Xerxes' Pet

Most of us have seen the movie 300. It is historically based on the Battle of Thermopylae, where Persian King Xerxes led an army of well over 100,000 men to Greece and was confronted by 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans. After 3 days of battle all the Greeks were killed. While the depiction of Xerxes and the battle against King Leonidas in the movie 300 did take some ‘journalistic’ freedoms, it was still cool to imagine that maybe Xerxes did look like that!

But neither what history, nor the movie 300 told us is ‘Did Xerxes have a pet? And if he did, what was it and what did it look like?’ (I mean, being a pet lover, this kinda stuff is important to me!)

After watching the movie, I had a pretty good idea that, IF Xerxes did have a pet, what it might have looked like.

We were on our bicycles [up in the hills above our house] when my other half abruptly stopped to pick something up. When we got home she pulled out this completely stripped, sun bleached skull out of her bike bag and said, “Here, make me something cool out of this!” It looked to be the skull of a sheep…and (according to the set designers for the movie 300) Xerxes had cattle on his thrown. Sooooo...I started to think of what I needed to make this skull his pet.

A cool, clean animal skull [Got it!]

Author's note: If you want to do something like this, and need an animal skull, check out eBay!

A silver paint marker (for the teeth and other areas)

A small drill and small drill bit

Hot glue gun and few glue sticks

Your Mother-in-Law's old jewelry (cheap, cosmetic jewelry works best)

Bobbles, Beads and small, shiny stuff (the shinier the better!)

Tin Foil (IF you just have'ta have an eye-patch!)

Your scrap bin of cool stuff [including left over scrap-booking stuff and that model stand that you've been hanging on to for no good reason]

Something to put it in (in case your wife won't let you leave it as the centerpiece of the dinning room table!)

Oh yeah, one last thing, a wild imagination!

I first mounted the skull on the model base using a small drill and some glue (the model base had a pin already on it). That way I would have a way to handle it as things got busy. Then, I collected my box of stuff (see previous step for detailed description) and spread it out on the table so I could see it all at one time.

To put something like this together, start placing things on the skull and see how they fit, and how they work with other objects you want to use. It's always best to put your 'must-haves' in place first and then work the other items in as you see fit. (For me it was the Trackball, Egyptian Scarab pendent and chainmail) You probably won't use everything you have gathered, but you would be surprised that weird thing that you've kept all these years might be 'just the ticket'!

Author's note: Many of the items used in this Instructable are described in detail in the photos.

Here are some of the more unique items in this build:

His eyeball is a 'Trackball' from a broken Trackball computer mouse. It was a perfect fit! (If that ain't a packrats dream come true, I don't know what is?!)

I made the eye patch from a piece of folded and formed tin foil (shiny side in). I considered a piece of leather, but I don't think that if Xerxes needed an eye patch it would have been leather...better make it look like silver. Then I glued some shiny beads around the periphery to look like silver rivets.

I know it's hard to see, but I colored the remaining teeth with the silver pen to make it look like they are all capped in silver.

I figured that he might have lost that eye in battle, so I stole a hot pad from the kitchen drawer [that just happen to look like a piece of chainmail armor!] and pinned it in place using an old tie tack.

While my wife really liked 'Mortimer', she didn't like it enough to let me put it out on the dinning room table, so I stuck it in an old tin chest (that I found at a flea market many moons ago [I knew that old chest would come in handy one day!]) and then hung the chest on the wall in the living room. I hung some more jewelry 'stuff' on the chest for effect, and then I stuck a cluster of battery powered LED lights behind it just for effect.

I will tell you right now that Mortimer was the hit of last year's Halloween party!