YBC: Highlights 96 (2024-01-30)

Created by: Wagensonner, Klaus

Two Seals Showing Banquet Scenes (YPM BC 023974 and YPM BC 008968, YBC 9991 and NBC 5987; Early Dynastic III period (about 2600–2350 BC); 25 x 19 and 50 x 26 mm; rock crystal and green calcite)

Feasting and drinking are popular themes on Early Dynastic cylinder seals. As on these two seals, the scenes often show seated men and women holding up cups or drinking from straws from globular vessels. Standing servants attend to the seated drinkers. Feasting was an important social and economic event in Early Dynastic society, an occasion for the elites to redistribute economic surplus to all members of society. As evidenced by the scenes on the seals—in which only some get to enjoy the drink, whereas others only get to stand and watch—feasting, and depicting it in art, was also a way for the upper echelons of society to communicate their elevated status to themselves and to others. Banquet scenes involving two or more people found their apex in Early Dynastic art, whereas on later images, holding a cup became a prerogative of the gods or the deified king. It may be that feasting played a less important role after the Early Dynastic period, but it seems more likely that the change reflects a political shift, away from groups of people being in charge to one individual wielding power at the highest level. See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Lassen, Agnete
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus