The excellent preservation of the ivory-covered chair Γ from the 8th-century BCE Tomb 79 in Salamis calls for a deeper analysis of the object than scholarship has offered since its discovery in the 1960s. The decision to include this object (and the other burial goods) in this tomb – whether by the deceased himself or by those who buried him – projected a specific identity upon him. Various physical and aesthetic qualities of chair Γ would each have added a particular facet to this overall identity. In this paper, I will analyse five of these qualities, which I term ‘agentive mechanisms.’ These include the chair’s nature as a luxury object, its nature as a foreign object, its nature as an ivory object, its luminosity, and its iconography. These mechanisms would have been activated during a public funerary ritual, when the audience (likely the community at Salamis) would have viewed the chair in association with the deceased. As a foreign, luxury object, chair Γ gave the deceased social, political, and diplomatic legitimacy. Its ivory material drew its possessor into an elite circle of consumers of ivory objects – perhaps, specifically, of ivory chairs/thrones. The luminous nature of the ivory and its gold decoration may have associated the chair – and thus the deceased – with the sacred or divine, while the iconography of the ivory goods as a whole may have projected an identity of kingship. By way of these mechanisms, chair Γ was meant to agentively mark, and thus legitimize, the deceased as a socially significant, politically able, diplomatically savvy, divinely touched, king-like figure. The memory of this figure and the goods buried with him would have left a lasting impact on the community and perhaps helped create a legend of a powerful ancestor of a royal dynasty.