The Vapheio Cups
Face to face with two astonishing artefacts which strike to the heart of western cattle culture... wild bulls being fought, hunted and observed with an artist's eye - 3,500 years ago!
The Vapheio Cups are on display at the Museum of Archaeology in Athens. To see them, you have to walk through the Bronze Age galleries, past the astonishing gold mask of Agamemnon and the breathtaking diadems uncovered by Schliemann’s famous excavations at Mycenae - and if you can’t immediately picture these objects from their names alone, the chances are that everybody would recognise a photograph of them. They’re probably the most famous artefacts of their kind in the world - they don’t even need those slightly spurious connections to the Iliad in order to make them famous - they’re celebrities in their own right.
By the time you reach the Vapheio Cups, it’s fair to imagine that you’re already exhausted. It’s all too much, and there’s a strong experience of sensory overload - so the Cups are probably doomed to play a distant second fiddle for most people… however, for an enthusiastic follower of all things related to cattle and bulls, they’re unforgettably important. Alongside the bull-jumping mosaics of Knossos, they’re a monumental landmark in human cattle culture.
