There can be no doubt that from the year 1000 B.C. down to the Christian æra there was a constant succession of artists in ivory in the western Asiatic countries, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Italy. Long before ivory was applied in Greece to the making of bas-reliefs and statues it was employed for a multitude of objects of luxury and ornament. Inferior to marble in whiteness, and of course greatly inferior in extent of available surface, ivory exceeds marble in beauty of polish and is less fragile, being an animal substance and of true tissue and growth. From the time of Hesiod and Homer numerous allusions are to be found in classic authors to various works in this material: such as the decoration of shields, couches, and articles of domestic use. As to statues, Pausanias tells us that, so far as he could learn, men first made them of wood only; of ebony, cypress, cedar, or oak. The passages from the earlier classics have been referred to, over and over again, by all the later writers on the subject; and it would be not merely wearying but unnecessary to repeat them here. In the sixth century before Christ, ivory statues of the Dioscuri and other deities were made at Sicyon and Argos. Sir Digby Wyatt, in the lecture before referred to, speaks of them as having been rude in character, but there is no evidence left for so disparaging a decision. Other works were statues of the Hours, of Themis, and of Diana. The names of some of the sculptors have been preserved: among them Polycletus, Endoos of Athens, the brothers Medon, and Dorycleides. The style in which objects of this kind were executed was called _Toreutic_: from τορεύω, to bore through, to chase, to work in relief; signifying chiefly working the material in the round or in relief. Winckelman, in his history of art, explains the term at first with insufficient exactness: “Phidias inventa cet art appelé par les anciens _toreutice_, c’est à dire, l’art de tourner.” In his second edition he corrects this, and rightly says, “la racine de cette dénomination est τορός, _clair_, _distinct_, épithète qui s’applique à la voix. C’est pourquoi on donne ce nomme au travaux en relief, par opposition au travail en creux des pierres précieuses.” A long disquisition on the meaning of the word, and its etymology, is given by De Quincy. One of the most famous of such _toreutic_ works, and of which Pausanias has left us a tolerably accurate description, was the coffer which the Cypselidæ sent as an offering to Olympia, about 600 B.C. It seems to have been made of cedar wood, of considerable size; the figures ranged in five rows, one above the other, along the sides which were inlaid with gold and ivory. The subjects were taken from old heroic stories. De Quincy has given a large plate with a conjectural restoration of the chest; which he supposes to have been oblong with a rounded cover. Others believe it to have been elliptical.