"

There is another piece of carved ivory which appears to Ling Roth to
be a piece of symbolic sculpture and which was probably used as a
scepter. Roth says of this:

"The execution of the detail is rough--more rugged perhaps than
the carved tusks--nevertheless there is considerable originality
of design, and it is especially remarkable as showing an earlier
stage of the application of hammered metal to carved work."[19]

Among the carved works in ivory are many splendidly carved armlets.
Ling Roth gives a description of one which is particularly interesting
as showing the ingenuity of the Negro artisan.

"While at first sight it appears to depict only one carved
armlet, it is really two armlets, one being carved inside the
other out of the same piece of ivory with only the space of a
knife-blade thickness between them. When moved, the two armlets
rattle against each other. The ornamentation consists of four
figures: a king or chief belonging to the outer armlet, and four
sets of two hands placed between the human figures belonging to
the inner armlet. The whole shows skill and ingenuity on the part
of the artist who planned this difficult piece of work, so
remarkable from a technical point of view. But although the
beauty of design is not its chief attraction, it is nevertheless
a piece of work which can not fail to be admired from the
artistic standpoint also."

Another object of interest described by Ling Roth is a highly ornate
fragment on an article which originally had the shape of a brass
sistrum, consisting of two bell forms, a large and a small one,
grafted onto one handle. Its delicate treatment is described as
differing somewhat from the rugged workmanship of the objects above
described, but it is said to err in its excessive elaboration.

"Yet there are good points," says Roth, "such as the blending of
the two bell forms into the common handle, the happy tapering of
the ornamentation into the Normian bird's beak; the increasing
size of the side cups as they rise to correspond to the enlarged
opening of the bell form; the truthfulness to nature in an
essential like the bust of the Negro, all of which betoken a fair
amount of artistic feeling. The craftsman who probably designed
execution of the smallest detail."[20]

It is the opinion of collectors that there existed in Benin at