Holy Grail

The word graal originally meant a wide, shallow dish. In Chrétien de Troyes's unfinished tale of the 1180s, the young knight Perceval watches a shining grail pass by in the Fisher King's castle, but fails to ask whom it serves and so loses his chance to heal the king.

A few decades later Robert de Boron turned the dish into the cup of the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea caught Christ's blood in it at the foot of the cross and carried it west to Britain. From then on the grail was the Holy Grail.

In the thirteenth-century prose Quest of the Holy Grail, the knights of the Round Table scatter to find it. Lancelot's sins keep him from coming near, while his son Galahad, with Percival and Bors, finally stands before it. Galahad dies on the spot, and the Grail is taken up to heaven.

The silver cup in this photograph, said to have been found near Antioch in Syria in the early twentieth century, was once presented as the true Grail and is known as the Antioch "Chalice." It is now thought more likely to be a lamp made in sixth-century Byzantium.