SOLD. Old Block of Ivory

SOCIAL
  • old-block-ivory-60310.jpg

$90.00

SOLD. Old Block of Ivory crafted to a pendant, capped top and bottom with hand-worked Silver and fitted with Silver bails and hinged cap. The Ivory block dates back to the early 1900s Rajasthan, the Silver-work to the early 1970s.

The hand-carved Ivory block square-profiled, 15x15mm; 48mm total pendant length.

See below for more information on this pendant.

 

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Old Block of Ivory,  from Rajasthan North India, early 1900s. Originally part of an implement for the creation of a straight line, a “ruler”, a household item for the very well-to-do a century ago. The last image in the gallery above shows this pendant against an intact example of such a desk ruler.
Back in the 1950s/60s/70s, desk rulers of this type, long straight square profiles of Ivory, often quite damaged in parts, were completely out of favour in well-off Rajasthani households, and in the market places were cut into sections for use as pendants. The above pendant was created in Chandni Chowk, Old Delhi, in the early 1970s, the Old Block capped top and bottom with hand-worked Silver, fitted with Silver bails and hinged cap opening to a small carved-out cavity.
(The elephant in India, aside from being useful and valuable, is holy, the embodiment of the god Ganesh, the Beloved; old Ivory from that part of the world came from the naturally deceased or from the polling of tusks of palace elephants, for safety reasons.)