Question: how did ancient Persians drink their wine at a rich man’s banquet? Not the way you think. The Persian bon vivant, half a millennium BC, took his wine – unmixed with water, as Greeks disapprovingly noted – from a rhyton, a drinking horn. And you didn’t just drink from it. You or a slave poured the wine through the spout from a height either into a shallow drinking bowl, balanced elegantly on your fingers, or possibly just into your mouth: quite a performance, especially if you’ve had a few.
And if the rhyton is shaped like a fearsome beast, real or mythological, it was meant to bestow its power on the holder. The splendid griffin that features on the exhibition poster is the base of an impressive silver rhyton, inlaid with gold, with a tiny hole between its forelegs to allow the wine to escape.
In this exhibition on luxury in the ancient near and Middle East, it’s the drinking horns that steal the show. We see the Panagyurishte Treasure, found in 1949, by three brothers digging clay for bricks in a bit of Bulgaria that was once part of Thrace, that great crossing point between Europe and Asia. What a find is is – eight beautiful gold vessels, marvellously made around the time of Alexander the Great: four animal-faced rhytons, three jug-rhytons in the form of goddess-heads, a stunning amphora with centaurs for handles and a shallow drinking bowl showing concentric rows of African faces. Our world looks too shabby to contain them.
Yet, other pieces that run close, not least a marvellous little gold chariot from the celebrated Oxus treasure, exquisitely made, with a charioteer wearing a gold torc on his neck, forever holding his horses’ reins while his master – a satrap perhaps – looks out impassively.
Nearby we find a reconstruction of the clothes he might have worn – contrasting squares of strikingly colourful fabric drawn in with a belt. Purple was for the elite, and there’s a video showing how a gland extracted from a sea snail is dried and ground to make vivid pigment. Poor snail, but he didn’t die in vain.
The exhibition juxtaposes the conspicuous luxury of the Persians of the Achaemenid dynasty with the different aesthetic and politics of Greece – though an exquisite Greek circlet of flattened gold oak leaves is very luxurious indeed. So too is an exquisite ivory satyr’s head: a furniture overlay.
There is, throughout, running commentary from Greek sources on the Persians whom, on the one hand, they despise as effeminates whose kings walk under parasols and wear eye kohl, and on the other fear and envy. There are some striking red pottery pieces showing Persians in undignified poses; Midas the king with ass’s ears is shown as a Persian.
Alexander the Great who conquered the Persians is here, with a fine posthumous portrait head from Egypt, but we are reminded that he too fell victim to Persian ways, by having courtiers prostrate themselves in front of him. Very un-Greek.
The Greeks have the last laugh. All the most fabulous things here are Persian, but their take on a rhyton was a drinking jug with an animal at its base. If you lift up the donkey version to drink, it looks like you are the ass.
