This silver drinking vessel is conventionally called a phiale (plural phialai), an ancient Greek term for any wide, shallow bowl. It has a carinated, or ridged, shoulder and a turned-out rim. In the center of the bowl is a raised boss, usually referred to by the Greek term omphalos, surrounded by fourteen tongue-shaped depressions. Between the depressions are deep, rounded lobes, or gadroons, and between these gadroons are smaller rounded lobes. A cuneiform inscription in Old Persian that runs around the interior of the rim reads "Artaxerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of lands, son of Xerxes the king, Xerxes son of Darius the king, the Achaemenid: in his house this silver bowl was made." The vessel was made by raising and sinking a single sheet of metal, and then adding chased details, a method that was employed for most Achaemenid metalware.
This bowl is part of a set of four, nearly identical vessels that all feature the same inscription and only vary slightly in size. The inscription implies that it was used at the royal table. Persian kings used banquets to display their wealth and power, and it was a great honor to be invited to dine with the king. It was a greater honor still to receive a drinking vessel as a gift – thus memorializing one’s status as a royal dinner guest – and this ostentatiously large inscribed bowl was likely intended for such a purpose. No doubt it took practice to drink adeptly from a vessel like this, but the omphalos in the base would have made it easier to hold with one hand, with the middle finger hooked inside the indentation and the thumb stretched out to grip the vessel at or near the rim.
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By 1932, known on the art market; 1940, purchased by Joseph Brummer from Arthur Upham Pope (Brummer inv. no. N4513); acquired by the Museum in 1947, purchased from the estate of Joseph Brummer, New York.
"Six Thousand Years of Persian Art," American Institute of Iranian Art and Archaeology, New York, April 24–July 1, 1940.
“Art of the Ancient Near East.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 4, 1949–September 5, 1949.
"Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World." The Getty Villa, Los Angeles, April 6, 2022–August 8, 2022.
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Pope, Arthur Upham. 1945. Masterpieces of Persian Art. New York: Dryden Press, p. 48 pl. 32.
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Amandry, Pierre. 1956. "Vaiselle d'argent de l'époque achéménide (Collection Hélène Stathatos)," Arch. Ephem. 1953-1954, pp. 12-13, fig. 2.
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Harper, P.O. et al. 1983. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection of the Ancient Near East Department, exh. cat. Tokyo: Chunichi Shimbun, fig. 11.
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Garrison, Mark B. 2021. "The Minor Arts." In A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, edited by Bruno Jacobs and Robert Rollinger. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 1403, fig. 95.2.
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Colburn, Henry P. 2022. "Some Material Correlates of Drinking in the Achaemenid Empire." In Food for Gods, Food for Mortals: Culinary and Dining Practices in the Greater Iranian World, ed. Shervin Farridnejad and Touraj Daryaee. Cista: Studies in the History, Cultures and Religions of the Iranian World 1. Irvine: UCI Jordan Center for Persian Studies, pp. 57-58, fig. 4.
Dunn-Vaturi, Anne and Martina Rugiadi. 2023. "The Brummer Gallery and the Making of Iranian and Islamic Arts." In The Brummer Galleries, Paris and New York: Defining Taste from Antiquities to the Avant-Garde, edited by Christine Brennan, Christel Hollevoet-Force, and Yaëlle Biro. Boston: Brill, pp. 417 and 429, n. 19 and Table 10.1, no. 39.
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Includes more than 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the time of the Arab conquests of the seventh century A.D.
