Cup

Cups of this kind were drinking vessels. The intact condition of the delicate glass indicates its origin from a grave, where it survived the vagaries of time. The dead were often given tableware to take to the grave, one vessel to drink, one to eat, sometimes also a jug or a bowl. This cup and the small bowl in the display case are examples of the glass tableware common in the 1st and 2nd centuries. The almost colourless yellowish-green glass points to the eastern Mediterranean area as the region of production.

Like the other objects in the display case on the right, this piece also comes from the illegally excavated collection of Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832-1904), who was first a professional military officer, then a diplomat and amateur archaeologist, and from 1879 the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These glasses were purchased at an auction in Paris in 1873 by Friedrich Imhoof-Blumer, the great Swiss numismatist, and were later bequeathed to the Münzkabinett Winterthur.

As with most of the antique objects in the extensive collection of Cesnola, which mainly went to the Metropolitan Museum, we know neither the exact excavation site of the pieces nor the context in which they were found. By tearing apart the finds from a site, important information for dating the graves, the gender of the deceased, but also about their social position, their habits, their access to imported goods and their ideas about the afterlife are lost to scholarship.

On the basis of this cup alone, it is not possible, for example, to draw any conclusions as to whether the deceased person was given only glassware or also domestic or imported clay vessels. Maybe there was also a valuable metal object in the grave. Moreover, it is also not possible to determine from such an individual find whether it was new or already had a certain age at the time of the deceased’s death.