Mária T. Biró: The Bone Objects of the Roman Collection. (Catalogi Musei Nationalis Hungarici. Seria Archeologica 2; Budapest, 1994)

VIII. CARVED FURNITURE DECORATION

VIII. CARVED FURNITURE DECORATION 1. Pivots, hinges Fig. SO. Hinge The use of devices made of bone like tools, pins and combs reaches back to the early history of mankind. However, the artistic level of bone processing industry was reached only in the empires of the East. The flourishing of these applied arts had taken place in the furnishing of palaces, of the houses of the live and the dead and arrived to its peak in the decoration of their furnitures. We may refer to the ivory mounts of the thrones, couches placed into the death chambers of Egyptian pharaos. The largest ivory find group — the several hundred carved pictures of the Begram bone reliefs — was similarly furniture inlay. Ivory small sculpture was generally the accessory of furniture. From Egypt until India it can be proved that the classic field of bone processing industry was the decoration of furniture, crustification and bone mounts decorating the edges, corners, legs and bordered their end face. The largest Provincial inlay find unit consisting of 140 pieces was unearthed at Bays Meadow, in the 3rd century layer of the settlement. These are the carvings in the Hungarian National Museum, too, which as opposed to hinges, are unique pieces. (Nos. 574-581.) We cannot range them into types; they have no analogies and in the majority of cases it is hard to judge even the way of their employment. The most beautiful piece of the Collection is slightly arched ivory handle representing dog head. (No. 574.) Such a curved object could be the handle of a stick, but it could have also decorated the arm of a chair or the back of a couch. The dog head depicts not a dog in general but a badger-dog. The demand to model lifelike animal species was already referred to above when describing the knife haft representing the capuchin monkey. Badger-dog was a favourite hunting dog of the Romans for fox and badger. The long lop-ears, the projecting, pointed nose, moreover the dog-collar are well discernible on the carving. The upper jaw of the dog and the end of the handle is broken. Therefore, it cannot be stated what it was made for. Similarly, we do not know what object the ribbed, curved edge mount from Szőny belonged to — although this carving has an analogy from Lyon — but, since the latter is also a