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Description & Provenance: Hand carved ivory dragons made into a ball for a display. Intricately hand carved ivory puzzle ball Incredibly beautiful and intricate Chinese Puzzle Ball. It has a number of freely moving layers, each within the other. A fascinating and incredible piece of artistry and workmanship. A lot of work goes into these detailed designs. Beautiful intricately carved antique ivory on display. The carved nested balls are particularly neat. this is a old ivory ball within a ball within a ball. Chinese carved ivory puzzle ball sculpture. We can count five to six balls, but there may be more? The inner balls are pierce carved with tiny stars. The outside ball measures 2 inches in diameter, and is pierce carved with tiny objects. The ivory sculpture is Beautiful.

Origin, Encyclopedia & Researched Articles:

Encyclopedia Name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_globe

A Puzzle globe, also called jigsaw globe, globe puzzle, puzzle ball, puzzle sphere or spherical puzzle, is a spherical assembly of puzzle pieces that, when put together, form a complete sphere or globe. An actual puzzle globes will generally have a one-piece spherical substrate that supports the puzzle pieces as they are laid in place. Like a 2-D puzzle, a globe puzzle is often made of all kinds of materials and the assembled pieces form a single layer. Like a 3-D puzzle, the final form is a three-dimensional shape. Most globe puzzles have designs representing spherical shapes such as the Earth, the Moon, and historical globes of the Earth.

Verbal History:

Carved ivory puzzle balls are made with a sphere and then turned on a lathe then conical holes are drilled towards the center. The maker has a set of "L" shaped tools the one with the longest upright has the shortest cutter and the one with the shortest upright has the longest cutter. Starting with the longest tool he lowers it to the narrow bottom of each hole in turn and rotates it to cut the innermost ball free. Then he gets the second tool which does not reach so far down the hole but can cut a wider arc and separates the second ball. He continues working from the innermost to outermost shell. For obvious reasons, usually only the outermost balls are elaborately carved. The outer layer is twice as thick as the inner layers. This is because the two outer layers are fused together. The reason for this is that the outer layer with the dueling dragons is carved so deeply that if it were free moving it would be too fragile and shatter, so it has to be fused to the 2nd layer to make it strong enough to avoid breaking. The very inner ball at the center is also counted as a layer making up the total number of layers. On the larger balls the center ball can have a ball within a ball (called the "marble") thus counting as two layers. Therefore counting the center ball and the other moveable layers will make up the total layers of the ball minus two layers, those remaining two layers are the ones fused together making up the outer shell. For example - an 18 layer ball will have 16 moveable layers (including the center ball and its inside "marble") plus the 2 fused outer layers.