The silver treasure from Paternò

In the spring of 1909, a woman working in the fields at the base of the Norman tower in Paternò (near Etna) discovered a silver treasure. Not realizing its worth, she sold it for a song to art dealers in the nearby city of Catania, who obscured its find spot and sold it for a princely sum in Paris and Munich. The Antiquarium of the Royal Museums of Berlin obtained seven of the presumed nine or ten larger pieces originally in the assemblage. The find spot was first revealed only in 1932, in a publication by the Italian archaeologist Paolo Orsi.
The seven silver vessels in Berlin were acquired between 1911 and 1914 with prefinancing from the Siemens family. They were all likely made in the fourth century BC. The small but heavy ribbed mug (height: 7.8 cm; diameter: 7.9 cm; weight: 249 g) seems to have been made around 400 BC in Thrace (today Bulgaria) or Epirus (Greece) before being exported. Rare shell-shaped pyxides like this one are known from graves in Bulgarian and Greek Thrace, as well as Apulia. The spool-shaped pyxis, the gilded patera with egg-shaped lobes, and the three handled cups find their closest parallels in ceramics from Taranto and Apulia between 350 and 300 BC.
With an eight-armed squid on its lid, the lovely box shaped like a scallop shell (13.3 x 13.2 x 3 cm; weight: 222 g) may have been a cosmetic container. Only three comparanda in silver are known: a shell-shaped pyxis with gilded rosettes on the lid was found in 2004 in the Royal Tumulus of Golyama Kosmatka near Shipka, Bulgaria, and dates to around 300 BC; another gilded box with Nereids on the lid comes from the Tomba degli Ori in Canosa (in Apulia near Taranto); and a simple miniature pyxis dated to the fourth century BC was discovered in a cist tomb in Abdera, a Greek settlement in Thrace (today in northern Greece).
The most laborious craftsmanship and decoration in the assemblage went into the lobed bowl (diameter: 24.3 cm), which unfortunately also suffered the most from being buried. Twelve egg-shaped lobes surround a gilded plaque with a flat navel (omphalos), encircled by twelve heads of Amazons with Phrygian caps set into leafy cups around the undulating edge. This vessel would have served as a luxurious offering bowl for funerary cult rituals.
Six of the vessels are linked by their punched or incised inscriptions naming three or four different owners. They suggest that the vessels came from Taranto but were acquired or inherited in Sicily in the course of the third century BC. The last owner may have been a Roman landholder in the area around Etna where the pieces were found. Fearing the caprices of the infamous proconsul C. Verres, he might have hidden away his silver before Verres seized power around 70 BC.