The Urartian royal bowls constitute a unique and extraordinarily interesting group of materials. They are, in fact, the only known objects that were definitely the ruler’s personal property and were most likely used in the ruler’s daily life with a drinking or eating purpose. The origin of the Urartian royal bowls can be detected in those processes of Assyrianization that began in the middle-Assyrian period, and found their climax thanks to Sarduri (I). As for the inspiration and reference models to which the Urartians looked, one can refer directly to the figure of the Assyrian king Aššurnaṣirpal II, ruler of Assyria between 883 and 859 BC (Frahm 2017, 615), who is depicted several times holding a bowl on the reliefs of his Northwest Palace in Kalḫu/Nimrud. The king is most often depicted in the act of drinking, in audience or ritual situations, when he is represented between winged genii. A substantial difference between Assyrian and Urartian bowls is the material from which they are made, which in Assyria is essentially precious, such as gold and silver (Dan-Bonfanti forthcoming; Hussein 2016), whereas in Urartu it is solely bronze, whose high percentage of tin inside makes the bowls appear to be golden. The later developments in the tradition of making these bowls are also interesting: it is important to note that the two traditions, Assyrian and Urartian, diverged in later centuries, as is the case with most of the Urartian adoptions from Assyria. If, in fact, we are aware of a series of extraordinary objects made of precious materials referable to the Assyrian queens of the 8th and 7th centuries BC found in their tombs at Nimrud, which allow us to observe how the tradition continued substantially unchanged over the centuries. In Urartu, on the other hand, we see a progressive morphological simplification, with a complete disappearance of the grooves, but a greater richness in the iconographic apparatus, with the inclusion of a highly selected set of symbolic elements that will make, especially from the time of Argišti (I) onwards, the Urartian royal bowl the most iconic and symbolic object of Urartian kingship. In fact, the Urartian bowls are objects made of metal, a production in which the Urartians certainly excelled; they bore cuneiform inscriptions, the highest element of Urartian royal expression; and iconographically, they presented few but highly evocative representations that may show a polysemic interpretation, but were always connected to kingship. The bowls are most likely the most recognisable object associated with the Urartian court.