Uraeus
The Uraeus is the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian cobra, used as a symbol of sovereignty, royalty and divine authority in ancient Egypt. The Uraeus is a symbol for the goddess Wadjet, she was one of the earliest Egyptian deities and was depicted as a cobra, as she is the serpent goddess. The center of her cult was in Per-Wadjet called Buto by the Greeks, she became the protector of all of Lower Egypt. The pharaohs wore the uraeus as a head ornament: either with the body of Wadjet atop the head, or as a crown encircling the head. In whatever manner that the Uraeus was displayed upon the pharaoh's head, it was, in effect, part of the pharaoh's crown; the pharaoh was recognized only by wearing the Uraeus. There is evidence for this tradition in the Old Kingdom during the third millennium BCE. Several goddesses associated with or being considered aspects of Wadjet are depicted wearing the uraeus as well. At the time of the unification of Egypt, the image of Nekhbet, the goddess, represented as a white vulture and held the same position as the patron of Upper Egypt, joined the image of Wadjet on the Uraeus that would encircle the crown of the pharaohs who ruled the unified Egypt.
The importance of their separate cults kept them from becoming merged as with so many Egyptian deities. Together, they were known as the nebty or The Two Ladies, who became the joint protectors and patrons of the unified Egypt; the pharaohs were seen as a manifestation of the sun god Ra, so it was believed that the Uraeus protected them by spitting fire on their enemies from the fiery eye of the goddess. In some mythological works, the eyes of Ra are said to be uraei. Wadjets existed long before the rise of this cult when they originated as the eye of Wadjet as a cobra. Wadjets are the name of the symbols called the Eye of the Moon, Eye of Hathor, the Eye of Horus, the Eye of Ra—depending upon the dates of the references to the symbols; as the Uraeus was seen as a royal symbol, the deities Horus and Set were depicted wearing the symbol on their crowns. In early ancient Egyptian mythology, Horus would have been the name given to any king as part of the many titles taken, being identified as the son of the goddess Isis.
According to the mythology of Re, the first Uraeus was said to have been created by the goddess Isis, who formed it from the dust of the earth and the spittle of the then-current sun deity. In this version of the mythology, the Uraeus was the instrument with which Isis gained the throne of Egypt for Osiris. Isis may be considered an aspect of Wadjet. In 1919, after only a half-hour of excavation, the Qufti worker Hosni Ibrahim held in his hands the solid-gold Golden Uraeus of Senusret II, it had been decided to make a complete clearance of the El-Lahun Pyramid's rooms at Saqqara. The start in the rock-cut offering chamber, leading from the tomb, on the south revealed in the turnover of the six inches of debris, the Golden Uraeus crown ornament. Prior to the 1922 find of Tutankhamun's tomb, this Golden Uraeus was the only ornament known to be worn by an entombed pharaoh, it was thought that it was passed to the next pharaoh; the Golden Uraeus is of solid gold, 6.7 cm, black eyes of granite, a snake head of deep ultramarine lapis lazuli, the flared cobra hood of dark carnelian inlays, inlays of turquoise.
For mounting on the pharaoh's crown, two loops in the rear-supporting tail of the cobra provide the attachment points. Besides the Uraeus being used as an ornament for statuary or as an adornment on the pharaoh, it was used for jewellery and in amulets. However, another important use is as the hieroglyph. For Uraeus ornament as a mummy grave example, See: Djedptahiufankh, High Priest of 21st Dynasty, Shoshenq I; the simplest hieroglyph is the "Cobra". The Rosetta Stone uses the plural of the last example, "3 × "god flag" with Cobra at each base of flag"; the story of the Rosetta Stone has the king listing his reasons for being honored, in return, "The Gods and Goddesses" reward him. The last two-thirds of the Rosetta Stone relates how he will be honored, including erecting the Rosetta Stone, for all to read. Another example of the hieroglyph usage is as adornments upon the hieroglyph for "shrine", for "buildings". Before the New Kingdom Period, the body of the Uraeus coiled in around in circles behind its raised head on the Blue Crown.
The king is most depicted wearing the Blue Crown in combat and the aftermath of combat scenes. Additionally, the smaller scale king wore the Blue Crown when depicted in a protective group of deities. Colossal statues of the king wearing a Blue Crown are rare. Depictions of the Blue Crown with its Uraeus does not decorate royal tombs until late in the Ramesside Period; the deity-on-earth king was thought to require extra protection in his mortal form, emphasizing the protective qualities of the Uraeus. The Uraeus was crafted from precious metals, most gold and less silver, adorned with gemstones; the angelic seraphim, found in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish and Islamic traditions, are associated with serpents and
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun was an Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom or sometimes the New Empire Period. He has, since the discovery of his intact tomb, been referred to colloquially as King Tut, his original name, means "Living Image of Aten", while Tutankhamun means "Living Image of Amun". In hieroglyphs, the name Tutankhamun was written Amen-tut-ankh, because of a scribal custom that placed a divine name at the beginning of a phrase to show appropriate reverence, he is also the Nibhurrereya of the Amarna letters, the 18th dynasty king Rathotis who, according to Manetho, an ancient historian, had reigned for nine years—a figure that conforms with Flavius Josephus's version of Manetho's Epitome. The 1922 discovery by Howard Carter of Tutankhamun's nearly intact tomb, funded by Lord Carnarvon, received worldwide press coverage, it sparked a renewed public interest in ancient Egypt, for which Tutankhamun's mask, now in the Egyptian Museum, remains the popular symbol.
Exhibits of artifacts from his tomb have toured the world. In February 2010, the results of DNA tests confirmed that he was the son of the mummy found in the tomb KV55, believed by some to be Akhenaten, his mother was his father's sister and wife, whose name is unknown but whose remains are positively identified as "The Younger Lady" mummy found in KV35. The deaths of a few involved in the discovery of Tutankhamun's mummy have been popularly attributed to the curse of the pharaohs. Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten and one of Akhenaten's sisters, or one of his cousins; as a prince, he was known as Tutankhaten. He ascended to the throne in 1333 BC, at the age of nine or ten, taking the throne name Nebkheperure, his wet nurse was a woman called Maia, known from her tomb at Saqqara. His teacher was most Sennedjem; when he became king, he married his half-sister, who changed her name to Ankhesenamun. They had two daughters. Computed tomography studies released in 2011 revealed that one daughter was born prematurely at 5–6 months of pregnancy and the other at full-term, 9 months.
The daughter born at 9 months gestation had spina bifida and Sprengel's deformity. Given his age, the king had powerful advisers including General Horemheb and Grand Vizier Ay. Horemheb records that the king appointed him "lord of the land" as hereditary prince to maintain law, he noted his ability to calm the young king when his temper flared. In his third regnal year, under the influence of his advisors, Tutankhamun reversed several changes made during his father's reign, he restored the god Amun to supremacy. The ban on the cult of Amun was lifted and traditional privileges were restored to its priesthood; the capital was moved back to Thebes and the city of Akhetaten abandoned. This is when he changed his name to Tutankhamun, "Living image of Amun", reinforcing the restoration of Amun; as part of his restoration, the king initiated building projects, in particular at Karnak in Thebes, where he dedicated a temple to Amun. Many monuments were erected, an inscription on his tomb door declares the king had "spent his life in fashioning the images of the gods".
The traditional festivals were now celebrated again, including those related to the Apis Bull and Opet. His restoration stela says: The temples of the goddesses... were in ruins. Their shrines were overgrown, their sanctuaries were as non-existent and their courts were used as roads... the gods turned their backs upon this land... If anyone made a prayer to a god for advice he would never respond; the country was economically weak and in turmoil following the reign of Akhenaten. Diplomatic relations with other kingdoms had been neglected, Tutankhamun sought to restore them, in particular with the Mitanni. Evidence of his success is suggested by the gifts from various countries found in his tomb. Despite his efforts for improved relations, battles with Nubians and Asiatics were recorded in his mortuary temple at Thebes, his tomb contained body armor, folding stools appropriate for military campaigns, bows, he was trained in archery. However, given his youth and physical disabilities, which seemed to require the use of a cane in order to walk, most historians speculate that he did not take part in these battles.
Tutankhamun was slight of build, 167 cm tall. He had large front incisors and an overbite characteristic of the Thutmosid royal line to which he belonged. Between September 2007 and October 2009, various mummies were subjected to detailed anthropological and genetic studies as part of the King Tutankhamun Family Project; the research showed that Tutankhamun had "a cleft palate" and a mild case of scoliosis, a medical condition in which the spine deviates to the side from the normal position. It was posited in a 2002 documentary'Assassination of King Tut' for the Discovery Channel that he suffered from Klippel-Feil syndrome, but subsequent analysis excluded this as an acceptable diagnosis. Examination of Tutankhamun's body has revealed deformations in his left foot, caused by necrosis of bone tissue; the affliction may have forced Tutankhamun to walk with the use of a cane, many of which were found in his tomb. In DNA tests of Tutankhamun's mummy, scientists found DNA from the mosquito-borne parasites that cause mala
Gold Museum, Bogotá
The Museum of Gold is a museum located in Bogotá, Colombia. It is one of the most visited touristic highlights in the country; the museum receives around 500,000 tourists per year. The museum displays a selection of pre-Columbian gold and other metal alloys, such as Tumbaga, contains the largest collection of gold artifacts in the world in its exhibition rooms on the second and third floors. Together with pottery, shell and textile objects, these items, made of a– to indigenous cultures – sacred metal, testify to the life and thought of the different societies which lived in present-day Colombia before the Spanish conquest of the Americas. In 1934, the Bank of the Republic began helping to protect the archaeological patrimony of Colombia; the object known as Poporo Quimbaya was the first one in a collection. It has been on exhibition for 70 years; the Museum is today administered by Banrepcultural. The museum houses the famous Muisca golden raft found in Pasca in 1969, that represents the ceremony of the new zipa of Bacatá, the basis for the El Dorado myth.
The heir to the chieftaincy assumed power with a great offering to the gods. In this representation he is seen standing at the centre of a raft, surrounded by the principal chieftains, all of them adorned with gold and feathers. After a decade of work, the museum was expanded and renovated in October 2008. With the renovation, the museum organized the permanent exhibition in five rooms with archaeological objects and an interactive room, it added an auditorium, some temporary exhibitions rooms, a cafe, a restaurant, a souvenir store. The museum has a collection of 55,000 pieces, 6,000 of which are on display in their expanded building. There are bilingual descriptions of all exhibits. On the first floor houses the museum's main entrance, a shop, a restaurant. Exhibitions begin on the second floor; the main room is called "People and Gold in pre-Hispanic Colombia". In glass vitrines display goldsmiths' work from the different cultures which inhabited Colombia before the Spanish colonists arrived.
The permanent exhibition is divided into different halls for every culture: Calima, Muisca, Zenú, San Agustín, Tolima and Urabá, a special room called "After Columbus". The exposition continues on the third floor, with "The Flying Chamanic" and "The Offering." The first shows the process of a shamanic ceremony with its different gold pieces, the second is divided into three parts: the "Offering Room", the "Offering Boat", the "Lake". At the end of the exposition, there is a "Profunditation Room" with artistic videos about the most important gold pieces of the museum. Muisca Muisca art Quimbaya culture Calima culture Quimbaya museum Official website Official website The Art of Precolumbian Gold: The Jan Mitchell Collection, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material relevant to holdings at the Gold Museum
Silver
Silver is a chemical element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, reflectivity of any metal; the metal is found in the Earth's crust in the pure, free elemental form, as an alloy with gold and other metals, in minerals such as argentite and chlorargyrite. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold and zinc refining. Silver has long been valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many bullion coins, sometimes alongside gold: while it is more abundant than gold, it is much less abundant as a native metal, its purity is measured on a per-mille basis. As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had an enduring role in most human cultures. Other than in currency and as an investment medium, silver is used in solar panels, water filtration, ornaments, high-value tableware and utensils, in electrical contacts and conductors, in specialized mirrors, window coatings, in catalysis of chemical reactions, as a colorant in stained glass and in specialised confectionery.
Its compounds are used in X-ray film. Dilute solutions of silver nitrate and other silver compounds are used as disinfectants and microbiocides, added to bandages and wound-dressings and other medical instruments. Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to its two vertical neighbours in group 11 of the periodic table and gold, its 47 electrons are arranged in the configuration 4d105s1 to copper and gold. This distinctive electron configuration, with a single electron in the highest occupied s subshell over a filled d subshell, accounts for many of the singular properties of metallic silver. Silver is an soft and malleable transition metal, though it is less malleable than gold. Silver crystallizes in a face-centered cubic lattice with bulk coordination number 12, where only the single 5s electron is delocalized to copper and gold. Unlike metals with incomplete d-shells, metallic bonds in silver are lacking a covalent character and are weak; this observation explains the low high ductility of single crystals of silver.
Silver has a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a high polish, and, so characteristic that the name of the metal itself has become a colour name. Unlike copper and gold, the energy required to excite an electron from the filled d band to the s-p conduction band in silver is large enough that it no longer corresponds to absorption in the visible region of the spectrum, but rather in the ultraviolet. Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminium at all wavelengths longer than ~450 nm. At wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silver's reflectivity is inferior to that of aluminium and drops to zero near 310 nm. High electrical and thermal conductivity is common to the elements in group 11, because their single s electron is free and does not interact with the filled d subshell, as such interactions lower electron mobility; the electrical conductivity of silver is the greatest of all metals, greater than copper, but it is not used for this property because of the higher cost.
An exception is in radio-frequency engineering at VHF and higher frequencies where silver plating improves electrical conductivity because those currents tend to flow on the surface of conductors rather than through the interior. During World War II in the US, 13540 tons of silver were used in electromagnets for enriching uranium because of the wartime shortage of copper. Pure silver has the highest thermal conductivity of any metal, although the conductivity of carbon and superfluid helium-4 are higher. Silver has the lowest contact resistance of any metal. Silver forms alloys with copper and gold, as well as zinc. Zinc-silver alloys with low zinc concentration may be considered as face-centred cubic solid solutions of zinc in silver, as the structure of the silver is unchanged while the electron concentration rises as more zinc is added. Increasing the electron concentration further leads to body-centred cubic, complex cubic, hexagonal close-packed phases. Occurring silver is composed of two stable isotopes, 107Ag and 109Ag, with 107Ag being more abundant.
This equal abundance is rare in the periodic table. The atomic weight is 107.8682 u. Both isotopes of silver are produced in stars via the s-process, as well as in supernovas via the r-process. Twenty-eight radioisotopes have been characterized, the most stable being 105Ag with a half-life of 41.29 days, 111Ag with a half-life of 7.45 days, 112Ag with a half-life of 3.13 hours. Silver has numerous nuclear isomers, the most stable being 108mAg, 110mAg and 106mAg. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives of less than an hour, the majority of these have half-lives of less than three minutes. Isotopes of silver range in relative atomic mass from 92.950 u
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans known as American Indians, Indigenous Americans and other terms, are the indigenous peoples of the United States, except Hawaii. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes within the US, about half of which are associated with Indian reservations; the term "American Indian" excludes Native Hawaiians and some Alaska Natives, while Native Americans are American Indians, plus Alaska Natives of all ethnicities. Native Hawaiians are not counted as Native Americans by the US Census, instead being included in the Census grouping of "Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander"; the ancestors of modern Native Americans arrived in what is now the United States at least 15,000 years ago much earlier, from Asia via Beringia. A vast variety of peoples and cultures subsequently developed. Native Americans were affected by the European colonization of the Americas, which began in 1492, their population declined precipitously due to introduced diseases as well as warfare, territorial confiscation and slavery.
After the founding of the United States, many Native American peoples were subjected to warfare and one-sided treaties, they continued to suffer from discriminatory government policies into the 20th century. Since the 1960s, Native American self-determination movements have resulted in changes to the lives of Native Americans, though there are still many contemporary issues faced by Native Americans. Today, there are over five million Native Americans in the United States, 78% of whom live outside reservations; when the United States was created, established Native American tribes were considered semi-independent nations, as they lived in communities separate from British settlers. The federal government signed treaties at a government-to-government level until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of independent native nations, started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to federal law; this law did preserve the rights and privileges agreed to under the treaties, including a large degree of tribal sovereignty.
For this reason, many Native American reservations are still independent of state law and actions of tribal citizens on these reservations are subject only to tribal courts and federal law. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U. S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. This emptied the "Indians not taxed" category established by the United States Constitution, allowed natives to vote in state and federal elections, extended the Fourteenth Amendment protections granted to people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. However, some states continued to deny Native Americans voting rights for several decades. Bill of Rights protections do not apply to tribal governments, except for those mandated by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of Europeans to the Americas has led to centuries of population and agricultural transfer and adjustment between Old and New World societies, a process known as the Columbian exchange.
As most Native American groups had preserved their histories by oral traditions and artwork, the first written sources of the conflict were written by Europeans. Ethnographers classify the indigenous peoples of North America into ten geographical regions with shared cultural traits, called cultural areas; some scholars combine the Plateau and Great Basin regions into the Intermontane West, some separate Prairie peoples from Great Plains peoples, while some separate Great Lakes tribes from the Northeastern Woodlands. The ten cultural areas are as follows: Arctic, including Aleut and Yupik peoples Subarctic Northeastern Woodlands Southeastern Woodlands Great Plains Great Basin Northwest Plateau Northwest Coast California Southwest At the time of the first contact, the indigenous cultures were quite different from those of the proto-industrial and Christian immigrants; some Northeastern and Southwestern cultures, in particular, were matrilineal and operated on a more collective basis than that with which Europeans were familiar.
The majority of Indigenous American tribes maintained their hunting grounds and agricultural lands for use of the entire tribe. Europeans at that time had patriarchal cultures and had developed concepts of individual property rights with respect to land that were different; the differences in cultures between the established Native Americans and immigrant Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations in times of war, caused extensive political tension, ethnic violence, social disruption. Before the European settlement of what is now the United States, Native Americans suffered high fatalities from contact with new European diseases, to which they had not yet acquired immunity. Smallpox epidemics are thought to have caused the greatest loss of life for indigenous populations. William M Denevan, noted author and Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on this subject in his essay "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492".
Old World diseases were the primary killer. In many regions the tropical lowlands, populations fell by 90 percent or more in the first century after the contact. "Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of what today constitutes the U. S. vary ranging from William M Denevan's 3.8 million in his 1992 w
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Warren Cup
The Warren Cup is an ancient Roman silver drinking cup decorated in relief with two images of male same-sex acts. It was purchased by the British Museum for £1.8 million in 1999, the most expensive single purchase by the museum at that time. It is dated to the time of the Julio-Claudian dynasty; the cup is named after its first modern owner, Edward Perry Warren, notable for his art collection, which included Rodin's The Kiss statue and Cranach's Adam and Eve painting. Representations of sexual acts are found in Roman art, although surviving male-female scenes outnumber same-sex couples, it cannot be assumed that homoerotic art was uncommon as the modern record may be biased due to selective destruction or non-publication of pederastic works in times. Illustrated drinking cups in pairs, were intended as dinner-party conversation pieces. Roman artwork on pottery and wall-paintings with sexual acts represented were popular and were intended to be seen by all sections of society; the Romans had no word for homosexuality and the images on the Warren Cup provide an important insight into this aspect of their culture.
One side of the Warren Cup depicts a "bearded man" and a "beardless youth" engaging in anal sex in a reclining position, with the youth lowering himself using a strap or sash to be penetrated. A boy watches from behind a door; the two figures are of a similar size. The apparent weight of the upper figure, as he lowers himself onto his lover's penis using the support, makes this a non-traditional passive role; the use of a strap or support during sex can be found in other Greek and Roman artworks, a close example being an erotic cup by Onesimos where a woman spreads her legs in anticipation while grasping a strap with her left hand. The other side depicts another scene of anal sex, between a "beardless" and clean-shaven "young man" and a smaller figure with long hair indicating he is a "boy" or "adolescent"; the boy's hairstyle is typical of a servant-boy or cup or armour bearer. Roman same-sex practice differed from that of the Greeks, among whom pederasty was a acknowledged relationship between freeborn males of equal social status.
Roman men, were free to engage in same-sex relations without a perceived loss of masculinity only as long as they took the penetrative role and their partner was a social inferior such as a slave or male prostitute: the paradigm of "correct" male sexuality was one of conquest and domination. There are significant differences to pederastic scenes found on classical Greek vases; the sex act is presented in graphic detail, the "beardless youth" appears to encourage the penetration, grasping his lover's arm. In Roman artwork there is an assumption that the penetrated youth is a slave or prostitute and on the Warren Cup, a mutual tenderness is represented. Both scenes show draped textiles in the background, as well as a cithara in the former scene and tibiae with finger holes being depicted in the latter. These, along with the careful delineation of ages and status and the wreaths worn by the youths, all suggest a cultured, Hellenized setting with music and entertainment; the active partners in the two sexual depictions are wearing leaf crowns to be symbolically made from myrtle.
Myrtle is an evergreen shrub, grown in the Roman period for medical and ritual purposes, such as weddings, dedicated to Venus, the Roman goddess of sexuality and love. It has a smaller leaf than the more depicted laurel. Myrtle was used to create the corona ovalis, a military crown awarded as an ovation but a far lesser award than the insignis corona triumphalis, one interpretation of the use of myrtle crowns on the Warren Cup, being a visual pun of homosexual penetration as an easy victory. Warren purchased the cup in Rome from a dealer in 1911 for £2,000, it was bought in Jerusalem and said to have been found near the city in Battir, with coins of the emperor Claudius buried during the upheavals of the Jewish Revolt. We don't know for certain, but it is thought that the Warren Cup was found buried at Bittir, a town a few miles south-west of Jerusalem. How it got to this location is a mystery. We can date the making of the cup to around the year 10. About 50 years the Roman occupation of Jerusalem sparked tensions between the rulers and the Jewish community, in AD 66 that exploded and the Jews took back the city by force.
There were violent confrontations, it is thought that our cup may have been buried at this date by the owner fleeing from the fighting. The cup became a prized item in Warren's large art collection, referring to it with friends as the "Holy Grail"; the first publication featuring the cup was in 1921, when Gaston Vorberg published a volume of 113 plates of erotic artwork from ancient artefacts. The photographs show the cup in an uncleaned state; the cup was included in Warren's book "A defence of Uranian Love", first published in 1928 under his pseudonym of Arthur Lyon Raile. On Warren's death in 1928, the cup became part of the inheritance for Asa Thomas, Warren's secretary and eventual business partner, it was part of the auction of the contents of Lewes House in 1929, but failed to sell and stayed hidden away in the Thomas' attic. The cup was sent for cleaning after the Lewes House auction and photographs taken of the cup in 1931 show that it had been cleaned before that year. In November 1952 Harold W. Parsons, an art historian and one of Warren's past companions, took responsibility for selling the cup and approached the New York collector Walter Baker, however Baker was hesitant to proceed
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