ORIENTAL IVORY CARVINGS 133 



the marks of the tools, but usually the surface has been 

 carefully smoothed, and in some instances even polished. In 

 a few cases a reddish or blackish tint has been imparted to 

 the ivory. When the natural opening is too large it is partly 

 closed with rosin, and any holes or cracks that may have 

 been made or developed in the course of manufacture are 

 closed with bulungu. In many cases the ivory surface of 

 the trumpet is protected by a tightly fitted covering of the 

 hide of the antelope, the buffalo, the elephant, or the iguana. 

 While, as has been remarked, the decorative motifs are us- 

 ually confined to the region of the mouthpiece, in some speci- 

 mens from the northern part of the Congo State the entire 

 surface is engraved with bands or stripes, and also with a 

 dot inside a circle, a sign much used in the Egyptian Sudan, 

 in the northeastern Congo, and on the Upper Kasai. 

 This is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol of the sun. 

 The natives are always very ingenious and often very artistic 

 in the order of arrangement and construction of the simple 

 circles and lines; and they form a beautiful decoration to 

 these trumpets that were capable of making a great forest 

 resound with their blasts. Many ivory flutes are also made 

 in the Congo, small tusks being used for this purpose.* 



Since the quaint and curious netsukes, the most character- 

 istic and original products of the Japanese ivory carvers' 

 art, have gone out of fashion in Japan, the carvers have 

 produced work of greater beauty and breadth of design, 

 showing in this as in other things the wonderful adapta- 

 bility and cleverness of these Frenchmen of the East. While 

 admitting that this testifies to a certain progress in the ivory 

 carving of Japan, some of us are unable to recognize these 

 more ambitious productions as really superior to the old 



*Annales du Musee du Congo. Ethnographic et Anthropologie. S6rie III. Notes 

 analytiques sur les collections ethnographiques du Musee du Congo, publiees par la direc- 

 tion du Musee. Tome I, Fasc. I, Bruxelles, November, 1902, pp. 90-96, 100. 



