Ivory cup a masterpiece of carving craft from 3,000 years ago

Check out this ivory cup resembling a soldier who exemplifies a heroic posture! The beige cup has a round mouth, thin rim and a slightly narrowed waist. Three sets of beast mask patterns respectively decorate its mouth, neck, belly and base. Turquois pieces are embedded in the beasts’ eyes, eyebrows, noses and tails, against a background of square-spiral patterns. A dragon-shaped handle, adorned with spiral patterns and inlaid turquois, is inserted into the cup body.

Combing various techniques such as three-dimensional carving, incision, relief and inlay, it is one of the two identical cups unearthed in 1976 from the tomb of female general Fu Hao in the Yinxu site in Anyang, Henan province, that showcase the ingenious artistic creativity and ivory carving crafts of the Shang Dynasty (c.16th century-11th century BC). One of the cups is housed in the National Museum of China and the other in the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.