The fountain depicts a life-size female figure pouring water from an urn into a bowl with the inscriptions "take the water of life freely" and "water is best".
Rosewood lent itself admirably to carving African figures, too, as shown by a delicately modeled German figure of a "Black Female Nude" (1600-10) that suggests an African-inspired trope on the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures of "Crouching Aphrodite, " versions of which had been engraved by the early 16th century.
The message has sunk in in Bahrain, where a third of finance-sector employees are female, and in Kuwait, where, including property, the figure rises to 40%.