The elephant is the king of the jungle (no matter what the lion says). And its power, when push comes to poke, is in its tusks. It’s no surprise, then, that tusks have long made fitting canvases on which to celebrate the rule of kings and other powerful leaders in Africa, in this case the ancestors of a military commander, or ezomo, in Benin, who commissioned this tusk between 1775 and 1777.
In Benin, as elsewhere, it’s good to be the king - most artworks in Benin pay homage to oba, or kings. But it’s also good to be the ezomo, the highest-ranking palace chief and military commander. A few tusk carvings, like this one, were made for particularly powerful ezomo. Here, at the base of the tusk, an ezomo is depicted as a tough-looking official wielding a sword.
Above the ezomo is an oba, or king, gripping an elephant trunk in each hand. If he can manage that, the image suggests, imagine how strong a leader he must be.
Crouching above the oba’s head is a leopard, a traditional sign of African royalty as it possesses such desirable traits: strength, agility, fierceness, and cunning.
For centuries, if not longer, tusks were the scrolls of the jungle, recording historical stories. The story carved into this tusk reputedly happened around 1773 in the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin.