The Artistry of China’s Ivory Puzzle Balls
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
https://www.nature.com/articles/507040a
> Synthetic ivory can now be crafted to the same diagnostic standards as genuine ivory (see M. E. Sims et al. Ethnobiol. Lett. 2, 40–44; 2011), and its price in China is only about 14% of that of real ivory
Weird tagline, both crass and wrong. There are legal sources of ivory, mainly antiques and mammoth tusks.
Some of the simpler items I've seen in museums were linked chains made from a single bone. The more detailed ones were round balls carved inside of square cages.
To be sure, they were nowhere as advanced as these Chinese artworks. But then, the soldiers were just using whatever was laying around, and were also busy fighting a war.
https://www.cwi.nl/events/cwi-scientific-meetings-1/cwiscien...
layers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are clearly visible
layers 6, 7, 8 and 9 are carved ‘blindly’
The region’s method is detailed in an 1876 publication by the Scottish photographer John Thompson, who traveled extensively around China. According to him, an artist first used a lathe to rotate a block of ivory, shaping it into a sphere. They then drilled evenly distributed conical holes towards the ball’s center. Accessing the interior with an L-shaped tool, they would carve grooves to form concentric gaps, creating layers. “Hole after hole is in like manner centered,” Thompson wrote, “until all the grooves are cut, and meeting each other, the innermost ball falls into the center of the sphere. This inner ball is then moved about and carved with long tools passed through the holes, after which the bent chisel is again brought into play to cut out the next ball.”