A small animal-headed glass fitting: the body of a crouched feline with a hollow tube rising from its back. The pleasure of it is that it reads two ways at once, as a creature and as a component. It was made to join something larger, a vessel or a fitting, not to stand entirely alone, which gives it that satisfying half-fragment quality.

Animal-headed spouts and vessel attachments do sit comfortably within the late antique and Parthian glass world, so the comparison is believable. We keep it in the "sold to us as" category rather than presenting it as settled. Translucent, slightly frosted from age, and stranger the longer you look at it.