The Barber Cup and Crawford Cup are two non-matching carved fluorite cups from about 50–100 AD. They were discovered during World War I by an Austro-Croatian officer who excavated a Roman tomb near the current Turkish–Syrian border. Both cups are now in the collection of the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, which acquired the Crawford Cup in 1971 and the Barber Cup in 2004. The two cups are the only two vessels carved from fluorite (also known as fluorspar) that are known to have survived intact from the Roman period.

Murrine vessels

Hardstone carving Hardstone carving is a general term in art history and archaeology for the artistic carving of predominantly semi-precious stones (but also of gemstones), such as jade, rock crystal (clear quartz), agate, onyx, jasper, serpentinite, or carnelian, ...

s were highly valued luxury items in the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic '' ...

wrote about exorbitant amounts of money spent for cups made of "murrine" (almost certainly fluorite). Cups made from the stone gave a strange, pleasing taste to wine drunk from them. This was probably from residual resin (perhaps

myrrh Myrrh (; from Semitic, but see '' § Etymology'') is a gum-resin extracted from a number of small, thorny tree species of the genus ''Commiphora''. Myrrh resin has been used throughout history as a perfume, incense and medicine. Myrrh mi ...

) that was applied to the stones, while they were carved, to prevent shattering. Pliny described the softness of the material (one Roman counsel nibbled at the edges of his cup) as well as its many-colored, banded appearance. The source of murrine was Persia.

Discovery and provenance

The two cups were discovered with other items in a Roman tomb near the modern border between

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

and

Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...

by an Austro-Croatian officer during World War I. Inside the tomb was a lead casket containing some gold medallions and the two fluorite vessels. All the items were dispersed shortly after World War I. It is unclear who originally purchased the two-handled cup, but by 1949 it was in the possession of A.I. Loewental.

The Art Fund Art Fund (formerly the National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charitable organization, charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for man ...

acquired this vessel for the British Museum in 1971 at a cost of , and named it the Crawford Cup after

David Lindsay, 28th Earl of Crawford David Alexander Robert Lindsay, 28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres, (20 November 1900 – 13 December 1975), known as Lord Balniel from 1913 to 1940, was a British Unionist politician. Life Lindsay was born at 49 Moray Place in ...

, a trustee of the museum. The Crawford Cup is a two-handled goblet or '' kantharos'', whose Roman origin is reinforced by its close similarity in design with the

Cup of the Ptolemies The Cup of the Ptolemies ( French: ''Coupe des Ptolémées''), also known as the Cup of Saint Denis, is an onyx cameo two-handled cup, or ''kantharos''. The cup, decorated with Dionysiac vignettes and emblems, was carved at some point in Classi ...

, an agate ''kantharos'' now in Paris. It measures 9.7 cm high by 10.7 cm in diameter. It is 14.9 cm wide (including the handles) and weighs 867 g. The one-handled cup was acquired by the Belgian collector Baron Adolphe Stoclet in Paris during the 1920s. In 2004, The Art Fund and other donors acquired this cup for British Museum via the antiquities dealer

Charles Ede Charles Richard Montague Ede (22 October 1921 – 29 May 2002"Ede, Charles Richard Montague (1921–2002)" by Brian Wolfson in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Jan 2006, online edition, January 2011. Retrieved 2 ...

for , and named it the Barber Cup after the former chairman of the British Museum Friends, Nicholas Barber. The Barber Cup has a low-relief design of a vine and grapes, and may have been intended as a ''trulla'', or dipper. It measures 15 cm high (13.5 cm without the handle) by 9.5 cm wide (at the rim). The foot is 6.4 cm in diameter.

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External links

* The

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