ABSTRACT
Luxurious materials, intoxicating drinks and sumptuous foods were the stuff of high status feasts throughout southern Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC (Table 10.1). This chapter examines the materiality of extravagant feasting, focusing on the Early Dynastic period in southern Mesopotamia1 and specifically the objects from the Royal Tombs of Ur. It explores the sensual experience of feasting, as evidenced by representations as much as the material objects used to serve and consume food and drink. It scrutinizes the incorporation of enchanted objects (Gell 1992) within the politics of power around the dining table and at the graveside, specifically focusing on the high-end objects used by elites – within what Dietler (1996; 2001) has described as diacritical feasting – as a means of separation, social enhancement, reiteration and legitimization, of their special elevated position in society (cf. Pollock 2003, 18). Furthermore, it investigates the agency and materiality of the substances used to craft these objects and in particular how specific materials were able to evoke a response on the part of the participants in the feast. It will then go on to consider how these objects of feasting not only mediated social relations within a specific social context, but likewise how these were increasingly manipulated to create a mutual language of elite consumption, within a shared cultural milieu (Gosden 2003).
