The subject of this dissertation is the role which a collection of ivory objects from North Syria played in the formation of royal identity during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the entity based in northern Mesopotamia in the ninth through seventh centuries BC. This dissertation suggests that the North Syrian ivories were collected by the kings of Assyria because they were metonymic reminders of the land of their origins which was imagined as a lush and naturally diverse world. This fictive imagining engendered a desire of the Assyrian kings to recreate that fertile world in the Assyrian heartland.