Hero and Animal Combat Beaker (900–700 BCE): Art, History and Details

Hero and Animal Combat Beaker (900–700 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

On this silver beaker, two registers show men grabbing felines by the paws and stabbing rearing beasts amid stylized trees. The bearded men wear long robes and scarves, carefully created using repoussé. A large guilloche pattern (interlacing curved lines) containing a smaller guilloche pattern and punctuated by round bosses fills the space between the registers. This beaker may show a Master of Animals or a hero in combat, popular motifs in the ancient Near East.

Object facts

• Title: Hero and Animal Combat Beaker
• Date: 900–700 BCE
• Culture: Iran, Luristan
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: silver, repoussé, engraved
• Dimensions: Diameter: 7.7 cm (3 1/16 in.); Overall: 10.1 cm (4 in.)
• Collection: Near Eastern Art
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1963.95

A detail from the museum

Repoussé is a technique of hammering into metal to create designs and figures.

Collection credit

Gift of K. Rabenou

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• Shepherd, Dorothy G. “Four Early Silver Objects from Iran.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 2 (February 1966): 38–50.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.