A skull cup is a drinking vessel made from the head of a slain enemy.[1] In every case the Chinese and Byzantine sources name, the dead man was a king or an emperor. The Chinese histories record it twice on the steppe: the Xiongnu made a cup of the skull of the Yuezhi king. The Rouran lacquered the skull of a Gaoche king.[2] A Byzantine chronicle tells the same of the Bulgar ruler Krum and the emperor Nikephoros I in 811.[3] The Yuezhi king’s skull is the best documented of these cups. The Xiongnu still had it under the Han emperor Yuan and drank a blood oath from it with two Han envoys.[4] By then the Yuezhi king had been dead for more than a century.

The cup of the Yuezhi king

The Shiji mentions the cup twice.[5] In the Jianyuan era, 140 to 135 BC, the Han emperor questioned Xiongnu who had come over to him.[5] They all said that the Xiongnu had defeated the king of the Yuezhi and made his head into a drinking vessel.[5] The Yuezhi had fled and hated the Xiongnu, but had no one to fight them with.[5] The Han wanted to destroy the Xiongnu. On hearing this, the emperor sought an envoy to the Yuezhi.[5] The man who offered himself was Zhang Qian.[5]

The Shiji’s notice on the Yuezhi names the ruler under whom the cup was made.[5] Bagatur had defeated the Yuezhi. Under his son Laoshang Chanyu, the Xiongnu killed the Yuezhi king and made his head into a drinking vessel.[6][7] Then the Yuezhi went far to the west.[5] The Han Shu repeats the notice in its chapter on the Western Regions.[8] It copies the Shiji here. It is therefore not a second witness.

The commentators did not agree on what the vessel was. The Shiji commentary of Wei Zhao takes the drinking vessel, 飲器, for an oval wine cup. Jin Zhuo takes it for a chamber pot in the shape of a tiger cub, or for the name of a drinking and wine vessel. Yan Shigu, on the Han Shu, rejects both. In his view, an oval wine cup is for keeping wine and not for drinking it. A chamber pot is for urine.[9]

The oath with the Han

The cup appears again in the Han Shu’s account of Huhanye Chanyu.[4] Two Han officers, Han Chang and Zhang Meng, came north with the chanyu’s son, who had been a hostage at the Han court.[4] They feared that the chanyu would go back north beyond their reach. Therefore they swore a treaty with him on the spot.[4] From that day the Han and the Xiongnu were to be one house, and whoever first broke the oath was to receive the ill favour of Heaven.[4] The Han Shu sets the mission in the year after the Han envoy Gu Ji was killed by the chanyu Zhizhi. The Zizhi tongjian puts Gu Ji’s mission in 44 BC.[10] The oath therefore falls in about 43 BC.

The two officers climbed the hill east of the river Nuo with the chanyu and his great men and killed a white horse.[4] The chanyu stirred the wine with the jinglu knife and a golden liuli.[4][11] Then they drank the blood oath together from the drinking vessel that had been made of the head of the Yuezhi king whom Laoshang Chanyu had defeated.[4][12][13] Some scholars note that the words on stirring the wine contain no word for blood, against a translation that has the wine mixed with blood.[14] At the Han court the ministers held that the officers had bound the emperor’s descendants in a curse with barbarians. The emperor, however, let the oath stand.[4] The cup of a Xiongnu victory had become the vessel of an oath sworn with the Han.

The Han Shu calls the knife jinglu, 徑路. Commentators on the Han Shu disagree about the name. One says that Jinglu is the name of the treasured sword of the Xiongnu. A later one holds that it is the name of the Xiutu king, who was enshrined and worshipped, and that the shrine of the god of Jinglu was a Xiongnu shrine.[4][15]

The word has also been explained from Turkic. Some scholars compare jinglu with Teleut kyngyrak and with qingrak of Eastern Turkestan, “knife”, and take the likeness for a proof that the Xiongnu were Turkic.[16] Others call it the oldest Turkic word on record and set it beside Middle Turkic kıŋrak, “large knife”, which lives on in modern Turkic languages.[17] Still others take jinglu, together with Turkic qïŋraq and Mongolic kingara, for a loan from an Iranian word for “sword”.[18]

Chounu and the Gaoche king

The Wei Shu gives the second steppe case.[19] Mi’etu, king of the Gaoche, the “high carts” whom the later histories call the Tiele, had killed the Rouran khan Futu on a campaign in the west.[19] In 516 Futu’s son Chounu Khan marched west, crushed the Gaoche and took Mi’etu prisoner.[19] He had the king’s legs tied to a sorry horse and dragged him to death.[19] Then he lacquered his head into a drinking vessel.[19] One account says that Chounu made the cup in Scythian or Xiongnu fashion.[20] The Bei Shi repeats the passage.[21]

Krum and Nikephoros

On 26 July 811 the Bulgars under Krum fell on the camp of the emperor Nikephoros I, who had invaded their country, and killed him.[22] Theophanes, writing a few years later, says that Krum cut off the emperor’s head and hung it on a pole for several days, to show it to the tribes that came to him and to dishonour the Romans.[3] After that he bared the skull and covered it on the outside with silver. In his pride, he made the chiefs of the Slavs drink from it.[23]

Further accounts

The oldest record is Greek. Herodotus describes the Scythians making drinking cups from the skulls of their enemies.[24] In 972 the Pechenegs killed the Rus’ prince Svyatoslav at the cataracts of the Dnieper. They made a cup of his skull, overlaid with gold, from which they drank.[25]

The practice reached beyond the steppe. Paul the Deacon writes that the Lombard king Alboin, allied with the Avars against the Gepids, killed the Gepid king Cunimund in battle and made his head into a drinking cup.[26] Years later, at a feast in Verona, Alboin had wine served in that cup to his queen Rosamund, Cunimund’s daughter. He invited her to drink merrily with her father.[27] Paul says that he saw the cup himself, when the Lombard prince Ratchis showed it to his guests on a feast day.[27] Paul’s account of Alboin’s wars with the Gepids is full of legendary features.[28]

Interpretations of the custom

No maker of such a cup explains it in a surviving text. Some scholars take it for an old magical practice, by which the victor took the powers of the dead man into himself.[28] A second view places it in a steppe tradition that runs from the Scythians through the Xiongnu to the Bulgars and the Pechenegs.[29] A third holds that the custom was not Turkic. In that case the Xiongnu took it over from Indo-Iranian peoples and the ancient Chinese.[9] A fourth finds in it both a means of frightening the enemy and a taking of the slain man’s spiritual power. It sets the custom within a cult of skulls tied to the cult of ancestors.[30] For that cult it cites a rite described in the Secret History of the Mongols, in which the Naiman honoured the severed head of the Kereyit ruler Toghril Ong Khan.[31] A fifth view calls the skull cup a state custom of the Xiongnu and the Göktürks, whereas among the Scythians any man who killed an enemy could make one. If so, the cup of the Göktürk khan Bumin, made from the head of the Rouran khan, was the symbol of the founding of the khaganate.[32][7] No source records such a cup for Bumin. The sources give the occasions instead: Theophanes speaks of pride and of dishonouring the enemy, the Han Shu shows the cup at an oath, and in Paul the Deacon it serves a king’s taunt.

The Chinese chapters on the Göktürks and the Uyghurs record no such cup. On the eastern steppe the custom is known from the Xiongnu of the second and first centuries BC and from the Rouran of the sixth century AD.

References

  1. ^ Shiji, juan 123; Wei Shu, juan 103; Theophanes the Confessor
  2. ^ Shiji, juan 123; Wei Shu, juan 103
  3. ^ a b Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 673–674
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Han Shu, juan 94
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h Shiji, juan 123
  6. ^ Shiji, juan 123; Shiji, juan 110
  7. ^ a b Ögel 2015, p. 251
  8. ^ Han Shu, juan 96
  9. ^ a b Erkoç 2026, p. 245
  10. ^ Han Shu, juan 94; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 28
  11. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 53
  12. ^ Roux 1994, p. 191
  13. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 151–154
  14. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 153
  15. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 52–53
  16. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 53–54
  17. ^ Tekin 2003, p. 12
  18. ^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 54
  19. ^ a b c d e Wei Shu, juan 103
  20. ^ Pulleyblank 1990, p. 23
  21. ^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98
  22. ^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 673
  23. ^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 674
  24. ^ Godley 1920, IV.65
  25. ^ Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 6480 (972)
  26. ^ Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, I.27
  27. ^ a b Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, II.28
  28. ^ a b Pohl 2018, p. 67
  29. ^ Golden 1992, p. 49, 249
  30. ^ Erkoç 2026, p. 245–246
  31. ^ Erkoç 2026, p. 246
  32. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 2,153

Sources

Literature

  • Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum (late 8th c.)
  • Nestor tradition; redaction 12th c., Повесть временных лет / Primary Chronicle (ca. 1113)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Cyril Mango, Roger Scott (trans.), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (1997)
  • Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822 (2018)
  • A. D. Godley, Herodotus, with an English Translation (1920)
  • Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç, Asya Hunlarında Dinî İnançlar (Religious Beliefs of the Xiongnu) (2026)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)
  • Shiratori Kurakichi, On the Territory of the Hsiung-nu Prince Hsiu-t'u Wang and His Metal Statues for Heaven-worship (1930)
  • Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The 'High Carts': A Turkish-Speaking People Before the Türks (1990)
  • Jean-Paul Roux, Türklerin ve Moğolların Eski Dini (1994)
  • Talât Tekin; Mehmet Ölmez, Türk Dilleri: Giriş (2003)

Related

What links here7

Persons
Chounu Khan · Huhanye Chanyu · Laoshang Chanyu
States
Xiongnu
Institutions and Titles
Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires · Lacquerware
Religions
Horse Sacrifice

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Skull Cup.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/institutions/skull-cup/

Last revised: 8 November 2026