In 1949, three brothers were digging for clay near the town of Panagyurishte in Bulgaria when they made a spectacular discovery: an ornate gold rhyton, an ancient drinking vessel, buried some 2 metres down. This was just the first object Pavel, Petko, and Mikhail Deykovi uncovered from the Panagyurishte Treasure: seven more golden vessels stacked over a large, shallow gold bowl soon followed.
By the time the hoard was buried, in a period of unrest around 300 BC, ancient Thrace – where Panagyurishte is sited – had seen Greek colonies founded; been annexed by the Achaemenid king Darius I in 513 BC; played host to the rise of a local Odrysian kingdom; and been absorbed by Philip II of Macedon in 350 BC, then beset by internal rivalries in the wake of the death of his son, Alexander the Great, in 323 BC.
The striking set of vessels employs Achaemenid Persian and Greek forms and is replete with Greek imagery, pointing to the influences and changes in power that shaped Thrace, and to the importance of wine among its elite. All the pieces were made from hammered gold sheet-metal, possibly in a Greek workshop in what is now Turkey, and are presumed to have belonged to a Thracian ruler. In May, the hoard goes on view in a newly refurbished space at the British Museum in the exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece, curated by James Fraser and Henry Bishop-Wright.
War Classics – Sagittarius Rising