Week 7 - Drinking and Dining

The so-called 'Lydian Treasure' is a large assemblage of grave goods from a group of elite tombs of the Achaemenid period from eastern Lydia, east of Sardis (Toptepe, Ikiztepe and others).  These tombs were systematically looted in the 1960s, and their contents sold in the United States.  Many of the objects were purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in New York; after a landmark legal battle, they were returned to Turkey in the early 1990s, and are now the main reason to visit the excellent little archaeological museum in the remote Turkish town of Uşak. 

The Lydian Treasure consists of some 363 objects, catalogued in the amazing volume I. Özgen & J. Öztürk, Heritage Recovered: The Lydian Treasure (1996), and discussed here.  It forms one of the finest assemblages of elite Achaemenid (or rather 'Persianizing'?) material culture known from the entire Achaemenid world. Particularly relevant for our purposes are the drinking and dining vessels, some of which are illustrated here, but you ought to get to know the assemblage as a whole. 

Deve Hüyük is located in Northern Syria, close to a crossing of the river Euphrates and c. 70km north-west of Aleppo. The history of the material from the cemeteries is somewhat tumultuous, but the first comprehensive publication of it was P. R. S. Moorey, Cemeteries of the first millennium B.C., at Deve Hüyük (1980). At that time, the material found in burials at Deve Hüyük II constituted ‘the only coherent group of archaeological material so far available from a Near Eastern fifth century context that may be cited for comparison with the literary and pictorial evidence for the weaponry of soldiers in the Achaemenid armies’ (50). The burials seem to belong to the period around 480-380 BC, and the weaponry and armour found in them raise important questions about ethnicity and culture: who made up the Achaemenid armies? The objects from the Deve Hüyük burials can be usefully compared with Achaemenid and “regional” art, as well as with the testimony of writers such as Herodotus; for examples and a demonstration of this method, see P. R. S. Moorey, ‘The Iranian Contribution to Achaemenid Material Culture’ Iran 23 (1985) 21-37.
 
The weapons from the Deve Hüyük burials are well worth getting to know, but particularly important from our perspective this week are the drinking vessels from Deve Hüyük, which provide non-elite versions (in clay and bronze) of all four of the types of drinking vessel which are generally identified as characteristically 'Achaemenid': the "Achaemenid Bowl", a deep cup with offset carinated rim; the shallower phiale, usually with omphalos at the centre and lobes or flutes on its sides; a deep hemispherical bowl; and the animal-protome rhyton.  (Some of these are on display in the Ashmolean Museum’s Near East gallery). For brief discussion, see E. Dusinberre, Empire, Authority and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia (2013), 104-5, 183-7, and for the four vessel-types, p.129.
 
This material can give us useful insights into the actual structure of the Achaemenid military, with its ‘complex relationship between a Persian/Iranian ethnic identity and the broader notion of an Achaemenid elite social or political identity’; senior commanders tended to be Persians whilst the rank-and-file were normally locals or sometimes Iranians (G. J. Stein, ‘Persians on the Euphrates? Material Culture and Identity in Two Achaemenid Burials from Hacınebi, Southeast Turkey’ in M. Stolper et al. Extraction and Control (2014)265-286). These burials provide ample opportunity for exploration of the structure of the military, the spread of culture (divergence, convergence, or both?), and the very nature of the interaction between the Achaemenid rulers with the land and the people they ruled.