in 1788 two ships to the Northwest
Coast, the "Columbia" and the "Lady Washington,"
which spent the spring and the summer of the follow-
ing year in trading along the coast. At the close of
the season all the furs collected were put on board the
"Columbia," which then proceeded to Canton to dis-
pose of the peltry, and with a cargo of Chinese goods
returned to Boston by way of the Cape of Good Hope,
arriving in August 1790 as the first American vessel
which had circumnavigated the globe. The following
years show a considerable growth in the American
Northwest Coast trade, until in 1801 there were at
least fourteen American ships on the coast. The nor-
mal voyage was to sail from the United States in the
summer or early autumn, and to arrive on the North-

60 Field Museum op Natural History

west Coast in the spring. The captains would then
trade with the Indians from inlet to inlet, getting
skins, preferably those of the rare sea-otter, in ex-
change for trinkets, knives, firearms, blankets, cotton
and woollen cloths. In the autumn they would cross
the Pacific to Canton, or if they had not yet obtained
a cargo, they would winter at the Hawaiian Islands
and trade on the Coast a second and even a third sea-
son before going to China. Once there they would
exchange their cargo for tea and other goods and
return to the United States by way of the Cape of
Good Hope. The voyages, as a rule, were very lucra-
tive. The original outlay was small, the furs sold in
Canton at a large gain, and the teas and other goods
purchased with the proceeds brought another profit in
America or Europe. The voyages, however, were full
of risk and required experience, and the trade was in
the hands of a few large firms (cf. K. S. Latourette,
History of Early Relations between the United States
and China 1784-1844, Yale University Press, 1917).
The beginnings of the trade in walrus ivory may be
traceable to these early cruises.

In 1913 the Department of Commerce and Labor
in Washington published the following communication
from F. D. Cheshire, American Consul-General at Can-
ton: "Before the revolution, about eighteen months
ago, there was considerable trade in the manufacture
from walrus ivory tusks of tobacco-pipe mouth-pieces,
handles of fans, thumb-rings, and peacock-feather
tubes for mandarin hats. These articles were sent to
Peking, where they were dyed a green color, resem-
bling the color of jade, but since the revolution there
has been very little activity in the manufacture of
such goods from walrus tusks. The demand has fallen
off considerably, and the trade is confined to making
cigarette holders, tooth-brushes, and chopsticks. The
value of walrus tusks is $280 to $400 Hongkong cur-

American Trade of Walrus Ivory to China 61

rency per picul (133^ pounds). Elephant tusks are
worth $700 to $1,200 Hongkong currency per picul.
The elephant tusks are more serviceable and at the
same time more valuable."

At the same time, Consul-General G. E. Anderson
of Hongkong reported to the Department that inquiry
among local importing and exporting firms and dealers
in ivory of Hongkong failed to locate any importations
of walrus ivory, but that elephant ivory was imported
in large quantities, and was shipped mostly to Canton.

According to a communication of the United
States Collector of Customs at the port of Juneau,
Alaska, there was during the year 1913 exported direct
from Alaska to China 4,000 lbs. of walrus ivory, to
the value of $1,200, and from Alaska to the United
States 7,763 lbs. of foreign walrus ivory, to the value
of $2,717. The destination of the latter quantity was
unknown to the office at Juneau, but it was believed
there that the bulk of this ivory found its way to
Japan and China. The shipment of ivory to China
was made in that year by the Norwegian tramp
steamer "Kit" from Nome en route to Japan ; there is
no regular transportation line direct from the Alaskan
coast to the Orient, but occasionally tramp steamers
call at different ports, bound for the Orient.

During the year 1924 there were shipped from
Alaska to the United States 4,854 pounds of ivory
valued at $6,602. This includes ivory of all kinds, but
it is mostly walrus ivory (communication of the U. S.
Collector of Customs at Juneau, January 19, 1925) .

During my stay in China in 1923 I made in-
quiries among the ivory carvers of both Peking and
Shanghai. They were perfectly well acquainted with
walrus ivory and knew that the tusks, specimens of
which were kept in their shops and readily shown
me, came from America. In Shanghai the old term

62 Field Museum of Natural History

"fish-tooth" (yii ya) is still in use; both in Shanghai
and Peking a new term has also sprung into existence
— ts'iu Mo ("horn of the ts'iu," originally the desig-
nation of some giant fish and the loach).

The Japanese likewise utilized (and still utilize)
both walrus and narwhal ivory (besides elephant
ivory) for their netsuke and other carvings. At the
end of the eighteenth century shipwrecked Japanese
sailors cast adrift on the Aleutian Islands acquainted
their countrymen with the walrus by means of a some-
what grotesque, but unmistakable sketch. It happens
that walrus sometimes get astray into the waters of
Japan, and about 1890 one was caught near Hakodate
in Tsugaru Strait, which must have passed along the
Kurils from the north. The walrus is called in Japa-
nese kaiba ("sea-horse") ; its teeth, kaiba no kiba. It
is curious that formerly also the term unikoro (our
"unicorn") was used and written with two Chinese
characters which mean "single horn." This hints at
a trade in the product with Portuguese and Hollanders.
Under the foreign name mentioned a pair of walrus
tusks is figured in the Japanese cyclopaedia Wa-kan
san-zai-zu-e, first published in 1714, with the explana-
tion that such tusks were imported on Dutch ships
coming from Batavia ; they were 6-7 feet in length and
measured 3-4 inches in circumference, resembling ele-
phant ivory. Among the temple treasures of Nikko,
a narwhal tooth is still preserved in the temple of
Iyemitsu. The rectangular box in which it is kept is
inscribed with the words "a horn of the Barbarians"
(Ban-kaku isshi) . This tusk is said to have been pre-
sented by the Hollanders in 1671. According to Thun-
berg whose travels extended over the years 1770 to
1779, narwhal ivory was contraband in Japan before
his time, and the Hollanders reaped immense profits
by it, as the Japanese, who attributed to it all medicinal
virtues, were willing to pay exorbitant prices for it.

IVORY SUBSTITUTES

Substitutes for ivory have been plentiful, both in
ancient and modern times. The ancients used the
teeth of the hippopotamus ("river horse") of the
Nile like ivory: thus Pausanias mentions a golden
statue of Demeter whose face was formed of hippo-
potamus teeth. The animal was known to the Hebrews
under the name behemoth (Job, XL, 10), which is de-
rived from the Egyptian p-ehe-mau ("water-ox"). We
have seen that Avril availed himself of this Hebrew
word for the designation of the walrus, and it has even
been suggested that the word mammoth has been de-
rived from behemoth through the medium of an Arabic
form mehemoth. It is by no means certain, however,
that this etymology is correct. The word behemoth
was used rather flexibly, and was referred not only
to the mammoth, but also to any large and strange
beast, for instance, to the rhinoceros. Hekataeus, one
of Herodotus' authorities, is the first who gave a de-
scription of the hippopotamus. The animal was
hunted by means of harpoons, and large numbers were
captured alive to be sent to Rome for the purpose of
fighting in the circus with crocodiles. Both skin and
teeth were used for industrial work. Arabic authors
like Masudi and Damiri refer to the animal; and, in
his notes on Egypt, Chao Ju-kwa, a Chinese author,
who wrote in a.d. 1225, mentions water-horses in the
Nile, which come out of the river to feed on the herbs
growing on the banks, but which dive into the water
at the sight of a man. Kubilai, the Great Khan, as
Marco Polo relates, received from envoys he had sent
to Africa "two boars' tusks, which weighed more than
fourteen pounds apiece; and you may gather how big
the boar must have been that had teeth like that ! They
related indeed that there were some of those boars as
big as a great buffalo." These boar's teeth, as Yule
comments in his edition of Marco Polo, were indubi-

63

64 Field Museum of Natural History

tably hippopotamus teeth, which form a considerable
article of export from Zanzibar. Burton speaks of
their reaching twelve pounds in weight.

Francesco Carletti, who travelled in America and
in the Far East from 1594 to 1606 and whose very
interesting book in Italian, entitled "Ragionamenti,"
was published at Florence in 1701, discusses the Mo-
hammedan trade at Goa and mentions the importation
of sea-horse teeth (il dente del cavallo marino), which
he identifies with the hippopotamus. He further men-
tions another tooth, no less marvelous and of no less
virtue coming from a fish called Fish Woman (Pesce
Donna), so called from the resemblance it bears to a
human creature. It is said that this fish has solely
one tooth of marvelous virtue for stopping the flow
of blood; yet of all these teeth they make without
distinction crowns and rings, as likewise of the tooth
of the hippopotamus to which they attribute the same
virtue, but it is not so highly esteemed. This "fish"
is the dugong (Halicore dugong), a cetaceous animal
found in all parts of the Indian Ocean. Pliny and
Aelian have written about it; according to the latter,
these creatures partly resemble satyrs, partly human
women. The Chinese also have their share of fables
about this creature, believing that in the course of
many years its teeth change into dragon's teeth, and
in this state they call the animal "pig-woman-dragon."
Its teeth were formerly imported into China from the
southern seas to be made into knife-hilts and handles
for fans. They were even imitated with elephant
ivory which was subjected to an artificial treatment
by means of chemicals.

At the first quarterly ivory sale held at Antwerp in
1912, 71 hippopotamus tusks were sold, at the second
quarterly sale 262 hippopotamus tusks, and at the third
quarterly sale 97 tusks. At one of these sales held in

Ivory Substitutes 65

1911, twelve kilos of rhinoceros tusks are mentioned,
so that also these must serve as a substitute of ivory.

Bones of whale, crocodile, and large sea-fishes also
are said to be used in lieu of ivory, particularly in
Annam, where the material is exposed to the smoke
of a charcoal fire ; it is then gently rubbed in the sun-
light, and is finally rolled for twenty-four hours in
fresh tobacco-leaves of Nicotiana rustica. An ultimate
energetic massage will produce a certain ivory-like
appearance and a yellow tint which is not unpleasing.
Similar bones are utilized in China for cheap orna-
ments, but they are invariably dyed a pink color and
sold under the name "fish-bone" (yii ku), not as ivory.
Teeth of the sperm-whale, lamantin, and other phocine
animals are imported into China in limited quantities,
and are also used like ivory.

In Japan, the large canine teeth of the sea-lion,
some of which are nearly four inches in length and
of the consistency of ivory, are sometimes carved into
netsuke. In the same manner the Koryak of north-
eastern Siberia employ the teeth of the white whale
and the bear in carvings.

Finally we have also blessed the Chinese with
celluloid which they euphemistically call "European
ivory."

OBJECTS MADE OF IVORY

From the preceding discussion it becomes clear
that the Chinese, in the course of their history, have
utilized the ivory of the elephant, the mammoth, the
walrus and the narwhal. In specimens of the archaic
period, as illustrated in Plate I, we may not err in
tracing the ivory to the native elephants of ancient
China. From the period which marks the end of
antiquity down to the middle ages (that is, from the
Han to the close of the T'ang dynasty, 206 B.C. — a.d.
906) we are bound to assume that the bulk of ivory

66 Field Museum of Natural History

used by the Chinese came from Kwang-tung and Yun-
nan, Annam, Camboja, Siam, Burma, and India. From
the tenth century onward the chief importers of ivory
into China were the Arabs, who obtained the material
from Java, Sumatra, India, and the east coast of
Africa. At present it is chiefly imported from Siam,
India, and Africa, and the African ivory will presum-
ably preponderate. The export of ivory from Siam
for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1910, amounted
to 4,301 pounds, valued at $8,489, and this is regarded
as a fair average of the export for the preceding five
years; this ivory is obtained from domestic elephants
that have died a natural death, as the animal is not
hunted in Siam for its ivory; the number of tame
elephants kept in Siam is roughly estimated at about
three thousand. From Bombay also much ivory is at
present exported to China.

To what extent mammoth ivory was utilized in
China is a question difficult to answer. It is said that
the furniture-makers of Ning-po used it for inlaying
tables. The desk-ornament illustrated in Plate IX,
Fig. 3, is possibly a piece of mammoth ivory; it is
deep brown and yellow in color, and is left in its natu-
ral state, being only sawed off and polished along
the base. The Chinese collector from whom I obtained
this object in 1923 was unable to give any informa-
tion about it.

The articles most commonly made of walrus ivory
are combs and back-scratchers both of which are kept
intact in their natural colors, handles for fans (see
exhibition of fans in Blackstone Chinese Collection),
dice for gambling, ear-rings and other small ornaments
usually dyed green with verdigris, and, above all, chop-
sticks. It is a curious fact that, although the whole-
sale price of raw walrus ivory is lower than that of
elephant ivory, chopsticks of the former material are
higher priced in Peking than those of the latter. A

Objects Made of Ivory 67

pair of good elephant-ivory chopsticks may be bought
anywhere at a price of Chinese $1.80-2.00, while a
pair of green walrus-ivory chopsticks, like that placed
on exhibition, which is a perfect specimen, retails in
Peking at Chinese $12.00, and a pair but partially
green at Chinese $5.50. Chopsticks are a remarkable
Chinese invention, and, as stated, were used as early
as the Chou period; in the sculptured bas-reliefs of
the Han period many banquets are illustrated with
chopsticks in evidence. While all other nations took
their food with their fingers, the Chinese were the
first who introduced and practised good table-manners.

The small dish illustrated in Plate IX, Fig. 1, is
likewise of walrus ivory stained green and carved all
over into a swirl of waves rising into crests along the
edge. The two covers for cricket-gourds in Figs. 4
and 5 of the same Plate are made of the same sub-
stance. One shows a boat in which a lady with a
basket stands, speaking to a man seated in a mat-
covered cabin. The other is carved in two layers, the
upper one in green representing a bird on the wing
flying toward a blossoming plum-branch (see, further,
below, p. 74).

Archaic objects of ivory are figured in Plate I
and have been referred to on p. 9. As to the T'ang
period (a.d. 618-906) , the Japanese Treasure-house of
Nara furnishes us some good examples, as, for in-
stance, a backgammon board of sandalwood decorated
with ivory inlays (Toyei Shuko, pi. 72), and two stan-
dard foot-measures of ivory colored red and green, re-
spectively (pi. 82-83). As Omura Seigai informs us,
ivory at that time (eighth century) was colored crim-
son, indigo, green, or some other shade, and on this
colored surface floral designs were so engraved that
the unstained part of the ivory stood out. He states
that this process has altogether been lost, and was not
used in later times. This may hold good for Japan,

68 Field Museum of Natural History

but in China it survived at least down to the K'ien-
lung period from which we have ivory snuff-bottles
with paintings of the same technique. The fact that
ivory was painted in China under the Tang may be
gleaned from an ivory fragment found by Sir Aurel
Stein (Serindia, p. 779) in the Limes of Tun-hwang;
it bears traces of a painted leaf -scroll in green. Ivory
dyed by means of purple in Asia Minor was known in
the Homeric age (Iliad, IV, 141). The Hawaiians
colored whale ivory yellow by smoking it with green
banana leaves.

Under the Mongols who ruled China as the Yuan
dynasty (a.d. 1260-1367), a bureau for carvings in
ivory and rhinoceros-horn was established. In this
court-atelier couches, tables, implements, and girdle-
ornaments inlaid with ivory and horn were turned out
for the imperial household. An official was placed in
charge of it in 1263', and the force consisted of a
hundred and fifty workmen. Again, toward the end
of the seventeenth century, under the reign of K'ang-
hi, an atelier for ivory works was founded within the
palace at Peking in connection with twenty-six other
establishments for the practise of all industrial arts.
Experienced craftsmen for the various branches of
work were summoned to Peking from all parts of the
empire. These factories lasted somewhat more than
a century, and were closed after the reign of K'ien-
lung (1795). Authentic productions which could be
safely identified with the output of the Mongol im-
perial works have not yet come to light ; but there are
authentic specimens of the K'ien-lung period, which
have come from the imperial palace and without any
doubt were fabricated in the imperial atelier, as, for
instance, the fan illustrated in Plate VIII. This is a
marvel of technical skill and harmonious beauty, being
plaited from finely cut ivory threads held by a tortoise-
shell rim and overlaid with colored ivory carvings of

Objects Made of Ivory 69

lilies, peonies, asters, and a butterfly. The handle,
likewise of ivory, bears etched designs in colors of
flowers and butterflies. The carved medallion on the
dividing rod in the centre is of amber, and the orna-
ment above the handle is of brass inlaid with blue
kingfisher feathers. At the time of the Han, Wei and
Tsin periods (first to fifth century A.D.), as we read
in Chinese accounts, mats of ivory were made. The
ivory plaiting in the above fan may give us a clew to
the technique of such mats. John Barrow, who visited
China in 1792, speaks of neat baskets and hats made
at Canton from ivory shavings interwoven with pieces
of quills, and as light and pliant as baskets and hats
of straw.

Paleologue (L'Art chinois) said in 1887 that the
fine Chinese ivories are excessively rare, and that the
Buddhistic statuettes offer us the most interesting
specimens of sculptured ivory. Unfortunately such
statuettes never bear the signature or seal of the
artist, nor are names of ivory-carvers preserved to us
in any records, so that we are entirely ignorant of art-
schools and artists working in this field.

The goddess of compassion, Kwan Yin, has been
the most favored subject of the sculptors, who were
particularly tempted by the task of presenting the
drapery of her long, flowing garb in graceful sweeps
and elegant lines. The statuette (Plate II, Fig. 1)
representing her is a masterpiece of modeling ani-
mated by life and motion, and is a triumph of the
spirit over matter. Her left hand supports a bowl
believed to be filled with the nectar of immortality,
and her right hand touches a ladle inserted in the
bowl, ready to distribute her gifts among her devotees.
Bracelets adorn both her wrists. Her face is refined
and spiritual and astir with religious fervor. The
lines of the figure and the drapery of the robe are
exquisite, worthy of a Madonna. No less impressive

70 Field Museum of Natural History

is the statuette of Tung-fang So (Plate II, Fig. 2)
whom we met as author of a book of marvels (p. 24).
He lived in the second century B.C. as a poet, states-
man, and adept versed in the mysteries of Taoism. He
was reputed as being possessed of divine wisdom and
supernatural powers, and is said to have thrice ab-
stracted from paradise the famed peaches of immor-
tality which ripen but once in three years. He was
on intimate terms with the emperor Wu, amusing him
with humorous sallies and earning for himself the
sobriquet of the Wit. Our figure shows him as a
genial old man with long whiskers and deep furrows
over his eyes; he handles a palm-leaf fan in his right
hand. The carving of the figure is cleverly adapted to
the natural curve of the elephant tusk. Both these
statuettes may be confidently ascribed to the Ming
period (1368-1643). Both have developed fine patinas
of dark brown and deep yellow.

A somewhat different style is represented in the
statuette of a Buddhist monk of pure-white ivory
(Plate III), apparently a portrait modelled from life
in the era of K'arig-hi (1662-1722). He is obviously
shown in the act of preaching a sermon of Buddha's
gospel based on the text that is written on the roll
of paper which he grasps in his left hand. Bald-
headed, as the Buddhist monks are, with bright, intel-
ligent eyes (outlined in black), high forehead, and his
lips in motion, he stands there a worthy disciple of
Qakyamuni, humble and modest, sincere and fully con-
scious of the truth of his convictions.

The Arhats (in Chinese Lo-han), the celebrated
disciples of the Buddha, form the subjects of the ivory
figures in Plates IV and V. The two grouped in Plate
IV were evidently turned out by the same artist in
the K'ien-lung period (1736-95) ; in style and attri-
butes they closely approach the Arhat paintings of
that time. Both figures are characterized by the same

Objects Made of Ivory 71

massive head, the same high helmet-shaped craniums,
bulging eyes, large noses, heavy mustaches and beards.
The Arhat in Fig. 1 sets his foot on the back of a lion
(symbolizing the saint's power over the wild animals) ;
in his right hand he holds a branch with fungus of
immortality (ling-chi) which, strictly speaking, is a
Taoist emblem, and in his left hand a fly-brush or
chowry, an ancient emblem of royalty or rank, usually
made of yak-tails or coir. The tip of the chowry
tickles the lips of the lion who devotedly looks up to
his master. A rosary is slung around his neck. His
companion (Fig. 2) sets his left foot on the head of
the three-legged mythical frog. He is represented in
the act of conjuring a dragon from his alms-bowl,
pointing at him a bead of the rosary which he holds
between the thumb and index-finger of his right hand.

In each of the two figures illustrated in Plate V
two Arhats are grouped together, each pair, including
the base, being carved from a single piece of ivory. In
the first group a monk hurls a dragon's head into the
face of his frightened companion, who is suddenly in-
terrupted in his prayers during which he was running
off the beads of his rosary and burning incense. The
counterpart of this figure presents a monk clasping
his arm around his brother's shoulder and showing him
a snake. Terror-stricken he screams aloud and presses
hard his left foot on the tiger below who feels the force
of his master's emotion. The conception of both groups
is highly dramatic and emotional.

In a.d. 484 Jayavarman, king of Fu-nan (Cam-
boja), sent Nagasena, an Indian monk, with a long
letter to the emperor of China, offering as presents
an elephant carved from white sandal-wood and two
topes (stupas) of ivory. The Museum is in the pos-
session of an ivory seal from Siam presented by Miss
C. Wicker ; it is carved in the form of a tope, and such
seals are still used by Buddhist monks. The design in

72 Field Museum of Natural History

the seal is a cat amid plants ; the cat was sacred to the
monks as the animal exterminating the rats which
threatened their sacred books with destruction; the
domesticated cat was hence introduced by the Bud-
dhists into China and all other countries of the Far East.

The esthetic needs of the scholar are cared for by
the ivory-carver in the production of handsome writ-
ing-brushes provided with ivory handle and encased
in a sheath of ivory. He is also fond of ivory foot-
measures etched on the back with delicate floral de-
signs and birds in colors, but, above all, delights in
brush-holders (pi tung) as a suitable decoration of
his desk. These are carved out of the central portion
of the tusk in the round, and are decorated with
designs in high relief of a plum-tree growing out of a
rock and surrounded by bamboo-leaves (Plate VI), or
are adorned with a genre-scene in flat relief, as that
in Plate VII, which shows a horseman at night in a
mountain-pass followed by a flag-bearer, a boy with
a lantern lighting the path; the scenery is enlivened
by pine-trees and clouds. Another ambition of the
literary man is to possess an arm-rest of ivory (usually
carved from bamboo) with elaborate designs; objects
like these are used on the desk for resting the forearm
while wielding the writing-brush.

The ivory objects of which the ancient Chinese
were proudest are flat tablets used for ceremonial pur-
poses and call hu. Six fine specimens of these coming
down from the Ming dynasty (1368-1643) are placed
on exhibition. These tablets carved from elephant
tusks formerly played a prominent part in official life.
In very early times they appear to have been made of
bamboo, being suspended from the girdle which be-
longed to the dress of every young gentleman. They
were used as memoranda for jotting down any notes.
At a somewhat later epoch they were made of ivory
and reserved for the organs of government, develop-

Objects Made of Ivory 73

ing into insignia of rank. When a high official had
audience at court, he respectfully held such an ivory
tablet, clasping both his hands around the broader
base, the upper narrow part being at the height of
his mouth, so that his breath might not touch the
imperial face. He had inscribed on the tablet what-
ever business he wished to report and submit to the
emperor, and recorded on it the imperial replies or
commands. The ancient Book of Rites (Li ki) con-
tains this passage, "When the great prefect had
washed his head and bathed, his secretary brought him
the ivory tablet to write down his thoughts, his re-
plies, and the orders of the prince."

Friar William of Rubruck, who sojourned among
the Mongols from 1253 to 1255, relates as follows:
"Whenever the principal envoy came to court, he car-
ried a highly-polished tablet of ivory about a cubit
long and half a palm wide. Every time he spoke to
the Khan or some great personage, he always looked
at that tablet as if he found there what he had to
say, nor did he look to the right or to the left, nor
in the face of him with whom he was talking. Like-
wise, when coming into the presence of the Lord, and
when leaving it, he never looked at anything but his
tablet." Under the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618-906) the
ivory tablets were round above and angular below, and
were used by officials down to the sixth rank; those
below the sixth rank had bamboo or wooden tablets.
Under the Ming the ivory tablets were angular at both
ends, and were granted to officials above the fourth
grade; those of the fifth grade and below had wooden
ones with painted designs. They were abolished under
the Manchu. In Korea such tablets were used down to
quite recent times. Yuan Shi-kai, toward the end of
his presidency, is said to have attempted to introduce
them again in connection with his scheme to restore
the monarchy, but in this he failed.

74 Field Museum of Natural History

Girdle-pendants of which the Chinese were for-
merly very fond were made of ivory also in the K'ien-
lung period, but are rather scarce. The one illustrated
in Plate IX, Fig. 6, is carved in the shape of the so-
called "wooden fish," — a sort of wooden drum used in
Buddhistic temples to mark time in the recitation of
prayers, the handle being formed by two dragon-
heads. Another pendant (Plate X, Fig. 3) represents
two bean-pods with tendrils and leaves, and that in
Fig. 5 two boys, so arranged that the complete figure
of a boy (altogether four) may be seen from every
angle. A scent-box in the shape of a flower-basket is
shown in Fig. 2 of Plate IX; it is carved in open
work with peaches and pomegranates and consists of
two halves joined together. It is filled with perfume
and worn in front of the dress during the summer.

In ancient Rome parrots were kept in cages of
gold, silver, and ivory (StBitius,Silvae, II, 4, 12), but
none of these has come down to us. From China we
receive bird-cages entirely made of ivory rods and
adorned with numerous small carvings of the same
material. No other nation has been more considerate
of the welfare of its pets and lavished on them the
most precious substances and the most exquisite work
that art could offer.

Crickets are kept by the Chinese for two pur-
poses— to enjoy their melodious chirps and to train
them as fighters. A cricket-fight is a great event, and
large sums are staked on the champions. In Peking
a special kind of gourd is raised to keep the insects
during the winter. Many of these gourds are elabo-
rately decorated and provided with finely carved lids
of jade and ivory. Five covers of such cricket-gourds
are reproduced in Plate X. That in Fig. 1 shows an
open-work composition of plum-blossoms with two
birds; that in Fig. 2, leaves and tendrils of a gourd,
with a butterfly. The cover in Fig. 5 is surmounted

Objects Made of Ivory 75

by three full figures of lions carved in the round and
playing with a ball in the centre; the lower band is
decorated with a row of peonies and leaves. A floral
composition is spread over the cover in Fig. 6, and a
dragon striving for the flamed pearl is carved in
Fig. 7.

Ever since Europeans came into contact with the
Chinese, their ivory fans have elicited unbounded ad-
miration. John Barrow, private secretary to the Earl
of Macartney on his mission to China in 1792, has the
following interesting notice on this subject: "Of all
the mechanical arts that in which they seem to have
attained the highest degree of perfection is the cutting
of ivory. In this branch they stand unrivalled, even
at Birmingham, that great nursery of the arts and
manufactures where, I understand, it has been at-
tempted by means of a machine to cut ivory fans and
other articles, in imitation of those of the Chinese;
but the experiment, although ingenious, has not hither-
to succeeded to that degree, so as to produce articles
fit to vie with those of the latter. Nothing can be
more exquisitely beautiful than the fine open work
displayed in a Chinese fan, the sticks of which would
seem to be singly cut by the hand, for whatever pat-
tern may be required, or a shield with coat of arms,
or a cypher, the article will be finished according to
the drawing at the shortest notice. The two outside
sticks are full of bold sharp work, undercut in such
a manner as could not be performed any other way
than by the hand. Yet the most finished and beautiful
of these fans may be purchased at Canton for five to
ten Spanish dollars."

Ivory beds were a prominent feature in many
oriental countries. Mong Ch'ang-kun, a Chinese minis-
ter of state, who lived in the third century B.C., was
famed for his extravagance and had as many as three
thousand retainers, all of whom wore shoes embroid-

76 Field Museum of Natural History

ered with pearls ; he is reputed to have been the owner
of an ivory bed which he presented to the prince of
Ch'u. A certain Yii Yang, who lived at the time of
the Liang dynasty (a.d. 502-556), was no less noted
for his love of luxury; he possessed a bed inlaid with
ivory, gold, and silver. On Java, the Chinese Annals
of the T'ang dynasty report, princes and people had
ivory beds; and the same is on record in regard to
India, where couches and seats were inlaid with ivory.
With reference to the city of Cambaya (now Cambay) ,
the Portuguese traveller, Duarte Barbosa (a.d. 1518),
writes, "A great quantity of ivory is used here in
very cunning work, inlaid and turned articles such as
bangles, sword-hilts, dice, chessmen and chess-boards;
for there are many skilful turners who make all these,
also many ivory bedsteads very cunningly turned,
beads of sundry kinds, black, yellow, blue and red and
many other colors, which are carried hence to many
other places." Wooden beds with ivory inlays are
still made at Ning-po in Che-kiang Province.

The opium-smoker has a particular veneration
for ivory: he may use a pipe with ivory mouth-piece
and ivory boxes to contain the drug (cf. Leaflet 18,
pp. 24, 35) ; he may also avail himself of an ivory
spatula for taking a pill of opium out of the box, and
he may worship the "god of opium" in the form of
an ivory image (figured by A. de Pouvourville, L'Art
indo-chinois, p. 189). Tobacco-pipes of ivory are de-
scribed and figured in Leaflet 18 (p. 22). Snuff-
bottles were also made of this material, carved with
designs or painted.

The concentric ivory balls which have attracted
much attention and which are still turned out at Can-
ton were manufactured as early as the fourteenth
century under the name "devil's work balls." There
is a tradition also that they were made in the palace
of the Sung emperors. They are the result of patient

VOBY

Objects Made of Ivory 77

toil, the balls being carved one within the other. Good,
old specimens are difficult to get; the modern ones
are usually intended for the foreign market.

In India chessmen and backgammon were made
of ivory at an early date (account of Masudi, a.d.
983). The Chinese make of ivory chessmen (Fig. 13),
dice, dominoes, and many other games derived from
the latter. The foreign craze for ma-jong has now
caused nearly all available ivory to be absorbed for
the manufacture of ma-jong sets, which has disor-
ganized the whole ivory industry and unfortunately
stopped the production of artistic carvings.

The main seats of the ivory industry are Canton,
Amoy, Shanghai, Suchow, and Peking. As a rule, the
objects are carved and sold in the same shop. Ivory
is now preferred in its pure white state, and Canton
workmen are successful in removing yellow tinges
from ivory and restoring it to its pristine whiteness
and brilliancy. On the other hand, there is no lack
of methods of lending ivory a yellow-brown patina
and making it appear old : for this purpose it is placed
in a decoction of tobacco or tea leaves, or exposed to
the fumes of burning incense.

Canton, for at least a century or more, has catered
to foreign taste and produced immense quantities of
ivory ware for export. Although many of these ar-
ticles are marvels of patient workmanship and tech-
nical skill and ingenuity, they lack artistic feeling and
finish; the carved concentric balls, models of boats,
houses, temples and pagodas belong to this class.
Others like brooches, chains, glove-boxes, etc., are en-
tirely foreign to the Chinese, and are solely intended
for the European or American market. Articles like
these were strictly excluded from the ivory collection
of the Museum, and only those made for and used
by the Chinese were selected.

B. Laufeb.

78 Field Museum of Natural History

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Beveridge, H. — The Emperor Jahangir's Treasures of Walrus
and Narwhal Ivory. Indian Magazine, February, 1914,
pp. 37-39.

Bishop, C. W. — The Elephant and Its Ivory in Ancient China.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. XLI, 1921,
pp. 290-306.

Dawkins, W. Boyd. — On the Range of the Mammoth in Space
and Time. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,
1879, pp. 138-147.

Howorth, H. H. — The Mammoth and the Flood. London, 1887.

Kunz, G. F. — Ivory and the Elephant in Art, in Archaeology,
and in Science. New York (Doubleday, Page and Com-
pany), 1916.

Laufer, B. — Arabic and Chinese Trade in Walrus and Narwhal
Ivory. T'oung Pao, 1913, pp. 315-364, with Addenda by
P. Pelliot, pp. 365-370.

Supplementary Notes on Walrus and Narwhal Ivory.
T'oung Pao, 1916, pp. 348-389.

Sino-Iranica, pp. 565-568 (with special reference to
Persia).

Lull, R. S. — The Evolution of the Elephant. Yale University,
Peabody Museum of Natural History, Guide No. 2, re-
printed from the American Journal of Science, Vol. XXV,
1908.

Lydekker, R. — Mammoth Ivory. Annual Report of the Smith-
sonian Institution for 1899 (Washington, 1901), pp. 361-
366.

Mayers, F. W. — The Mammoth in Chinese Records. China Re-
view, Vol. VI, 1878, pp. 273-276.

Ranking, J. — Historical Researches on the Wars and Sports
of the Mongols and Romans: in which Elephants and Wild
Beasts were Employed or Slain. And the Remarkable
Local Agreement with the Remains of Such Animals Found
in Europe and Siberia. London, 1826.

Watt, G.— Indian Art at Delhi, p. 173. Calcutta, 1903.

The Commercial Products of India, pp. 695-699. Lon-
don, 1908.

wimiJOAiBaBW»

LEAFLET 21.

e<

ARCHAIC IVORY CARVINGS (p. g). CHOU PERIOD (1122-247 P>.C ).

About two-thirds actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923

\W<*

LEAFLET 21.

IVORY STATUETTES OF THE GODDESS KWAN-YIN AND TUNG-FANG SO (p. 69).

MING PERIOD (1368-1643).

About one-half actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923.

WEWftQFULiii

* U»*

LEAFLET 21.

IVORY STATUETTE OF A BUDDHIST MONK (p. 70). K'ANG-HI PERIOD (1662-1722).

About one-half actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923.

WBsnYonuwnwKAK

LEAFLET 21.

IVORY STATUETTES OF BUDDHIST SAINTS (p. 70). K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (1736-95).

About one-half actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923.

anasnYtfii**1*^

LEAFLET 21.

IVORY STATUETTES OF BUDDHIST SAINTS (p. 71). K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (1736-95).

About one-half actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923-

IVORY BRUSH-HOLDER WITH DESIGNS IN HIGH RELIEF (p. 72).
K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (1736-95)-
Five inches high.
Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China. 1923.

tfUW

v l««*

{&*

IVORY BRUSH-HOLDER CARVED WITH PICTURES IN RELIEF (p. 72).

K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (1736-95).

Five and three-fourths inches high.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923.

tfwrERsirr Qt luuiwfo tmifrv

*"*>^-i V

• %^fr%

LEAFLET 21.

PLATE VIII.

¥

PALACE FAN PLAITED FROM IVORY THREADS AND DECORATED WITH FLOWERS CARVED

FROM IVORY AND COLORED (p. 68). K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (1736-95).

Ten inches high.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China, 1923.

00m

\ft «UJHw

&*****'****"

LEAFLET 21.

jmk

**!£&?

1. DISH OF WALRUS IVORY. 2, SCENT BOX, K 'IEN-LUNG PERIOD. 3. DESK ORNAMENT

OF MAMMOTH IVORY. 4, COVERS OF WALRUS IVORY FOR CRICKET GOURDS.

6, GIRDLE PENDANT, K'lEN-LUNG PERIOD (pp. 6;, 74).

About one-half actual size.

Capt. .Marshall Field Expedition to China, iyjj.

fflinTOrnroFiLLiwiuiwunr

LEAFLET 21.

1. 2. 4, 6, 7, IVORY COVERS FOR CRICKET-GOURDS.

3, 5, IVORY GIRDLE PENDANTS (pp. 74. 7s).

About two-thirds actual size.

Capt. Marshall Field Expedition to China. 1923.

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***

**•**

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