Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Vessels gathers seven containers bound up with religious narrative, and the group runs the full range from a controlled archaeological find to a story that was never a single physical object at all.

The Caiaphas Ossuary is the group's most securely attested member, a limestone bone box recovered in a controlled 1990 excavation in Jerusalem, inscribed with the name of Joseph son of Caiaphas and widely, though not universally, identified with the high priest of the Gospel trial narrative. The Chalice of Valencia is regarded as the most historically credible of the many objects claimed as the Holy Grail, because the ancient agate bowl at its center is a genuine Near Eastern vessel later mounted in gold and gems. The Gundestrup Cauldron, the largest known piece of European Iron Age silver work, was found dismantled in a Danish peat bog in 1891 and has remained in the National Museum of Denmark since, whatever the exact identity of the horned figure decorating its plates. Buddha's Alms Bowl in Kabul is a real monumental stone bowl whose identification as the Buddha's own begging bowl is a matter of tradition scholars doubt, not least because of its size.

The Ark of the Covenant and Noah's Ark share a fate: both are described in detail in scripture, both vanish from any historical record, and neither has left a physical trace, though the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that the Ark rests at Aksum. The Holy Grail itself is the clearest case of a non object in the group, a motif of medieval romance rather than a single relic, which is why multiple real cups, the Chalice of Valencia among them, have separately been proposed as it.