The British Museum exhibits the Lycurgus Cup - the only diatret with a figured pattern that has survived since antiquity. Diatrets were exquisite and expensive items for the Romans. These glass vessels were predominantly bell-shaped with double walls: the body of the vessel is located inside the outer glass openwork "mesh" of carved work.
The first specimen of the diatret was discovered in 1680 in northern Italy. Since that time, attempts have been made to restore production methods and create copies.
The shape of the diatrette and the inscriptions on them suggest that they were used as vessels for drinks. However, the peculiar edge of the surviving diatrets (one of the copies kept in the Corning Museum in New York, even has a bronze ring with three handles on it) testifies against this version: the diatrette could be suspended from the ring like a lamp.
Ancient laws are known that regulated the responsibility of grinders for damaging diatrets. The earliest copies of the diatret date from the 1st century. n. e. Diatrette production flourished in the 3rd and 4th centuries. To date, there are about 50 known specimens of glass vessels of this type, which are often only partially preserved in fragments.
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The Lycurgus Cup, owned by the British Museum since 1958, is the most famous diatrette. The product is a glass vessel 165 mm high and 132 mm in diameter, presumably made by Alexandria in the 4th century. This is the only glass vessel that has survived in its entirety, and is considered unique in its color effect and finish.
The uniqueness of the cup is the ability to change color from green to red depending on the lighting. This effect is explained by the presence of the smallest particles of colloidal gold and silver (approximately 70 nanometers) in the glass in a ratio of three to seven. The rim of gilded bronze and the leg of the vessel are the latest additions from the early Empire era.
How the creators managed to create such a creation at the level of nanotechnology is still beyond science to explain. Nobody knows where the artifact came from. There is an assumption that he was found in the tomb of a noble Roman. Then, perhaps, for several centuries he lay in the treasury of the Roman Catholic Church.
In the 18th century, the goblet was confiscated by French revolutionaries who were in need of funds. Around 1800, to ensure safety, a rim of gilded bronze and a similar stand decorated with grape leaves were attached to the bowl.
In 1845, Lionel de Rothschild bought the Lycurgus Cup, and in 1857 it was seen in the banker's collection by the famous German art critic and historian Gustav Vaagen, who for several years begged Rothschild to put the artifact on public display. In 1862 the banker agreed and the cup was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it was first presented to the general public. Then the cup again became unavailable for almost a century.
In 1950 Lord Victor Rothschild asked the British Museum to examine the goblet. In 1956, the German scientist Fritz Fremersdorf published a report in which he indicated that the cup was produced by cutting and grinding. This version is currently considered the mainstream. In 1958, Baron Rothschild sold the cup for a symbolic 20 thousand pounds to the British Museum.
In 1959, Donald Harden and Jocelyn Toynbee published a detailed account of the Lycurgus Cup. Modern replicas of the goblet have been made several times, partly to test a hypothesis about the manufacturing method.
Researchers believe that the walls of the cup depict the death of the Thracian king Lycurgus, who may have lived around 800 BC. e., which for insulting the god of wine Dionysus was entangled and strangled by vines.
According to legend, Lycurgus, an ardent opponent of Bacchus orgies, attacked the god of winemaking Dionysus, destroyed many of his maenad companions and expelled them all from their possessions. Recovering from such impudence, Dionysus sent one of the nymph-hyads named Ambrose to the king who had offended him. Hyades appeared to him under the guise of a charming beauty, bewitched him with her beauty and persuaded him to drink wine.
Drunk, the king went mad: he attacked his own mother and tried to rape her, then rushed to cut down the vineyard - and chopped his own son Driant into pieces with an ax, mistaking him for a vine, then the same fate befell his wife.
In the end, Lycurgus became an easy prey for Dionysus, Pan and the satyrs, who, taking the form of vines, entwined his body, whirled and tortured him half to death. Trying to free himself from this tenacious embrace, the king swung an ax and chopped off his own leg, after which he bled out and died.
There is a hypothesis that the theme of the high relief was not chosen by chance. It allegedly symbolized the victory that the Roman emperor Constantine won over the greedy and oppressive co-ruler Licinius in 324.
It is believed that the goblet could be passed from hand to hand by the bacchantes during Dionysian libations. In any case, its unusual color could symbolize the ripening of grapes. Experts suggest that the goblet may have been made in the 4th century. However, it is almost impossible to determine the exact time of manufacture of products from inorganic materials. It is possible that this diatret could have been made in a more ancient era. The place of manufacture is also unknown and is determined presumably on the basis of the fact that Alexandria and Rome were famous in ancient times as centers of glass-blowing craft.
There is no consensus on the purpose of this cup either. Some believe that it was used by the priests in the Dionysian Mysteries. Another version says that the goblet served as a determinant of whether the drink contained poison. And some believe that the bowl determined the ripeness level of the grapes from which the wine was made.
However, the artifact is famous primarily for its unusual properties. Under normal lighting, when the light comes from the front, the goblet is green, and when it is backlit, it turns red.
The color of the cup also changes depending on what kind of liquid is poured into it. For example, a goblet glows blue when water is poured into it, but becomes bright red when filled with oil.
There are no convincing hypotheses for making a cup, just as there were no nanotechnologies sufficient for making a cup in the 4th century.
Only in 1990, with the help of an electron microscope, it was possible to find out that the whole point is in the special composition of the glass. For a million particles of glass, the craftsmen added 330 particles of silver and 40 particles of gold. The size of these particles is surprising. They are about 50 nanometers in diameter - a thousand times smaller than a salt crystal. The resulting gold-silver colloid had the property of changing color depending on the lighting.
Scientists believe that the principle of operation of the technology is as follows: in the light, electrons of precious metals begin to vibrate, changing the color of the cup depending on the location of the light source. University of Illinois nanotechnology engineer Liu Gang Logan and his team of researchers drew attention to the enormous potential of this method in the field of medicine - for the diagnosis of human diseases.
The researchers hypothesized that when the goblet is filled with liquids, its color will change due to the different vibration of the electrons.
Scientists could not experiment with the valuable artifact, so they used a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp, which was coated with nanoparticles of gold and silver through billions of tiny pores. Thus, they got a miniature copy of the Lycurgus Cup. Researchers applied various substances to the plate: water, oil, sugar and salt solutions. As it turned out, when these substances entered the pores of the plate, its color changed. For example, a light green color was obtained when water entered its pores, and red when oil entered.
The prototype turned out to be 100 times more sensitive to changes in the salt level in solution than the commercial sensor, which is widely used today, created for similar tests. Physicists from the University of Massachusetts (USA) decided to use the "principle of operation" of the Lycurgus Cup to create portable testers. They can detect pathogens in saliva and urine samples or identify hazardous fluids carried by terrorists on board an aircraft. Thus, the unknown creator of the Lycurgus Cup became a co-author of the revolutionary inventions of the 21st century.