The British Museum has a small and very lovely exhibition on now of British fourth century silver – looking at the Great Dish from the Mildenhall treasure. There’s an intimate recreation of a late Roman dining room, with a stibadium (curved couch) for you to recline on, in exactly the right position for eating from the gorgeous 60cm diameter low relief “Neptune Dish”.
Of course, I thought of fourth century Sasanian silver dishes. But the BM exhibition set-up, with all the information about eating, getting drunk, and sex at Roman dinner parties, also made me wonder what those Sasanian silver dishes were used for (before they adorned modern museums).
I’m not a Sasanian expert – so apologies if you all knew this already – but when I dug a little (internet – not actual digging), I found that much less seems to be known about where the Sasanian dishes come from, how they were used, and their significance. Almost none of the Sasanian dishes come from controlled archeological excavations: “Many were found in the Soviet Union, particularly in the Perm region in the Ural mountains, an area to which they were sent as articles of barter or trade in antiquity”.
Harper suggests that the plates with images of the king were “part of a state propaganda production since both the form of the designs and the source of the material were rigidly controlled”, and were sent as gifts intended to impress allies and neighbouring rulers.
Which doesn’t sound quite as much fun as the boozy, sexy Roman dining. But also underlines how little we know about the Sasanians – in contrast, Roman specialists even know enough to try cooking the “Parthian chicken” of Apicius (the famous late Roman cook), in an authentic Roman portable oven. Sadly, they don’t seem to know if the recipe is a knock-off of contemporary Persian food, or is just called Parthian since it uses (stinky) asafoetida – and when silphium was farmed to extinction in Libya, it was Persian asafoetida which took its place.
Click here or here if you want the Roman recipe for Parthian chicken.
And maybe change your mind if you think globalisation is a new idea!