Cup-size for practical use, larger for ceremonial use, typically in a roughly conical shape caused by a spout or a pseudo-spout at the bottom.
Writing
May be inscribed and otherwise decorated
Created
Prehistoric times through the present
Silver rhyton with goat protome and death of Orpheus, c.420–410 BC, housed in the Vassil Bojkov Collection, Sofia, Bulgaria. The horn in a continuous and graceful curve makes a right-angled bend. Its lower two thirds are covered by flutes with arc-shaped upper tips. A figural scene below the flaring rim represents the murder of Orpheus. The musician is the central figure, fallen to his right knee, flanked by three attacking Thracian women. He holds a six-string lyre on his right hand and with his left one, wrapped in his mantle, a knobbed wooden stick, with which he tries vainly to protect himself.
A rhyton/ˈraɪˌtɒn,ˈraɪtən/ (pl.: rhytons or, following the Greek plural, rhyta) is a roughly conical container from which fluids were intended to be drunk or to be poured in some ceremony such as libation, or merely at table; in other words, a cup. A rhyton is typically formed in the shape of either an animal's head or an animal horn; in the latter case it often terminates in the shape of an animal's body. Rhyta were produced over large areas of ancient Eurasia during the Bronze and Iron Ages, especially from Persia to the Balkans.
Many have an opening at the bottom through which the liquid fell; this could be either for pouring libations, or as a way of drinking. Others did not, and were merely used as drinking cups, with the characteristic, shared by many early cup forms, that they were "unstable" and could not usually be set down on a surface without spilling their contents.
The English word rhyton originates in the ancient Greek word ῥυτόν (rhy̆tón or rhŭtón). The conical rhyton form has been known in the Aegean region since the Bronze Age, or the 2nd millennium BC. However, it was by no means confined to that region. Similar in form to, and perhaps originating from, the drinking horn, it has been widespread over Eurasia since prehistoric times.
Name and function
Liddell and Scott[2] give a standard derivation from Greek rhein, "to flow", which, according to Julius Pokorny,[3] is from Indo-European*sreu-, "flow". As rhutos is "stream", the neuter, rhuton, would be some sort of object associated with pouring, which is equivalent to English pourer. Many vessels considered rhytons featured a wide mouth at the top and a hole through a conical constriction at the bottom from which the fluid ran. The idea is that one scooped wine or water from a storage vessel or similar source, held it up, unstoppered the hole with one's thumb, and let the fluid run into the mouth (or onto the ground in libation) in the same way that wine is drunk from a wineskin today.
Smith points out[4] that this use is testified in classical paintings and accepts Athenaeus's etymology that it was named ἀπὸ τῆς ῥύσεως, "from the flowing".[5] Smith also categorized the name as having been a recent form (in classical times) of a vessel formerly called the keras, "horn", in the sense of a drinking horn.[6] The word rhyton is not present in what is known about Mycenaean Greek, the oldest form of Greek written in Linear B. However, the bull's head rhyton, of which many examples survive, is mentioned as ke-ra-a on tablet KN K 872,[7] an inventory of vessels at Knossos; it is shown with the bull ideogram (*227VAS; also known as rhyton). Ventris and Chadwick restored the word as the adjective *kera(h)a, with a Mycenaean intervocalic h.[8]
A rhyton drinking vessel with animal details; such vessels were widely produced in Persia during the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), though the lifelike animal details as seen in this one date from the later Parthian Empire (247 BC – AD 224).
Rhyta shaped after bulls are filled through the large opening and emptied through the secondary, smaller one. This means that two hands are required: one to close the secondary opening and one to fill the rhyton. This has led some scholars to believe that rhytons were typically filled with the help of two people or with the help of a chain or a rope that would be passed through a handle. Rhytons modeled after animals were designed to make it look like the animal was drinking when the vessel was being filled.[citation needed] A bull rhyton weighed about three kilograms when empty and up to six kilograms when full.
Other rhytons with animal themes were modeled after boars, lions, and lionesses (such as Lion head horn). Some shapes, such as lioness rhyta, could be filled through simple submersion, thanks to the vessel's shape and buoyancy. Horizontally designed rhyta, like those modeled after lionesses, could be filled by being lowered into a fluid and supported. Vertically designed rhyta, like those modeled after boars, required another hand to cover the primary opening and to prevent the liquid from spilling as the vessel was filled.
Rhyta were often used to strain liquids such as wine, beer, and oil. Some rhyta were used in blood rituals and animal sacrifice. In these cases, the blood may have been thinned with wine. Some vessels were modeled after the animal with which they were intended to be used during ritual, but this was not always the case.[9]
Geography
Roman fresco from Herculaneum demonstrating the use of a rhyton, c.50 BC
Not every drinking horn or libation vessel was pierced at the bottom. An aperture invites zoomorphic interpretation and plastic decoration in the forms of animal heads—bovids, equines, cervids, and even canines—with the fluid pouring from the animals' mouths.
Rhyta occur among the remains of civilizations speaking different languages and language groups in and around the Near and Middle East, such as Persia, from the second millennium BC. They are often shaped like animals' heads or horns and can be very ornate and compounded with precious metals and stones. In Minoan Crete, silver-and-gold bulls' heads with round openings for the wine (permitting wine to pour from the bulls' mouths) seemed particularly common, for several have been recovered from the great palaces (Heraklion Archaeological Museum).
One of the oldest examples of the concept of an animal figure holding a long flat ended conical shaped vessel in hands was known to be discovered from Susa, in Southwestern Iran, in Proto Elamite era about 3rd millennium BC, is a silver figurine of a cow with body of a sitting woman actually offering the vessel between both her bovine hoofs.
Rhytons were very common in ancient Persia, where they were called takuk (تکوک). After a Greek victory against Persia, much silver, gold, and other luxuries, including numerous rhytons, were brought to Athens. Persian rhytons were immediately imitated by Greek artists.[10] Not all rhyta were so valuable; many were simply decorated conical cups in ceramic.
Rhytons are represented in Chinese archaeology.[11]
Classical Athenian pottery, such as red-figured vases, are typically painted with themes from mythology. One standard theme depicts satyrs, which symbolize ribaldry, with rhyta and wineskins. The horn-shaped rhyta are carefully woven in composition with the erect male organs of the satyrs, but this blatantly sexual and somewhat humorous theme appears to be a late development, consistent with Athenian humor, as is expressed in the plays of Aristophanes. The ornate and precious rhyta of the great civilizations of earlier times are grandiose rather than ribald, which gives the democratic vase paintings an extra satirical dimension.
The connection of satyrs with wine and rhyta is made in Nonnus's epic Dionysiaca. He describes the satyrs at the first trampling of the grapes during the invention of wine-making by Dionysos:
...the fruit bubbled out red juice with white foam. They scooped it up with oxhorns, instead of cups which had not yet been seen, so that ever after the cup of mixed wine took this divine name of 'Winehorn'.[12]
Károly Kerényi, in quoting this passage,[13] remarks, "At the core of this richly elaborated myth, in which the poet even recalls the rhyta, it is not easy to separate the Cretan elements from those originating in Asia Minor." The connection to which he refers is a pun not present in English translation: the wine is mixed (kerannymenos), which appears to contain the bull's horn (keras), the ancient Greek name of the rhyton.
In the myth, ichor from Olympus falls among rocks. From it grow grapevines. One grows around a pine tree, where a serpent, winding up the tree, eats the grapes. Dionysus, seeing the snake, pursues it into a hole in the rocks. Following an oracle of Rhea, the Cretan mountain goddess, Dionysus hollows out the hole and tramples grapes in it, dancing and shouting. The goddess, the rocks, the snake, and the dancing are Cretan themes. The cult of Dionysus was Anatolian. At its most abstract, the rhyton is the container of the substance of life, celebrated by the ritual dancing on the grapes.
4th century BC Greek gold and bronze drinking horn with head of Dionysus from Tamoikin Art Fund
An Ancient Greekrhyton serving vessel in the shape of a dog's head, made by Brygos, early 5th century BC. Jérôme Carcopino Museum, Department of Archaeology, Aleria.
The Stag's Head Rhyton dating to 400 BCE, the largest so far known of recent examples, recently surrendered and worth $3.5 million, originally rediscovered in the 20th century after rampant looting in Milas, Turkey[15][16][17]
↑ The horn in a continuous and graceful curve makes a right-angled bend. Its lower two thirds are covered by flutes with arc-shaped upper tips. A figural scene below the flaring rim represents the murder of Orpheus. The musician is the central figure, fallen to his right knee, flanked by three attacking Thracian women. He holds a six-string lyre on his right hand and with his left one, wrapped in his mantle, a knobbed wooden stick, with which he tries vainly to protect himself.
↑ Smith, William; Wayte, William; Marindin, GE, eds. (1901). "Rhyton". A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Vol.II (3rd Revised, Enlargeded.). London: John Murray.
↑ Kerenyi, Karl (1996). Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp.58–60.
↑ Rhyton. The upper section of the luxury vessel used for drinking wines is wrought from silver plate with gilded edge with embossed ivy branch. The lower part goes in the cast Protoma horse. The work of the Greek master, probably for Thracian aristocrat. Perhaps Thrace, the end of the 4th century BC. NG Prague, Kinský Palace, NM-HM10 1407.
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus by the Greeks for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherius, his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. His thyrsus, a fennel-stem sceptre, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.
Ampelos or Ampelus (Latin) was a personification of the grapevine and lover of Dionysus in Greek and Bacchus in Roman mythology. He was a satyr that either turned into a constellation or the grape vine, due to Dionysus.
A libation is a ritual pouring of a liquid as an offering to a deity or spirit, or in memory of the dead. It was common in many religions of antiquity and continues to be offered in cultures today.
In the material culture of classical antiquity, a patera or phiale is a shallow ceramic or metal libation bowl. It often has a bulbous indentation in the center underside to facilitate holding it, in which case it is sometimes called a mesomphalic phiale. It typically has no handles, and no feet.
The Lenaia was an annual Athenian festival with a dramatic competition. It was one of the lesser festivals of Athens and Ionia in ancient Greece. The Lenaia took place in Athens in Gamelion, roughly corresponding to January. The festival was in honour of Dionysus Lenaios. There is also evidence the festival also took place in Delphi.
The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which sometimes used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques to remove inhibitions. It also provided some liberation for men and women marginalized by Greek society, among which were slaves, outlaws, and non-citizens. In their final phase the Mysteries shifted their emphasis from a chthonic, underworld orientation to a transcendental, mystical one, with Dionysus changing his nature accordingly. By its nature as a mystery religion reserved for the initiated, many aspects of the Dionysian cult remain unknown and were lost with the decline of Greco-Roman polytheism; modern knowledge is derived from descriptions, imagery and cross-cultural studies.
Aegean art is art that was created in the lands surrounding, and the islands within, the Aegean Sea during the Bronze Age, that is, until the 11th century BC, before Ancient Greek art. Because it is mostly found in the territory of modern Greece, it is sometimes called Greek Bronze Age art, though it includes not just the art of the Mycenaean Greeks, but also that of the Cycladic and Minoan cultures, which converged over time.
A drinking horn is the horn of a bovid used as a cup. Drinking horns are known from Classical Antiquity, especially the Balkans, and remained in use for ceremonial purposes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in some parts of Europe, notably in Germanic Europe, and in the Caucasus. Drinking horns remain an important accessory in the culture of ritual toasting in Georgia in particular, where they are known by the local name of kantsi.
A kantharos or cantharus is a type of ancient Greek cup used for drinking. Although almost all surviving examples are in Greek pottery, the shape, like many Greek vessel types, probably originates in metalwork. In its iconic "Type A" form, it is characterized by its deep bowl, tall pedestal foot, and pair of high-swung handles which extend above the lip of the pot. The Greek words kotylos and kotyle are other ancient names for this same shape.
Pseira is an islet in the Gulf of Mirabello in northeastern Crete with the archaeological remains of Minoan and Mycenean civilisation.
The Minoan civilization produced a wide variety of richly decorated Minoan pottery. Its restless sequence of quirky maturing artistic styles reveals something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists in assigning relative dates to the strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, in Cyprus, along coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans.
Minoan religion was the religion of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization of Crete. In the absence of readable texts from most of the period, modern scholars have reconstructed it almost totally on the basis of archaeological evidence such as Minoan paintings, statuettes, vessels for rituals and seals and rings. Minoan religion is considered to have been closely related to Near Eastern ancient religions, and its central deity is generally agreed to have been a goddess, although a number of deities are now generally thought to have been worshipped. Prominent Minoan sacred symbols include the bull and the horns of consecration, the labrys double-headed axe, and possibly the serpent.
The oldest evidence of ancient wine production has been found in Georgia from c. 6000 BC , Iran from c. 5000 BC, Greece from c. 4500 BC, Armenia from c. 4100 BC, and Sicily from c. 4000 BC. The earliest evidence of fermented alcoholic beverage of rice, honey and fruit, sometimes compared to wine, is claimed in China.
The influence of wine in ancient Greece helped ancient Greece trade with neighboring countries and regions. Many mannerisms and cultural aspects were associated with wine. It led to great change in Ancient Greece as well.
The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.
Minoan art is the art produced by the Bronze Age Aegean Minoan civilization from about 3000 to 1100 BC, though the most extensive and finest survivals come from approximately 2300 to 1400 BC. It forms part of the wider grouping of Aegean art, and in later periods came for a time to have a dominant influence over Cycladic art. Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved surviving examples of Minoan art are its pottery, palace architecture, small sculptures in various materials, jewellery, metal vessels, and intricately-carved seals.
The Borovo Treasure, also known as the Borovo Silver Treasure, is a Thracian hoard of five matching silver-gilt items discovered in late 1974 while ploughing a field in Borovo, Bulgaria.
The Archaeological Museum of Pella is a museum in Pella in the Pella regional unit of Central Macedonia. The building was designed by architect Kostas Skroumpellos and is on the site of the ancient city of Pella. It was completed in 2009 with the support of the Greece's Third Community Support Framework.
A cup is an open-top vessel (container) used to hold liquids for drinking, typically with a flattened hemispherical shape, and often with a capacity of about 100–250 millilitres (3–8 US fl oz). Cups may be made of pottery, glass, metal, wood, stone, polystyrene, plastic, lacquerware, or other materials. Normally, a cup is brought in contact with the mouth for drinking, distinguishing it from other tableware and drinkware forms such as jugs. They also most typically have handles, though a beaker has no handle or stem, and small bowl shapes are very common in Asia.
The Achaemenid Persian Lion Rhyton is a gold rhyton from the Achaemenid Empire, dated to about 500 BC. It is 6.7 inches high and is made in solid gold, with the different parts joined together by soldering, done so skilfully as to leave no obvious marks.
The lion head horn is one of several kinds of drinking horns that have been used throughout Eurasia since prehistoric times. Horns with animal heads have been found among artifacts from the Near East and the Middle East, dating perhaps to classical antiquity or the time of Archaic Greece. The lion head horn, while not very common, does seem to have recurred across a span of several centuries.
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