Romanesque and the Mediterranean (2015), 1558

THE OLIPHANT:
A CALL FOR A SHIFT OF PERSPECTIVE
Mariam Rosser-Owen
Oliphants are ivory horns made from an elephants tusk, which may be lightly faceted
or carved with figurative motifs. Some eighty surviving oliphants decorated in a variety of
styles (Islamic, Byzantine and Latin) can be attributed to southern Italy, and possibly
other European centres, in the late 11th to the late 12th centuries. However, a decade ago
a hypothesis was advanced arguing that some of these objects the so-called Saracenic
group were conceived and carved in Fatimid Egypt. This hypothesis has never been
critiqued, and is now appearing in Islamic art scholarship. This article presents a detailed
consideration of the Cairene origin theory, and argues for a reassessment of the oliphants
by considering the Saracenic group as one small subset of a much wider, European
cultural phenomenon, which includes horns in materials other than ivory. By examining
stylistic connections with the art of southern Italy under Norman hegemony, and the
cultural conditions in which such horns were used and preserved, it aims to redirect the
focus of future studies of these objects away from the Islamic world.

INTRODUCTION

discussion concluding the Cairene origin of Shalems

Group II is two short paragraphs, just thirty-eight
lines, long; while the quite certain Islamic origin
of his Group III is established in three paragraphs
(42 lines).2 Despite these tentative foundations, this
Cairene origin theory has nevertheless already taken
hold in the Islamic art field.3 However, this attribution
still needs to be corroborated with other evidence
cultural, historic, economic, as well as considerations
of materials, techniques and style.
In this article, I will engage with Shalems arguments for the Fatimid attribution, before taking a
step back to consider what I see as the problems with
the Fatimid/Islamic interpretation. Part 1 provides a
summary of Shalems arguments for assigning some of
the oliphants to the Islamic world, followed by an
analysis of those arguments; next follows a reconsideration of Ernst Khnels three main points against
an Islamic attribution (the lack of representations of
horns and horn-blowers in Islamic art; the absence
of medieval oliphants found in the East; the absence
of reference to ivory horns in medieval Arabic sources),
which are still pertinent. In Part 2, I concentrate on
expanding the group of oliphants under discussion,
by considering the different groups that exist outside
the hitherto narrow focus on the Saracenic group.
Connections will be made with oliphants decorated
in other perceived styles (for example, Byzantine), as

The fact that the majority of the medieval oliphants

were usually decorated with oriental or orientalised
motifs suggests that in the collective memory of
medieval man the origin of the oliphant was probably
associated with the East.1

In his book, The Oliphant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context, Avinoam Shalem revisited the longdebated question of where a group of decoratively
carved elephant tusks, known as oliphants, were made
(Figs 1 and 2). This highly stimulating work was born
of many years of scholarship on the authors part, and
provides an extremely useful encapsulation of the
historiography of this subject as well as advancing new
ideas and theories about the context, function and
production of ivory horns. In his chapter on Stylistic
classification, and especially in the section on
Stylistic groups, Shalem presented the hypothesis, in
some respects quite tentatively, that some of these
ivory horns are Islamic objects that is, they were
conceptualized and produced in Fatimid Egypt, in the
early 11th century. As I will discuss in more detail
below, this attribution was based on stylistic comparisons with examples of Fatimid woodwork, in the
(significant) absence of securely identifiable examples
of Fatimid ivory with which to compare these objects,
and some observations about carving technique. The
British Archaeological Association 2015

15

mariam rosser-owen

Figure 1
Oliphant in the National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh (A.1956.562) ( National Museums Scotland)

16

the oliphant
within a much larger class of horns in all materials that
had a very specific role to play in the culture of the
Latin West. Finally, in the concluding discussion, I
turn to questions of chronology, places of production
and consumption, showing that the balance of evidence very much rests with southern Italy in the late
11th to the late 12th century. It is posited that the conception and creation of oliphants was a paradigmatically Italo-Norman product.
But, first, what is an oliphant? This is the term
used to describe a tusk-shaped ivory object that has
been carved from an elephants tusk, in some cases
decoratively, in others quite simply, and that has at
some later point been presented to a European church
treasury. The eighty-odd surviving oliphants have
been assigned mainly to the 11th and 12th centuries.
The etymology of the term will be discussed below, but
first it is pertinent to understand how an oliphant is
actually made.4 The most likely process was to take
advantage of the natural morphology of an elephants
tusk (Fig. 3), in particular the pulp cavity which is a
conical-shaped hollow occupying 2030% of the length
of the fully grown tusk (it can be more in young
animals). The small and narrow examples (such as
Khnel nos 7275) may have been made from milk
teeth. Three or four centimetres of dentine are left
around the hollow core, which allows for the carving
of some surface decoration. The dentine between the
pulp cavity and the tusks bark (called cementum)
could be shaved into very thin panels to be used for
Figure 2
Oliphant in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Frederick Brown Fund and H. E. Bolles Fund
(50.3426) ( 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

well as those that are simply left out of consideration,

taking as a particular point of reference the Horn of
Ulf in York Minster (Fig. 17). I next examine stylistic
connections between the decoration on the oliphants
and contemporary Italian sculpture, including a
discussion of the significant elements which are not
common in the repertoire of Islamic art motifs.
Part 3 turns to the cultural context within which the
oliphants were used, considering their primary role as
functional objects within the noble hunt, and their
repurposing as reliquaries in ecclesiastical treasuries,
which has ensured their preservation. This mode
of transfer is analysed in the context of the use by
European nobles of symbolic objects to gift land to the
Church, especially after the Norman conquest, when
land ownership was particularly contested. I then
broaden the field still further by discussing non-ivory
horns and other objects with an association to noble
hunting practices, which have like the oliphants
acquired an almost magical mystique since medieval
times. Oliphants will be seen to be one type of object

Figure 3
Diagram showing (on the right) how an oliphant is
formed from an elephant tusk along with other types
of ivory objects ( all rights reserved, D. GaboritChopin, Ivoires. De lOrient ancient aux Temps
Modernes (Paris, Muse du Louvre, 2004)
17

mariam rosser-owen
oliphants, and rightly so, as it forces scholars to stop
thinking of ivory horns simply within the Crusader
context of medieval Europe.9 The surviving African
oliphants date from the late 15th/early 16th century
at the earliest, and indeed European oliphants are
known from later dates as well: the V&A collection,
for example, includes an early-14th-century oliphant
which is Gothic in style.10 These are never included in
the corpora of oliphants.
The fixation on the Saracenic group has developed
through historiographical accident. The great cataloguer of ivories, Adolph Goldschmidt (18631944),
never published his planned volume on ivory horns,
and this gap was partially filled by Otto von Falke
(18621942), who was the first to establish a division
between those oliphants he attributed on the one hand
to Egypt and Italy and, on the other, to Byzantium.11
In 1959, Khnel (18821964) took the Egypt and Italy
grouping and refined it, arguing that the whole group
was made by Muslim craftsmen active in southern
Italy, more specifically in cosmopolitan Amalfi. The
reasons for bringing Islam into the picture at all were
based entirely on style, as I shall discuss. Khnels
earlier essay was reprinted in his great posthumous
work, Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturen, together
with a fully illustrated catalogue of the Saracenic
group.12 A corpus of all oliphants was planned but not
completed until 2014. As a consequence, the so-called
Saracenic group is the most published and best
known, but it only comprises about one-third of the
extant ivory horns. Khnel divided the seventyfive oliphants known to him into four groups:
(i) Saracenic (about 30), thought to be made by Arab
craftsmen or at least by western workshops strongly
influenced by Fatimid motifs, which Khnel thought
was likely to be in southern Italy; (ii) a Byzantine
group (again about 30), of which he thought only
a few were actually made in Constantinople, while
probably most were again made in southern Italy
(Salerno, Amalfi or Sicily); (iii) a European group
(about 10), most of them made over the Alps, probably in England and Scandinavia; (iv) the rest of the
oliphants, each unique.13 Now that the eagerly awaited
corpus of medieval oliphants has been published, there
is finally a single place where researchers can access
images of all known ivory horns, and readily see the
great differences that exist across the wider group.14
The point of departure for this paper is, therefore, how
can we fully understand a phenomenon if we only
concentrate on one tiny sub-set of it?
A more significant hindrance to the proper consideration of this body of objects is the division of art
history into discrete disciplines. Consequently, Islamic
art historians are generally only interested in the oliphants decorated in an Islamic style, while Byzantinists
only look at those decorated in a Byzantine style. Jill
Caskey, in writing about the art of Norman southern
Italy, has called this the dissective tendency.15 We

veneer, while the remainder of the tusk presents pure,

good quality dentine which can be carved into a range
of possible objects. This is significant when considering the time and place in which the oliphants were
conceived and produced, as I will discuss below; it
suggests that the idea to make oliphants occurred in a
region where there was intense ivory production, and
derived from the desire not to waste any element of the
precious tusk.
A secondary point to keep in mind is that the ivory
material itself might to an extent have dictated issues
of carving style and technique. Commonalities between
ivories carved far apart, geographically and temporally, may be due to methods of production cutting
tools as well as artists empirical practice remaining
essentially the same over time. Iconographic, technical
and stylistic similarities should not necessarily be
considered etiologically in the sense of being reasons for linking an object to a specific site or circumstance of origin but might be caused by craftsmens
common ways of working with a particular material.
The stylistic and technical aspects in themselves should
not be considered without reference to wider cultural
and contextual factors.
The word oliphant deriving from the Old French
for elephant was coined in the chivalric epic known
as the Song of Roland, written down in Anglo-Norman
in the mid-12th century: the horn makes its appearance when Roland, fighting the Arabs in Spain at the
battle of Roncevaux in 778, blows with all his might to
recall his master Charlemagne.5 As David Ebitz noted,
the attribution of an ivory horn to Roland may be a
reason for, and at least symptomatic of, the widespread popularity of this kind of horn as the heros
horn par excellence.6 That is, the 12th-century writer
of the Chanson gives 8th-century Roland an ivory
horn, because in the Norman context in which the
Song was composed, that was already a sine qua non of
the noble warriors accoutrements.
A consequence of this etymology is that the word
oliphant has come to have a particular connotation
of the intersection of Christian and Muslim cultures,
which is now almost the only context in which these
objects are discussed.7 This fixates scholars on a particular group, those that Khnel originally called the
Saracenic group, which as Shalem has stated it
seems to conform to three styles: near-Fatimid,
nearer-Fatimid and nearest-Fatimid.8 This fixation
has blinkered our view to all the other types of oliphants that were decorated in rather different styles,
indeed all the other types of non-ivory horns that were
also used by medieval noble Europeans. Might it be
time to stop calling these objects oliphants at all, as a
way of opening our minds to this larger context?
Alternatively, we might broaden the categories
encompassed by this term: Ezio Bassani, who has
written extensively on ivory horns in the sub-Saharan
African context, insists on calling these objects
18

the oliphant
same time he seems hesitant to rule out the probable
production of Group I in Fatimid Cairo. In his 2014
volume, he opts more broadly for Egypt, southern
Italy or Sicily for the locus of production. The large
number of objects associated with Group I suggests
they were commissioned by a wealthy clientele.

rarely, for example, consider the (Byzantine-style)

Clephane horn in the same context as the (Islamicstyle) Borradaile horn, both of them in the British
Museum and now in fact displayed together in that
museums Medieval Galleries (Figs 4 and 5).16 However, as Antony Eastmond has recently commented,
the Byzantine oliphants have been largely ignored
because of the unease of Byzantine art historians
to consider them as properly Byzantine.17 Islamic
art historians should take a leaf out of this book. If
Byzantinists find it difficult to recognize anything
truly Byzantine about the motifs on some of these
oliphants, Islamicists are entitled to ask just how
Islamic is the Saracenic group? Such labels whose
application is, ultimately, subjective may turn out
to be too fragile to apply to these objects.

Group II (comprising eight oliphants, with two others

associated) was probably manufactured in Egypt,
most probably in Cairo.20 These objects have plain,
lightly faceted bodies, decorated with raised borders,
carved in one plane only, which contain friezes of
running animals or geometricized designs of palmette
scrolls (Fig. 2). The animals bodies are decorated
with an elegant rinceau and feature deep scratches to
indicate ribs, while their eyes are almond-shaped with
pupils appearing at the pointed end rather than in the
centre; there are no human figures or fabulous animals
in this group. They are carved with the typical oblique
cutting back to the ground. Unfortunately, however,
this significant technical characteristic is nowhere
defined or explained. There is a brief reference to
Anthony Cutlers The Hand of the Master, where
Cutler describes one of the three sorts of cut with
which Byzantine craftsmen carved all ivories as a cut
with a slanting stroke.21
The groups style is Islamic par excellence: this
refers to i) the repertoire of animals running after
each other, for which no parallels are known in the
medieval West; and ii) the distinctive ornament of
palmette scrolls organized within triangles, of which
the clearest example appears on the upper register of
the Boston oliphant (Fig. 2). Otherwise similarities in
the vocabulary of motifs and the treatment of details
are related to two small wooden objects, one of them
found at Fustat, which show the oblique cut typical
of Group II, as well as the sharp cuts to indicate
ribcages and the characteristic elegant rinceaux. This
is the basis on which Group II is attributed to
Egyptian production. While the wooden quadruped
found at Fustat (Shalems fig. 63) may well have been
made in Fatimid Egypt, the carving of the rinceau and
ribcage on its body is much more sophisticated than
that on the animals in the Group II oliphants, where
the scrollwork is cursory by comparison (see the
border of the Edinburgh oliphant in Fig. 1), and actually relate more closely to the animals which feature on
the wooden panel from the Palazzo Reale in Palermo.22
The second wooden piece he adduces is in the Museum
fr Islamische Kunst in Berlin (his fig. 64), and no
reason is given for assigning this to Egypt rather than
Sicily or southern Italy.
Group II also includes four oliphants (in Baltimore,
Paris, Edinburgh and Berlin) whose bodies are now
decorated but which, following Ebitzs argument
about the oliphant in the Muse de Cluny, Shalem
thinks likely were originally left plain and recarved
later, because their style and carving method differ

PART 1. REASSESSING THE EVIDENCE:

ARE THE OLIPHANTS ISLAMIC OBJECTS?
In his 2004 study, Shalem focused on Khnels
Saracenic group, refining its categories still further.
He rightly called for definition and clarity, but this
led him to reduce the group under consideration by
rejecting at the outset various examples that did not fit
his argument.18 The remainder were to be judged
on the method of carving and the variety of motifs.
On this basis, he identified three groups in total,
Shalems arguments apply to just twenty-four oliphants out of the total known number of eighty-odd.
I prcis his arguments in the following paragraphs,
but refer the reader to his volumes for more specific
details and references to particular objects. My discussion of these arguments will follow at the end of this
summary.
Group I is Fatimid style.19 It comprises thirteen oliphants, but is associated with a number of caskets and a
penbox decorated in the same style. Its designs are
characterized by inhabited scrolls and bands, with tiny
scratches on the animals bodies to indicate fur and
plumage; the animals eyes are round and the pupils
are marked by a puncture at the centre. The cut of the
carving tool is straight and deep, the background is
left undecorated and the surface smooth, the objects
are carved in two planes. A series of stylistic comparisons strongly recall Fatimid woodwork: the examples
cited include a wooden panel showing a procession
of animals and birds inside roundels (which are not
interlinked by small circles, as on the oliphants and
caskets), and panels from Coptic churches. The
remainder of the comparisons made are to southern
Italian ivories, a self-fulfilling argument if the workshop producing Group I is to be located in southern
Italy. Group I is subject to the dominant force of the
international Fatimid style. Though Shalem resists
specifically stating a southern Italian localization for
the workshop, it is strongly implied, though at the
19

mariam rosser-owen
While Shalem does not explicitly state in his 2007
article that he now believes these four oliphants to
have been produced in Norman Sicily, this is strongly
implied by the concentration on comparisons with
other examples produced in Rogers reign that show
the same contrasting juxtaposition of two different
styles within a single work of art (multilingual inscriptions, coins, the Cappella Palatina, and the royal
mantle). He also now appears to have rejected the
recarving argument.
Finally, Group III (comprising only three oliphants,
one each in Paris and Doha while the third was
formerly in the Eduard Gans collection) is possibly
attributed to Norman Sicily.25 This group includes
the only oliphant to feature an Arabic inscription
the horn now in Doha, which repeats al-yumn, good
fortune (Fig. 7).26 This phrase is totally generic in, for
example, the Mudjar arts of Spain, that is, Islamicstyle art made for non-Muslim patrons; for this
reason, I would agree with Shalem that this feature
suggests that the Doha horn and its companions were
carved in a Muslim ambience or in an area strongly
influenced by Muslim culture.27 For the same reason,
I would completely disagree that the presence of this
Kufic inscription might even suggest that these [oliphants] were carved by Muslim craftsmen. As historians
of the arts of medieval Spain know all too well, and
have been trying to demonstrate for many years, the
presence of Islamic aesthetic elements in a work of
art does not mean it was made by Muslims. It seems
that art historians of other multicultural areas, where
the Mudjar concept also applies, could benefit from
adopting a more nuanced approach.
The three objects in this group have a single wide
decorated band at the top and bottom, without the
usual recesses allowed for carrying straps. Their bodies
are left plain, with light faceting. The decorated bands
are carved with a straight, deep cut, with the background left undecorated. They feature motifs which
are undoubtedly Islamic, including the doublebodied sphinx with a crown on the lower band of the
Paris oliphant (Shalems fig. 65), peacocks, a seated
drinker, the scene of two lions devouring a stag or ox.
Other motifs including the lively banquet, hunting
scenes, and busy composition [. . .] in a vegetal background recall the painted ceiling of the Cappella
Palatina and the probably Fatimid openwork ivory
panels now in Berlin and the Bargello. As such, this
small group, which is clearly Islamic, is connected
with the opulent Norman city of Palermo.

Figure 4
Byzantine style oliphant in the British Museum (the
Clephane Horn, M&ME 1979,7-1,1) ( Trustees of
the British Museum)

from those in their upper and lower zones.23 While

these border designs are supposedly Islamic, the bodies
of these objects are markedly different, and in the case
of the Cluny horn feature obviously Christian scenes
(Fig. 6). I will return to this recarving argument
below, though it should be noted here that in a more
recent publication, Shalem has presented a rather different view of these four objects, highlighting instead
their hybrid aesthetic or Bivisualitt.24 To summarize: two very different styles are not fused into a single
hybrid style on these oliphants, but remain separate
and contrasting, implying they are consciously recognized and accepted by the craftsmen or patrons as
different and other. This conforms to an aesthetic
tendency towards a hybrid style which Shalem says
developed in the Latin West in the 11th and 12th
centuries, in particular in the art of Norman Sicily
under Roger II (r. 1105 [as count]/1130 [as king]1154),
whose commissions show the coexistence of two
separate aesthetic cultures in a single work of art, and
clearly demonstrate the idea of a multicultural art.

The clearest recurring theme in Shalems analysis is the

tendency to treat Sicily, southern Italy and Fatimid
Egypt as if they were one and the same thing unified
through the complicated international Fatimid
style.28 Shalem is not the first nor is he the only
scholar to treat the eastern Mediterranean as if it
20

the oliphant

Figure 5
Saracenic style oliphant in the British Museum (the Borradaile Horn, M&ME 1923,12-5,3) ( Trustees of the
British Museum)

21

mariam rosser-owen

Figure 6
Oliphant in the Muse de Cluny, Paris (Cl. 13065) (Mariam Rosser-Owen, by kind permission of the Muse de
Cluny-Muse National du Moyen ge, Paris)

22

the oliphant
were an exclusively Fatimid sea in the 11th and 12th
centuries this view is now quite widespread. But
these three regions were not the same politically,
confessionally, culturally though merchants and
objects, and thus artistic styles, certainly circulated
between them. As Eva Hoffman has discussed, style
travels, and imported Fatimid textiles and ceramics
may have provided the stylistic models which were
translated (to use her term) into ivory, though paper
may also have played a role, in the form of pattern
books or illuminated manuscripts.29 We must also
bear in mind the possibility of the circulation of artisans themselves. While the presence of an inscription
in Arabic, no matter how generic the content, does
suggest that a degree of Islamic style was considered
desirable by the carvers or patron of that one oliphant,
Shalem has to concede that the fact that none of these
carved horns [. . .] bears any Arabic dedicatory inscriptions, which usually ornament costly Islamic ivory
artefacts, remains enigmatic.30
Secondly, Shalems stylistic discussion does not go
deep or wide enough. The comparisons he makes are
selective and surprisingly few in number for the
momentous conclusions that are drawn. Few of the
Fatimid objects in wood or ivory he adduces are
securely identified as such, and a vanishingly small
number of his comparisons are drawn from Sicilian or
southern Italian woodwork, which might feasibly have
a comparable carving technique and style. Full discussions of examples such as the doors from George of
Antiochs church (Santa Maria dellAmmiraglio, also
known as the Martorana), and the panel, perhaps
from a ceiling, from the Norman Palace and now
in the Galleria Regionale, would have been expected.31
I would even go so far as to ask: what makes the style
of the oliphants Fatimid anyway? Should palmettes,
roundels containing animals, hunting scenes, and so
on, be seen as distinctly and exclusively Islamic? What
Islamic art historians call the courtly cycle shares a
common inheritance from classical antiquity with the
art of Byzantium and the Latin West. We will return
to stylistic questions in Part 2, but for the moment, in
reference to the notion that friezes of running animals
are exclusively and identifiably Islamic, without parallel in the West, I cannot resist drawing attention to
the wonderful panel in the British Museum, carved
from the tip of a mammoth tusk in France around
13,000 years ago (Fig. 8).32 This panel depicts male and
female reindeer swimming one after the other, and is
carved with deep, vertical cuts to indicate the females
ribcage and looser incised strokes to indicate her long
fur, in a similar manner to the animals on the oliphants. Far from suggesting that we should see any
kind of continuum between this stunning piece of
Ice Age art and the medieval oliphants, I merely
note here the commonality in carving technique
and style between two ivories carved 10,000 years

apart again, probably due to an empirical familiarity with the material that caused craftsmen to cut and
style their works in similar ways, despite geographical
and temporal distances.
Returning to Shalems classification of the Saracenic oliphants, stylistic associations appear more
objective by reference to carving techniques, above all
the oblique cut, which is proposed as distinctively
Fatimid (it is typical of his Group II). However, the
authority on ivory carving Cutler, whom Shalem
himself cites is careful to state that three sorts of
cut are used,
each distinguishable from the other but generally used
in conjunction. Our ability to discriminate between
these techniques should not be confused with the notion
that they characterize different plaques (or carvers)
[. . .] Not all three strokes were used on every ivory. But
no ivory of which I am aware makes use of only one of
these methods.33

His cut with a slanting stroke, also referred to as

an oblique cut, is actually termed Kerbschnitt by
Cutler, to denote a form of undercutting that removes
less material, entering into the ivory but ending against
a wall.34 From the surface it gives the appearance of
an undercut, but the carved element remains tethered
to the ivory ground and thus has more stability. It
helps to create effects of light and shade and gives the
carving a greater sense of three-dimensionality.
But is Cutlers Kerbschnitt really what Shalem
means in the carving technique of the Group II oliphants? It seems unlikely, and it is unfortunate that
Shalem does not define what he means by this typical
oblique cut. A detailed physical examination of the
oliphant in Edinburgh (Fig. 1), conducted by myself
in June 2012, revealed that the bodies of the animals
are rendered as three-dimensional by a smoothly
rounded edge that curves down to the ivory ground,
but does not undercut (Figs 9, 10 and 11).35 Additionally, I detected on this object a combination of both
this rounded edge and the straight cut, which is
characteristic of Shalems Group I. On the Edinburgh
oliphant, the walls of the roundels containing animals
have a cut straight down to the floor of the tusk, as do
the leaves in the interstices between the roundels, and
the animals legs and other extremities, while their
bodies have the rounded edge to give them a greater
sense of volume. As seems logical, the ivory carver
used whatever type of cut was needed to create the
desired sculptural effect. The type of cut is thus not
a distinctive technique indicative of a specific place
of production, and it is certainly not accurate to
imply that a particular cut is typical of a particular
worksite.
The Edinburgh horn is one of that sub-group of
Shalems Group II that is said to feature uncomfortably different styles on its borders (animals running
after each other, which Shalem considers to be characteristic of Fatimid production) and the roundel
23

mariam rosser-owen

Figure 7
Oliphant (inscribed al-yumn, good fortune) in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (MIA IV.11) ( The Museum
of Islamic Art, Doha)

Figure 8
The Swimming Reindeer, mammoth ivory (Palart.550) ( Trustees of the British Museum)

design (to borrow Hoffmans phrase) of its body,

which Shalem considers characteristic of his Group I
(Fatimid style but possibly made in Southern Italy).36
The Edinburgh horn relates to three other horns which
have Group II borders but show a different aesthetic
on their bodies. As mentioned above, Ebitz argued
that these four oliphants had been recarved later, while

Shalem now opts for an explanation based on conscious, multicultural hybridizing. My own study of the
Edinburgh oliphant certainly shows that it was carved
in one campaign: the surface of the ivory in the body
of the horn is at the same level as the borders, which
means it cannot have been recarved from an originally
faceted body; while the treatment of details on the
24

the oliphant
bodies of the animals within roundels is identical to
those in the borders. Compare, for example, the treatment of the ribs or the double detail at the animals
shoulder, in my Figure 9 (from the upper border)
and Figure 10 (from the body) they are identical.
All this suggests the simpler explanation that body
and border were carved in the same place, at the
same time.
A recent study by Jennifer Kingsley has come to the
same conclusion about the oliphant in the Walters Art
Museum in Baltimore.37 A detailed optical analysis of
its motifs and the execution of the carving between the
endzones and the body of this oliphant proves that all
the carving [. . .] was executed at the same moment,
probably by a single craftsman. Carving signatures
such as the way of finishing the curls inside the scrollwork (endzone) and on a birds wing (body) are identical; while the interlacing snakes that occupy the full
length of the inner curve of the horn cannot have been
carved in a second phase, firstly because they are at the
same level as the carving around them and secondly,
as Kingsley points out, the design of the encircling
borders has not been planned to match up if the snake
motif were to be removed. Kingsley also shows how
the overall design of the oliphant has been conceived
to accommodate both vertical and horizontal axes
of symmetry, which can only have been produced
in a single campaign. Significantly, Kingsley does
not believe the stylistic differences between body and
border to be ideologically motivated:

Figure 9
Cut with a rounded edge around the body of an animal
(upper border)

In no way does the carver signal his design choices

to be motivated by anything but a response to the
medium, nor does he introduce motifs that carry with
them references to specific origins such as Christian
religious motifs or Kufic writing [. . .] Rather the
carver of the Walters oliphant worked to create a
harmonious effect out of a wide variety of forms
organized and oriented in what are at times visually
discontinuous ways.38

Figure 10
Cut with a rounded edge around the body of an animal
(body)

Is there any need to be worried about the different

aesthetics employed in the borders and bodies of these
oliphants? How different is the aesthetic, really, on the
Baltimore and Edinburgh horns? The figurative bodies
of the Cluny and Berlin horns raise more questions,
perhaps. In both cases, when looked at in profile, the
bodies of the horns seem to be recessed by a few millimetres, which might suggest that some ivory surface
has been lost but not as much as would be necessary
if the carver had to plane down an originally faceted
surface to start with a blank canvas. Ebitzs argument
about the horn in the Muse de Cluny is ingenious
and attractive: its body features an Ascension scene
which he suggests was carved in a new Byzantine- or
Lombard-influenced context in the 12th century, to
visibly Christianize the horn and render this fundamentally secular object more appropriate to the sacred
function of holding holy relics (Fig. 6).39 However,
when one examines the minutiae of his argument,

Figure 11
Straight cut around interstitial leaf and wall of
roundels (body)
Details of the oliphant in the National Museums
Scotland, Edinburgh (A.1956.562). (Mariam RosserOwen, by kind permission of the National Museums of
Scotland)
25

mariam rosser-owen
over the body decoration of this oliphant, they must
have been part of his putative second carving campaign. The frieze of animals around the bottom of the
body section presents a problem for the Christianizing
interpretation of this recarving proposal, one which
Ebitz acknowledged but did not fully elaborate on.
If created in a totally different aesthetic from the
Islamic style borders, why do they look so in keeping
with Islamic modes themselves? Apart from prowling
lions we have an animal combat scene, showing a lion
attacking a deer with its head turned back. They
reminded Ebitz of the

several things do not work, though my observations

on the Cluny horn must remain provisional since
I have not had the opportunity to study it in person.40
For example, Ebitz avers that the new carving
incorporates the remains of drill holes left over from a
band of braided ornament which originally formed the
decoration of the raised belt in the oliphants upper
zone (his fig. 4); similarly, a raised band of circles and
lozenges containing rosettes has apparently replaced a
raised belt of palmette scrolls but in both these
cases it is not possible for one to replace the other and
remain at the same surface level. There do seem to be
shallow drill holes visible in his fig. 4, though these
could simply be the result of mistakes in the carving.
The braided band at the base of the body, which Ebitz
considers to be part of the oliphants original decoration, is carved at the same level as the animals above
it, supposedly carved later, which rest their feet on it
(Fig. 12). He seems to believe that the egg-and-dart
border below this braided band was squeezed in
between it and the raised belt with a palmette scroll
below, since it does not appear in his proposed reconstruction of the oliphants original appearance (his
fig. 5), and since egg-and-dart filled bands are seen all

beasts on the margins of Italian Romanesque church

faades [. . .] On the one hand, they reflect a playful
interest in fantastic creatures and a tacit appreciation
of the aesthetic qualities of the already existing
animals around the mouth of the horn. On the other
hand, they may serve to signify the perils that beset
the human soul and thereby intensify the desire for
salvation.41

This rather reads as an evasion.

In fact, these animals are stylistically very close to
those on a group of oliphants that are never considered alongside the Saracenic group: those associated
with the Horn of Ulf in York Minster, which I will
discuss below (Fig. 17). The distribution of the body
design of the Berlin horn (Shalems fig. 42) into horizontal zones filled with narrative scenes also relates
to the Ulf group, as do the rather squashed vegetal
scrolls inside the narrow borders that separate these
horizontal zones. The braided design which occurs
twice in the lower zone of the Cluny horn is seen on
one of the raised belts in the upper zone of the Berlin
horn, while the style of the figurative scenes on the
Berlin horn provides a link to the Byzantine group
of oliphants. In fact, these two horns, which at first
glance seem rather unusual, have many points of
contact with oliphants outside the very narrow group
of Saracenic horns, but which are never incorporated
into the oliphant discussion. Indeed, within the small
group of Byzantine oliphants, there are several which
could be said to have surprisingly different styles in
their bodies and borders: the Clephane horn in the
British Museum (Fig. 4) is bordered by somewhat
naturalistic half-palmette scrolls while lions and
sphinxes prowl at its bell-end, in a manner similar to
the Horn of Ulf; the oliphant in the Treasury of St
Vitus Cathedral in Prague has chariot-racing scenes
at its centre, flanked by bands of roundels containing
birds, mythical beasts and animal combat; while
Lehels horn in the Jsz Mzeum at Jszberny,
Hungary (Fig. 13) features an all-over composition on
its body, with a border of roundels containing birds,
animals, and so on, and guilloche bands on its raised
belts, which are not too dissimilar from the braided
bands seen on the Cluny and Berlin horns just discussed.42 This apparent combination contradiction,
perhaps of Islamic and Byzantine elements

Figure 12
Detail of animals on the oliphant in the Muse de
Cluny, Paris (Cl. 13065) (see Fig. 6) (Mariam
Rosser-Owen, by kind permission of the Muse de
Cluny-Muse National du Moyen ge, Paris)
26

the oliphant

Figure 13
Lehels horn (Byzantine style) in the Jsz Mzeum at Jszberny, Hungary (Bela Zsolt Szakacs, with kind
permission)

within the decoration of these horns has not been discussed by Shalem, Hoffman or Ebitz, and no arguments about recarving have been advanced to explain
this supposed hybridity. This is because the three
horns I just described have simply been left out of consideration.
I will return in Part 2 to all these objects, but for
now I note that there is no need to resort to elaborate
arguments about recarving. In terms of the visual
effect of this small group, I concur with Kingsley in
not seeing anything of deeper ideological significance
here: perhaps the Cluny oliphant was always intended
for an ecclesiastical context, hence its striking Ascension scene. We know nothing about the structure of
the workshops in which the oliphants might have been
produced, if workshops existed at all, but the differences perceived on these objects may simply have been
a matter of different hands one craftsman excelled
in geometricized palmette borders, another was better
at animals, and sometimes did both borders and
bodies, as on the Edinburgh oliphant.

issues and resolves to his satisfaction that Khnels

objections no longer hold, concluding that the Muslim
and Christian populace in the Levant, especially in
Mamluk Egypt, were quite familiar with oliphants.43
However, Shalems analysis does not negate Khnels
objections; indeed, they remain relevant to the question of the oliphants origins. I will deal with these
three issues in reverse order.
i) Representations of horns and horn-blowers in
Islamic art
Compared to the enormous number of representations
of curved horns (whether oliphants or other types of
horns, as I will discuss below) being carried, drunk
from or blown in the Christian European context,
among the literally thousands of hunt scenes in Islamic
art, a vanishingly small number features horns. The
sole Islamic example that Khnel could find was a
medallion on a bronze candlestick in the Topkap
Palace Museum in Istanbul (inv. 2628); depicted
in one of four small medallions which separate the
panels bearing the dedicatory inscription is a rider
who clearly sounds a horn, a motif which Khnel
called an Ochsenreiter.44 He attributed the candlesticks manufacture to Ayyubid Syria (specifically
Aleppo) in the 13th century, though now an Ilkhanid
provenance and an early-14th-century date seem most
likely.45
However, most interesting from our current
perspective is the context in which the candlestick
was discussed by David Storm Rice. He describes
the scenes within the small medallions punctuating
the inscription, concentrating on two medallions that

Function and depiction in the Islamic context

Another key aspect of Khnels attribution of the
oliphants and their carvers to southern Italy and
north-western Europe was based on the following
three issues: i) the lack of any mention of ivory horns
in medieval Arabic sources; ii) the fact that not a single
medieval oliphant has been found in the East; and
iii) the scarcity of representations of curved horns or
oliphants in Islamic art. Shalem re-examines these
27

mariam rosser-owen
feature musician couples in a garden. Rice comments
that they have a distinctive European (one is tempted
to say Italian Trecento) flavour and recall early examples of European genre painting. While they have
haloes in the Islamic tradition, the figures poses, the
cut of their robes and rendering of drapery, their
hairstyles, and the shape of the benches on which they
sit are all Western. Rice concludes, There can be no
doubt that the models for these scenes with musicians
were European works of art and probably Italian.
The dating of the candlestick in the late 13th or
early 14th century fits perfectly with the diplomatic
contacts with Europe, especially with the Vatican,
which followed the Mongol invasions, and the subsequent opening up of the Mongol lands to Italian
merchants, who brought portable European works
of art that began to influence local artistic production,
as Rice goes on to discuss. It is tempting to wonder
whether the unusual motif of the ox- or zebu-riding
horn-blower on the Topkap candlestick is based on
another European prototype.
Shalem adds new examples, but none is without
problems. Apart from the clear depiction of a man
blowing a horn on the southern Italian ivory casket in
Maastricht an object from Shalems Group I and
thus a self-fulfilling argument he adds a postSasanian gilded silver plate, perhaps made in Central
Asia in the 9th to 10th centuries, which may depict the
Biblical story of the fall of Jericho. However, this is
a notoriously problematic group of objects, many of
which are probably fakes.46 His other two examples
are a Coptic wooden panel from the Muallaqa church
in Old Cairo, depicting the Harrowing of Hell,
datable c. 1300, and thus to the Mamluk period; and
a Crusader icon at Mount Sinai, also depicting the
Harrowing of Hell and datable c. 125075. None of
these can really be claimed as examples of Islamic art:
the latter two, although made in Egypt, are both
from Christian religious contexts and thus draw their
references from Christian iconographical and hagiographical traditions, not to mention the possible influences of Crusader art. The most interesting aspect of
these two examples is that they were produced during
the Mamluk period, an issue to which I shall return.
Another example was not known to Shalem, since it
only came to light when it appeared on the London art
market in April 2008; it is now in the Museum of
Islamic Art in Qatar (Fig. 14).47 This is a long, carved
wooden beam, broken at its right-hand side, featuring
four and a half triple arches embedded in luxurious
vegetation, within and around which a hunt scene
plays out: at the far left, a male figure very obviously
blows a horn. The beam is described in the Christies
sale catalogue as late Umayyad or early Taifa Spain,
11th century; the museum label opts for the simpler
and more impressive Umayyad. If this were true, this
would indeed be a clear Islamic example of horn- or
oliphant-blowing. But there is no way that this wooden
beam can date from the 10th or 11th century, since the

Figure 14
Detail of the horn blowing man from the Mudjar
wooden beam in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha
(MIA WW.141) ( The Museum of Islamic Art,
Doha)

type of arch profile employed here does not develop

until the early 12th century. This is the so-called
mixtilinear or lambrequin arch that develops in
the Almoravid architecture of the Maghrib al-Aqsa,
whence it is introduced to Islamic and then Christian
Spain.48 It is most fully developed by the time of the
construction in Almohad style of the Assumption
Chapel at the Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos
(11871211).49 Other features in the decoration of that
royal monastic complex reference the Islamic art of
al-Andalus and the Maghrib: for example, harpies
depicted with a similar female head and striated body
to the harpy in the far left spandrel of the Qatar beam
are seen in the plaster-decorated vaults of the monastery cloister. The leaf forms at Las Huelgas refer
closely to the style of Umayyad and Taifa vegetation,
with the characteristic striations indicating each vein
of the leaf, interspersed with tiny rings. The more
naturalistic, blockier leaf forms on the Qatar beam are
similar to those seen in the synagogue of Samuel ha
Levi, built in Toledo c. 135961.
Thus, while this wooden beam and the monument from which it came has obviously been
28

the oliphant
created within the idiom of the earlier art and architecture of al-Andalus, its closest parallels are with the
Mudjar art of northern Spain and perhaps particularly Toledo, which was famous for its woodwork.50
The arch type seen here is not earlier than the late 12th
century, and other motifs in the beam have parallels
from 13th- and 14th-century Mudjar examples. There
is no problem with accepting this beam as part of the
decoration of a luxurious house or palace, constructed
for a Christian within the Mudjar artistic world of
Toledo or further north, possibly as late as the 14th
century. It is not, however, the missing link it has been
claimed to be an unproblematic Islamic depiction
of an oliphant.51

this being the major difference between European and

African ivory horns.
Such magnificent objects formed part of the Swahili
royal regalia: The siwa had to be blown to mark any
formal occasion in the life of a ruler or potential heir.54
In his travel account, Vasco da Gama described the
use of such horns when he arrived at Malindi (Kenya)
in 1498: he writes of being received by the king attended
by many players on anafils, and two trumpets of ivory,
richly carved and the size of a man, which were blown
through a hole in the side and made sweet music with
the anafils.55 This is the earliest datable reference to
the existence of such African ivory horns, but the Pate
siwa is actually much later, probably crafted between
1650 and 1700. The Pate Chronicle tells us that the new
siwa was a close copy of an older prototype, but the
problem lies in the Arabic inscriptions, which appear
to be written in very corrupt Arabic, and have defied
all efforts at interpretation.56 Their style relates to
those on another late-17th- or early-18th-century siwa,
from Lamu, made of bronze in the lost wax technique.57 Knowledge of this technique is not recorded in
the eastern and southern parts of Africa at this time,
which has led to speculation that the Lamu siwa was
made outside of East Africa as a special commission
for a Swahili ruler, or in exchange for (and as a mark
of) some sort of vassalage.58 Hamo Sassoon notes that
inevitably one thinks of the Arab world, of such centres of technical skill as Cairo and Baghdad, and since
the style of the siwas inscriptions has been identified
as Mamluk naskhi of 13th- or 14th-century date, a
Mamluk original has been proposed which need
not, of course, have been a horn.59 The inscription
itself has been reconstructed as four couplets from a
poem in basit metre, written by the Abbasid poet
Muhammad ibn Bashir al-Himyari.60 There is nothing
in these lines that seems apposite to the siwa itself or its
function, and James De Vere Allen concludes that the
verses were likely simply copied from some other artefact or document at the craftsmans disposal in order
to provide the siwa with textual ornamentation.61
Why this focus on the Pate siwa? Shalem suggests
that this spectacular East African ivory horn is based
on a now-lost Mamluk example of an oliphant: as the
carved naskhi inscriptions [. . .] recall typical Mamluk
naskhi inscriptions, it is possible that the ivory horn
from Pate copied a Mamluk one.62 But, although
remarkable, the Pate siwa is not a unicum. Apart from
its apparent pair in bronze, other siwas exist in wood
and ivory, including the pommel end of another
monumental ivory example, decorated with the same
openwork design of four-armed crosses, now in the
Cabinet of Curiosities at the Bibliothque de SteGenevive, Paris.63 It can only be dated by its depiction in an engraving by Claude Du Molinet published
in 1692, so is probably coeval with the Pate siwa. Ivory
panels with the same kind of knotwork designs, including in openwork, have been found in excavations at
Kilwa and Gedi (ancient Malindi), in stratigraphic

ii) The lack of medieval oliphants found in the East

Shalem addresses this objection of Khnels by
reference to the Pate siwa, an enormous side-blown
ceremonial trumpet (siwa) 2.15 m long, formed from
two elephant tusks, and now in the Lamu Museum in
Kenya (Fig. 15).52 This magnificent object the size of a
man has a faceted body, bordered at the bell-end with
an elaborate cursive Arabic inscription contained
within bands of interlaced knotwork, and an ornately
decorated central cylinder, carved in openwork with a
network of four-armed crosses and bordered at both
ends by other cursive inscriptions in Arabic.53 A large
round opening in the middle of the horn allows the
instrument to be side-blown rather than end-blown,

Figure 15
Ivory siwa of Pate after J. de Vere Allen (1976) fig. 2
29

mariam rosser-owen
contexts datable to the 16th century.64 More are known
from textual sources, such as the looting by the Portuguese of four siwas from Pate in 1679.65 However, the
vast majority of surviving African oliphants hail from
West Africa. Portuguese travel accounts of the late
15th and early 16th centuries talk of elephant tusks
and objects worked from ivory on the West African
coast, and it is now well established that by the 16th
century carvers from the ivory coast that is, Sierra
Leone, Congo, Nigeria were producing objects,
including oliphants, for the European market.66 Their
carving and decoration was increasingly influenced by
Europe, including copying motifs from imported
European prints; some of the hunting scenes on the
Sapi-Portuguese horns look extremely close to
medieval European oliphants carved three hundred
years earlier.67 In the African tradition, oliphants are
blown from an opening at the side, not the end as in
the European oliphants, and those African horns that
do have a blow-hole at the end are those we know to
have been made for the Portuguese market. Though
the African examples have largely survived through
their preservation in European royal and courtly collections, it is not insignificant that they are all postmedieval, and seem to have responded to a European
function and aesthetic.
As with the oliphants themselves, the Pate siwa
should be discussed within its proper context, rather
than isolated as the missing link to the putative
Islamic ivory horn. It should not be a surprise that
countries close to sources of raw ivory and which
engaged in the ivory trade should have made use
of elephant tusks as horns. Secondly, why suppose a
derivation from an imported Arab source, for which
there is otherwise absolutely no physical evidence?
And, most significantly, how does a presumed Mamluk
model explain why a group of ivory horns were made
in Cairo under the Fatimids in the 11th century? Such
a Mamluk model cannot be earlier than the late 15th
century: this is the earliest date for which we have a
textual reference to the presence of ivory siwas on the
East African coast; and, as we shall now discuss, there
is no evidence within the Mamluk context for the use
of horns before the 15th century.

date. According to Ward, its shape is unique in enamelled glass, and the depictions of Christian saints and
its anodyne Arabic inscription indicate that it was
a special commission for a European merchant.69 Its
shape is identical to those of drinking horns made
from aurochs and European bison, discussed in Part 3
of this article, and this commission would fit with a
revived taste for drinking horns in central Europe in
the 14th to 16th centuries.70
Apart from this unique example, Mamluk depictions of horns are all abstracted into the emblems
which comprise composite blazons datable to the very
end of the 15th/beginning of the 16th century (Fig. 16);
no horn is contextualized by being represented in
figurative scenes showing people actually blowing
them, and thus their identity as horns, though likely,
has not been definitively established.
Shalem gives a clear account of the Arabic term bq,
pl. bqt or abwq, used in medieval sources to describe
a conical wind instrument irrespective of material,
possibly deriving from the Greek or Latin
buccina, implying an instrument that was introduced
to the Mediterranean Arabs by their western neighbours.71 This term is used by al-Maqrizi (13641442)
to refer to some of the riches of the Fatimid treasury
during the reign of al-Mustansir (r. 103694), though
this does not mean that these wind instruments were
ivory oliphants. Trumpets of peace are described by
a late Fatimid/early Ayyubid historian, Ibn al-Tuwayr,
as being used during Fatimid Nile flooding ceremonies, but it is particularly during the Mamluk period,
when interaction with the West and with crusaders in
particular were intensive, that horns are mentioned.72
Most significant is the all-too-brief statement by
al-Qalqashandi (d. 1418) that the investiture of an

iii) The absence of ivory horns in medieval Arabic

sources
This last objection of Khnels still requires some
dedicated research. The Mamluk period is the only
context in which there is undeniably an Islamic custom
of using and depicting horns, though whether these
horns are made of elephant tusks, and what their function and symbolism actually was, is still a debated
issue. This is also the only period for which a medieval
Islamic example of a horn exists the enamelled glass
horn now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, with
probably German mounts added in 1551.68 Following
Rachel Wards chronology, this object can be attributed to Syria (Damascus) with a mid-14th-century

Figure 16
Textile fragment with composite blazon showing horns,
Mamluk period, late 15thearly 16th century, Egypt.
Wool, appliqued and embroidered. H. 22.9 cm, W. 30.5
cm. Rogers Fund (1972.120.3) ( Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York)
30

the oliphant
amir included the presentation to him of a horn and a
flag (ummira bil-bq wal-alam); as Shalem points
out, this is probably reminiscent of the medieval western idea of horns of tenure.73 This seems to be the only
occasion on which the bq as an amiral accoutrement
is referred to in texts.
Despite this, the horn was not one of the recognized
Mamluk symbols of office. While other symbols
regularly depicted on works of art commissioned for
Mamluk amirs can be linked to specific positions in
the sultans household (the cupbearer, keeper of the
inkwell, bearer of the royal cloth, etc.), there is no
office for which a horn is emblematic. As L. A. Mayer
stated,

Qaitbay, and what its meaning might have been on

the blazons, remains to be established, and would
certainly be an interesting topic for future research.
One Islamic context where the use of ivory horns
can probably not be attributed to European influence
is the kingdom of Mali in the mid-14th century. One
source that certainly requires further exploration in
this regard is the description provided by Ibn Battutah
(130468) who travelled to Mali between 1351 and
1353. He described the ruler, Mansa Sulayman, sitting
in his pavilion (qubba), and attended by his courtiers:
each [amir] has his followers before him with lances,
bows, drums and trumpets. Their trumpets (bqt)
are made out of elephant tusks and their [other] musical
instruments are made out of reeds and gourds and
played with a striker and have a wonderful sound.79

The figure does not recall any of the devices mentioned in Arabic literature and is the first of a series of
badges which have to be interpreted without the aid
of any contemporary meaning. We are forced to
guess both at the objects they represent and at their
meaning.74

This passage provides an instance where bqt are

explicitly made from ivory, which is not the case with
the citations presented for Egypt. As we saw above,
there was an indigenous culture in West Africa of producing horns from elephant tusks, a material which
was abundantly available locally; while the surviving
examples are all early-16th-century at the earliest, Ibn
Battutahs description allows us to push the date of
their use back by some 150 years.

A variety of suggestions has been offered by scholars,

including cornucopiae, horns, cornets, ostrich plumes,
daggers, trumpets and elephants tusks, as well as the
sarwl al-futuwwa, or trousers of nobility.75 William
Leaf argued that they were horns, connecting them
with Siculo-Arabic horns that is, oliphants and
citing Khnels ivory corpus, which had been published a decade earlier: Dr Khnel says [these] may
well be influenced by the work of Egyptian craftsmen.
A note of caution should be blown, however:
al-Qalqashandi gives no indication that the horns
featured in the amiral investiture ceremony were
made of ivory. Further, in attempting to connect
Mamluk horns with oliphants, it is important to keep
chronology in mind.
The horn motif first appears on Mamluk blazons at
the end of the 15th century. It can be associated with
the reign of Sultan Qaitbay (r. 146896) and his amirs,
and was in use up to the Ottoman conquest of 1517. It
always appears paired, and three-dimensionality or
hollowness is suggested by the depiction of a disc or
section at the opening. It is only ever found in composite blazons with the same six elements: a napkin in
the upper field, a big cup charged with a pen-box and
placed between two figures [our horns] [. . .] in the
middle field, and a small cup in the lower one.76 Julia
Gonnella states that this was the most popular blazon
of the late Burji period, used by at least forty-seven
amirs.77 It became a sort of Mamluk state blazon,
with a specific reference of allegiance to Qaitbay. But
why the horn/oliphant? Again, the answer probably
lies in contact with Europe and influence from the
West, which was intense at Qaitbays period, through
trade and diplomatic relations, especially with Italy.78
In the 15th century, horns were still frequently depicted
as noble accoutrements in European art, some of
which may well have found their way to the Mamluk
court. But why the use of this motif begins under

To summarize this discussion, none of the bqt

cited by Shalem is explicitly made from ivory, though
the references he cites do seem to imply a culture
of horn-blowing in Islamic Egypt at various periods,
including the Fatimid, to mark significant or ceremonial occasions. This seems to have been particularly
strong at the very end of the Mamluk period, when
we even have oliphant-like objects regularly depicted
in the state blazon of Qaitbay and his amirs; this is
likely due to contact with Europe. An Egyptian use
of horns in the late 15th century does not, however,
explain the putative Egyptian use of horns in the 11th
century. The Islamic use of ivory for horns, cited by
Shalem as another reason for considering plausible the
existence of Fatimid oliphants, dates to the mid-14th
century at the earliest, thanks to Ibn Battutah, and
most of the extant evidence comes from West rather
than East Africa, from an even later date. Finally,
among all the thousands of hunting scenes in the
history of Islamic art, there are almost no representations of figures blowing or using horns. We have to
scrabble in the margins to find one, and when we do,
those examples turn out to be problematic, or to have
a strong connection with Europe. In contrast, we
constantly encounter depictions of horns in the art of
Latin Europe, especially in contexts datable to the
12th century. In sum, Khnels objections to the
Islamic-ness of the oliphant still very much hold.
We now move to a detailed look at the internal
evidence of the oliphants themselves, to see how this
contributes to the discussion about where these objects
were conceptualized and produced.
31

mariam rosser-owen
PART 2. RAISING REASONABLE DOUBT:
NON-SARACENIC OLIPHANTS AND
NON-ISLAMIC MOTIFS

believe a group of objects, whose production presupposes abundant availability of the raw material, to
be Fatimid, when there is actually very little other
evidence for Fatimid ivory carving? The answer comes
down to style, and the circulation of motifs in the
Mediterranean during a period when there were close
trade and diplomatic contacts between Egypt and
southern Italy, when many objects travelled, especially
ceramics and textiles.85 Hoffmans notion of pathways of portability provides a useful framework
within which to see the translation of motifs from
Fatimid portable objects onto works of art made
locally, though it is another matter whether such
motifs were identifiably Islamic.86
We must also recognize, however, that many of the
textiles and ceramics which came to Italy, and were
preserved as bacini in church faades, were not
Fatimid. In fact, only 4.6% of the bacini have been
identified through scientific analysis as being of
Egyptian manufacture, with Byzantine ceramics a
close second at 3.2% and only 1.9% from the Islamic
Near East (Syria, Iran, etc.). The vast majority of
the bacini an astonishing 90.3% have been shown
to originate from the central and western Mediterranean, in particular from Islamic Sicily (10%), and the
areas corresponding to present-day Tunisia (40%)
and Spain (40%).87 These ceramics generally date from
the last quarter of the 10th to the mid-13th century,
and provide a good indicator of the period in which
Mediterranean trade was exploding. They are also the
tip of the iceberg, standing for the many textiles and
perishable goods which were traded alongside the
ceramics but have not survived. The failure to pay
due attention to the contribution of the western
Mediterranean is symptomatic of a more widespread
historiographical neglect of the Islamic West and especially North Africa, and it is important to keep in mind
that not all imports or sources of artistic influence
came from the East.88
I will consider stylistic questions below, but first
I want to broaden out the group of objects under
discussion, to include those oliphants that do not
easily fit with the main classifications. Since the objective of the historiography to date has been to localize
the oliphants places of production, those objects
that defy easy categorization have simply been left
out of consideration, or subjected to outlandish
explanations such as the recarving argument
discussed above in order to explain a perceived
non-conformity to the idea of what Islamic or
Islamic-style objects should look like. However, once
we take into consideration the oliphants that do not
form part of the Saracenic group, we start to see
many points of contact between these objects, even
when stylistically they are totally unalike. As Ebitz
cautioned, the formal classification into Islamic or
Byzantine groups has given rise to false distinction[s]
and taken too much attention away from the smaller

The place of ivory in the context of Fatimid art history

has been exaggerated. One key reason for this is that
so many students of ivory have come from a background in the art of Byzantium or the Islamic East.
This is compounded by the neglect of the central and
western Mediterranean evidence for, on the one hand,
trade in raw elephant ivory and, on the other, the
production of large objects in solid ivory, revealing
how abundant the raw material was in this region. The
Andalusi ivories, made between the mid-10th and
mid-11th centuries for named patrons in the Umayyad
and Taifa royal households, are paradigmatic of this,
but they are rarely placed by art historians into their
wider Mediterranean or global context.80 In contrast,
the only indisputably Fatimid ivory object known is
the casket now in the Museo Arqueolgico Nacional,
Madrid, inscribed with the name of the caliph alMuizz (r. 95375), and datable to the 960s, as Jonathan Bloom has convincingly argued.81 The inscription
on the lid states that it was made in al-Mansuriyya, the
Fatimid capital in Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia). This
place of production makes perfect sense given what we
know about Ifriqiya as an entrept and transit point
for trans-Saharan trade, whose commodities included
elephant ivory.82 Ivory gathered at the port of Mahdiyya would have been transported by Italian merchants, in particular the entrepreneurial Amalfitans
(and later the Genoese), who may already have been
trading with al-Andalus and North Africa by the early
10th century. Luxury silk textiles were the motor for
this trade, as well as the basic foodstuffs, especially
grain, that were the mainstay of their economy in the
medieval period.83 It is thanks to this close trade that
ivory must have been so abundant in southern Italy in
the 11th and 12th centuries that so many objects of all
kinds have been attributed to this region: ecclesiastical
objects like the Salerno ivory group, large chess pieces
both figurative and non-figurative, the so-called
Siculo-Arabic caskets, large carved caskets, a pencase
and, I would argue, the oliphants.
In contrast, all the ivories that have been called
Fatimid the most famous being the openwork
panels in Berlin and Florence have been so attributed on stylistic grounds, and on the circumstantial
evidence of provenance: there is no other inscribed
or dated piece.84 It is also significant that the Fatimid
ivories are all small plaques, intended to be mounted
on to larger items of furniture. Apart from the
al-Muizz casket, there is no Fatimid object carved
from solid ivory that can be compared to the Andalusi
group, for example. This fact has not been widely
recognized, but it is highly significant for what it
implies about the supply of raw ivory in Egypt during
the Fatimid period, as well as the broader context
within which we should consider the oliphants: why
32

the oliphant
with the Jszbernyi oliphant, including its rather
highly placed lower band of interlace. Such connections between the different oliphant groups should be
considered rather than ignored, and this will be much
easier to do in future with the arrival of Shalems new
corpus.
Eastmond examines four oliphants from the
Byzantine group, considering just how Byzantine
they are.91 Two are decorated with chariot-racing, the
pre-eminent sport associated with Constantinople
(see Fig. 4), and two with a miscellany of hunting and
fighting scenes, mixed in with mythological beasts
(Fig. 13). Apart from these shared visual schemes,
stylistically there is nothing in common between these
individual objects. They cannot be easily grouped
and, as Eastmond notes, their styles do not fit any
[. . .] Byzantine carving[s] in ivory or other materials
that we know about in this period. Just as Khnel
observed that no oliphant has ever been found in
Egypt, the same can be said for Byzantium. Eastmond
concludes that these four oliphants should be placed
within the broader mainstream of oliphant production, that is, they should also be attributed to southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries.92 This region
had, of course, been a Byzantine province until the 9th
century, and, as Eastmond discusses, the schemes on
these horns present a distant memory of Byzantium.
He cites one connection between the Clephane
horn and the art of southern Italy: its double comma
drapery and conical hats [. . .] can be compared to the
telamones who hold up the episcopal throne in the
church of San Nicola, Bari, made by archbishop Elias
for the visit of pope Urban II in 1098.93 In addition,
we may note the tendency in the Byzantine group not

formal units that characterize the style of a carver

or [work]shop, such as favourite motifs, unconscious
gestures and technical procedures.89 It is these
elements that I will attempt to highlight in the next
section.

Expanding the discussion

At the outset of his stylistic classification, Shalem
explicitly excludes from his discussion the small and
narrow oliphants (Khnel nos 7275) as well as two
related oliphants in Hanover and London, and two
oliphants from the roundel group (Khnel nos 6465),
including the Borradaile horn; these all have a carving
style different from the one employed in the Fatimidstyle group. The Borradaile horn has a specific carving style far beyond what one may call Islamic or even
Saracenic [. . .] and several motifs are clearly unusual,
when compared with Fatimid images.90 The problem
with these exclusions is that Shalem has already
made up his mind what constitutes a Fatimid-style
oliphant, and thus only takes into consideration those
objects that fit his argument. The unusual motifs on
the Borradaile horn are actually quite significant, and
I will return to them in the next section. Other features
on these excluded objects have connections to the
Byzantine style group, recently studied by Eastmond,
as well as the Ulf group, discussed below. For example, Khnel nos 73 and 74 have a roundel style body
but the decoration at their upper border is arranged in
vertical panels, as on some of the Ulf group. The St
Petersburg horn (Khnel no. 64), which according to
Shalem features some disturbing motifs, has affinities

Figure 17
Horn of Ulf, York Minster ( By kind permission of the Chapter of York)
33

mariam rosser-owen
to confine the decoration within any kind of organizational structure, but to let it play out across the whole
surface of the ivory in a rather haphazard way, as on
the Jszbernyi (Fig. 13) and Copenhagen horns.94
This recalls the decoration of some mosaic pavements
in southern Italian contexts. One vivid example
carpets the nave at Otranto Cathedral, datable 1163
65, where an axial motif of a tree is surrounded by a
chaotic mix of Old Testament and legendary scenes;
the motifs here include a crenellated building, as on
the Jszbernyi horn.95
The next major group that has not yet been fully
incorporated into the study of oliphants, though it
was discussed by Hanns Swarzenski and more recently
by Valentino Pace and now comprises Group B in
Shalems new corpus, is a stylistically coherent group
of six oliphants, of differing sizes, associated with the
Horn of Ulf in York Minster (Fig. 17).96 Though this
horn is not the largest or most heavily decorated of the
group, it is the one for which there is associated documentary evidence to suggest a possible date in the 11th
century. Its 17th-century silver mounts provide the
information that the horn was given to York Minster
by Ulf, a chieftain of the Western Deira, with all his
lands.97 The oliphant is thus an archetypical horn of
tenure, a physical symbol of the gift of land to the
Church, as I will discuss in Part 3. However, the documentary record for this gift goes back no further than
the late 14th century, though the horn was associated
with Ulf at least a century earlier, as it is represented
along with the benefactors attributed arms in the
carved heraldry on the north side of the nave, begun
in 1291.98
Antiquarian writers identified this Ulf as the powerful Danish nobleman who ruled what is now Yorkshire during the reign of King Cnut (r. [in England]
101635), and associated the gift with a period soon
after Cnuts death when controversy arose between
Ulfs sons about sharing their fathers lands.99 This
would put the horns date of manufacture some time
before the 1030s. Art historians have taken this as a
fixed point in the chronology of the oliphants, which
has lent support to the view that some were made as
early as the early 11th century.100 However, Christopher Norton has rightly pointed out that very little is
likely to have survived the destruction of Anglo-Saxon
York Minster by the Normans in 1069, during which
the building, its library, archives and treasury were
destroyed and pillaged, leaving nothing that can be
attributed today to pre-conquest York.101 Moreover,
Norton points out that Ulf was a common name in
11th-century Yorkshire and several are listed in the
Domesday Book. One of these held land in 1066
(the time of the census), which by 1086 had become
the property of the see of York. This would fit with the
historical association of the horn with a man named
Ulf, but it would mean a post-conquest date for the
land gift and associated horn.102 This would seem to be

Figure 18
Oliphant in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Maria
Antoinette Evans Fund (57.581) ( 2015, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston)

the most plausible explanation from the point of view

of both the 11th-century history of York and the likely
dating of the oliphants in this group, which bear close
connections with the Salerno ivories group, which
have themselves been dated to the late 11th/early 12th
century, as we will discuss.
The Horn of Ulf itself has a plain, faceted body with
decoration confined to the bell end and the raised
belts on either side of where the mounts are attached.
This arrangement is identical to the oliphant from
Muri Abbey, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, though the decoration at the bell end differs
from Ulf in featuring a human hunter among the
animal combat scenes; the body of the Vienna horn
has also been inscribed with the information that it
was given by Count Albrecht III von Habsburg to
Muri Abbey in 1199.103 The decoration of both oliphants is arranged in the same way as in Shalems Group
34

the oliphant

Figure 19
Saracenic style ivory casket in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (MIA IV.12.98) ( The Museum of Islamic
Art, Doha)

III. Otherwise, the scenes show real and mythological

animals facing off or attacking each other, all in the
rather charming way that distinguishes the animal
motifs of this group. The other oliphants are more
densely decorated (Fig. 18), and are divided into
several registers both horizontally and vertically
(through the use of framing devices such as columns,
arches, axial tree motifs). Their style is internally very
consistent, and they are surely the product of the same
hand or workshop. The same motifs occur again
and again, and we will examine some of them individually in the next section. One distinctive creature is
a unicorn that is basically a lion with a pointed
protuberance emerging from the top of its head. Disembodied animals heads poke up out of the ground;
small creatures seem to fly through the air. This group
features more human figures than the other oliphants,
many of them nude or clad in a classicizing manner.
The animals have smiling faces, with almond-shaped
eyes, and their tails have smaller animalian terminations. All of these features are shared with some of the
roundel style group, such as the Edinburgh horn and
the casket in Doha which can be associated with it
(Fig. 19); in two examples of an identical motif on the
roundel group, this animalian termination takes off
on its own.104 These shared features may point to a
connection between the carvers of the Ulf group and

those of at least some of the roundel group. Similarly,

the tightly curling scroll in the vertical borders of the
top register of the Zaragoza horn are very like those on
the border design group (Khnel nos 5255), and on
some of the horns with running animals in friezes
(Khnel nos 77 and 79).105 As mentioned above, details
in the decoration of the Cluny oliphant relate to the
Ulf group, such as the division of the body into
geometric sections, and the style of the animals in its
lower border (Figs 6 and 12).
However, the most telling comparison is between
this group and the magnificent set of ivories from
an unidentified piece of liturgical furniture, now in
the Museo Diocesano in Salerno.106 In particular, the
distinctive type of vegetal scroll that fills the raised
belts of the oliphants in the Ulf group finds close parallels in the panels of the Salerno group, in particular
the borders (Fig. 20).107 There, the vegetal scroll is
given more space, so the individual motifs are bigger
and rounder, but taking into account the attenuation
of these elements to fit into a narrow belt on the oliphants, one appreciates that the triangular, cinquefoil
form of the leaves, the bunches of grapes, the distinctively concave form of the rosette, as well as the
veining of the scroll itself, the feathered details on the
acanthus leaves, and so on, are all identical between
the Salerno panels and the oliphants of the Ulf group.
35

mariam rosser-owen
The last group that should not be forgotten in discussing the oliphants are those which are totally plain,
uncarved apart from the faceting of their bodies. These
tend only to be discussed or published by art historians
when they have interesting mounts. Examples include
the Savernake horn in the British Museum (Fig. 21),
which was in the possession of the Sturmy family by
the second half of the 12th century.110 Its embellishments consist of two silver and enamelled bands
datable 132550, and other later silver bands which
probably replaced older ones. Another plain oliphant,
extremely large at 72 cm in length, comes from the
Treasury of the church of St Servatius in Maastricht,
and is now in the Muse du Cinquantenaire in Brussels
(inv. 4). It is decorated with gilt-copper mounts added
by a Mosan atelier around 116080, to turn it into
a reliquary.111
No doubt there are many other plain oliphants in
international collections or still in church treasuries
that have not yet become part of the oliphant discussion, though happily Shalem includes this category as
Group E of his new corpus. Their lack of decoration
makes assigning these horns to a particular region or
date problematic. As we will see in Part 3, however,
cornua eburnea, without any reference to further
decoration except sometimes to metal mounts, are frequently mentioned in medieval church inventories,
and thus these plain horns have just as significant a
role as decorated examples in understanding the creation and consumption of oliphants. The light faceting
of the body of these sometimes huge oliphants allows
the ivory material itself to be displayed, perhaps stemming from a desire to show off the use of this expensive
material, or from a fascination with the exotic beast
from which the tusk originally came. Such interesting
questions certainly deserve some consideration.
One last word on the expanded group should be
given to the anomalous horns, which can be no more
than mentioned here, in the hope that eventually they
will be better understood and contextualized. These
include an oliphant in the V&A, the only example
known so far of an oliphant with incised decoration, in
a manner similar to some of the Siculo-Arabic ivories
of the 12th century.112 Paul Williamson has recently
suggested a very early date, in the first half of the
11th century, based on the radiocarbon analysis of
the tusk, and the crudity of the figural style which he
associates with the tenacity of Longobardic heritage
in central and southern Italy. Another unusual example, in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin (K3105),
was published by Von Falke in his article on Byzantine
oliphants, and attributed to early-13th-century
Sicily.113 It has rich, three-dimensional scrolling ornament totally covering its upper and lower zones; the
scrolls consist of unusual leaf forms and contain rather
naturalistic animals, alone or in combat, as well as
disembodied human heads facing each other among
the foliage. Highly unusual are the bands of pseudoKufic inscriptions, carved in relief at the horns upper

Figure 20
Border panels from the Salerno ivory group, Museo
Diocesano, Salerno (Francesca DellAcqua, with kind
permission)
The resemblance is not just stylistic but resides in the
handling of how these motifs are carved. The Salerno
border scrolls also feature birds and animals: the longbodied hare apparently trapped within a scroll has the
same almond-shaped eyes, long rounded ears, and a
ruff of fur which only covers the top half of its body.
These same features characterize the deer on the Ulf
group, seen for example in Figure 18. Very similar vegetal motifs are also occasionally seen on the plaques
themselves.108
While it is broadly agreed that the Salerno ivories
were made in southern Italy (whether in Salerno
itself or in a neighbouring community such as Amalfi),
there is still no real consensus on when they were
made. Robert Bergman considered the consecration of
Salerno Cathedral in 1085 as the most likely context
for the commission, while more recent studies favour
a date in the early 12th century.109 A late-11th-century
date for the existence of the Salerno ivories workshop
would fit neatly with the information outlined above
for the Horn of Ulf. Indeed, perhaps the Horn of Ulf
provides a date for the Salerno ivories, while the
Salerno ivories offer the oliphants a locale.
36

the oliphant

Figure 21
The Savernake horn (M&ME 1975,0401.1) ( Trustees of the British Museum)
has understandably deterred scholars from undertaking it, since it also requires an approach that cuts
across art historical disciplines and specialisms. This
task will be facilitated immeasurably by Shalems
publication of the oliphant corpus. Here, I would
like to attempt a first look at certain motifs on the
oliphants, some of which have been assumed to be
indicative of their Islamic style or even origins, while
the significance of others has not been highlighted as
perhaps it should. It is important to note that several
motifs recur on the oliphants that are unusual within
the repertoire of Islamic art. A discussion of these
motifs, which can only be superficial in the confines of
an article, serves to ask the question: what makes the
style of the oliphants Fatimid anyway?
As with all the motifs discussed here, there are many
more examples that could be gleaned from a comprehensive art historical survey. My selection is admittedly random. I am also not the first person to draw
connections between motifs on the oliphants and those
of contemporary Italian sculpture. But this approach
has previously been taken (by Pace, for example) in
order to localize the ivory workshop in a particular
part of southern Italy. That is not my aim here, though
I will return to the question of production centres in
my conclusion. Rather, I aim to show that the oliphants style and iconography was current in Italian art
of the late 11th to late 12th century, especially but not
exclusively in architectural sculpture. There is thus no
need to look to Islamic art for the immediate source of
the decoration on the oliphants.

rim, and incised around the zone where the mounts are
attached. I have already mentioned the Gothic example in the V&A.114 Since horns are depicted being
worn and used by hunters in European art into the
15th century, it makes sense that there should still be a
market for the creation of such objects, and Gothic
carvers clearly had the available ivory and a wealthy
enough clientele to sustain it.115 Thus, not only might
some of the oliphants be earlier than the usual chronological focus of study, other examples take us considerably beyond that period, and suggest that we should
look to other medieval centres of ivory production,
perhaps even in northern Europe.

Stylistic connections
It is clear that the stylistic connections within and
beyond the oliphant group are more wide-ranging
than a simple one-way conversation with Fatimid
art. Ultimately, a comprehensive stylistic analysis is
needed, which takes all the extant oliphants into
account, and looks at the connections across the whole
group, highlighting especially the incidental details
in borders, interstices, stylistic tells in the representation of eyes, fur, and so on that are often ignored
but which say so much about the hands involved in
production. Such a study should take into account
comparative material carved in ivory as well as stone
and wood, and should range across the Italian Peninsula, and probably beyond. The enormity of this task
37

mariam rosser-owen
Starting with the purely ornamental motifs those
which might be considered to be more Islamic in
origin than the figurative motifs I begin with the
motif of alternating triangles containing heart-shaped
palmette scrolls, as seen in the wide border at the bellend of the plain oliphant in Boston (Fig. 2). Shalem
associates this elegant design with his quintessentially
Islamic Group II, though he cites no Islamic examples
of this motif. However, this pattern along with
other purely ornamental designs, often contained
within roundels or vegetal scrolls, and bearing a strong
textile aesthetic is found in the mosaic decoration
of the window embrasures of the royal Norman church
foundations in Sicily. The pattern from the Boston oliphant is matched exactly by windows at the Cathedral
of Monreale, founded by William II and dating to the
1170s80s (Fig. 22).116 The rather swirling style of the
scrolls within a geometric framework, which characterize the oliphants of Shalems Group II, are matched
by the mosaics of other window embrasures, including
the lower range in the outer walls of the Cappella
Palatina in Palermo, datable to the new campaign of
mosaics added to the nave and aisles under William I
in the 1150s60s.117
Such examples show that these motifs were current
in the elite art of Norman Sicily in the second half of

the 12th century. In fact, most of the purely ornamental motifs seen in the decoration of the oliphants have
parallels in the illuminated ornament of Byzantine
manuscripts, which likely provided one of the models
for the mosaics.118 For what M. Alison Frantz describes
as the motif of triangular palmettes dovetailed
together and filling a zigzag, the best parallels seem to
be 11th-century manuscripts.119 Herbert Bloch illustrates several manuscripts copied at Monte Cassino in
the late 11th century with the same type of scroll within
a geometricized structure.120 There are also parallels
in Byzantine illumination for the other border motifs
we regularly see on the oliphants, including the
ubiquitous half-palmette scroll (seen in Figs 1, 2 and 6,
for example).121 The wide geographical spread of this
motif surely attests to the use of portable models,
such as manuscripts, or possibly pattern books. The
intricate knotwork that fills the borders of several
oliphants (seen in Fig. 6, for example) was, according
to Frantz, one of the characteristic motifs of southern
Italian illumination from the 9th to 11th centuries.122
She notes that this kind of interlace had become one
of most prevalent forms of ornamental decoration by
the 8th century. It is seen, for example, in the marble
slab from the side of an ambo in the church of San
Salvatore in Brescia, datable to the 8th or 9th centuries. Originally one of an affronted pair, this Lombard
carving shows an elegant peacock surrounded by
vegetal scrolls including bunches of grapes, and a
border of elaborate knotted circles running along the
base.123 Jumping forward to the mid-12th century, we
see knotwork filling some of the lower soffits of the
arcades in the Cappella Palatina, between the roundels
depicting haloed figures; knotwork closer in style to
that on the oliphants fills some of the long panels
of sandstone carvings on the right-hand portal of
the Basilica di San Michele in the former northern
Lombard capital of Pavia, dating to the early 12th
century.124 An elaborate knotwork design surmounts
the main portal of the church of San Benedetto in
Brindisi, datable to the late 11th or early 12th century.125 Whatever the ultimate derivation of this type
of ornament whether from Islamic or Celtic art
by the 11th century, these motifs were integrated and
widespread in the decorative repertoire of medieval
Italy.
The next motif I want to examine is that of structuring decoration within linked roundels. The largest
group of oliphants is decorated in this way, dubbed by
Hoffman the roundel design group. It is this group
above all on which she bases her reading of the oliphants as central to the expression of Crusader ideology
and identity, attesting to the Crusader experience
in the Eastern Mediterranean.126 To summarize her
argument, the designs of this group of oliphants were
specifically modeled on Fatimid portable objects in
circulation in Italy, in particular ceramics and textiles
decorated with animal motifs inside roundels, which
the oliphants appropriated. Their hunting imagery

Figure 22
Alternating triangle-and-scroll motif in mosaic in
window embrasure in Monreale Cathedral, Sicily
(Mariam Rosser-Owen)
38

the oliphant
aptly allude[d] [. . .] to the prowess of the owner of the
horn during the hunt or in battle, an allusion easily
translatable in Crusader terms. Hoffman asserts that
the eastern Mediterranean origin of these motifs would
be emphatically recognized by viewers of the oliphants, indeed that these objects became identifiably
Islamic by virtue of their decoration being contained
inside roundels. These motifs even authenticated the
owners association with the Crusader experience, and
provided a tangible link to the Holy Land. The notion
of the material transfer of holiness extended to
Italian architecture as well, where the construction in
certain cities of buildings modelled on holy monuments in Jerusalem provided a strategy through which
the topography of Jerusalem could be transferred to
[Italy], linking citizens and their civic identities to the
earthly and heavenly Jerusalem.
Unfortunately, Hoffman provides no references to
primary sources which would support her assertions
that this motif was indeed understood in this way by
contemporary viewers. One has to query how many
Crusaders in the Levant at this period could afford or
be able to access lustrewares or silk textiles made in
Cairo and usually shipped from Alexandria by Italian
merchants. If anything, the structuring of the decoration within roundels alluded to luxury imports, as
Hoffman argued in earlier studies; but those imports
were not exclusively Fatimid. As we saw above, the
vast majority of the ceramics reused as bacini in church
faades originated in Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia)
and Islamic Spain, two centres whose trade propped
up the Italian economy in the 11th century. How might
visual references to these luxurious commodities have
carried a link to the Holy Land and the Crusader
experience?
From the late 11th century well before Roger II
of Sicily remodelled Norman kingship on the splendid
courts of Cairo and Constantinople such luxury
imports were providing inspiration for Italian architectural decoration in an almost unmediated state.
Caskey recently published a moulded stucco panel,
probably originally from a chancel screen, which was
found in excavations at the church of Santa Maria
di Terreti in Reggio Calabria; this is one of three
churches, all decorated with plaster, which can be
associated with the patronage of Roger I (d. 1101).127
The panel in question features roundels containing
paired birds in the upper register and paired quadrupeds (deer?) below, with the interstices filled by leaf
decoration not unlike that seen on the Edinburgh
oliphant (Fig. 1) and its closest associates. The
roundels are linked by a small loop containing a fourpetalled rosette, and grouped in twos within vertical
rectangles whose borders probably mask the scar
left by the plaster mould. This decoration is very
obviously based on an Islamic textile, though not
necessarily one from the Fatimid realm. The whole
composition is surrounded by a rather wobbly pseudoKufic ornament, indicating a clear Islamic origin for
the model.

Decoration within roundels becomes particularly

common from the second half of the 12th century.
This is how the busts of haloed figures are contained
in the soffits of the arches in the nave mosaics of the
Cappella Palatina in Palermo (1150s60s). Here the
roundels are linked, but not with the connector loops
which Hoffman associates with the Fatimid models
for the roundel design. At Monreale, the busts of
warrior angels just below the roof beams process along
the walls within roundels with connector loops, whose
linkages contain four-petalled rosettes (Fig. 23). This
way of organizing the decoration literally covers the
carving of the capitals and columns in the cathedrals
cloister, especially the clusters of four columns at the
corners and around the fountain (Fig. 24). Indeed, the
disposition of occupied roundels across the cylindrical
surface of the column is handled in a very similar
way to that of the oliphants, and there are many
motifs among these carvings which find parallels on
the ivories.
Hoffmans arguments concentrate on the roundels
which contain animals, but it cannot really be said
that Fatimid-Islamic art is the only one to adopt this
motif. Animals within circular scrolls from where it
is a logical development to isolate them within roundels are already seen on the throne of Maximian,
probably made near Ravenna in the mid-6th century.128 Roundels with connector loops are seen in the
basketwork capitals at San Vitale, also at Ravenna
(built 52647), while the ambo of Bishop Agnellus,
now in Ravenna Cathedral, features single animals
arranged in a grid: it is not a huge conceptual leap to
adapt one to the other.129 Of course, animals within
roundels are also widespread in another culture with a
debt to late antique forms, namely medieval Spain, as
seen for example on the exterior friezes at Quintanilla
de las Vias, among many possible examples.
The next motif is that of running animals, as seen on
the bodies of some of Shalems Group I and the borders of his Group II (Khnel nos 7781). As discussed
in Part 1, the repertoire of animals running after each
other was Shalems reasoning for assigning Group II
to Cairene production, and for being ambivalent
about the localization of Group I. But hunting was
not a preserve of the Islamic world. Looking at the
oliphants, it would be a simple process to adapt the
technique of faceting the bodies of plain oliphants to
accommodate a frieze of carved animals, which are
stylistically extremely close to those within roundels,
and probably produced within the same workshop.
This arrangement is simply reversed when, as on the
Edinburgh oliphant (Fig. 1), we have roundels on the
body and running animals in the border. A carver
faced with decorating the border of a cylindrical object
which would be turned in the hand would surely not
have taken long to come up with the idea of a narrative cycle that would unfurl as the holder turned, be
that a series of animals, or something more complex
like the hunting or drinking scenes on the oliphant in
39

mariam rosser-owen

Figure 23
Warrior angels within linked roundels, Monreale Cathedral, Sicily (Mariam Rosser-Owen)

All the animals on the oliphants find parallels in the

sculpture of 11th- and 12th-century Italy. Swarzenski
illustrates a marble screen from the church of San
Salvatore de Birecto in Atrani, near Amalfi, which
shows two heraldic peacocks, their tails fully splayed,
clutching prey in their claws (one of them a human
figure) and flanked by birds and harpies.134 This recalls
the vigorous heraldic style of the splayed eagles
clutching prey in the Ulf group and on the Doha
casket, and those without prey on the roundel group
(Khnel nos. 62e and 65b).135 We see harpies on the
roundel style oliphant in the Metropolitan Museum
(Khnel no. 67c) and the Ulf-group oliphant in Boston
(Fig. 18), but more common is the sphinx, seen on the
Byzantine-style Clephane Horn (Fig. 4), and regularly
on the Ulf group.136 A griffin and winged lion face each
other across a complex tree motif on an 11th-century
marble screen from the church of San Giovanni
Crisostomo in Bari; a particularly fierce winged lion
decorates the ambo of Bari cathedral; and paired
griffins appear in the pierced marble screens flanking
the throne platform at Monreale Cathedral.137 In the
carvings of the cloisters columns and capitals, there
is a plethora of animal motifs rendered in a similar

Doha (Fig. 7), or that formerly in the Gans Collection

(both in Shalems Group III).130
Turning to the animals themselves, among the types
of fauna depicted are many real and fantastical
with which Islamic art historians will be familiar:
splayed eagles, peacocks, other birds sometimes with
necks entwined, griffins, harpies, lions, deer, some
with very long branching antlers, hares . . . These creatures are usually represented singly, sometimes in
combat with each other, and often with the slight smile
that seems to play on the faces of many creatures in
the zoological world of the oliphants. Less common
animals also feature, such as elephants and bears.131
However, while these types of animals might have
connections to Islamic art, the style in which they are
depicted often does not. Khnel noted that many
of the beasts and birds betray features foreign to
Fatimid types, and reveal the intrusions of Christian
and Western elements.132 Swarzenski reminded us that
we should not forget that on Italian soil a vast repertoire of animal and mythological subjects had its own
long tradition from classical antiquity onwards, citing
by way of example the heraldic winged sphinx [that]
appears on the archaic Temple of Selinunte in Sicily.133
40

the oliphant
the Ulf group were remarkable for the intrusion of
classical themes among this array of oriental beasts,
singling out the man carrying a quadruped on his
shoulders on the Chartreuse de Portes oliphant, which
evokes the Kriophoros, the prototype of the Good
Shepherd; on the associated oliphant in Boston
(Fig. 18), a semi-nude Hercules figure wrestles with the
antlers of a hind, in almost exactly the same pose as
seen on a 4th-century marble carving in Ravenna
(Swarzenskis fig. 25); while the dog-headed giant seen
on the Boston oliphant is probably the Cynocephalus,
one of the marvels of the East as reported
in the De Rerum Naturis of Rabanus Maurus (c. 780
856), and a popular motif in 11th- and 12th-century
art.140 In addition to these motifs, there are centaurs
on the Boston oliphant and the Byzantine-style
Jszbernyi horn; a mounted hunter on the Chartreuse
de Portes oliphant wearing the same classical-style
tunic as the Hercules and the hind motif; other naked
huntsmen; obviously Norman knights, identifiable by
their helmets and kite-shaped shields; and beasts,
real and fantastic, all of which have parallels in the
contemporary art of southern Italy. This art may also
provide the source of the odd, disembodied demon
head which pokes out between the roundels of the
St Petersburg oliphant (Khnel fig. 64b), or the bird
pecking at its breast on the V&A (roundel style)
oliphant (Khnel fig. 66b), which Pace associated with
ai pellicani di ascendente simbologia cristiana.141 On
the horn in Auch (Khnel no. 76), there are even three
equal-armed crosses a motif which is also present
on the Cappella Palatina soffits nestling between
the apparently Islamic beasts!
Two particularly distinctive motifs are a type of
snake or dragon with a body which curls over itself
into loops; and the motif of two birds on either side of
a bowl, vase or fountain, sometimes drinking from it
(both motifs are visible in Fig. 5). Both of these motifs
derive from Roman or late antique precedents, and
both are known from sarcophagi. The motif of the
birds drinking from a fountain is more ubiquitous,
perhaps because it came to have a Christian allegorical
significance of ingesting eternal life.142 It is seen on a
sarcophagus from the mausoleum of Galla Placidia,
datable to the 6th century and now in the Archiepiscopal Museum in Ravenna; and on Roman spolia reused
in Christian contexts, such as the interior lintel above
the entrance to Charlemagnes Palatine Chapel in
Aachen, founded c. 798. Also in Ravenna, the motif is
seen on abaci above some of the basketwork capitals
in the early-6th-century church of San Vitale. It is
occasionally encountered in early medieval contexts
before undergoing a revival across 11th-century
Europe, most spectacularly in western France. In
northern Italy it appears several times on the
early-12th-century portal of the Basilica di San
Michele in Pavia; while in a southern Italian context,
there are several examples in the remarkable sculptural capitals in the Monreale cloisters (Fig. 25).143

Figure 24
Cluster of four columns at one of the corners of
Monreale Cloister, Monreale Cathedral, Sicily
(Mariam Rosser-Owen)

manner to those on the oliphants, including pronounced ribs on running quadrupeds.138

The style in which these animal motifs are depicted
is not consistent. The carving style in the architecture
differs according to chronology and region; on the
oliphants, within their stylistic groups they are usually
internally coherent, but there is little in common
between, for example, harpies on the roundel style
and those on the Byzantine style groups. This
suggests that the ivory carvers and stone masons are
not all drawing on a single model, but that the artistic
concept of decorating with animals in roundels, or
featuring mythological beasts is shared across
southern Italy at this period. Whether this is due to
the dominant force of the Fatimid style, or to a
local development from classical, late antique and
Byzantine styles, is perhaps not the most important
question.139 Instead, it is significant that this style was
prevalent in southern Italy by the (late?) 11th century,
and provides the artistic context within which the
decoration of the oliphants was created. We will return
to the implications of this.
It is surely more instructive to take into consideration the motifs that recur across the oliphants that
are not known within the repertoire of Islamic art.
Swarzenski already pointed out that the horns of
41

mariam rosser-owen
On the oliphants, particularly elaborate examples of
the motif of two birds drinking from a fountain are
seen on the Ulf group: an almost identical presentation of the motif is seen on the oliphants now in
Boston, Paris and Zaragoza.144 Like the unicorn,
another motif which is not widespread in medieval
Islamic art, it is one of the motifs that unites the oliphants in this group.145 However, it is also seen on the
Saracenic oliphants, including the Borradaile horn in
the British Museum, where it occurs in the top register
of roundels on both sides of the body (Khnel nos.
65a, c, excluded from Shalems groupings). Here the
fountain is depicted distinctively as a high bird-table
with loops at top and centre, which is also how it
appears in the front border of the lid of the Doha
casket (Fig. 19), whose carving style and technique is
otherwise close to the oliphant in Edinburgh (Fig. 1).
This motif, with its Christian origins and allegorical
meaning, is thus embedded in the iconography across
all the oliphant groups.
The curledbodied dragon is also seen on the
Borradaile horn, looking rather Celtic in two roundels
in the top register of the horns outer curve, between
the roundels of birds at the fountain (Khnel nos
65c, d); it is seen all over the Blackburn horn (Khnel
no. 81), now in the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. On
the magnificent oliphant in the National Museum in
Copenhagen, which is associated with the Byzantine
group, a pair of creatures in the upper border, depicted
rather differently with scaly bodies and wings, nevertheless shows the same way of looping the body.146
This provides another iconographic connection
between the Saracenic and Byzantine groups.
This way of depicting a fantastical snake, dragon or
sea monster becomes extremely widespread in Italy,
especially in the 12th century. It is seen in the Monte
Cassino illustration of Rabanus Maurus, copied in
1023. Extant architectural examples date from the
11th century.147 There are several elaborate examples
in the mosaic pavements of churches, including the
main apse of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo (1140s)
where two snakes curl on either side of the main altar,
perhaps intended as guardians.148 The wonderful
mosaic frieze of birds and animals which adorns the
architrave of the portico at the Cathedral of Terracina
in Lazio, probably dating to the late 12th century,
includes a curl-bodied dragon with wings, a scaly
body and a dog-like face very like the motif on the
upper band of the Copenhagen oliphant.149 Turning to
sculptural examples, this motif is depicted on either
side of the entrance to the Campanile (Leaning
Tower) at Pisa, above the foundation date of 1173 on
the right hand side (Fig. 26). It is winged and scaly, not
unlike the examples on the Copenhagen oliphant, but
fiercer, menacing a ram on one side and a cow on the
other, and being attacked by bears. This motif, paired
on either side of the belltowers entrance, probably has
apotropaic significance. The creature appears again

in the lintel above the south-eastern entrance to the

Duomo, the Porta di San Ranieri, which faces the
Campanile, whose bronze doors were made c. 1186 by
Bonanus Pisanus, after returning from Sicily where he
produced the bronze doors at Monreale Cathedral.150
A rather tamer dragon appears at the centre of the
architrave of the main portal at San Benedetto in
Brindisi, datable to the early 12th century. It is speared
by a warrior, and flanked by two figures wearing
Norman-style pointed helmets, spearing equally
tame-looking lions; the rather amused expression of
these three supposedly fierce beasts reminds one of the
depiction of animals on oliphants, especially those in
the roundel style.151 Finally, again in the Monreale
cloisters, we see some highly elaborate examples of the
curled-bodied monster in several of the capitals, sometimes combined with the motif of birds drinking from
a fountain.152
The reason for lingering on these two distinctive
motifs is that such non-Islamic motifs on the oliphants even on the Saracenic group have, to my
knowledge, not been pointed out before. Their presence, fully incorporated into the zoological world of
the oliphants and peacefully cohabiting with the other
animals whose origins and designs have been perceived
to be Islamic, is significant. Other stylistic connections
with the oliphants could be elucidated through a
comparative study of medieval Italian sculpture: for
example, other capitals in the Monreale cloister
feature soldiers with the Norman kite-shaped shields,
as well as a very classical figurative style, which seems
to relate to the Byzantine series of oliphants.153 There
is also a quadriga depicted in one of the ceiling paintings at the Cappella Palatina might that have been
influenced by a continuing local artistic tradition
of depicting chariot racing, as illustrated on the
Byzantine oliphants?
Stylistically, the oliphants as with the architectural
sculpture to which their iconography relates are so
diverse that there is likely to be no single common
place of production. Many hands and styles are
discernible, even within the one group that has been
extensively studied, that at the very least there were
probably different shops at work. Indeed, according
to Cutler, to make objects in ivory you really only need
one craftsman, sometimes with an assistant, carrying
portable tools such as a bow-lathe, and a few tusks to
supply the raw material.154 No industrial equipment
or fixed location is needed to carve ivory objects, and
as the material is so precious, every inch of it is used,
leaving only the rarest of traces in the archaeological
record.155 The likelihood of itinerant craftsmen undermines the need for fixed places of production. Like
Bonanus, perhaps sculptors travelled to where their
craft was in demand. Some of these craftsmen may
have worked in various media perhaps in both
stone and ivory as well as plaster and wood, though
this has largely disappeared facilitating the transfer
42

the oliphant

Figure 25
Capital with motif of birds at a fountain, Monreale Cloister, Monreale Cathedral, Sicily (Mariam Rosser-Owen)

Figure 26
Curl-bodied dragon above the entrance to the Campanile, Pisa (Mariam Rosser-Owen)
43

mariam rosser-owen
it with wine, and drank it in front of the altar on
bended knee.160 It is important to note that the horns
mentioned in such sources would only rarely have
been made of ivory.
These anecdotes lead us from the primary function
of the oliphant as a noble accoutrement for hunting
and feasting to its secondary function, which sheds
significant light on the cultural context in which these
horns were created and used. All oliphants for which
we know a provenance have come to us from the
treasuries of churches, primarily in northern Europe
(the so-called Latin West). The objects in Khnels
catalogue of the Saracenic group, as well as the references to horns in medieval treasury inventories listed
in his Appendix, all come from France, Germany and
the British Isles. Indeed, given the likelihood that
many oliphants were made in southern Italy, it is odd
that there are none in Italian collections apart from
that now in the Bargello and previously in the Medici
collection, which could thus have been acquired from
anywhere and Khnels list of inventories does not
include any sources from Italy.161 I will return below to
why this might be.
Many of the sources listed in Khnels Appendix
refer to horns as containers for relics.162 Such horns
were once suspended above the great altar at Canterbury Cathedral, for example; the ivory horn inventoried at Durham in 1383 held the relics of St Oswald
(d. 642 or 672), king of Northumbria; while the ivory
horn inventoried at Angers in 1255 improbably contained the relics of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob and Sarah, as well as fragments of the Lords
supper and many other relics.163 Importantly, the
horns listed in these inventories are not just made from
ivory: there are several instances in Khnels Appendix of gold and silver horns. For example, the church
at Eller in the Mosel region was equipped with unam
argenteam et alteram auro et lapidibus paratam, while
among the treasures given to Durham by King Aethelstan (r. 92439) were three cornua auro et argento
fabricata.164 Somewhat later, Edmund Mortimer, earl
of March (d. 1381), bequeathed by will his great Horn
of gold; also his lesser Horn of gold, with the strings.165
The majority of the references indicate no material
at all, mentioning simply cornua, but if ivory is
intended they are described as cornua de ebore or
cornu eburneum. Very rarely is any further description given of these objects, the exception being the
1295 inventory of St Pauls Cathedral (London) which
lists an ivory horn engraved with beasts and birds,
large.166 More frequently, the only feature mentioned
is the mounts: for example, the list of royal treasures
seized from the castle of Edinburgh in 1296/7 includes
three ivory horns adorned (harnesiata) with silver and
with silk (Khnel, Anhang, no. 10); the Limoges
inventory (11261245) lists four cornua de ebore,
quaedam sunt cum argento (Khnel, Anhang,
no. 15).167 One horn not included in Khnels Appendix (which was not intended to be exhaustive) is listed

of style and iconography across media; shared artisanal skills might mean that the oliphants were carved
in Bari and Amalfi, and other centres besides. It is also
highly likely that some of the oliphants were made
in centres unconnected with the Mediterranean. We
will return to some of these issues in the concluding
discussion, but first we should turn to the cultural
context in which oliphants were used, and for that we
have to ask why they were produced what was the
function of the oliphant?
PART 3. SECULAR AND SACRED: THE LATIN
CONTEXT
Though they have taken on a rather mythical quality
as Ebitz said, the spirit [of the oliphant has] escaped
into the magic world of the romance oliphants
were originally essentially practical objects. They were
horns. The tip of the tusks is usually hollowed out,
allowing the horn to be blown. And they seem to have
been effective, as evinced by past attempts to actually
blow them.156 Oliphants were, therefore, eminently
suitable for hunting, which is how horns are seen being
used in hundreds of scenes in medieval art. Though
it is often said that oliphants are too heavy to be
practical, this varies, depending on the size of the tusk
and thickness of the ivory. Many of them have been
trimmed down from the outside so that the walls are
quite thin, allowing them to resonate sufficiently to
make a sound. They would certainly not have been too
heavy for a seasoned hunter, who would be strapping
on much heftier gear than this.157 The raised belts
that are integral to the decoration of the oliphants
are also fundamental to their use, as they allow
straps probably originally in leather or textile, later
made more permanent and decorative in metal to
be attached, to facilitate the horn being carried during
a hunt; or, if later repurposed, to be suspended, for
storage or display. Some of the particularly large
oliphants, which can be more than metre in length,
may have been more of a status symbol or ceremonial
rather than functional objects, or were presented
directly to churches as reliquaries, as seems to have
been the case with the plain St Servatius horn.
Their hollow tip could be stoppered so that the
signalling horn doubled up as a drinking horn, as
King Harold and his knights are depicted on the
Bayeux Tapestry, drinking during the feast at Bosham
in 1064.158 This use is also frequently mentioned in
the medieval sources: Ingulphus, abbot of Crowland
(Lincolnshire) at the time of William the Conqueror,
mentions in his history of the abbey the gift of Witlaf,
king of Mercia, of the horn used at his own table, for
the elder monks of the house to drink out of on
festivals and saints days.159 Likewise, in describing
the ceremonial presentation of his oliphant to York
Minster, William Camden describes how Ulf took the
horn, from which he was accustomed to drink, filled
44

the oliphant
in one of the inventories of Edward Is treasury in
Westminster Abbey: a horn with silver fittings that
belonged to St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of
Hereford (127582).168 So while these horns were
clearly valued for their materials or their saintly
contents or connections, it seems highly questionable
whether they were understood as objects from the
east, or had a recognizably Islamic association, as
Hoffman has argued.
Ebitz discussed the presentation of ivory horns to
churches as pious gifts.169 Discussing the oliphant in
the Muse de Cluny (Fig. 6), he believes it was recarved
with Christian themes to make this fundamentally
secular object more appropriate for its new role as a
container for sacred relics. The stylistic comparisons,
which we noted in Part 2, between the oliphants and
southern Italian church architecture actually makes
the decoration of the oliphants appear less overtly
secular, a point I will come back to below. But the
somewhat passive manner in which Ebitz talks of this
object passing [. . .] from the hands of its secular owner
into the treasure of a church underestimates the
importance of the presentation of the oliphant, horn
or other item as a symbolic object to use Michael
Clanchys phrase of some more meaningful and
substantive gift, usually land.170 Ulfs horn in York
Minster, for example, was a physical memorial of
his presentation of lands to the Church. This was
very common practice: as Clanchy has discussed, the
presentation of a symbolic object was an essential
aspect of what he calls pre-literate property law.
Before conveyances were made with documents,
witnesses heard a donor utter the words of the grant
and saw him make the transfer by a symbolic object.
This customarily involved the ceremonial laying of the
object on the altar, in the presence of many witnesses.
Such a gesture was intended to impress the event on
the memory of all those present. If there were dispute
subsequently, resort was had to the recollection of the
witnesses, or to the presentation of the object itself.
This actually happened with the Pusey horn (Fig. 27),
purportedly presented to William Pusey by King
Cnut, by which to hold the land.171 What John Cherry
described as the legal apotheosis of horn tenure
occurred in 1685 when a case before Lord Chancellor
Jefferies (164589) required the horn to be produced in
court and with universal admiration, [it] was received,
admitted and proved to be the identical horn by which,
as by a charter, Cnut had conveyed the manor of Pusey
seven hundred years before.172
Such horns are known as horns of tenure, and
there are many other examples, in ivory as well as
horns from domestic cattle, European bison, and
aurochs. These latter had become extinct in England
around 1500 BC but continued to survive in Germany
and Poland until the 17th century, and it is assumed
that their horns were imported raw to be turned into
drinking horns in England, or mounted in central

Figure 27
The Pusey horn (M.220-1938) ( Victoria and
Albert Museum, London)

Europe and then imported.173 Another famous tenure

horn, which survives to this day in a private collection,
is the Borstal Horn, said to have been given by Edward
the Confessor as a symbol of land in Bernwood Forest,
Buckinghamshire, which he gave to the huntsman
Nigel who killed a wild boar that was infesting this
royal hunting park.174 Nigel and his heirs were to hold
this land in perpetuity per unum cornu, quod est
charta praedictae forestae. By the late 12th century
this hereditary office was symbolized by its bearer
wearing his horn hanging about his neck when
attending the kings army. The (ivory) Savernake
Horn (Fig. 21) was named after the forest of which its
owners were the hereditary bailiffs and keepers [. . .]
ever since the reign of Henry II.175 The decoration
on its 14th-century silver mounts consists of hunting
dogs and hunted animals, especially deer and birds of
prey, but in the most visible position at the top face of
the uppermost mount are three figures: an aged king
sitting under a Gothic canopy, lifting his right hand
and holding a sceptre in his left; to his right, a bishop
in his mitre, uplifting his hand like the king; on the left
of the king is a forester or bailiff, blowing a horn with
his right hand and drawing a sword with his left. The
author of the antiquarian study of this object interpreted this combination of figures as denoting some
grant of office and power jointly conferred by the king
45

mariam rosser-owen
commonly presented, as well as other non-oliphant
objects made of ivory. For example, the ivory handle
of a whip was found in the ruins of St Albans Abbey,
and appears to have been the testimony of a gift of
four mares to the monks from one Gilbert de Novo
Castello.185 However, ivory as a material was probably
exceptional, and most horns in medieval treasuries
were made from cattle. Sometimes these horns were
already prestigious for their age: the drinking horn
now in the collection of Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, has been identified as coming from an
aur-bull (an aurochs male) of the Holocene period,
c. 3000 BC.186 Aurochs are probably the terrible beasts
of the Hercynian Wood, described in Julius Caesars
De Bello Gallico, hunted heroically by young men
of the Germani tribes; once killed they display the
horns in public, and these, eagerly sought for, they
surround with silver on the mouths and use as cups
in the grandest feasts.187 Their ancient and heroic
associations gradually led to the adoption of magical
properties: a mounted ox-horn in the Cabinet des
Mdailles in Paris, which came from Abbot Sugers
treasury at St Denis, was said to be a griffins claw.188
An ibex horn now in the British Museum is associated
with St Cuthbert, and according to the inscription on
its silver mount, added 15751625, was also thought to
have been a griffins claw.189 These attributions make
sense of some of the inventory sources included in
Khnels Appendix, including the gift to Winchester
cathedral from Bishop Henry of Blois (d. 1171) of nine
ivory horns et ungula grifonis (Anhang, no. 29).190
Aurochs horns became a supreme status symbol:
Edward III (r. 132777) had un corn de griffon pour
boir, garnished with gilt copper.191
Another magnificent creature that was becoming
extinct in central Europe in the medieval period was
the European elk. Regarded as noble game, the
Ottonians banned their hunting without permission.192
An entire antler from a mature bull elk is now in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, with a provenance of the
funerary chapel of Louis the Pious in the abbey church
of Metz. Dated through radiocarbon analysis to the
period AD 9751020, the entire circumference of the
antler, including its tines, is carved with a vine scroll
inhabited by birds and lions. Though the recent publication of this object associates the carving style
with north-eastern France in the late 11th/early 12th
century, there are clear similarities especially in the
rendering of the grape bunches and birds bodies
with the Salerno ivories group. How an antler from a
central European animal came to southern Italy, or
how a carver from southern Italy might have come to
Metz, is not a question for this article to address. More
interesting is the possible identification of this carved
antler with the famous shield of Louis the Pious, and
the fact that it hung from the vault of his funerary
chapel alongside an oliphant (that now in the Muse
de Cluny, Fig. 6), as a combined relic of Carolingian
imperial power and authority.

and bishop on the person at their left hand, who as

forester blows his horn of office and with his uplifted
sword signifies the power he is invested with for the
execution of that office.176 In other words, the very
visualization of the conveyance of land and therefore
power which the horn itself physically represents.
The choice of object presented in this manner stands
for the type of gift: a horn an accoutrement of hunting, which may itself have been obtained through acts
of bravery in the hunt stands for a gift of land which
can be hunted on. Land tenure and hunting privileges
signify territorial power and above all wealth both
to their secular owners and to the churches to which
the land was conveyed. Hunting, both physically
enacted and visually represented, is emblematic of the
unique privileges of land ownership, and the social
status it secures, as Jerrilyn Dodds has pointed out.177
David Rollason has recently stressed the importance
of forests and parks as the sites of royal hunting and
recreation, enhancing the power of place controlled
by castles and great houses throughout early medieval
Europe.178 By the 11th and 12th century because of
the Normans invasion and their consequent need to
codify and demonstrate land ownership hunting
rights became one kind of concrete and symbolic proof
of a lords sovereignty over the land.179 It is in this
context that horns of tenure become so widespread,
when land ownership was a particularly contested
issue.180
The Normans in England actively encouraged the
expansion of hunting as a means of land appropriation, introducing fallow deer, possibly from Sicily or
southern Italy, and establishing them in forests across
England to be hunted as a prerogative of the ruling
elite, as imposed by the new Forest Law.181 In addition, new hunting rituals were introduced, again
possibly from Sicily, such as the unmaking of the
deer, the climax of a hunt when hunters displayed their
skill at dismembering the carcass, gifting different
parts of the animal to particular individuals. Rollason
comments that to have a share in the pursuit, killing
and breaking up of the beast, and the distribution of
the game [. . .] might well have been the same type
of sought-after privilege as was attending the leve of
Louis XIV at Versailles.182 Hunting rituals became
increasingly complex and circumscribed during the
medieval period, and were encouraged as equivalent to
warfare and an essential part of the education of the
nobility. As Sally Sutton points out, knowledge of the
attendant rituals and procedures denoted status and
were considered to be a mark of the ruling elite, the
Normans; as such, she concludes that, ivory horns
may well have been the ideal instrument for displaying
Norman identity.183 It is also interesting to note that
the oliphants bestiary has parallels with literary
descriptions of the animals that inhabited royal
hunting parks.184
Horns are not the only type of object presented in
this symbolic mode of conveyance: knives were very
46

the oliphant
These non-ivory horns and related objects provide
crucial cultural context for the oliphants, and they
should be discussed together, but because of the
hierarchies of materials within art history, the ivory
horns and above all, those ivory horns with decoration have been extracted from their wider context
and discussed in isolation. These other types of horn
have been almost totally neglected in art history, since
the attention of a few 18th-century antiquarians who
were fascinated by them from a legal history point of
view.193 These bovine horns present a host of problems
to the art historian: they are usually undecorated, have
mounts that are probably later, it is difficult to know
genuinely how old some of them are (none of them, to
my knowledge, has been radiocarbon dated). On the
other hand, they have in most cases emerged from
ecclesiastical, aristocratic and even royal collections, a
provenance that cannot be ignored. Methodologically, as art historians, how do we work with such
material, totally lacking in ars? What can be gained,
art-historically speaking, by considering ivory oliphants in the broader context of horns? What happens to
the role of ivory as a material in the appreciation and
function of oliphants when they are considered within

the wider group of horns? What happens to their ornamentation? Such questions should inform the way in
which research into this broader category is taken forward, a task which I am happy to defer to others.194
This expanded category of horns is the cultural
context into which the oliphants fit, which informs
us about their function and consumption, and within
which they should be discussed and understood. We
should be opening up the discussion of the oliphant,
not only to include the many which are not decorated
in an Islamic style, but also to attempt to understand
the reason for their creation in reference to the cultural
context in which they were used and valued.
CONCLUSIONS
This brings me to my final observations, about the
places of production and consumption of these intriguing objects, as well as some remarks on chronology.
Though it is an art historical truism that many uncategorizable objects have been dumped in southern
Italy, as a melting pot of Byzantine, Islamic and Latin
styles, nevertheless the southern Italian context remains

Figure 28
Porta dei Leoni at the church of San Nicola, Bari (Valentino Pace, with kind permission)
47

mariam rosser-owen
perilous to attempt to match extant objects with medieval inventories, especially when the texts provide no
further description of the objects concerned.198
The insistence on an early-11th-century date for the
oliphants has sustained the Fatimid connection: since
the Fatimids were in their heyday at the turn of the
10th and 11th centuries, and this is when we can trace
physical evidence of Fatimid works of art in Italy
the bacini in Pisa, or the lustreware tesserae that form
the sea monsters on the Ravello ambo then the
oliphants must date from this period too. But if, as
I am arguing here, we should downplay the Fatimid
connection and look instead to the local Italian context, then it makes more sense to assign the oliphants
to the late 11th century at the earliest, given the stylistic associations with the Salerno ivories and the plaster
panels from Santa Maria di Terreti, and predominantly to the 12th century, perhaps even quite late in
the century. Indeed, it is very likely that different
groups of artisans produced oliphants throughout
that century, probably working in different centres,
and responding to the availability of the raw material.
The possibility of travelling craftsmen, perhaps
working in both stone and ivory as well as other
materials such as wood and plaster has been mentioned, as a means by which such closely similar styles
and motifs transferred across media. This is not the
place for a full discussion of this question, but it is a
genuine possibility. As Sarah Gurin has pointed out,
the hardness of ivory (three on the Mohs scale) is
equivalent to that of limestone, and implies that a
carver skilled in one material could equally turn his
skill to the carving of the other.199 Ivory carvers in
Gothic Paris, for example, operated in guilds according to the types of images they produced, and were not
specialised by material; and as Rose Walker discusses
in her contribution to this volume, monks at Monte
Cassino in the late 11th century were trained not only
in laying mosaics, but also in metal and glass working,
as well as ivory, wood, alabaster and stone carving.200
Sculptors may have travelled to where their craft was
in demand, just as Bonanus travelled to where bronze
doors were required. It is worth pointing out that if a
consignment of tusks were to suddenly arrive, by
whatever means, at an Italian centre, it would be
necessary to find someone to carve them, and who
better to turn to than sculptors already working in
stone and stucco to adorn foundations such as Monte
Cassino or Salerno Cathedral?
This undermines the need for fixed places of production, and suggests that we should perhaps stop trying
to localize the oliphants place(s) of production in
specific southern Italian centres. Indeed, the availability of the raw material might have dictated when and
where ivory objects were produced. It is possible that
ivory was not constantly available in abundance, so
that craftsmen may have worked in other materials
during the down time.201 The seventy or so oliphants

the one for which there is strong circumstantial

evidence for the production of these objects, through
stylistic comparison to architectural schemes, as well
as the consumption of comparable ivory objects.195
The stylistic connections outlined in Part 2 lead to the
conclusion that the decorative schemes as conceived
and executed on the oliphants come from an artistic
repertoire that was widespread in Italy, especially but
not exclusively in the south, from the late 11th to the
late 12th century.
As in the Islamic world, it is religious architecture
that tends to survive, and all the most relevant comparisons come from ecclesiastical contexts. This is no
doubt significant, given that the oliphants decoration
has always been thought to be primarily secular, in
apparent contradiction to their subsequent use as
reliquaries.196 However, since these churches portals
(Fig. 28) and interiors were frequently decorated in the
same fashion, perhaps this contradiction was not so
great, if it existed at all. Indeed, the widespread use of
these motifs in church architecture makes it difficult
to sustain the idea that the oliphants decoration was
identifiably Islamic, unless the same also held true for
the churches. The decoration of the oliphants drew on
an iconographical pool that was fully current in 11thand 12th-century Italy, an aesthetic that was shared
across the urban centres of the south, where the wealth
and patronage power existed to commission such
buildings or objects. There is thus no need to look to
Islamic art for the immediate source of the motifs
employed. Some of these may originally have derived
from Islamic sources, but much of it was Roman, or
Byzantine, perhaps seasoned with a bit of Islamic art
imported from the Fatimid world or, actually more
likely, from further west, from the central and western
Mediterranean, via the southern Italian ports of Bari,
Palermo or Amalfi.
One broad conclusion about dating can be drawn
from the discussion of stylistic comparanda, though
it raises many issues which I hope other scholars
will elaborate and elucidate. The vast majority of the
stylistic and iconographical parallels I have been
adducing come from contexts datable to the 12th
century, frequently to the end of the century. This
must have an implication for dating the oliphants.
These are usually dated broadly to the 11th and 12th
centuries, with a preference to assign them to the 11th
century, even to the early 11th century. This is based
partly on the Horn of Ulf, whose early-11th-century
date can no longer be sustained, and partly on the
references to cornua eburnea in medieval church
inventories, which begin in the early 11th century.197
Pace has suggested that the roundel style horn now in
Berlin (Khnel no. 60) is one of the sechs Hrner von
Helffantzehen gemacht presented to the cathedral of
Speyer in 1065, implying a mid-11th-century date for
the roundel group. But as far as I know there is no
documentary basis for this association, and it is always
48

the oliphant
that seem to have been made in southern Italy in the
hundred years from the late 11th to the late 12th
centuries given the visual connections we have
made with stucco and stone and perhaps in temporal clusters within that broad period, attest to the fact
that a lot of raw ivory was passing through the ports
of southern Italy at this time. It is now emerging as
a consensus that the source of this ivory was subSaharan reservoirs in West Africa, transported with
other luxury commodities along the Gold Route
to Mediterranean ports in North Africa, especially
Ifriqiya, and thence shipped to southern Italy.202
Conversely, the evidence for the availability of raw
ivory in medieval Egypt is slim and patchy, since the
Swahili ports of East Africa directed their trade to the
Indian Ocean, with limited penetration of the Red Sea.
Combined with the minimal evidence for the existence
of Fatimid ivories, it is illogical to attribute this level
of ivory availability and production to Egypt.203
Considering that African elephant tusks could reach
a length of 2 metres, sometimes more, and that the
pulp cavity the conical hollow that was used to
make an oliphant occupied up to a third of the
tusk, more than a metre of good quality dentine then
remained from which to make other ivory objects
(Fig. 3). In addition to the oliphants, a huge range
of objects has been associated with southern Italy (in
which I include Sicily) in the late 11th and 12th centuries, which seems to have been a region of intense ivory
production in this period: the Farfa casket, the Salerno
group and other ivories that can be associated with it,
large caskets decorated in the style of the Saracenic
oliphants (Fig. 19), a plethora of large chess pieces
both figurative and abstract, more than 300 surviving
Siculo-Arabic boxes associated with the Norman
court at Palermo, and no doubt other objects whose
origins have not yet been identified.204 Such objects are
not normally discussed together, but should be, given
what they cumulatively tell us about ivory trade and
production patterns across one region at a relatively
limited time multidisciplinarity in the future study
of this material is essential.205 Oliphants thus emerge
as an object type inspired by a wider ivory-carving
culture, as a way to use part of the tusk that would
otherwise be thrown away.
If it is true that the same craftsmen worked in ivory
and stone, particularly close stylistic comparisons
between objects and buildings might further elucidate
the chronological question. Apart from the broad
groups that coalesce from ivories that are stylistically
coherent and were probably therefore made by workshops, the misfit oliphants may have been made outside of this structure, at any point from the 10th to the
13th century or later, when their production perhaps
shifts to northern Europe, following the ivory supply.206
Turning finally to the question of consumption,
southern Italy is again the region for which we have
evidence in the form of the penbox made for Taurus

son of Mansone (Manso./Tauro. Fi.), linked with one

of the most powerful families in Amalfi at the end
of the 11th century; and the Farfa casket, for which
the consensus seems to be a date in the 1070s and an
association with the same family who commissioned
bronze doors for the new abbey at Monte Cassino.207
These associations point to a wealthy mercantile
class with the money and patronage power to express
their identity through sometimes ostentatious artistic
commissions. Ecclesiastical patronage must also be
considered. In the period after 1076 the conquest of
Salerno by Robert Guiscard, and adoption of this city
as his capital this patronage power seems also to
have been expressed by the new Norman elite, who
used artistic patronage to construct and display their
new hegemony.208
So why have no oliphants been found in Italy? The
consumption patterns we have been discussing the
presentation of these objects to churches, either as
symbols of conveyed property or as reliquaries is
what has preserved them, and this seems to have been
a northern European phenomenon. The early use of
horns for drinking and as symbols of status seems to
have been a Scandinavian custom since the Iron Age,
particularly under the Vikings.209 Horns were also
important status symbols in AngloSaxon culture.210
An anecdote related by Gervase of Tilbury, c. 1210,
mentions drinking from a great horn, adorned with
gold and gems, as was the custom among the most
ancient English implying that, even so long after
the Norman conquest, this was understood as a
preNorman custom.211 Using the horn as a mode of
conveyance seems likewise to have existed before the
Normans, as Ingulphus, abbot of Crowland at the
time of the conquest, remarks on the custom of conveying [land] sine scriptis and by means of symbols.212
Did the Normans in Italy originally Vikings and
still culturally Norsemen invent the oliphant as a
cultural symbol? As we have seen, the horn was the
quintessential medieval symbol of hunting, and thus
of prowess in battle, a crucial talent if you wanted to
advance in Norman society. As a symbol of the hunt,
it also came to signify the ownership of land, as well as
the legal conveyance of land, an issue of great importance to the Normans as they established themselves
in southern Italy. The types of animal from which
horns of tenure were customarily made in the northern
European lands from which the Normans hailed
bison and aurochs, especially were not common in
the Mediterranean.213 On the other hand, southern
Italy was positioned at a focal point for trade with
Ifriqiya, a commerce which had been flourishing for
more than a century, in which ivory was a readily
available commodity. The creation of the Salerno ivories group and if Robert Guiscard was not himself
the patron, then it was another member of the Norman
elite or other contemporary pieces, such as the
Farfa casket, might have suggested an alternative use
49

mariam rosser-owen
for the piece of tusk that could not be carved into
panels for the paliotto or to veneer caskets. Could the
intensity of ivory carving for both secular and religious purposes, sponsored by a Norman elite actively
engaged in consolidating their land and position in
southern Italy, have led the ivory craftsmen to turn
their hand to producing oliphants? These prestigious
horns, made of luxury materials and richly decorated,
would have become valued status symbols locally, but
could also have been used as gifts within the complex
network of Norman kinship ties across Europe.
Perhaps this stimulated further demand in northern
Europe for an object type which could only, at that
date, be made in southern Italy, thanks to the trade
with Ifriqiya, and fuelled an export trade in oliphant
production?214 It is also possible that raw tusks
were transported along Norman kinship networks,
allowing for the possibility that some of the misfit
oliphants those that do not conform to stylistic
comparanda locatable in southern Italy might have
been carved in production centres in the north and
west, far from the Mediterranean. If the demand for
luxury ivory horns was just as great within Italy, for
some reason the secondary process of conveying the
horn into a treasury collection, thus ensuring its preservation was not so prevalent there, which is why
no oliphants have apparently survived within Italian
ecclesiastical collections.

world; for close looking, and for sometimes taking the

more difficult investigative path. I hope other scholars
will take forward some of the ideas presented here, and
that ultimately we will develop a richer understanding
of the cultural context within which ivory horns were
conceived, created and consumed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the organizers of the BAA conference in Palermo, and especially to Rosa Bacile, for
accepting my paper and finally giving me the opportunity to travel to Sicily after all these years; and for
arranging such stimulating visits to the key Norman
monuments, which really opened my eyes to the
broader material context of Sicily and southern Italy.
I am deeply grateful for the excellent and helpful
feedback I received from other conference attendees
then and since, including Martin Biddle, Richard
Camber, Lev Kapitaikin, Christopher Norton and
Ittai Weinryb. I would also like to thank those who
were present at a first, very tentative presentation
of these thoughts at the Museum of Islamic Art in
Doha in March 2012, while I was there as visiting
scholar. I am particularly grateful to all the friends and
colleagues who took the time to read the early draft
of this article and provide such helpful and honest
feedback their comments and suggestions have
strongly informed my revisions, though of course any
errors remain my own: Silvia Armando, Rosa Bacile,
Isabelle Dolezalek, Barbara Drake Boehm, Antony
Eastmond, Sarah Gurin, John McNeill and Rose
Walker. Finally, sincere thanks to the colleagues who
helped me to source images and permissions, including
MarieCcile Bardoz, Sheila Canby, Elisabeth Delahaye, Francesca DellAcqua, Elisabeth OConnell,
Leslee Katrina Michelsen, Valentino Pace, Friederike
Voigt, Laura Weinstein and Bla Zsolt Szakcs. Other
people have helped along the way and they are thanked
in the footnotes.

The genesis of this article was a desire to staunch

a tendency among Islamic art historians to absorb
an hypothesis without subjecting it to a thorough
critique. This hypothesis was based on assumptions
about the role of Fatimid art and trade, and stylistic
transfer between Egypt and southern Italy, that may
be long-held but that need to be subjected to closer
scrutiny. At the same time, this hypothesis focused on
a small subset of a large group of objects, which did
not allow for a wholistic understanding of an artistic
and cultural phenomenon. The arguments outlined
here conclude that there is no Fatimid cultural milieu
within which oliphants could have been conceptualized or consumed; that the raw material to make them
was scarce in Egypt, while in contrast it was abundant
in southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries; that
the stylistic comparisons have a strong connection to
the art of southern Italy in the Norman period; that
the central and western Mediterranean contexts have
been unduly ignored. There are still many unanswered
questions about this intriguing group of objects, but
I hope here to have made a case for opening up the
subject broadly, rather than narrowing it down; for
thinking about a familiar group of objects within
an expanded framework that intersects with social,
cultural and economic history; for releasing the small
subset of Saracenic oliphants from the circular arguments to which they have been subjected, which divert
us towards the east and to connections with the Islamic

NOTES
1
A. Shalem, The Oliphant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context
(Leiden 2004), 106. Shalems long-awaited corpus was literally
hot-off-the-press when the final revisions to this article were due:
see A. Shalem assisted by M. Glaser, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante,
2 vols, Deutscher Verein fr Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin 2014).
I have not had the necessary time to go through this new volume in
detail and make a comparative study with the arguments proposed
in 2004. In general it seems that the theoretical framework and the
chronological/typological groupings presented in Shalems earlier
publication have not changed substantially, though they have been
refined somewhat and new sub-groupings proposed. As such, the
arguments I express here, based on the 2004 study, still apply.
2
Ibid. (as n. 1), 7679.
3
For example, Jonathan Blooms recent study of Fatimid art
followed Shalems attribution by captioning the British Museum
oliphant (OA +1302) after Shalems volume: both read Egypt,

50

the oliphant
17

c. 1000 (J. Bloom, The Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and
Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt (Yale and London
2007), 4, fig. 4; Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), pl. VI, fig. 44), though
the oliphant question is not discussed in Blooms text. Shalems
theory was more explicitly reinforced by the inclusion of the Boston
oliphant (50.3425) in the exhibition Gifts of the Sultan: the Arts
of Giving at the Islamic Courts (in its Los Angeles and Houston
venues) and accompanying catalogue: see J. Bloom, Fatimid
Gifts in Gifts of the Sultan: the Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts,
ed. L. Komaroff (New Haven and London 2011), 95109, fig. 88,
cat. no. 127.
4
For more detail, see the discussion in Shalem, Oliphant (as
n. 1), 3849.
5
D. Ebitz, The Oliphant: Function and Meaning in a Courtly
Society, in The Medieval Court in Europe, ed. E. E. Haymes
(Munich 1986), 12341; discussed in Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1),
10104. The word oliphant was also used in the epic to refer to
other objects made from ivory.
6
D. Ebitz, Secular to Sacred: the Transformation of an
Oliphant in the Muse de Cluny, Gesta, XXV (1986), 3138.
7
See, for example, the recent articles by E. Hoffman, Pathways
of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth
to the Twelfth Century, Art History, 24 (2001), 1750 and 19;
Translation in Ivory: Interactions across Cultures and Media in
the Mediterranean during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, in
Siculo-Arabic Ivories and Islamic Painting 11001300. Proceedings
of the International Conference, Berlin, 68 July 2007. Rmisches
Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, vol. XXXVI, ed. D. Knipp
(Munich 2011), 10019.
8
E. Khnel, Die sarazenischen Olifanthrner, Jahrbuch der
Berliner Museen, 1 (1959), 3350; Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 51.
9
See E. Bassani and W. Fagg ed., Africa and the Renaissance:
Art in Ivory (New York 1988); J. Levenson ed., Encompassing
the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries,
exhibition catalogue (Washington DC 2007); and E. Bassani,
Ivoires dAfrique dans les anciennes collections franaises (Paris
2008), 4244. My thanks to Sarah Gurin for bringing this last
book to my attention.
10
V&A: A.5641910, see <http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/
O312375/oliphant-unknown> [accessed 19 May 2013]. This is
attributed to Paris or Cologne, c. 1300 by P. Williamson and
G. Davies in their recent catalogue of the V&As Gothic ivories,
Medieval Ivory Carvings 12001550, 2 (London 2014), 73237 (cat.
250). Shalem includes it, and other Gothic ivories, in his new corpus
(E2): Shalem, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante (as n. 1). Various examples are also attributed to the 15th century, such as the Relikhoorn
of St Cornelius, now in SintJanshospitaal in Bruges, which is
faceted and decorated with gilding: see S. Vandenberghe, Ivoor in
Brugge: Schatten uit Musea, Kerken en Kloosters, Museum Bulletin
2 (Musea Brugge 2010).
11
O. von Falke, Elfenbeinhrner I: gypten und Italien,
Pantheon, 4 (1929), 51117; Elfenbeinhrner II: Byzanz, Pantheon,
5 (1930), 3944.
12
E. Khnel, Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturen VIIIXIII
Jahrhundert (Berlin 1971), prepared by his wife and assistants;
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 5253, describes the confusion that arose
between the 1959 and 1971 iterations of Khnels theories about the
Saracenic oliphants.
13
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 34.
14
Shalem, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante (as n. 1).
15
J. Caskey, Stuccoes from the Early Norman Period in Sicily:
Figuration, Fabrication and Integration, Medieval Encounters,
17 (2011), 80119.
16
For more information on these objects, see Clephane horn,
M&ME 1979, 71,1): <http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/
highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/t/the_clephane_horn.aspx>
(Borradaile horn, M&ME 1923,1215, 3): <http://www.british
museum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/t/the_
borradaile_oliphant.aspx> [both sites accessed 30 June 2013].

A. Eastmond, On Diversity in Southern Italy. The Problem

of Style, Culture, Geography and Attribution in Medieval Ivories,
in The AmalfiSalerno Ivories and the Medieval Mediterranean: A
Notebook from the workshop held in Amalfi, 1013 December 2009,
Quaderni del Centro di Cultura e Storia Amalfitana, 5 (2011), 105
25. Now see his article Byzantine oliphants?, in .
Spaziergang im kaiserlichen Garten. Schriften ber Byzanz und seine
Nachbarn. Festschrift fr Arne Effenberger zum 70. Geburtstag, ed.
N. Asutay-Effenberger and F. Daim, Monographien des RmischGermanischen Zentralmuseums, 106 (Mainz 2013), 95118.
Hoffman, Translation (as n. 7), 105, says these are fashioned to
look authentically Byzantine.
18
I suggest [. . .] including into the Saracenic group only those
oliphants which have a distinctive Islamic decoration or those which
slightly diverge from the typical Islamic ones: Shalem, Oliphant (as
n. 1), 61.
19
This discussion of Shalems Group I summarizes his arguments on Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 6364, 7076, 136. Shalems
2014 corpus refines these groupings and adds sub-groupings, but
they remain essentially the same as those presented in 2004. Due
to the new volumes nature as a catalogue raisone, Shalem is
more specific about places of production. His Group I (A1A13)
is assigned to Egypt, southern Italy or Sicily, 11th century; Group
II (A14A18) is assigned to Egypt, probably Cairo, 11th century;
A19 and A20 are related to Group II, also Cairo, 11th century;
Group III (A21A23) is assigned to Sicily, probably Palermo, in
the late 11th to early 12th century; ditto the two oliphants (A24
A25) that are related to Group III; finally, there is a category of
oliphants which present variations of the Fatimid style in the West
(A26A30), assigned to southern Italy or Sicily, late 11th to 12th
century. The objects assigned to Cairo are those that have a plain,
lightly faceted body, with a decorated band at the bell-end featuring
running animals or palmette scrolls.
20
This discussion of Shalems Group II summarizes his
arguments on Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 6465, 7677, 136.
21
A. Cutler, The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory and
Society in Byzantium (9th11th Centuries) (Princeton 1994), 111.
22
F. Gabrieli and U. Scerrato, Gli Arabi in Italia (Milan 1979),
fig. 196.
23
Compare Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), figs 3942, conveniently
arrayed across a double-page spread.
24
A. Shalem, Islamische Objekte in Kirchenschtzen der lateinischen Christenheit: sthetische Stufen des Umgangs mit dem
Anderen und dem Hybriden, in Das Bistum Bamberg in der Welt
des Mittelalters, Bamberger interdisziplinre Mittelalterstudien
Vorlesungen und Vortrge 1, ed. C. and K. van Eickels (Bamberg
2007), 16376.
25
This discussion of Shalems Group III summarizes his
arguments on Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 6667, 7779, 136.
26
M. Rosser-Owen, Ivory: 8th to 17th Centuries. Treasures from
the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar (London 2004), cat. 7, 3233. This
formula is extremely common on the Siculo-Arabic caskets (with
my thanks to Silvia Armando for this observation).
27
The word Mudjar derives from an Arabic word meaning
tamed or submissive, referring to the communities of Andalusi
Muslims who continued to live in their native lands after they
had been conquered by Christians and thereby submitted to
non-Islamic law in their territory. However, it was not necessarily Muslim craftsmen who made art in an Islamic style, which
was highly fashionable among non-Muslims in the 15th and 16th
centuries especially. For definitions, see the introductions to L. P.
Harvey, Islamic Spain 12501500 (Chicago 1990); L. P. Harvey,
Muslims in Spain 15001614 (Chicago 2006); G. Wiegers, Islamic
Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado (Leiden 1994). For a discussion of the vogue for Mudjar artistic styles, see M. Rosser-Owen,
Islamic Arts from Spain (London 2010), chapter 3.
28
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 73.
29
Hoffman, Pathways and Translation (as n. 7). Jeremy Johns
has recently suggested the possibility of Islamic models travelling to
southern Italy in the form of pattern books, citing the rare drawings

51

mariam rosser-owen
on paper that have survived in the dry conditions of Fustat (old
Cairo), and are generally datable to the late 10th to late 12th centuries (coinciding with Fatimid rule in Egypt). One example, now in
the Benaki Museum in Athens (inv. 16656), shows a roundel, linked
to other roundels now lost, containing a camel howdah flanked
by attendants. This scene appears several times on the Cappella
Palatina ceiling, and on the Saracenic group ivory casket in the
Metropolitan Museum. J. Johns, Strained Relationships: Carved
Ivories of the Amalfi Group, Siculo-Arabic Painted Ivories and
the Royal Art of Norman Sicily, paper presented at the conference
Ivory Trade and Exchange in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, The
Warburg Institute, London, 18 June 2013. It should be noted that
Jonathan Bloom is more sceptical about these fragments, which have
all been recovered from unscientific, unstratified excavations. In his
Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic
World (New Haven and London 2001), 165, he says, It seems best to
treat all these unauthenticated fragments with extreme caution
and not base an argument on them. The same might be said of the
thousands of ceramic fragments recovered from Fustat in the same
way, but these continue to provide a useful source of study for the
history of ceramic technology and trade.
30
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 79 (my italics).
31
On the Martorana woodwork, see Gabrieli and Scerrato,
Gli Arabi (as n. 22), figs 11416. They illustrate other examples of
Sicilian woodwork at figs 19698, and a 12th-century panel from
Monte Cassino at fig. 469.
32
British Museum: Palart.550, see <http://www.britishmuseum.
org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/s/swimming_
reindeer.aspx> [accessed 19 May 2013], also J. Cook, The Swimming
Reindeer: Objects in Focus Series (London 2010); and by the same
author Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (London 2013),
26769, figs 2021.
33
Cutler, Hand of the Master (as n. 21), 11011 (my italics).
34
Cutlers second and third cuts are true undercutting and the
straight stroke, which cuts back at a right angle to the plane of the
ground: Hand of the Master (as n. 21), 111, 119.
35
Inv. 1956.562; Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), pl. XI, figs 5 and
40. I examined this object on 1 June 2012. My sincere thanks to
Friederike Voigt, Godfrey Evans and Sarah Worden of National
Museums Scotland for arranging for me to study this object.
36
Hoffman, Translation (as n. 7), 106, following Shalems
argument on these objects, calls this combination surprising.
37
J. Kingsley, Reconsidering the Medieval Oliphant: The Ivory
Horn in the Walters Art Museum, in A New Look at Old Things
[= Journal of the Walters Art Museum, 68/69], ed. K. B. Gerry and
R. A. Leson (201011), 8798, esp. 9194.
38
Kingsley, Reconsidering (as n. 37), 94.
39
Ebitz, Secular to Sacred (as n. 6). This object came to
hold the relics of St Arnoul, at his abbey church in Metz. If the
object had been recarved at the time of its repurposing, one might
reasonably expect this to have happened in Metz itself, which does
not explain the stylistic connections to the Ulf group of oliphants,
discussed below. See J. de Hond and F. Scholten, The elk antler
from the funerary chapel of Louis the Pious in Metz, The Burlington
Magazine, no. 1323, vol. 155 (June 2013), 37280, esp. 373, 380.
40
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires mdivaux VeXVe sicle (Paris
2003), 206 is not convinced either: Cette [. . .] hypothse nest
toutefois pas convaincante, puisque la partie centrale de lolifant,
si elle t retaille, serait beaucoup plus en contrebas quelle ne lest
aujourdhui [. . .] Il semble raisonnable de revenir [. . .] lopinion de
Khnel, ou du moins lide de deux interventions contemporaines,
dans la seconde moiti du XIe sicle.
41
Ebitz, Secular to Sacred (as n. 6), 37.
42
Eastmond, Byzantine oliphants? (as n. 17). I would like to
thank Bla Zsolt Szakcs of the Central European University in
Budapest for sending me images and information about Hungarian
publications on Lehels horn, which tend to associate it with Kiev,
far from the Mediterranean.
43
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 5460 (my italics).
44
Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), 15, fig. 31. He had
written about this piece in an earlier publication: E. Khnel, Die

Sammlung trkischer und islamischer Kunst im Tschinili Kschk

(Berlin 1938), 24, fig. 30. My deep gratitude to Julian Raby for
identifying the Topkap candlestick and the publications in which
it features, and for sharing his own view on the origin of the
candlestick.
45
Khnel read the dedicatory inscription as naming one
al-Malik Ghiyath al-Din. David Storm Rice, who later published
the candlestick, seems to have been unaware of Khnels earlier
publication as he believed the inscription to be anonymous: see
D. S. Rice, The Seasons and the Labors of the Months in Islamic
Art, Ars Orientalis, 1 (1954), 139, esp. 3435, pl. 18 (our medallion
is shown in image b). Storm Rice also favoured a Syrian connection,
but believed the candlestick to have been made by Syrian craftsmen
for an Ilkhanid patron in north-western Iran, soon after the Mongol
conquest of Syria in 1300. Raby does not agree with the Syrian
connection, believing it to be Ilkhanid production, perhaps made
during the reign of ljeit (r. 130416), who used the title Ghiyath
al-dunya wal-din (personal communication, 27 February 2013).
46
See the introduction to A. Gunter and P. Jett, Ancient Iranian
Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of
Art (Washington DC 1992), 1320.
47
WW.141.2008, see S. Rees and F. Hilloowala, Carved wooden
beam, in Focus on 50: Unseen Treasures from the Museum of Islamic
Art in Qatar (Doha 2010), 3437, also sale catalogue for Christies,
King Street, 8 April 2008 (Sale 7571, Lot 39).
48
The earliest parallel I have been able to trace for a simpler
version of this arch profile is in the oblong vault (the dme
barlong) in front of the mihrab in the Qarawiyyin Mosque in
Fez, constructed as part of Ali ibn Yusuf ibn Tashfins refurbishment of that monument between 1136 and 1143: see H. Terrasse,
La Mosque al-Qaraouiyin Fs (Paris 1968), fig. 22. In the frieze
that runs along the base of the vault, triple arches alternate with
single humps, that by the time of the Mosque of Tinmal (founded
1156) are starting to be incorporated into the arch profile itself. On
Tinmal, see H. Basset and H. Terrasse, Sanctuaires et forteresses
almohades, Hespris, IV/1 (1924), 991; G. Marais, Larchitecture
musulmane dOccident (Paris 1954), 20102. I have not yet been
able to find parallels for the way in which the bottom edge of the
lambrequin arch overlaps and intersects with the next arch, as on
the Qatar beam.
49
See, for example, R. Snchez Ameijeiras, El ementerio real
de Alfonso VIII en Las Huelgas de Burgos, Semata, 10 (1998),
77109.
50
For example, the magnificent wooden doors which hang at the
entrance to the Saln de Embajadores in the Reales Alczares in
Seville were made by craftsmen brought from Toledo, as stated in
the Arabic inscription on the Patio Doncellas side, which also gives
the date of 1366. See J. C. Hernndez Nez and A. J. Morales,
The Royal Palace of Seville (London 1999), 58.
51
Rees and Hilloowala, Carved wooden beam (as n. 47), 35.
Some Islamic depictions of horn-blowing that do merit attention
are some examples on 10th- and early-11th-century artefacts made
in al-Andalus. In his new corpus, Shalem notes the depiction
of horn-shaped objects being played in scenes of courtly entertainments on a ceramic bottle, some ivories and a marble basin,
but as he himself points out the positions of the musicians
fingers indicate that instruments with holes are being played, i.e.
end-blown flutes such as a nay: Shalem, Die mittelalterlichen
Olifante, 1 (as n. 1), 18687. There is also no indication in these
scenes that these instruments are made from ivory, though it is
conceivable, given the materials abundance in al-Andalus at this
time.
52
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 5657, figs 18ac; J. de Vere Allen,
The Siwas of Pate and Lamu: Two Antique SideBlown Horns
from the Swahili Coast, Art and Archaeology Research Papers,
9 (1976), 3847; H. Sassoon, The Siwas of Lamu: Two Historic
Trumpets in Brass and Ivory (Nairobi 1975).
53
De Vere Allen, Siwas (as n. 52), 41.
54
Ibid. (as n. 52), 40.
55
Ibid. (as n. 52), 38.

52

the oliphant
56

al-Din, displayed in a most curious manner / a pair of draws upon

his banner (Qui ot portrait en sa baniere / enseignes destrange
maniere / o estoit une baniere as braies / cerent ses enseignes
veraies): ed. W. Stubbs (London 1864), cited by W. Leaf, Not trousers but trumpets: a further look at Saracenic heraldry, Palestine
Exploration Quarterly, 114 (1982), 4751. Leaf commented (51):
without Ambroises remark I do not think anyone would have
noticed any similarity between two entirely separate, convex, curving, pointed objects and a pair of trousers. He thinks it more likely
that Ambroise described a bifurcated banner like those used by
Byzantine armies, which would act as a rallying point for the troops,
but also as a windsock, an invaluable reference for the mounted
archers in the Ayyubid army (4748). Mayer later changed his
mind, advancing the new suggestion that these two curved objects
depicted powder horns, or a powder horn paired with its cleaning instrument, represented as equal in size for symmetrical effect:
L. A. Mayer, Un nigme de blason musulman, Bulletin de lInstitut
de lEgypte, 21 (1938/9), 14143. This is not accepted by Leaf who
notes the Mamluks deep rooted detestation of firearms, as the
favoured weapon of their enemy, the Ottomans (51).
76
Mayer, Saracenic Heraldry (as n. 74), 32.
77
J. Gonnella, Stone blazon, in Discover Islamic Art. Museum
With No Frontiers, 2013, <http://www.discoverislamicart.org/
database_item.php?id=object;ISL;sy;Mus01_A;48;en> [accessed
12 May 2013], citing M. Meinecke, Zur mamlukischen Heraldik,
Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archologischen Instituts, Abteilung
Kairo, 28/2 (1972), 21387.
78
See, for example, the enormous output by Marco Spallanzani
of the Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Universit degli
Studi di Firenze, for example Ceramiche orientali a Firenze nel
Rinascimento (Florence 1978), Ceramiche alla Corte dei Medici
nel Cinquecento (Modena 1994), or Oriental Rugs in Renaissance
Florence (Florence 2007).
79
Ibn Battutah, Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi gharaib al-amsar wal-ajaib
al-asfar, cited in J. Hopkins and N. Levtzion ed., Corpus of Early
Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge 1981), 290
(my italics).
80
For recent studies on the ivories from Muslim Spain, see the
special issue of the Journal of the David Collection, 2 (2005), which
cites relevant bibliography.
81
J. Bloom, The painted ivory box made for the Fatimid caliph
al-Muizz, in Siculo-Arabic Ivories (as n. 7), 14150; S. Armando,
Separated at Birth or Distant Relations? The Al-Muizz and
Mantua Caskets Between Decoration and Construction, paper
presented at the conference Beyond the Western Mediterranean:
Materials, Techniques and Artistic Production, 6501500, The
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 20 April 2013.
82
S. Gurin, Forgotten Routes? Italy, Ifrqiya and the
Trans-Saharan Ivory Trade, Al-Masq: Islam and the Medieval
Mediterranean, 25/i (April 2013), 7091.
83
For the key literature on trade in the central Mediterranean,
especially between Amalfi and North Africa, at this time, see
M. Brett, Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade from the Tenth
to the Twelfth Century A.D., Journal of African History, 10 (1969),
34764; A. Citarella, The Relations of Amalfi with the Arab World
before the Crusades, Speculum, 42 (1967), 299312; A. Citarella,
Patterns in Medieval Trade: The Commerce of Amalfi Before
the Crusades, The Journal of Economic History, 28 (1968), 53155;
. Fbregas Garca, Other Markets: Complementary Commercial
Zones in the Nasrid World of the Western Mediterranean (Seventh/
Thirteenth to Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries), in Al-Masq: Islam
and the Medieval Mediterranean, 25/i (April 2013), 13553; S. D.
Goitein, Medieval Tunisia: the hub of the Mediterranean, in
Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, XVI (Leiden 1966),
30828; S. Gurin, Avorio dogni ragione: the supply of elephant
ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era, Journal of Medieval
History, 36 (2010), 15674; B. Kreutz, Ghost ships and phantom
cargoes: Reconstructing early Amalfitan trade, Journal of Medieval
History, 20 (1994), 34757; P. Skinner, Amalfitans in the Caliphate
of Cordoba Or Not?, Al-Masq: Islam and the Medieval
Mediterranean, 24/ii (August 2012), 12538.

Though Sassoon, Siwas (as n. 52), 910, cautions that the

Chronicles author, Bwana Kitini, had a regrettable reputation
as a teller of good stories, so the account of the siwa should
probably not be treated as reliable history: De Vere Allen, Siwas
(as n. 52), 43.
57
Sassoon, Siwas (as n. 52), 10 and 16.
58
De Vere Allen, Siwas (as n. 52), 43.
59
Sassoon, Siwas (as n. 52), 1719. It should be observed,
however, that the Lower Niger region was associated with lost-wax
copper-alloy casting from the 9th century, with a particular flourishing in the 15th and 16th centuries: see J. Picton, West Africa: the
Lower Niger region, in Bronze, ed. D. Ekserdjian (London 2012),
6268.
60
As quoted by Abu Tammam (d. 846) in his anthology, Hamasa
or Poems of Bravery: see Sassoon, Siwas (as n. 52), 19; De Vere
Allen, Siwas (as n. 52), 45.
61
Ibid. (as n. 52), 45.
62
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 56.
63
Inv. 1943, no. 126, see Bassani, Ivoires dAfrique (as n. 9),
4244. Sassoon, Siwas (as n. 52), gives various examples, including
a wooden siwa at Mweni which is 1.7 m long and needs to be held up
at its bell-end by an assistant in order to be blown.
64
The pieces found at Kilwa were published in drawings by
H. N. Chittick, Kilwa: an Islamic trading city on the East African
coast, 2 (Nairobi 1974), 43435, fig. 168ce (e is carved in
openwork, like the siwas). Their stratigraphy indicated a 16th- to
17th-century date. The Gedi panel was found in 2002, in a context
datable to 150050: see S. Pradines, Gedi: une cit portuaire swahilie.
Islam mdival en Afrique orientale (Cairo 2010), 125134, 235, 270,
272, fig. 229. My thanks to Stphane Pradines for providing me with
information and an image.
65
De Vere Allen, Siwas (as n. 52), 41.
66
See Bassani and Fagg ed., Africa and the Renaissance (as
n. 9); Levenson ed., Encompassing the Globe (as n. 9); Bassani,
Ivoires dAfrique (as n. 9), 4244. A simple ivory horn just under
half a metre in length was found in the early 1970s near the ruins of
the Portuguese fort at Sofala in Mozambique: see Sassoon, Siwas
(as n. 52), 3.
67
See the discussion and fascinating parallels cited by Bassani,
Ivoires dAfrique (as n. 9), 4975.
68
M. Piotrovsky ed., Heavenly Art, Earthly Beauty: Art of Islam
(Amsterdam 1999), cat. 167 and 201. It is worth noting that there
was a widespread tradition in Lombard Italy, of the 6th and 7th
centuries, of producing drinking horns from glass. These have
been recovered from graves. See, for example, British Museum inv.
1887,0108.2, <http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_
online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=8872&partId=1&
searchText=1887,0108.2&page=1> [accessed 6 August 2014], which
includes bibliography.
69
My thanks to Dr Rachel Ward for sharing her thoughts on
this object in a personal communication dated 6 June 2014. She also
notes that if the horn was in Europe in the 16th century, it is highly
likely that it had been there since its manufacture, as antiques were
not trade items at that period.
70
See V. Etting, The Story of the Drinking Horn: Drinking
Culture in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, Publications of the
National Museum Studies in Archaeology & History, 21 (Odense
2013). The enamelled glass horn is illustrated alongside examples
of European drinking horns, which clearly shows its identical shape
(4849). Perhaps the glass horn was a copy of an aurochs horn the
European merchant happened to have with him in Damascus?
71
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 5456.
72
Ibid. (as n. 1), 55.
73
A. N. Poliak, Feudalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the
Lebanon, 12501900 (London 1939), quoting ub al-Ash, IV
(Cairo 191428), 70, ll. 2, 7, 9, 18.
74
L. A. Mayer, Saracenic Heraldry (Oxford 1933), 19.
75
Ibid. (as n. 74), 22. This was based mainly on the observation by Ambroise in his Itinerarium peregrinorum et gestae Regis
Ricardi of 119196, that Taqi al-Din Umar, the nephew of Salah

53

mariam rosser-owen
84

101

See, for example, E. Hoffman, A Fatimid Book Cover:

Framing and Reframing Cultural Identity in the Medieval
Mediterranean World, in Lgypte Fatimide: son art et son histoire,
ed. M. Barrucand (Paris 1999), 40320.
85
Shalem draws many comparisons with contemporary Egyptian
woodwork, but this is a subject that still needs a thorough study.
He did not give as much attention to southern Italian woodwork,
and a comparative study of woodwork from both regions would
contribute much to our understanding of carving methods in the
medieval Mediterranean.
86
Hoffman, Pathways and Translation (as n. 7).
87
G. Berti, Pisa citt mediterranea. La testimonianza delle
ceramiche importate ed esportate, in M. Tangheroni, ed., Pisa e il
Mediterraneo: Uomini, merci, idee dagli Etruschi ai Medici (Milan,
2004), 16973. She comments at 170, Di gran lunga pi rappresentati sono i recipienti importati da paesi islamici occidentali.
See also G. Berti and L. Tongiorgi, I bacini ceramici del Duomo di
S. Miniato (ultimo quarto del XII secolo) (Genoa 1981); G. Berti
and M. Giorgio, Ceramiche con coperture vetrificate usate come
bacini. Importazioni a Pisa e in altri centri della Toscana tra fine X e
XIII secolo (Florence 2010); F. Berti and M. Caroscio, La Luce del
Mondo: maioliche mediterranee nelle terre dellImperatore (Florence
2013), with my thanks to Marta Caroscio.
88
See M. Rosser-Owen, Mediterraneanism: how to incorporate
Islamic art into an emerging field, in The Historiography of Islamic
Art, ed. M. Carey and M. Graves, special issue of the Journal of Art
Historiography, 6 (June 2012).
89
Ebitz, Secular to Sacred (as n. 6), 34.
90
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 6162.
91
Eastmond, Byzantine oliphants? (as n. 17).
92
Ibid. (as n. 17), 20.
93
Ibid. (as n. 17), 114. On the Bari throne, see R. Dorin, The
Mystery of the Marble Man and His Hat: A Reconsideration of the
Bari Episcopal Throne, Florilegium, 25 (2008), 2952.
94
See also the comments by D. Glass, Romanesque Sculpture
in Campania: Patrons, Programs and Style (University Park,
Pennsylvania 1991), 5759, where she compares the small-scale
motifs and incoherent organisation of a fragmentary, probably
early-12th-century archivolt from Alife to the designs of the oliphants. My thanks to John McNeill for bringing this to my attention.
95
On the Otranto pavement, N. Rash-Fabbri, A Drawing in
the Bibliothque Nationale and the Romanesque Mosaic Floor in
Brindisi, Gesta 13/1 (1974), 514, fig. 5.
96
H. Swarzenski, Two Oliphants in the Museum, Bulletin
of the Museum of Fine Arts, 60/320 (1962), 2745; V. Pace, Fra
lIslam e lOccidente: il mistero degli olifanti, in Studi in onore
di Umberto Scerrato per il suo settantacinquesimo compleanno, ed.
M. V. Fontana and B. Genito (Naples 2003), 60927; republished in
French as Prsence et reflets de lart Islamique en Italie Mridionale
au Moyen ge, Les Cahiers de Saint Michel de Cuxa, 35 (2004),
5769. My thanks to Vicky Harrison, Collections Manager at York
Minster, for arranging for me to study the Horn of Ulf on 14 July
2011.
97
T. D. Kendrick, The Horn of Ulph, Antiquity, XI/43
(September 1937), 27882, esp. 278. The Latin inscription on the
silver mounts reads: Cornu hoc Ulfus, in occidentali parte deirae
princeps, unacum omnibus terris et redditibus suis olim donavit:
amissum vel abreptum Henricus D. Fairfax demum restituit. Dec.
et cap. de novo ornavit an. dom. 1675. See S. Gale, An historical
dissertation upon the antient Danish horn, kept in the Cathedral
Church of York, Archaeologia, 1 (1770), 182.
98
C. Norton, York Minster in the time of Wulfstan, in
Wulfstan, Archbishop of York. The Proceedings of the Second Alcuin
Conference, ed. M. Townend (Turnhout 2004), 20734, esp. 211
12, no. 10. His arms are also seen on the south side of the choir,
constructed around 1400.
99
Gale, An historical dissertation (as n. 97), 17273.
100
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), 36: Thus this horn, and
with it the whole group, cannot be dated later than the first half of
the eleventh century. Pace follows this: Fra lIslam e lOccidente
(as n. 96), 617 and Prsence et reflets (as n. 96), 62.

Norton, York Minster (as n. 98), 21112. He notes that it is

conceivable that Archbishop Ealdred (106069), his household or
the clergy managed to secrete and save some treasures from the
looming disaster, but he does not seem convinced.
102
C. Norton, personal communication, 28 March 2013. I am
extremely grateful to Professor Norton for taking the time to send
me his thoughts on this complicated matter and to hunt out references and photocopies for me, including W. Andrews, Old Church
Lore (Hull 1891), 6970, whose chapter, Charter horns, contains
the information about the Ulf mentioned in Domesday Book at
6970.
103
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), figs 12 and 13.
104
For the fragmentary oliphant in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, see Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), no. 68b, and ibid.,
no. 64c, for the horn in St Petersburg, which Shalem excludes.
105
On the Zaragoza horn, see also R. Corts Gmez and A.
Lavesa Martn-Serrano, El olifante fatim del Museo Pilarista de
Zaragoza, Anales de Arqueologa Cordobesa, 12 (2001), 37183.
106
Swarzenski already pointed out this connection, Two oliphants (as n. 96), 44, and Shalem, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante
(as n. 1), makes this association with Group B of his corpus.
On the Salerno ivories, see R. Bergman, The Salerno Ivories: Ars
Sacra from Medieval Amalfi (Cambridge MA 1980); F. Bologna
ed., Lenigma degli avori medievali da Amalfi a Salerno, 2 (Naples
2008); A. Braca, Gli avori medievali del Museo diocesano di Salerno
(Salerno 1994); F. DellAcqua ed., The AmalfiSalerno Ivories
and the Medieval Mediterranean (as n. 17). A publication is
currently being prepared to encapsulate the contributions of a
three-year research project based at the Kunsthistorisches Institut
in Florence: The Salerno Ivories: Material, History, Theology, ed.
A. Cutler, F. DellAcqua, H. L. Kessler, A. Shalem and G. Wolf,
2 vols (Darmstadt forthcoming).
107
For good images of all the border elements, see Bologna,
Lenigma degli avori (as n. 106), cat. 62.
108
See, for example, in Bologna, Lenigma degli avori (as
n. 106): Old Testament, cats 13: creation of the plants and trees;
15: temptation of Adam and Eve (leaves on the tree); 21: Noah
cultivating vines; 24: Pharoah returns Sarah to Abraham (the half
palmette scroll border on the throne); 27: Jacobs ladder (tree); New
Testament, cats 44: flight into Egypt (leaves on the tree at bottom
upper left); 52: crucifixion and burial of Christ (half palmette frieze
underneath Christs feet, on cross); 55: doubting Thomas (palmette
frieze); 58: ascension of Christ (floral motif beneath his mandorla).
There are also stylistic similarities between animals on the Salerno
plaques and those on the Ulf-group (and other) oliphants; for example, cat. 14: creation of birds, fish and animals, where the griffins,
lions, dragon with looped bodies, and birds are particularly close to
the oliphants.
109
Bergman, Salerno Ivories (as n. 106), 8183, 12830; Bologna,
Lenigma degli avori, vol. 1 (as n. 106), 87, dates the Salerno panels
not earlier than 113740 but his reasons are not clear. He seems to
associate the commission with the Norman conquest of the Duchy of
Naples by Roger II in 1137, the creation of a new charter for Salerno
and the appointment of a new archbishop, William (until 1152)
in the same year. It is hoped that the forthcoming edited volume
The Salerno Ivories (as n. 106) presents a clearer argument for the
12th-century attribution.
110
British Museum inv. M&ME 1975,41,1. See Rev. Dr Milles,
On Lord Bruces Horn, Archaeologia, 3 (1775), 2429; J. Cherry,
The Savernake horn, in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England
12001400, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski (London 1987), cat. 544,
43738; J. Cherry, The Savernake Horn: an oliphant adorned with
metal, in De Re Metallica: the Uses of Metal in the Middle Ages, ed.
R. Bork, S. Montgomery, C. Neuman de Vegvar, E. Shortell and
S. Walton, AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology,
Science and Art, vol. 4 (Aldershot 2005); G. Bathe, The Savernake
Horn, Wiltshire Studies: Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural
History Magazine, vol. 105 (2012), 16881.
111
See La salle aux trsors: chefs-doeuvre de lart roman et mosan,
Muses royaux dart et dhistoire (Turnhout 1999), no. 40, 106
07; also J. Koldeweij, De reliekenhoorn van SintServatius: een

54

the oliphant
131

romaanse jachthoorn in die collectie van de Koninklijke Musea,

Bulletin des Muses royaux dArt et dHistoire, 56/2 (1985), 2542.
Shalems new corpus includes the plain oliphants as Group E,
though they are dated en masse to the Gothic period, which cannot
be the case for all of them.
112
V&A: 80351862, see <http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/
O313757/horn-unknown/> [accessed 30 June 2013], also P.
Williamson, Medieval Ivory Carvings: Early Christian to
Romanesque (London 2010), 33437, cat 85. A sample from the rim
was analysed by radiocarbon dating, obtaining a date for the death
of the elephant of AD 9901051, with 63.4% reading within a 95.4%
degree of probability. This object is in Group A/III of Shalems new
corpus, which is assigned to Sicily, probably Palermo, late 11th to
early 12th century: Shalem, Die mittelalterlichen Olifante (as n. 1),
cat A22.
113
Von Falke, Byzanz (as n. 11), 44, Abb. 9.
114
See Williamson and Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings (as
n. 10).
115
See Gurin, Avorio dogni ragione (as n. 83), and by the same
author Introduction to Gothic Ivories, in Catalogue of Gothic
Ivories at the Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon and Milan forthcoming).
116
On Monreale cathedral and cloister, the key work is W.
Krnig, Il Duomo di Monreale e lArchitettura Normanna in Sicilia
(Palermo 1965), though now also see T. Dittelbach, Rex imago
Christi: der Dom von Monreale. Bildsprachen und Zeremoniell in
Mosaikkunst und Architektur (Wiesbaden 2003).
117
For a useful discussion of the dates of the different decorative
campaigns in the Cappella Palatina, see W. Tronzo, The Cultures
of his Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo
(Princeton 1997), chapter 2: New dates and contexts for the
decorations and furnishings of the chapel, 2896.
118
M. A. Frantz, Byzantine Illuminated Ornament: A Study in
Chronology, The Art Bulletin, 16/1 (March 1934), 42101.
119
Frantz, Illuminated Ornament (as n. 118), 44, pl. II: 9, 1115
(which she dates to the late 10th/early 11th century), pl. II: 1819
(still later). See also pl. XVII for heartshaped palmettes within
triangles.
120
H. Bloch, Monte Cassino, Byzantium and the West,
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 3 (1946), 163224. For knotwork and
scrolling ornament, see esp. figs 239 (dated 1072), 24046 (dated
1071), 24749 (datable 107687).
121
Frantz, Illuminated Ornament (as n. 118), 6064, pls XIII
XVIII. This motif is particularly prevalent from the 10th to 12th
centuries.
122
Frantz, Illuminated Ornament (as n. 118), 5054, pls IV
VI; see also Bloch, Monte Cassino (as n. 120). Examples on the
oliphants are Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), nos 64 (in
St Petersburg); 65 (Borradaile horn); 71 (Vienna); the Jszbernyi
oliphant in Eastmond, Byzantine oliphants? (as n. 17), figs 1012,
1415; the associated casket in Doha in RosserOwen, Ivory (as
n. 26) cat. no. 9. Interestingly, knotwork borders do not seem to
appear on the Ulf group.
123
F. Gabrieli and H. Betz ed., Mohammed und Karl der Grosse:
die Geburt des Abendlandes (Stuttgart and Zrich 1993), fig. 107.
This knotted interlace is equivalent in design to Frantz, Illuminated
Ornament (as n. 118), pl. IV: 11, from MS Patmos 33, dated 941.
124
Gabrieli and Scerrato, Gli Arabi (as n. 22), fig. 630.
125
Ibid. (as n. 22), fig. 348.
126
Hoffman, Translation (as n. 7), 10407.
127
Caskey, Stuccoes (as n. 17), 8487, fig. 12. See also Gabrieli
and Scerrato, Gli Arabi (as n. 22), figs 30308. The more fluid frieze
of a single row of animals within roundels in fig. 308 seems particularly close to the carving style of the oliphants. Animals in roundels
are also seen on Abbot Desiderius reliquary of c. 1086: see Bloch,
Monte Cassino (as n. 120), figs 25758.
128
D. Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era (London 1986),
2122, figs 1012.
129
Gabrieli and Betz, Mohammed und Karl der Grosse (as n. 123),
figs 4246 (capitals), fig. 120 (ambo).
130
Rosser-Owen, Ivory (as n. 26), cat. no. 7; Shalem, Oliphant (as
n. 1), figs 48, 66 (Gans Collection).

As on V&A: 79531862, see <http://collections.vam.ac.uk/

item/O93335/horn/> [accessed 30 June 2013].
132
Cited by Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), 31.
133
Ibid. (as n. 96), 43.
134
Ibid. (as n. 96), 44, fig. 28. In note 25 he gives references to
examples from ecclesiastical contexts in Bari and Rome of the eagle
with a quadruped in its claws.
135
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), figs 14, 21; RosserOwen, Ivory (as n. 26), cat. no. 9, which shows eagles with prey (on
the back) and without (on the lid). One of these prey is a curled
bodied dragon: see discussion below.
136
Clephane horn, upper border, see Eastmond, Byzantine
oliphants? (as n. 17), fig. 3. For sphinxes on the Ulf group, see
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), figs 3 and 5 (Boston); figs 7
and 9 (Chartreuse de Portes).
137
Pace, Fra lIslam e lOccidente (as n. 96), figs CII a and d and
Prsence et reflets (as n. 96), figs 11 and 13.
138
See capital E15Sh39 in the online database of high-resolution
photographs of all capitals in the Monreale Cloister (CENOBIUM
project, coordinated by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence),
at <http://cenobium.isti.cnr.it/monreale/capitals> [accessed 1 July
2013].
139
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), 74.
140
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), 34. See D. Higgs
Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in
Medieval Art (Princeton 2003), esp. 5051 and fig. 13, which illustrates a detail of two Cynocephali in the tympanum of the abbey
church of La Madeleine in Vzelay, built c. 1125. The author argues
for an interpretation of these motifs as representing contemporary Muslims whom Crusaders would expect to encounter in the
Holy Land (15960). She cites C. Lecouteux, Les Cynocphales:
tude dune tradition tratologique de lAntiquit au XIIe s.,
Cahiers de civilisation mdivale, 24 (1981), 11728, which I have
not had the opportunity to consult. Rabanus Maurus was copied
at Monte Cassino in 102223: see Swarzenski, Two oliphants
(as n. 96), 34, 44 and no. 26, citing Monte Cassino, Codex 132,
produced under Abbot Theobald. See also Bloch, Monte Cassino
(as n. 120), 198; M. Reuter, Text und Bild im Codex 132 der
Bibliothek von Montecassino, Mnchner Beitrge zur Medivistik
und Renaissance-Forschung, 34 (Munich 1984); Rabano Mauro,
facsimile edition with commentary (1994); F. Newton, The
Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino 10581105 (Cambridge
1999), 20 and 326.
141
Pace, Fra lIslam e lOccidente (as n. 96), 623.
142
D. Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge 1998),
fig. 5. The classic study of this motif is M.-T. Camus, Les oiseaux
dans la sculpture du Poitou roman, Mmoires de la Socit des
antiquaries de louest, Ser. 4, vol. 11 (1973), 7102.
143
Gabrieli and Scerrato, Gli Arabi (as n. 22), fig. 630.
144
Swarzenski, Two oliphants (as n. 96), figs 5 (Boston), 8
(Paris) and 21 (Zaragoza).
145
See the classic study by R. Ettinghausen, Studies in Muslim
Iconography I: The Unicorn, Freer Gallery of Art Occasional
Papers, vol. 1, no. 3 (Washington, 1950). In the examples from
the full panoply of Islamic art which Ettinghausen studies and
presents all are winged and generally do not have an equine form,
as they do in the European motif. He illustrates (pl. 5) the horned
griffins on the Pamplona casket, made in Crdoba in 1004/5, as
the earliest representations of the unicorn in Muslim art so far
traced. The other ivory pyxis he illustrates here as being made in
11th-century al-Andalus is now generally considered a 19th-century
creation by Palls y Puig the very European style unicorns being
one reason for this attribution: see M. Rosser-Owen, Questions of
Authenticity: the Imitation Ivories of Don Francisco Palls y Puig
(18591926), in Journal of the David Collection, 2/2 (2005), 24867.
Ettinghausen cites a few 12th-century examples, but in general the
karkadann the term by which he refers to the unicorn motif in
Islamic art, from the Arabic for rhinoceros becomes widespread
from the 13th century onwards, and in the Islamic East, especially
Anatolia and Iran.

55

mariam rosser-owen
146

158

Eastmond, Byzantine oliphants? (as n. 17), fig. 16.

Bloch, Monte Cassino (as n. 120), fig. 232.
148
Tronzo, Cultures (as n. 117), 33, fig. 26. Another pavement,
at SantAdriano at San Demetrio Corone (Calabria), datable
10881106, features a snake whose body creates a pattern of three
concentric circles with loops in its tail in the outer circle: Tronzo,
Cultures (as n. 117), 33, no. 20. A further example is the sea monster
swallowing Jonah, on either side of the ambo, datable c. 1130, in the
Duomo at Ravello, intriguingly from tesserae made from Fatimid
lustreware, datable 102575: see Rob Mason, Middle Eastern
Pottery in Italy and Europe, at <http://www.utoronto.ca/nmc/
mason/italy.html> [accessed 1 June 2013].
149
Gabrieli and Scerrato, Gli Arabi (as n. 22), fig. 473.
150
I. Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages, in Bronze
(as n. 59), 6977.
151
Gabrieli and Scerrato, Gli Arabi (as n. 22), fig. 348.
152
For example, dragons occur on capitals S8Sh57 (south face);
S18Sh67; S20Sh69. They are combined with birds drinking from a
fountain on S7Sh56. Birds at a fountain are also seen on N18Sh17
and S24Sh73. See <http://cenobium.isti.cnr.it/monreale/capitals>
[accessed 1 July 2013].
153
For example, helmeted knights are shown duelling on capital N6Sh5 (south face) armed knights on N23Sh22; nude figures
fight with each other on N12Sh11 (east and west faces); atlantes
on E8Sh32 and E13Sh37: see <http://cenobium.isti.cnr.it/monreale/
capitals> [accessed 1 July 2013].
154
Cutler, Hand of the Master (as n. 21), 6678, The Question of
Workshops.
155
The excavation of a knife-making workshop in Paris in 2000
not only revealed traces of iron casting, implying that knife blades
were made in the same workshop as the handles, but while many
offcuts of bone were recovered, only one small piece of ivory
was found. This suggests that ivory was too precious to leave to
waste, which may also explain why no traces of ivory working in the
medieval Mediterranean have yet been identified archaeologically.
See Lecture, par M. Michel Fleury, dune note de Mme Catherine
Brut sur des dcouvertes de cramiques et de restes de coutellerie
du XIVe sicle faites 34, rue Greneta (2e arr.), in Commission du
Vieux Paris, procs -verbal de la sance du mardi 9 janvier 2001 (Paris
2000), no. 1, 1421; and E. Hamon et al, La demeure mdivale
Paris (Paris 2012), 23941. My thanks to Sarah Gurin for this
information.
156
Khnel himself once asked a professional hornist to play
an oliphant, and he recalled in a letter to Andr Grabar that
the sound was so loud and intense that the staff and the museum
visitors huddled together in fright! Letter dated 14 January 1953,
cited in Jens Krger, Khnel and ivory scholarship up to 1971,
Journal of David Collection, 2/2 (2005), 26893; and no. 71. The most
recent attempt was made in Berlin in 2004, when the three horns in
the collections of the Islamic and Bode Museums were blown by
a solo hornist and trumpeter from the Berlin State Opera: Shalem
notes that each of the horns produced an individual and haunting
sound, which carried far. See Shalem, Der Klang des Olifants, in
Wissen ber Grenzen: Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter,
ed. A. Speer and L. Wegener (Berlin 2006), 77590. Shalems new
corpus includes a CD with sound recordings of these experiments in
oliphant-playing! Ebitz (Function and Meaning (as n. 5), 125)
who apparently blew oliphants himself in the British Museum and
Cleveland Museum noted that the resulting sound is deep and
limited to one, two or at most three tones. See also the letter from
Ebitz to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, cited in Shalem.
157
I acknowledge that the preciousness of the material might
argue against the pure functionality of the ivory horn. As Eastmond
notes, the lack of wear on most of them suggests that they were not
played often, and the lack of breaks suggests that they werent often
taken out hunting. I do see them as ceremonial versions, perhaps to
be played once you were back safely from the hunting in front of a
nice warm fire (personal communication, 26 February 2013). He
does believe, however, that the breaks on the Clephane horn must
[. . .] be related to an attempt to improve it as a musical instrument,
and it may be that objects that broke have not survived.

Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), fig. 70.

And that when they gave thanks, they might remember the
soul of Witlaf the donor: cornu mensae suae ut senes monasterii
bibant inde festis sanctorum et in suis benedictionibus meminerint
aliquando animae donatoris Witlafii, cited in Pegge, Of the horn
as a charter or instrument of conveyance. Some observations on
Mr Samuel Foxlowes Horn, as likewise on the Nature and Kinds of
these Horns in general, Archaeologia, 3 (1775), 112.
160
William Camdens Britannia, published in 1600, cited in Gale,
Historical dissertation (as n. 97), 169: Dominabatur Ulfus ille in
occidentali parte Deirae, et propter altercationem filiorum suorum,
senioris et junioris, super dominiis post mortem mox omnes fecit aeque
pares. Nam indilato Eboracum divertit, et cornu, quo bibere consuevit, vino replevit, et coram altari, Deo et beato Petro, Apostolorum
principi, omnes terras et redditus flexis genibus propinavit.
161
Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), no. 78. My thanks to
Benedetta Chiesi for showing me the Bargellos ivory collection
on 28 June 2012 and for discussing this object with me. According
to Dr Chiesi, it would not be easy to reconstruct this objects
pre-Medici provenance, without painstaking work in the Medici
archives. Tusks and oliphants are known in Italy but they are
probably not medieval: Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), 6,
fig. 7, mentions an ivory horn recovered from the 7th-century BC
necropolis in Palestrina, now in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di
Villa Giulia in Rome; while an enormous unprepared elephant tusk,
known as the Tusk of Constantine, hangs in the Treasury of St
Peters Basilica in Rome: my thanks to Sarah Gurin for bringing
this to my attention.
162
Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), 8588, Anhang
Quellen und Schatzverzeichnisse: nos 11 (Eller): unam argenteam et
alteram auro et lapidibus paratam, ambasque sanctis reliquiis interius
redimitis; 12 (Erstein): Quintum cornum cum reliquiis sancti Adelphi.
Sextum eburneum cum reliquiis sanctae Waltburgae . . . Both date
from the first half of the 10th century.
163
Ibid. (as n. 12), Anhang, nos 5: . . . in majori cornu eburneo pendente sub trabe ultra magnum altare; 9: Item unum cornu eburneum . . .;
and 36. There are also nos 28: two ivory horns presented by Henry II
(r. 100224) to the church of St Vincent in Verdun between 101424,
which were reliquiis conferta; and 19: an ivory horn with silver
mounts in the middle and at the ends hanging by a silver chain,
inventoried at Noyon in 1523, which continet infra suam concavitatem de pluribus sanctis.
164
J. M. Kemble and C. Rock, The gifts of Aethelwold, Bishop
of Winchester (AD 963984), to the Monastery of Peterborough,
The Archaeological Journal, 20 (1863), 35566; no. 6 (the charter of
Aethelstan to Durham, printed in the Monasticon). These remind
one of the 5thcentury golden horns found at Gallehus in Denmark
(see below, note 209).
165
Pegge, Horn as charter (as n. 159), 10.
166
Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12), Anhang, no. 16: Item
cornu eburneum gravatum bestiis et avibus, magnum. Item aliud cornu
eburneum planum et parvum.
167
Other examples are Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12),
Anhang, nos 33 (John de Foxle, 1378), 34 (Charles V of Germany,
r. 136480) and 35 (Thomas, earl of Ormonde, 1515).
168
The National Archives, London, doc. E101/357/13 m1:
unum cornum argento munitum quod fuit sancti thome de cantilupo.
Personal communication from Jeremy Ashbee, 25 April 2012.
169
Ebitz, Secular to Sacred (as n. 6), 37.
170
M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England
10661307, 2nd edition (Oxford 1996): Chapter 8 Hearing and
Seeing (25393), section on Symbolic objects and documents
(25360).
171
V&A: M.220&A1938, aurochs horn, mounted with silver
gilt mounts, unmarked, around 1400, which are inscribed, I kynge
knowde [Cnut] gave Wyllyam Pecote [Pusey, mistranscribed by the
goldsmith] thys horne to holde by thy land. See M. Campbell, The
Pusey Horn, in Gothic: Art for England 14001517, ed. R. Marks
and P. Williamson (London 2003), cat. no. 182, 315, and <http://
collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O84673/the-pusey-horn-horn-andcase-unknown/> [accessed 30 June 2013]. My thanks to Dr Kirstin

147

159

56

the oliphant
grifonis ex ebore. The association with the griffin derives from a
story told of Pope Cornelius (elected in 251) who cured a griffin
of falling sickness (epilepsy). By way of thanks, the griffin shook
off one of his claws and left it with St Cornelius [. . .] [who] then
used it for a drinking vessel, and is painted with it: Rackham, The
Great Horn (as n. 186), 39. St Cornelius is usually depicted with a
reliquary-horn as his attribute: see, for example, the wall-painting
from c. 1459 in the cathedral of Roskilde, Denmark, in Etting,
Story of the Drinking Horn (as n. 70), 90, or the polychrome wooden
sculpture from the 14th century now in the Sint-Janshospitaal in
Bruges. Ironically, some griffins claws were made of ivory, including a 15th- and a 16th-century example also in SintJanshospitaal:
see Vandenberghe, Ivoor in Brugge (as n. 10).
191
Rackham, The Great Horn (as n. 186), 44. He lists six medieval aurochs horns in England, which can only be dated by the
age of their mounts, or the date of their presentation, if known.
The Corpus Christi horn is first mentioned in a college inventory
datable c. 1385, though its silver finial which may actually represent
St Cornelius wearing his papal crown probably dates from the
late 13th century. There seems to have been a trend for horns in
the 15th century, when the Egglesfield, Pusey and Christs Hospital
horns all seem to have been (re)mounted.
192
De Hond and Scholten, Elk antler (as n. 39).
193
See Cherry, Symbolism and Survival (as n. 172), 11516.
Though now see Etting, Story of the Drinking Horn (as n. 70).
194
These questions were asked to me by two colleagues who read
the first draft of this article, Sarah Gurin and Isabelle Dolezalek.
Since they are so pertinent, I quote them directly and with gratitude.
In a museological context, it is interesting to note that in the V&A,
for example, the ivory oliphants are held in the Sculpture section,
and are thus validated as artistic objects, while the drinking horns
are held in Metalwork, valued only for their mounts.
195
Eastmond, Diversity (as n. 17), 106.
196
Ebitz, Sacred to Secular (as n. 6), 37.
197
The earliest listing in Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12),
Anhang, which specifically mentions ivory is no. 28: the gift of two
cornua eburnea with their relics from Henry II (r. 100224) to the
church of St Vincent, Verdun, after 1014.
198
Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12) Anhang, no. 25; Pace,
Fra lIslam e lOccidente (as n. 96), 617.
199
My thanks to Sarah Gurin for sharing with me the introduction to her doctoral dissertation, where this issue is discussed.
I eagerly await the publication of her observations on this issue.
200
Gurin, Introduction to Gothic Ivories (as n. 83); Leo of
Ostia, The Chronicle of Monte Cassino, in A Documentary History
of Art: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. E. Gilmore Holt,
trans. H. Bloch (Garden City 1957), vol. 1, 12, 27 (with thanks to
Sarah Gurin for the reference). Unfortunately the text does not
state if the monks specialised or worked across media.
201
Lawrence Nees has made a similar argument in connection with Carolingian ivory carving, in Charlemagnes elephant,
Quintana: Revista de Estudos do Departamento de Historia da Arte,
5 (2006), 1349.
202
Gurin, Forgotten Routes? (as n. 82). The papers and
discussion at the recent conference, Ivory Trade and Exchange (as
n. 29), served to reinforce the view that the eastern Mediterranean
bias for medieval ivory production has been unfounded.
203
Pace, Fra lIslam e lOccidente (as n. 96), 620, no. 28, points
out that significantly no oliphant is represented in the paintings of
the Cappella Palatina ceiling, which might be expected if this was a
contemporary Fatimid tradition in the process of being adopted by
the Normans.
204
It is surely significant that the construction method of several
of these caskets is the same as the two Fatimid ivories made in
al-Mansuriyya in the 960s. This discovery was first shared by Silvia
Armando in her paper Separated at Birth or Distant Relations?
The Al-Muizz and Mantua Caskets between Decoration and
Construction, at the conference Beyond the Western Mediterranean
(as n. 81). Could it be that ivory carvers or casket-makers came
from Tunisia to southern Italy along with the ivory supply?
205
On the Siculo-Arabic group, see the recent PhD thesis by
Silvia Armando, Avori arabo-siculi nel Mediterraneo Medievale,

Kennedy of the V&As Metalwork Section for showing me the

Pusey Horn and discussing it with me.
172
J. Cherry, Symbolism and Survival: Medieval Horns of
Tenure, The Antiquaries Journal, 69/1 (March 1989), 11118, esp.
11516.
173
The art historical study of medieval drinking horns is almost
non-existent, and as far as I am aware little if nothing has yet
been written on how the raw horns were obtained in order to be
converted and mounted. See Etting, Story of the Drinking Horn (as
n. 70).
174
Pegge et al., Of the Borstal Horn, Archaeologia, 3 (1775),
1518.
175
See the references in n. 110.
176
Milles, Lord Bruces Horn (as n. 110), 26.
177
J. Dodds, Hunting in the Borderlands, in Courting the
Alhambra: CrossDisciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice
Ceilings, ed. C. Robinson and S. Pinet, special issue of Medieval
Encounters, 14 (2008), 267302. I would like to thank Glaire
Anderson for reminding me of this article.
178
D. Rollason, Forests, parks, palaces, and the power of place
in early medieval kingship, Early Medieval Europe, 20/4 (2012),
42849.
179
Dodds, Hunting (as n. 177), 291.
180
Ibid. (as n. 177), 292.
181
S. Sutton, The Study of Oliphants, essay submitted for the MA
in History of Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London, 2013, 1113, citing N. Sykes, Zooarchaeology of the
Norman Conquest, in Anglo Norman Studies, XXVII: Proceedings
of the Battle Conference, 2004 (Woodbridge 2005), 196. My thanks
to Sally Sutton for sharing her unpublished research with me.
182
Rollason, Power of place (as n. 178), 439.
183
Sutton, Study of Oliphants (as n. 181), 13.
184
Rollason, Power of place (as n. 178), 443, who quotes Ermold
the Blacks description of the Carolingian park at Aachen, and
Walafrid Strabos poem on the statue of Theodoric.
185
H. Ellis, Observations on some ancient methods of conveyance in England, Archaeologia, 17 (1814), 31119, esp. 313, also
discussed in Clanchy, From Memory (as n. 170), 25759. My thanks
to Martin Biddle for sending me an image of the record of this find,
in the first minute book of the Spalding Gentlemens Society for
3 May 1733, ed. D. Owen, Lincoln Record Society, 73 (1980), 14.
Ellis, as above, also mentions an ivory-handled knife used by
William II in 1096 to give the Abbey of Tavistock seisin of the land
or manor of Wlurinton [?] per Cultellum eberneum; inscribed on its
haft were words signifying the donation. Khnels Appendix notes
a few instances of ivory caskets (Elfenbeinskulpturen (as n. 12),
Anhang, nos 24, 27: scrinium or scriniolum eburneum).
186
O. Rackham, The Great Horn or Bugle, in Treasures of Silver
at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ed. O. Rackham (Cambridge
2002), 3345, esp. 3435. My thanks to Kirstin Kennedy for bringing Rackhams article and the Egglesfield horn in The Queens
College, Oxford (presented 134149) to my attention.
187
Caesar, De Bello Gallico, vi, 28, cited in Rackham, The Great
Horn (as n. 186), 42.
188
Now in the Cabinet des Mdailles, Bibliothque National de
France, Paris, inv. St Denis 1794.4. The gallery label attributes the
gilt copper mounts to France or the Rhineland, 13th century. There
are many other examples, especially in German and Scandinavian
collections: see Etting, Story of the Drinking Horn (as n. 70).
189
Inv. OA.24, see <http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/
collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=
44328&partId=1> [accessed 20 February 2013]. Another griffins
claw cup in the British Museum (inv. WB.102) was mounted at
Mainz in 1550 for the noble von Greiffenclau family, as indicated in
the inscription on the mounts. See: <http://www.britishmuseum.
org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?
objectId=31701&partId=1> [accessed 20 February 2013]. My
thanks to Rosie Mills for bringing these objects to my attention.
190
Also Bamberg in 1127 (Khnel, Elfenbeinskulpturen (as
n. 12) Anhang, no. 1) of three ivory horns: duo leunculi, et II

57

mariam rosser-owen
Etting, Story of the Drinking Horn (as n. 70), esp. 1738, gives other
examples of surviving bovine horns that can be associated with Iron
Age and Viking Scandinavia, though the author notes that if the
horns are buried they completely disintegrate, so frequently their
metal mounts are the only archaeological trace.
210
Seven ox horns were found in the 6th/7th-century burial at
Sutton Hoo, and three in the 6th-century princely burial at Taplow:
see Rackham, The Great Horn (as n. 186), 42, citing Victoria
County History, Buckinghamshire, 1 (1905), 200. The Taplow horns,
found with other rich grave-goods in 1883, were ornamented with
intricately embossed and gilded silver triangles around the mouth
and with long silver finials. All these horns are now in the British
Museum (M&ME 1883,1214,1920). It is interesting that on the
Bayeux Tapestry, it is the English not the Normans who
are depicted drinking from horns, which seem to be a visual device
signalling their AngloSaxon identity. See Etting, Story of the
Drinking Horn (as n. 70), 3839, citing two works by Carol Neuman
de Vegvar which I have not had the opportunity to consult: A Feast
to the Lord: Drinking Horns, the Church, and the Liturgy, in
Objects, Images, and the Word: Art in the service of the Liturgy, ed.
C. Hourihane (Princeton 2003), 23156; Dining with Distinction:
drinking vessels and difference in the Bayeux Tapestry feast scenes,
in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches. Proceedings of a conference at the British Museum, ed. M. J. Lewis, G. R. Owen-Crocker
and D. Terkla (Oxford 2010), 11220. How that fits with the idea
of oliphants as something indicative of Norman identity is an
important avenue for further investigation.
211
Rackham, The Great Horn (as n. 186), 42.
212
Pegge, Horn as charter (as n. 159), 4.
213
Etting, Story of the Drinking Horn (as n. 70), 47.
214
Pace and Eastmond have both recently made a similar point:
Pace, Fra lIslam e lOccidente (as n. 96), 620: Dal vaglio delle
fonti la localizzazione resta invece non solo irrisolta, ma sembra
addirittura divenire ancor pi problematica [. . .] la loro strada fosse
sin dallorigine segnata da un immediato futuro di esportazione
[. . .]; Eastmond, Byzantine oliphants? (as n. 17), 21: The market
for oliphants seems predominantly to have lain outside the region in
which they originated. All the evidence indicates that they were
valued above all in Northern Europe.

Universit della Tuscia, Viterbo 2012. Through physical analysis

of the caskets in Italian collections, Dr Armando convincingly
associates their production with a single structured workshop in
Palermo, probably with some connection to the Norman court.
206
Gurin, Avorio dogni ragione (as n. 83). Jeremy Johns has
added complexity to the question of when this ivory might have
arrived in southern Italy: the Norman invasion of Sicily in 1060 led
to a decline in contact with Ifriqiya, until the Normans reached an
accommodation with the Zirids around 1080. Since Amalfi was conquered in 1073 and Salerno in 1076, these states no longer operated
as independent trading centres, but instead under the agency and
control of the Norman ruler. Likewise, he notes an apparent decline
in trade between Egypt and Sicily between 1090 and 1120. See
J. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan
(Cambridge 2002), 25859. This would imply that the ivory from
which the Farfa casket and possibly Salerno ivories were carved was
already in southern Italy before 1060, or alternatively the whole
group postdates 1080.
207
Shalem, Oliphant (as n. 1), fig. 34. It has been pointed out
that the inscription might have been added to the object later,
thus raising a question mark over the connection to this prominent
mercantile family. This would nevertheless mean that the areas in
which the inscription was later written were deliberately left blank,
and this can only have been because they were intended to receive
additional carving such as a dedicatory inscription. It could
have been passed from the sculptor to another craftsman, who was
literate. Gurin, Forgotten Routes? (as n. 82), 8791.
208
On the consolidation and exploitation of land and land rights
under the first generations of Norman settlers in Italy, see G. Loud,
The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman
Conquest (Essex 2000).
209
For example, two golden horns datable to the 5th century
were found at Gallehus in South Jutland (Denmark), in the 17th
and 18th century. Unfortunately they were both stolen and melted
down in the 19th century, though they are still known through a
series of electrotypes created from the detailed descriptions and
drawings made at the time of their discoveries, such as those in the
British Museum (M&ME 1885160a and 161a), see: <http://www.
britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/r/
reproductions_of_the_gallehus.aspx> [accessed 9 June 2013].

58