The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
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. Although the two terms may be used interchangeably, particularly in the context of Etruscan culture, phiale is more common in reference to Greek forms, and patera in Roman settings, not to be confused with the Greek (Πατέρας) Patéras or Father.
The Mildenhall Treasure is a large hoard of 34 masterpieces of Roman silver tableware from the fourth century AD, and by far the most valuable Roman objects artistically and by weight of bullion in Britain. It was found at West Row, near Mildenhall, Suffolk, in 1942. It consists of over thirty items and includes the Great Dish which weighs over 8 kg (18 lb).
A bowl is a typically round dish or container generally used for preparing, serving, or consuming food. The interior of a bowl is characteristically shaped like a spherical cap, with the edges and the bottom forming a seamless curve. This makes bowls especially suited for holding liquids and loose food, as the contents of the bowl are naturally concentrated in its center by the force of gravity. The exterior of a bowl is most often round, but can be of any shape, including rectangular.
The National Archaeological Museum of Naples is an important Italian archaeological museum, particularly for ancient Roman remains. Its collection includes works from Greek, Roman and Renaissance times, and especially Roman artifacts from the nearby Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum sites. From 1816 to 1861, it was known as Real Museo Borbonico.
The Ziwiye hoard is a treasure hoard containing gold, silver, and ivory objects, also including a few gold pieces with the shape of human face, that was uncovered on in Ziwiyeh plat near Saqqez city in Kurdistan Province, Iran, in 1947.
Sant'Angelo Muxaro is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Agrigento in the Italian region Sicily, located about 70 kilometres (43 mi) south of Palermo and about 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of Agrigento. The town was founded and historically inhabited by the Arbëreshë community.
The Water Newton Treasure is a hoard of fourth-century Roman silver, discovered near the location of the Roman town of Durobrivae at Water Newton in the English county of Cambridgeshire in 1975. The hoard consisted of 27 silver items and one small gold plaque. Because of inscriptions found on some of the pieces in the collection it has been suggested that they may have been used in a local church, and they therefore comprise the earliest probable group of Christian liturgical silver yet found in the Roman Empire.
The Panagyurishte Treasure is a Thracian treasure.
The Pietroasele Treasure found in Pietroasele, Buzău, Romania, in 1837, is a late fourth-century Gothic treasure that included some twenty-two objects of gold, among the most famous examples of the polychrome style of Migration Period art. Of the twenty-two pieces, only twelve have survived, conserved at the National Museum of Romanian History, in Bucharest: a large eagle-headed fibula and three smaller ones encrusted with semi-precious stones; a patera, or round sacrificial dish, modelled with Orphic figures surrounding a seated three-dimensional goddess in the center; a twelve-sided cup, a ring with a Gothic runic inscription, a large tray, two other necklaces and a pitcher. Their multiple styles, in which Han Chinese styles have been noted in the belt buckles, Hellenistic styles in the golden bowls, Sasanian motifs in the baskets, and Germanic fashions in the fibulae, are characteristic of the cosmopolitan outlook of the Cernjachov culture in a region without defined topographic confines.
The Oxus treasure is a collection of about 180 surviving pieces of metalwork in gold and silver, most relatively small, and around 200 coins, from the Achaemenid Persian period which were found by the Oxus river about 1877–1880. The exact place and date of the find remain unclear, but is often proposed as being near Kobadiyan. It is likely that many other pieces from the hoard were melted down for bullion; early reports suggest there were originally some 1500 coins, and mention types of metalwork that are not among the surviving pieces. The metalwork is believed to date from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, but the coins show a greater range, with some of those believed to belong to the treasure coming from around 200 BC. The most likely origin for the treasure is that it belonged to a temple, where votive offerings were deposited over a long period. How it came to be deposited is unknown.
The Nimrud ivories are a large group of small carved ivory plaques and figures dating from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC that were excavated from the Assyrian city of Nimrud during the 19th and 20th centuries. The ivories mostly originated outside Mesopotamia and are thought to have been made in the Levant and Egypt, and have frequently been attributed to the Phoenicians due to a number of the ivories containing Phoenician inscriptions. They are foundational artefacts in the study of Phoenician art, together with the Phoenician metal bowls, which were discovered at the same time but identified as Phoenician a few years earlier. However, both the bowls and the ivories pose a significant challenge as no examples of either – or any other artefacts with equivalent features – have been found in Phoenicia or other major colonies.
The Aegina Treasure or Aigina Treasure is an important Minoan gold hoard said to have been found on the island of Aegina, Greece. Since 1892, it has been part of the British Museum's collection. It is one of the most important groups of Minoan jewellery.
The Carthage Treasure is a Roman silver hoard, which was found in Tunis, Tunisia, at the site of the ancient city of Carthage. The treasure principally consists of silver tableware and jewellery, most of which is now held at the British Museum.
The Bursa Treasure or Brusa Treasure is the name of an early Roman silver hoard found in the city of Bursa, Turkey. Since 1913, the entire treasure has been at the British Museum.
The Boscoreale Treasure is a large collection of exquisite silver and gold Roman objects discovered in the ruins of the ancient Villa della Pisanella at Boscoreale, near Pompeii, southern Italy. Consisting of over a hundred pieces of silverware, as well as gold coins and jewellery, it is now mostly kept at the Louvre Museum in Paris, although parts of the treasure can also be found at the British Museum.
Jack Ogden, FSA, FGA, is a British jewellery historian with a particular interest in the development of Materials and technology. He is considered one of the foremost experts in his field. He is the current President of The Society of Jewellery Historians, having held the position since February 2018, and was appointed visiting professor of Ancient Jewellery, Material and Technology, at the Birmingham School of Jewellery Birmingham City University in 2019
Phoenician metal bowls are approximately 90 decorative bowls made in the 7th–8th centuries BCE from bronze, silver and gold, found since the mid-19th century in the Eastern Mediterranean and Iraq. They were historically attributed to the Phoenicians, but are today considered to have been made by a broader group of Levantine peoples.
