Rhyton
 Example: Golden rhyton from Iran's Achaemenid period. Excavated at Ecbatana. Kept at National Museum of Iran. | |
| Material | Ceramic, metal, horn, stone |
|---|---|
| Size | Cup-size for practical use, larger for ceremonial use, always in a roughly conical shape caused by a spout or a pseudo-spout at the bottom. |
| Writing | May be inscribed and otherwise decorated |
| Created | Prehistoric times through the present |
| Present location | Eurasia |
A rhyton (plural rhytons or, following the Greek plural, rhyta) is a container from which fluids were intended to be drunk or to be poured in some ceremony such as libation. The English word rhyton originates in the ancient Greek word ῥυτόν (rhŭtón). The conical rhyton form has been known in the Aegean region since the Bronze Age, or the 2nd millennium BC. However, it was by no means confined to that region. Similar in form to, and perhaps originating from, the drinking horn, it has been widespread over Eurasia since prehistoric times.
Name and function
Liddell and Scott[1] give a standard derivation from Greek rhein, "to flow", which, according to Julius Pokorny,[2] is from Indo-European *sreu-, "flow." As rhutos is "stream," the neuter, rhuton, would be some sort of object associated with pouring, which is equivalent to English "pourer". Many vessels considered rhytons featured a wide mouth at the top and a hole through a conical constriction at the bottom from which the fluid ran. The idea is that one scooped wine or water from a storage vessel or similar source, held it up, unstoppered the hole with one's thumb, and let the fluid run into the mouth (or onto the ground in libation) in the same way that wine is drunk from a wineskin today.
Smith points out[3] that this use is testified in classical paintings and accepts Athenaeus's etymology that it was named apo tes rhyseos, "from the flowing". Smith also categorized the name as having been a recent form (in classical times) of a vessel formerly called the keras, "horn", in the sense of a drinking horn. The word rhyton is not present in what is known about Mycenaean Greek, the oldest form of Greek written in Linear B. However, the bull's head rhyton, of which many examples survive, is mentioned as ke-ra-a on tablet KN K 872, an inventory of vessels at Knossos; it is shown with the bull ideogram. The word is restored as an adjective, *kera(h)a, with Mycenaean intervocalic h.[4]
Wide provenance
It cannot be supposed that every drinking horn or libation vessel was pierced at the bottom, especially in the prehistoric phases of the form. The scoop function would have come first. Once the holes began, however, they invited zoomorphic interpretation and plastic decoration in the forms of animal heads--bovids, equines, cervids, and even canines--with the fluid pouring from the animal's mouth.
Rhyta occur among the remains of civilizations speaking different languages and language groups in and around the Near and Middle East, such as Persia, from the second millennium BC. They are often shaped like animals' heads or horns and can be very ornate and compounded with precious metals and stones. In Minoan Crete, silver and gold bulls' heads with round openings for the wine (permitting wine to pour from the bulls' mouths) seemed particularly common, for several have been recovered from the great palaces (Iraklion Archaeological Museum).
Rhytons were very common in ancient Persia, where they were called takuk (تکوک). After a Greek victory against Persia, much silver, gold, and other luxuries, including numerous rhytons, were brought to Athens. Persian rhytons were immediately imitated by Greek artists.[5]
Not all rhyta were so valuable; many were simply decorated conical cups in ceramic.
Greek symbolism
Classical Athenian pottery, such as red-figured vases, are decorated with painted themes typically from mythology. One standard theme depicts satyrs, which symbolize ribaldry, with rhyta and wineskins. The horn-shaped rhyta are carefully woven in composition with the erect male organs of the satyrs, but this blatantly sexual and somewhat humorous theme appears to be a late development, in keeping with Athenian humor, as is expressed in the plays of Aristophanes. The ornate and precious rhyta of the great civilizations of earlier times are grandiose rather than ribald, which gives the democratic vase paintings an extra satirical dimension.
The connection of satyrs with wine and rhyta is made in Nonnus's epic Dionysiaca. He describes the satyrs at the first trampling of the grapes during the invention of wine-making by Dionysos:
- "...the fruit bubbled out red juice with white foam. They scooped it up with oxhorns, instead of cups which had not yet been seen, so that ever after the cup of mixed wine took this divine name of 'Winehorn'."[6]
Karl Kerenyi, in quoting this passage,[7] remarks, "At the core of this richly elaborated myth, in which the poet even recalls the rhyta, it is not easy to separate the Cretan elements from those originating in Asia Minor." The connection to which he refers is a pun not present in English translation: the wine is mixed (kerannymenos), which appears to contain the bull's horn (keras), the ancient-Greek name of the rhyton.
In the myth, ichor from Olympus falls among rocks. From it grow grapevines. One grows around a pine tree, where a serpent, winding up the tree, eats the grapes. Dionysus, seeing the snake, pursues it into a hole in the rocks. Following an oracle of Rhea, the Cretan mountain goddess, Dionysus hollows out the hole and tramples grapes in it, dancing and shouting. The goddess, the rocks, the snake, and the dancing are Cretan themes. The cult of Dionysus was Anatolian. At its most abstract, the rhyton is the container of the substance of life, celebrated by the ritual dancing on the grapes.
See also
Notes
- ↑ Henry George Liddell; Robert Scott (1940). "ῤυτὀν". A Greek-English Lexicon. Revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- ↑ "sreu". Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke. 1959. p. 1003.
- ↑ Smith, William; Wayte, William; Marindin, GE, eds. (1901). "Rhyton". A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Volume II (3rd Revised, Enlarged ed.). London: John Murray.
- ↑ Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1973). Documents in Mycenaean Greek (2nd ed.). Cambridge: University Press. pp. 330, 552.
- ↑ Bakker, Janine. "Persian influence on Greece". History of Iran. Iran chamber society. Retrieved 15 June 2012.
- ↑ Dionysiaca XII 361-362.
- ↑ Kerenyi, Karl (1996). Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 58–60.
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