This paper treats a distinctive type of wooden chair, which can be found in global museum collections today and is distinguished by ivory or bone inlaid decoration, a high pointed back, raised foot and armrests, and a caned or string covered seat. In East Africa, this type of chair is associated with the coastal cities of Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar, where it is known as “kiti cha enzi,” a Swahili term that is often translated as “chair of power” or alternatively by the geographically oriented appellation, “Lamu chair.” In Egypt, a few similar examples, which likely date from the nineteenth century, can be found on view at the Gayer Anderson House. Orientalist writers Prisse d’Avennes and Edward Lane encountered these chairs in their Egyptian travels and have provided the ethnographic basis for other designations, like the “kursi al-‘immah” or the “Indian wedding chair,” referring to the seat’s function as the place for the groom’s turban in local marriage rites. In the little scholarly attention that they have received, the primary focus has been on determining the origin of this apparently widespread tradition of constructing and ornamenting raised free-standing furniture, often citing carpentry traditions of India and Europe as precedents. This paper engages with this ongoing discourse, but not by trying to resolve the problematic and seemingly multi-sited identity of this chair. Rather, the paper identifies it as an itinerant type of furniture whose meaning lies in the fluid cross-cultural maritime context of the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. In fact, in this arena, carved wooden objects circulated anonymously between various sites of production and consumption and were worked in a manner that obscured their places of origin, rather than revealing them. Thus, the so-called “Indian wedding chair’s” resistance to the demands of the various national art histories of Egypt, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, which have attempted to date, claim, or repatriate it, is evidence of the endurance of this artistic strategy of anonymity.