Where did this flask go?
As the archeologist William Anderson has noted, "Menas flasks are probably the most prevalent form of surviving late antique pilgrim artefact." Hundreds of Menas flasks have been found all over Europe and the former Byzantine lands, from England in the north to as far south as Sudan; the latter finds suggest that Nubian or Ethiopian Christians visited the site. The flask’s provenance does not indicate where this particular flask was found, although its relatively poor state of conservation indicates that it was probably excavated from the soil. It was purchased by a New York collector named C. Dikran Kelekian in 1983 and sold to the Alice Corinne McDaniel Collection of the Department of the Classics at Harvard University in 2012. From there, it was transferred to the Harvard Art Museums.
