What is the secret of an ancient Roman artifact that cannot be recreated today: the Lycurgus Cup

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

There are many different architectural monuments and artifacts from the ancient world that amaze modern people with their sophistication. How people who clearly lacked our modern understanding of science to create things like Stonehenge or the pyramids seems amazing and mysterious. One of these wonderful artifacts of antiquity is the Lycurgus Cup. How could a nanotechnological object be created in the 4th century, which no one has yet been able to recreate?

Of course, the architectural structures of ancient times are striking in their scale and beauty. But our amazement at the wonders of ancient creativity and technology is not limited only to buildings. There are smaller things that are also, if not more, amazing. One such item is an ancient Roman artifact known as the goblet of Lycurgus.

This is a glass bowl, the only complete diatrette with a figured pattern that has survived since antiquity. For the Romans, this was a very expensive product. They were made of double glass bell-shaped. From the outside, they were decorated with openwork carvings. It is believed that diatrets were used as drinking bowls. At feasts, they were passed from hand to hand by the bacchantes.

The Lycurgus Cup is considered unique not only for its decoration, but also for its mysterious color effect. The bowl changes color depending on the lighting - it becomes either jade green or blood red. How is this possible? Diatretta was created using the earliest known example of applied nanotechnology.

The cup is made of dichroic, that is, two-colored glass. With the help of modern analysis technologies, scientists were able to find out that glass contains tiny particles of silver and gold. To imagine how small they are, imagine that they are a thousand times smaller than a grain of table salt! It is the presence of these precious metal particles in the glass that gives this amazing color effect.

Another question: how did the creators of the bowl, who lived in the 4th century, manage to achieve the effect at the level of nanotechnology? This is still a mystery to modern science. The origin of the artifact is also shrouded in mystery. Historians suggest that he was found in the tomb of a high-ranking Roman official. Then he got to the Roman Catholic Church and was kept there.

The history of the origin of the decorations on the goblet is interesting. Researchers believe that it depicts the death of the king of Thrace - Lycurgus. According to legend, he was entangled and strangled by vines. This was the revenge of the offended god Dionysus. The fact is that King Lycurgus was an ardent opponent of the cult of Dionysus, the accompanying Bacchic orgies and wine drinking in general. The myth of the king says that Dionysus decided to take revenge on Lycurgus. He sent to him one of the nymph-hyads - Ambrose. She seduced the king and persuaded him to drink wine.

Scientists suggest that the plot for decorating the bowl with the history of Lycurgus was not chosen by chance. The painting symbolized the victory of the Roman emperor Constantine over Licinius. There is a version that the color of the bowl symbolizes the ripening process of grapes. Some historians believe that the goblet was used by the priests of the god Dionysus in their services. Others believe that the purpose of the bowl was that when filling it with a drink, it would be possible to reveal the presence of poison in it.

Historians' conclusions differ not only in what this cup is intended for. Its age and place of manufacture are also controversial. It is possible that the diatret was made precisely in the 4th century, and possibly even earlier. The place where the bowl was made also raises questions, since its origin is unknown. The researchers' assumptions are based on the fact that in ancient times of antiquity, Rome and Alexandria were famous as cities of unique glassblowers.

The unique technology of creating the Lycurgus Cup amazes the imagination of today's sophisticated spectator. How it works? How can a bowl change its color? The simplest way to explain this phenomenon is that when light hits metal particles in glass, their electrons vibrate in different ways. These vibrations only partially reflect the transmitted light, creating the same two-color effect.

Scientists have found that the type of liquid the cup is filled with also affects its color. Detailed conclusions are hampered by the fact that the researchers cannot use the Lycurgus cup in their experiments. They had to recreate a test sample, so these are just theories. Even though the model created by scientists is 100% more sensitive than modern electronic sensors. This technology can be very useful for detecting pathogenic microorganisms, or for preventing terrorists from carrying dangerous liquids on board.

It is very disappointing that the unique nanotechnologies that were used by humans back in antiquity are irretrievably lost. In the mid-20th century, NASA began working with dichroic glass. Their technology differed from the ancient ones in that everything happened with the help of the evaporation of various metals in a vacuum chamber. Then the resulting mixture was applied to glass in the form of a thin film. The coating is visible to the naked eye. It is used to protect astronauts and spacecraft from dangerous direct sunlight. Also, dichroic glass is used in arts and crafts, when creating optical filters and jewelry.

Despite all this, the amazing technologies of the ancient Roman glassblowers have not yet been resurrected. The Lycurgus Cup is an unsolved mystery.

Read about other mysterious and mysterious ancient artifacts in our article Nazca lines, moai statues and other mysterious archaeological discoveries.