纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 028巴斯伊于特酒壶（2）

They were found in Lorraine, in north-eastern France, near the town of Basse Yutz, and they're always referred to as the Basse Yutz Flagons. They're bronze, extremely elegant and highly elaborate. They are about the size of a large bottle of wine, a magnum, and they hold about the same amount of liquid, but they're in the shape of large jugs, with handle, lid and very pointed spout. They've got a very broad shoulder, which tapers to a narrow, rather unstable base. But what really strikes you about these two flagons is the extraordinary decoration at the top, where animals and birds cluster. And that must have been what everybody would have looked at, as they were feasting with these amazing objects.

These elaborately decorated flagons were stumbled on in 1927 by workmen digging in Basse Yutz. Nothing quite like them had ever been found in western Europe before, and the strangeness of their style and decoration led many experts to assume that they must be fakes. But the curators at the British Museum were convinced that they were genuinely ancient; that they represented a new, unknown chapter in European history, and so then the flagons were acquired for the then colossal sum of ?5,000. Betting the bank on this kind of acquisition is a huge gamble on curatorial knowledge, but in this case it paid off, and research since has confirmed they were indeed made about two and a half thousand years ago. That is, roughly the same time as the Parthenon was being built in Greece, the Persian empire was at its zenith, and Confucius was teaching in China. And the Basse Yutz Flagons are now celebrated as two of the most important and earliest pieces of Celtic art anywhere.

In northern Europe at this time, around 450 BC, there were no towns or cities, no states or empires, no writing or coinage. From the Steppes to the Atlantic, there were small communities of farmer-warriors, connected across thousands of miles by trade, by exchange and frequently by war. It was a precarious existence for most, but life for those at the top of the pile, in the Iron Age Rhineland, could be very glamorous indeed. The smartest graves in the region where the flagons were found have wagons and chariots, hangings of silk, exotic hats, shoes and clothes - and of course all the things you needed for throwing parties. Mere death was not going to keep these northern Europeans from the good life, so the graves have lots of drinking equipment - bowls and cauldrons, drinking horns and flagons.