Ram-Head Drinking Vessel (c. 600 BCE): Art, History and Details

Ram-Head Drinking Vessel (c. 600 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The Medes, who conquered the Assyrians, were soon conquered by the Achaemenian Cyrus the Great, king of Persia from 559 to 529 BC. The rhyton, or horn-shaped drinking vessel, popular among the Medes, was adopted by the Achaemenians.

Object facts

• Title: Ram-Head Drinking Vessel
• Date: c. 600 BCE
• Culture: Iran, Median
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: silver
• Dimensions: Overall: 30.3 x 19.8 x 18.7 cm (11 15/16 x 7 13/16 x 7 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Near Eastern Art
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1963.479

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

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 (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.