A gold rhyton from The Al Thani Collection is on loan at the exhibition The Feast at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The exhibition explores banquets, feasts, and food in the Ancient Near East from the 4th to the 1st millennium BCE. Such festive events were employed by religious and royal institutions as a means to establish and reaffirm their power, and consolidate the prevailing ideology.

The Feast showcases selected archaeological artifacts, iconographic representations, organic materials, and textual evidence, from the Land of Israel and neighboring cultures, primarily from the Israel Museum’s own rich holdings. Through a lavish display of artifacts, the exhibition highlights the social mechanisms that surrounded the communal consumption of food, offering visitors a sense of the motivations at play around the table in antiquity, and their reflection in contemporary culture.

Finely decorated and taking the form of of a kneeling stag, the rhyton on loan from The Al Thani Collection was created in Anatolia circa 2000–1500 BC. It was intended to impress at the banqueting table or show respect for the gods in a sacred context; at the time it was crafted, the stag was associated with multiple deities.

More details of the exhibition can be found here