Skull cup

[2] The oldest record in the Chinese annals of the skull-cup tradition dates from the last years of the Spring and Autumn period, when the victors of the Battle of Jinyang in 453 BC lacquered the skull of their enemy into a winecup.

Laoshang (or Jizhu), son of the Xiongnu chieftain Modu Chanyu, killed the king of the Yuezhi around 162 BC, and in accordance with their tradition, "made a drinking cup out of his skull".

The Shah had his enemy's body dismembered and the parts were sent to various areas of the empire for display, while his skull was coated in gold and made into a jewelled drinking goblet.

In Japan, there is an anecdote that Oda Nobunaga, a famous feudal lord from the Sengoku period, drank sake from the skulls of his defeated enemies warlords.

[8] The highly reliable contemporaneous historical document Shinchō Kōki and the secondary source Azai Sandai Ki state that Nobunaga unveiled the skulls of Asakura Yoshikage, Azai Hisamasa and Nagamasa, which had been made into hakudami (lacquered and painted with gold mud), to his closest vassals, and made them serve to relish the sake at a feast in the lunar New Year 1574.

[12] Khan Krum of the First Bulgarian Empire was said by Theophanes the Confessor, Joannes Zonaras, the Manasses Chronicle, and others, to have made a jeweled cup from the skull of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus I (811 AD) after killing him in the Battle of Pliska.

He likely intended this as a compliment to Sviatoslav; sources report that Kurya and his wife drank from the skull and prayed for a son as brave as the deceased Rus warlord.