Barber Cup and Crawford Cup

The Barber Cup, (on display at the British Museum)

The Barber Cup and Crawford Cup are two non-matching carved fluorite cups from about 100 AD. They were discovered with other items in a tomb near the modern border between Turkey and Syria by an Austrian soldier during World War I. They are now in the collection of the British Museum.

Hardstone carvings were highly valued luxury items in the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder wrote about exorbitant amounts of money spent for cups made of murrine (probably fluorite). Cups made from the stone gave a strange, pleasing taste to wine drunk from them. (This was probably from residual resin [perhaps myrrh] that was applied to the stones, while they were carved, to prevent shattering.) Pliny described the softness of the material (one Roman counsel nibbled at the edges of his cup) as well as its many-colored, banded appearance. The source of murrine was Persia.

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