One of the earliest mentions of Thrace appears in with King Rhesos arriving to fight for Troy. His armor is “a wonder to behold,” his horses are a dazzling white, and the accompanying chariot is wrought with silver and gold.
Though Rhesos’s cameo is short-lived—he is promptly defeated along with his men by Odysseus and Diomedes—contained within Homer’s lines are characteristics that will define the Thracians for the next two millennia.
First off, Thrace’s wealth. Homer was writing in the 8th-century B.C.E. and already its abundant minerals and skill in horse-breeding were well-known. Second, the bravery of its soldiers. Third, the region’s delicate position between empires of West and East (Troy, being a satellite of the Hittite empire). Just how Thrace navigated this tricky geography (and was changed by it) is the focus of an exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles.
Installation view of “Ancient Thrace and the Classical World” at the Getty Villa Museum. Photo: © 2024 J. Paul Getty Trust.
It’s the third show in a series from the museum aiming to place the classical world in context (Egypt and Persia came first). As the museum’s director Timothy Potts rightly noted, many visitors will be meeting the Thracians for the first time. So, big picture: who were they? In short, tribes made up of skilled horsemen, metalworkers, and warriors who had migrated from the Eurasian Steppe and settled the Balkan area from roughly 1700 B.C.E to 300 C.E.
hree-Part Vessel from 1500 to 1000 B.C.E. Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
The key, curators Jens Daehner and Sara E. Cole said, is to think of Thrace as a region that was inhabited by a range of groups or tribes, who were uniformly labelled as “Thracian” by Greeks. Continued contact with Greek settlers began in the 600s B.C.E. through trading posts set up to handle the region’s metals. While Thracians did develop a written language, it hasn’t been deciphered, which means much of what we known of Thrace derives from Greek sources. We know what the Greeks thought of the Thracians, Cole noted, but piecing together Thracian history is a challenge: “how would the Thracians have defined themselves and their own culture?”
Female Bust, Possibly a Thracian Mother Goddess (200–100 B.C.E.). Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
Thankfully the archaeological record is rich and the exhibition, which has drawn from 14 Bulgarian institutions in addition to Greek and Romanian loans, features treasures from some of the region’s greatest finds in the 20th-century. There are terracotta jugs with galloping Thracians, carved marble reliefs, gilded shell containers, gaudy golden drinking vessels shaped like Athena’s head, and more besides.
Seismic change arrived in the region when the Persian Empire moved into Thrace in 513 B.C.E., eventually using it as a springboard to launch their ill-fated invasion of Greece. In addition to subjugating some tribes and conscripting workers to build the capital of Persepolis, Thracian peoples fought for the Persians in the Peloponnesian War. The political vacuum that was created by Xerxes’s defeat and retreat was filled by the Odrysians, which heralded two centuries of relative unity.
Portrait of King Seuthes III who reigned 310 – 300 B.C.E. that was found in the Golyama Kosmatka burial mound. Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
The Persians might have departed but their fondness for crafting gold and silver objects lingered. This is shown through the lavish goods found in burial mounds from the 5th to the 3rd centuries B.C.E. Most notable, perhaps, is the burial chamber of Seuthes III, a sprawling necropolis that excavated in 2004 and brought forth bronze and silver armors and a rich assembly of luxury objects.
Goods like these are what remain most pressingly from the territory in the eastern Mediterranean—they offer a “sense of awe,” Daehner said, “at the sheer beauty of luxury metalwork coming out of Thrace.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
