(The calvaria)

“The problem with society today is that no one drinks from the skulls of their enemies anymore.” The author of this oft-quoted quip has been lost to time. But leaving aside the question of whether it is problematic that our society disfavors drinking from the skulls of enemies, what is the history of skull cups?

Across the ages, societies around the world have converted the top of the human skull (the calvaria) into cups or bowls. There is evidence of the practice in ancient Europe, China, Tibet, India, Japan, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands.

Perhaps the most famous description of the practice comes from the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century B.C. Of the Scythians he wrote: “The skulls of their enemies, not indeed of all, but of those whom they most detest, they treat as follows. Having sawn off the portion below the eyebrows and cleaned out the inside, they cover the outside with leather. When a man is poor, this is all he does; but if he is rich, he also lines the inside with gold; in either case the skull is used as a drinking cup. They do the same with the skulls of their own kith and kin if they have been at feud with them and have vanquished them in the presence of the king. When strangers whom they deem of any account come to visit them, these skulls are handed round, and the host tells how that these were his relations who made war upon him, and how that he got the better of them, all this being looked upon as proof of bravery.”

After defeating, capturing, and executing the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I in 811 A.D., the Bulgar Khan Krum the Fearsome famously had the vanquished emperor’s skull made into a jeweled drinking cup.

According to legend, the skull of the pirate Blackbeard was plated with silver and made into a punchbowl.

The oldest known specimens of skull cups/bowls were discovered in Gough’s Cave in Somerset England in 1987. Paleontologists who have studied the nearly 15,000-year-old cups believe they were made from the skulls of enemies and were likely used in rituals (probably involving cannibalism), both as trophies of victories and a means for the continued humiliation of foes.

Oddly, however, despite their reputation for doing so, there is no evidence that Vikings drank from the skulls of their enemies.

The images are a photo of one of the Gough Cave skull cups, now in the National History Museum in London, and a painting depicting Khan Krum using the skull of Emperor Nikephoros I as a wine glass.