Made a little before 1700 by the Danzig goldsmith Daniel Friedrich von Mylius, the barrel of tankard is given over to panoramic vision of Belshazzar’s Feast en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar%27s_feast in Babylon. King Belshazzar himself sits at the head of a long sloping table, his miniature guests individually modelled in high relief, each feasting happily as, above them, visible to the drinker of the tankard but not yet to them, the writing on the wall appears _ “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin,” “Thou are weighed in the balance and found wanting” -- and God condemns the opulent sacrilege of the feast. . . And it I characteristically German from the message: ‘Mene Tekel” is still used in modern German to pronounce something unacceptable or wrong.

The two other tankards make a quintessentially Hanseatic point. The one made in Lubeck has engraved inside the cover the city emblem of Riga, then part of Polish-Lithuanian Common-wealth; while the Hamburg beaker, a startling creation that could be mistaken for Art Nouveau, carries an inscription in Russian in Cyrillic script. Together they are wealthy witness of the centuries-long supra-national trading community of Hansa. . . . Page 242