In search of the Thracians: From ancient tales to archaeological riches

This article is from World Archaeology issue 129

Subscribe now for full access and no adverts

The Thracians may not be as famous as the Greeks and Romans, but they were certainly no strangers to the ancient literature. One memorable appearance takes the form of a cameo in the Iliad, where a contingent of Thracian warriors were late arrivals to the Trojan cause. The mythical leader of these Thracians, King Rhesos, is portrayed as a man who knew how to make an entrance. One of his horses was as white as snow and fast as the wind, while the king’s golden armour was seen as more fitting wear for a god than a mortal. The contingent’s contribution to the fighting was rather less striking, though. A great many were slain as they slept by the Greek heroes Odysseus and Diomedes, who promptly made off with the king’s accoutrements. Short though this incident is, it captures a number of the stock traits associated with Thracians in ancient literature: they were warriors, riders, workers of sumptuous metalwork, and they had an uncanny knack for finding themselves sandwiched between two greater and competing powers. They were also branded barbarians, for the Thracians did not write literature to equal their metallurgical marvels. Instead, our surviving sources were written by outsiders, primarily the ancient Greeks.

Thrace can more or less be equated with modern Bulgaria, along with parts of Romania, Greece, and Turkey. Archaeology has revealed that this region was indeed a source of breathtaking ancient metalwork, ranging all of the way from extravagant banqueting sets to a striking royal portrait. Such artefacts present some of the highlights of the current Ancient Thrace and the Classical World exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum in California (see further information box below). This forms part of a series dedicated to putting the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan worlds in context by exploring their relationships with neighbouring cultures. Thanks to a partnership with Bulgarian institutions, material has been loaned from 14 regional museums, while other museums around the world have also contributed objects. The result is only the third major exhibition dedicated to the Thracians in the US, and the first on the West Coast. While the exquisite metalwork from ancient Thrace showcases the talents of their artisans, these archaeological riches pose a question, too: just who were the Thracians? Any attempt to answer it requires a careful weighing of the historical and archaeological sources.

Seen from the outside

‘The bulk of what we know from the ancient literature comes from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides’, says Sara E Cole, associate curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum. ‘In both instances, we have to be very careful about how we assess them. Herodotus is arguably taking more of what we would call an ethnographic approach, by describing different peoples and their practices. He talks about the military prowess of the Thracians, as well as how they practise tattooing as a sign of noble birth, and their dress and customs. Herodotus notes that they are organised into many different tribal groups, and he believes that the Thracians lack power because of an inability to organise among themselves. Thucydides, by contrast, provides a historical account of the Peloponnesian War, from 431-404 BCE. He does, though, have a personal connection to Thrace, as he seems to be of at least partial Thracian ancestry and has mining rights in the region. Nevertheless, when talking about the events of the war, he highlights a massacre that characterises them as a very violent and brutal people. Both of these authors are coming at Thrace from a particular cultural perspective, which holds that Greece is a very organised, sophisticated, and civilised society, while people who don’t act or look like them are chaotic, barbaric, and inferior. We have to be aware of this agenda when we consider these sources.’

‘And yet, while we have to be conscious of the biases, our main sources for the set up of Thrace as a political entity are those ancient historiographers and other Greek texts of various forms,’ says Jens Daehner, acting senior curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum. ‘There are also Thracian inscriptions, but we cannot read them. While archaeology can provide a counterbalance, there are gaps. We encountered one when we were putting together the exhibition: we tried to find images showing what Thracians look like when they depict themselves, but it is not an easy task. Different cultural influences are apparent in their art, so sometimes a seemingly locally produced piece represents people in a recognisibly Greek style. In other cases, we find objects showing Thracians that had clearly been manufactured in the Greek world. So those outsider perspectives do not just appear in the literature. Ultimately, we need the ancient sources, because they are what allow us to construct history, and we need archaeology to show us how that measures up to the material evidence from the region.’

Among that evidence, the most renowned must be the surviving metalwork, which typically comes from two types of context. One is aristocratic or royal tombs. While many of these were looted in antiquity, some survived intact and contained artefact assemblages that often combine both locally produced goods and objects from further afield in the Mediterranean world. The other context is treasure hoards, which have produced some of the most fabulous examples of metalwork from Thracian territory. These include the Valchitran treasure, the Panagyurishte group, and the Rogozen hoard. It seems that such sets were deliberately gathered together and then stashed in the ground, seemingly to keep valuables safe during periods of invasion or internal strife. Fortunately for modern scholars, in at least some cases any ancient hopes of recovering these caches were dashed. As these hoards were generally buried away from tombs, settlements, or temples, interpreting their ownership and purpose can, though, prove challenging.

Land of plenty

When considered in the round, the material evidence indicates that the Thracians were less clear-cut as a group than the ancient sources imply. It is generally believed that their ancestors were nomadic groups who lived in the Eurasian Steppe, before migrating into the Balkans. This movement might have started with trickles as early as the Neolithic period. From an archaeological perspective, though, a distinctive culture can be seen emerging in the region during the Late Bronze Age, roughly around 1500 BC. Scholars often see this as the era when Thrace came into being, although there is a growing belief that it is more accurate to talk about Thracian peoples in the plural, rather than as a single, uniform group. The name itself comes from the Greeks, so we do not know if all – or even any – of these groups referred to themselves as Thracian. They may well have spoken numerous different languages, while the boundaries between these Thracian peoples and their neighbours remain blurry and hard to pin down in concrete terms. At the same time, the groups inhabiting the region enjoyed some shared practices and similarities in material culture, as well as connections via elite marriages and military alliances.

The land that the Thracians settled was a bountiful one, which in antiquity became famed for its gold, silver, and copper mines. Some of these deposits were being exploited long before recognisably Thracian cultures were established in the region. Indeed, the oldest known gold objects in the world can be traced to the Varna region in Bulgaria, emphasising that there was a very early talent for metallurgy. While this tradition was disrupted by the arrival of the Thracians, it was producing artefacts aligned to their cultural needs that would raise the region’s renown for metalworking to new heights. This was particularly true in the arena of elite pursuits and display, with exemplary expressions of the metalsmith’s art including jewellery, vessels used for banqueting and wine consumption, armour – such as helmets, greaves, and swords, some of which were for ceremonial use – and also horse trappings. Inevitably, these metal deposits attracted the interest of Thrace’s neighbours, too. From the 8th century BC, the Greeks were founding colonies on Thracian territory along the Black Sea coast, in order to gain access to these resources. As such, the abundance of metals was a crucial catalyst for the intense cross-cultural connections that would go on to define the region.

The Greeks were not the only ones to establish a physical presence on the ground. Persia entered the region in 513 BC, when Darius I led his army up the Black Sea coast, conquering various Thracian peoples as he passed. In 480 BC, the Persian ruler Xerxes I launched an invasion of Greece from Thrace, with Thracian warriors fighting at his side. The Greeks, though, emerged victorious, and by 479 BC the Persians were withdrawing from the region. It was in the aftermath of these events that a Thracian group known as the Odrysai gathered sufficient power to unite most of the peoples occupying Thrace within an Odrysian kingdom. This endured into the early 3rd century BC, and is the closest that Thrace ever came to existing as a single, unified political entity.

The Odrysians supplied Athens with military support – especially cavalry – and in turn enjoyed special privileges, including the right to worship the Thracian deity Bendis on Athenian territory. In Thrace, meanwhile, inland trading centres brought together groups of Thracians and Greeks, with a Greek inscription from an emporium known as Pistiros recording the protections afforded to its inhabitants by a royal decree from an Odrysian monarch. It was also during this era that a wealth of elite finery was interred in noble and royal tombs. A notable concentration occurs in the ‘Valley of the Thracian Kings’, which lies to the north of a capital city established by the Odrysian king Seuthes III, c.330 BC. The quality of the masonry chambers within these tombs is as much a rebuke to notions of the region being home to simple barbarism as the metalwork deposited within. Odrysian treasures are not just known from the tombs, though, as elements of the Rogozen hoard bear royal names from this dynasty as well, written out in Greek script.

Inspired artistry

While the presence of Greeks and Persians had a profound impact on Thracian art, it also drew inspiration from much wider sources. ‘We see many influences at work in pieces found in Thracian territory’, says Sara. ‘Greek and Persian, certainly, but also from Asia Minor, the north Aegean, central Europe, and probably the Scythians. All of these come together in varied ways in the objects we find in Thrace. There were a lot of imports, too, so it is not always possible to establish whether an object was made locally or brought in from elsewhere. It is extremely challenging to come up with a list of criteria to say what makes an object “Thracian”. What we can say about all of these pieces, regardless of where they originated from or who made them, is that they ended up in Thracian lands, and so they were of value to them: they were circulating in Thracian territory, they were owned and used by Thracian people, and in many cases they were considered sufficiently high status that people took them to the grave.’

‘We made a deliberate choice not to apply a cultural attribution to most objects in the exhibition,’ Jens says. ‘In some cases, we know that the object is a Greek painted pot that was made in Athens and then deposited in a Thracian tomb. But more often the question of which artist, with which ethnic profile, working in which area has to be an open one. This is because of the mobility of everything – materials, technologies, and artists. We probably have ethnic Thracians who end up as vase painters in Athens, for instance. Equally, when you look at the objects, you’ll sometimes see a style that is closely associated with Greek workshops. But does this mean that Thracians didn’t know how to emulate it? Or could they have made a whole business out of imitating that style? In other cases, we see metal vessels that are Greek in form, but bear iconography that does not fit with our knowledge of Greek imagery and myth. The 165 vessels comprising the Rogozen treasure really illustrate this diversity. Some iconography can be read straight out of Greek mythology, while other examples are recognisably Persian. In another case, we have an image of an apparent female – perhaps a goddess – with a bow and arrow, riding on an apparent panther. We don’t have a mythical narrative to explain this, so we are more likely to label it as “Thracian”, because we can’t match it with other cultures.’

By the 2nd century BC, another major power was starting to take an interest in Thrace: Rome. This culminated in the region being annexed to create the province of Thracia in around AD 46. In some ways, the early results mirror earlier entanglements with incoming settlers or invaders, as the inhabitants of Thrace adopted new ways that might prove useful, while also maintaining certain long-standing traditions. A keen interest in horsemanship and elite dining, for example, endured alongside a willingness to learn Latin, assume Roman names, and fulfil the administrative roles necessary to sustain the vision of public life underpinning the Empire. Even so, it is change that seems to have become the dominant force. A break from some of the clearest forms of local expression – setting up inscriptions in a Thracian language, for example – is evident during the centuries of Roman control, cumulatively creating a permanent shift in the region. ‘As mixed as the melting pot may have been,’ says Jens, ‘there is no denying that Thrace as the distinctive culture that we start to grasp in the Late Bronze Age ceased to make its mark.’

FURTHER INFORMATION:
• Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece will run at the Getty Villa Museum, California, until 3 March 2025. For more details, see http://www.getty.edu/exhibitions/ancient-thrace-and-the-classical-world-treasures-from-bulgaria-romania-and-greece.
• The exhibition is a collaboration between the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Ministry of Culture, Republic of Bulgaria; and the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Science.
• A fascinating publication accompanying the exhibition is also available: J Spier, T Potts, S E Cole, and M Damyanov (eds) Ancient Thrace and the Classical World (ISBN 978-1606069400, £55).