King Lycurgus

In Greek mythology, Lycurgus was the king of the Edoni in Thrace, son of Dryas. Lycurgus banned the cult of Dionysus. As punishment, Dionysus drove Lycurgus insane. In his madness, Lycurgus mistook his son for a mature trunk of ivy and killed him, pruning away his nose and ears, fingers and toes. Consequently, the land of Thrace dried up in horror. Dionysus decreed that the land would be dry and barren as long as Lycurgus was left unpunished, so his people bound him and flung him to man-eating horses on Mount Pangaeüs.

In other stories Lycurgus tried to rape his mother after imbibing wine. When he discovered what he had done, he attempted to cut down the grapevines, believing the wine to be tainted. In Homer's Iliad, an older source, Lycurgus's punishment for his disrespect towards Dionysus is blindness inflicted by Zeus followed not long after by death.

The Lycurgus cup features dichroic glass, with gold and silver nanoparticles, producing a green appearance when light is shining on it from the front, and red when illuminated from behind. The cup is also a very rare example of a complete Roman cage-cup, or diatretum, where the glass has been cut and ground back to leave only a decorative "cage" at the original surface-level. The cup features a composition showing the mythical King Lycurgus, who tried to kill Ambrosia, a follower of the god Dionysus (Bacchus). She was transformed into a vine that twined around the enraged king and restrained him, eventually killing him. Dionysus and two followers are shown taunting the king. The process used to create the dichroic effect is unclear, and it is likely that it was not well-understood by the makers.

The cup was made about 290-325 AD. It is first mentioned in print in 1845.

Ancient textiles returned to Peru

Peru recovered 79 pre-Hispanic textiles in 2017 that had been illegally located in Sweden since 1935. In 1935, Swedish ambassador to Peru Sven Karrell acquired the fabrics hailing from the Nasca and Paracas cultures and took them to Sweden illegally. They were anonymously donated to The Museum of Gothenburg, according to the Peruvian government. The fabrics were made of cotton and wool from vicunas, the national animal of Peru. The textiles were made between 700 B.C. and A.D. 200

Rare Roman horse race mosaic

Scenes from a chariot race are depicted in a rare Roman mosaic found in rural Cyprus in 2017. Dating from the 4th Century AD, it is in Akaki, a village not far from Nicosia. Only nine similar mosaics - showing a hippodrome race - have been found at ancient Roman sites.

The ornate 26-metre-long (85ft) mosaic was probably part of a wealthy man's villa.

Sanxingdui

Sanxingdui is the ruins of the capital of the ancient Shu Kingdom. In the 1980s, researchers found two pits full of strange relics: piles of elephant tusks, gold masks, and bronze figures. The objects were 3,000 years old, and unlike anything seen in China.

Sanxingdui was once the capital of a powerful and technologically advanced civilization, which flourished in the region around the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The prize find was a huge bronze statue known as the Large Standing Figure — a giant, intricately detailed rendering of a man standing 2.6 meters tall and weighing nearly 200 kg.