The Thracians

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Speaker 1 It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
And this is an episode that many of you have been clamoring for.

Speaker 1 Both in recent polls that we've released on Spotify and in emails that you've sent to me. A regular request for an ancient episode over the last year has been the Thracians.

Speaker 1 Now I'm very excited to say that that is what we're covering today.

Speaker 1 The Thracians were a culture that's lived in Eastern Europe, largely in what is today Bulgaria.

Speaker 1 We hear a lot about them from the ancient Greeks, with whom the Thracians had a lot of contact throughout ancient history. They feature in Greek mythology.

Speaker 1 They are mentioned in Homer's epic poem the Iliad, with a particular Thracian king siding with the Trojans Trojans during the Trojan War.

Speaker 1 Indeed, the Thracians are linked to many of the biggest names from Greek and Roman history. Spartacus, the world's most famous gladiator who led a revolt against the Romans, well he was a Thracian.

Speaker 1 Now, the Thracians are an extraordinary ancient people, often overlooked compared to the Greeks and Romans, and yet archaeology is revealing a lot about them and how they lived.

Speaker 1 Today we're going to shine the ancient spotslight on the Thracians and give you a taster of just how interesting they are.

Speaker 1 Our guest today is Dr. Zosha Archbold, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and an expert on the Thracians and their archaeology.

Speaker 1 We cover everything from Thracian expertise as cavalrymen and the strange weapons some of them wielded like this large bladed weapon called Ronfaya to great archaeological treasures of Thrace such the Panagerishti treasure and the remarkable bronze statue head of a powerful ruler called Suthes III.

Speaker 1 There's a lot to talk about, so let's get into this long-awaited episode.

Speaker 1 Zosha, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 2 Thank you, thank you, Tristan. I'm really pleased to be contributing something on this exciting topic.

Speaker 1 Well, it is such an exciting topic, and one that has topped a couple of our recent polls: the so-called Thracians. Now, Zosha, to start it all off, a big question: who were the Thracians?

Speaker 2 Well, indeed, we can start with Homer.

Speaker 2 This is one of our first written sources about people called Thracians, and the Homeric poems refer to Thracians as allies of the Trojans and therefore enemies of the Greeks from the mainland.

Speaker 2 But if we look at these references in detail, we can see that most of the information comes from seafaring sources, people who actually crossed the Aegean Sea and met other people at the other end.

Speaker 2 But this sort of writing reflects a real curiosity about the north, the north, the exciting north, which is part of the unknown territory of Europe.

Speaker 2 And we have the goddess Hera stepping down from Mount Olympus and floating across the sea towards the river Hebros. So there's a rather mystical feel

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 what this territory was like and who lived there. And we hear about some of the heroic figures from the participants on the Trojan side.

Speaker 2 And maybe the most spectacular is the leader Rhizos, Rhizos, with his wonderful decorated armour and horse gear.

Speaker 2 And this is, of course, something that we actually find in real burials, but rather later on, several hundred years later,

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 we have princely tombs that have been excavated in Aegean Greece and in Bulgaria that reflect these spectacular figures.

Speaker 2 And some of the plays written in Athens in the fifth century also reflect a little bit of that spectacular glory, the wonderful horses, the beautifully decorated horse gear and these extraordinary leaders.

Speaker 2 So we get a little bit of that reflection

Speaker 2 that first appears in the Homeric poems.

Speaker 1 So many different things there that I love to delve into first before we then explore various aspects of Thracian society, archaeology and so on.

Speaker 1 The first thing is of course you mentioned like the Trojan War and Homer and Greek sources and Athens, the Aegean Sea, and so on.

Speaker 1 So, are Greek sources, ancient Greek writings, are they a key source of information for people like yourself researching the Thracians and that area of Thrace today?

Speaker 1 They seem to be fascinated by them.

Speaker 2 Well, there are various Greek writings that refer to Thracians.

Speaker 2 Some of them refer to Thracians as heroes, like the Homeric poems. The comedies that were written in Athens in the second half of the fifth century refer to Thracian slaves.

Speaker 2 So we get a full spectrum of society in Greek sources, but probably

Speaker 2 the most important writer about Thrace was the historian Thucydides, because Thucydides was connected with this region.

Speaker 2 So Thucydides was one of those rare authors who wrote about the history of his own lifetime. So, he was writing about contemporary affairs.

Speaker 2 And he himself had family connections with parts of Thrace that are now in northern Greece, around the great silver mountain, Pangion.

Speaker 2 He had a

Speaker 2 a silver concession, a mine concession there. So,

Speaker 2 he knew quite a lot about the area. He knew a lot about the people, but he doesn't tell us a great deal about these local connections.
He mainly tells us about the big picture,

Speaker 2 the politics of his day, the international relations, and that means the Athenians, the Spartans.

Speaker 2 And of course, these various Thracian rulers who were referred to in his history. And

Speaker 2 top of the list is King Citalcase,

Speaker 2 who invaded the Halcidic Peninsula of northern Greece at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. He was allegedly an ally of the Athenians.
So this was an alliance which united

Speaker 2 one side of the war, the Peloponnesian War, with these foreign troops.

Speaker 2 But the Athenians got a little bit scared because because suddenly there were literally hundreds of thousands of people moving south.

Speaker 2 So this was a bit of a no-no for the Athenians, and they decided to pull out of this alliance rather quickly.

Speaker 2 But what we do learn from

Speaker 2 later affairs towards the end of the Peloponnesian War and from various inscriptions that survive from the fifth and the fourth centuries BC is that the international power, the big movers and shakers of contemporary affairs, really did feel that they needed to

Speaker 2 find some kind of political

Speaker 2 alignment with the rulers of this region because they were big players. And it's mainly the inscriptions that tell us about this history

Speaker 2 because a lot of the writers that we read or that dominate this period were not terribly interested in the locals.

Speaker 2 They were interested in locals who came to them, who happened to be either landowners or slaves. But they weren't terribly interested in political affairs.

Speaker 2 So, apart from Thucydides and Xenophon, who we might say something about in due course, most contemporary writers are not terribly interested in local affairs.

Speaker 2 They're interested in the region if some of their people go there.

Speaker 2 If a prominent political figure like Alcibiades goes off and occupies a couple of forts on the coastline near the Hellespontine Straits, then they're interested.

Speaker 2 But otherwise, it sort of rather falls below the radar.

Speaker 1 So the Thracians have this interesting relationship with the Greeks. And those inscriptions are interesting, aren't they, Zosha?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think I remember one where the Athenians are honoring a certain Thracian king who's aligned with them.

Speaker 1 But as you say, that kind of those people on the edges of the what they would see as the civilized world, and I stress what they would see, like kind of on the edges of the Greek world, how to deal with them, are they a threat, can they be an ally, how that differs from time to time.

Speaker 1 The whole home region of the Thracians, this area of Bulgaria today, was it a land in antiquity that was very suitable?

Speaker 1 That helps you understand why there was such a large population of people called Thracians who lived there at that time? Was it a rich area of the world?

Speaker 2 Well, from an economic point of view, it was.

Speaker 2 It was and is rich agricultural land.

Speaker 2 When I first went to do field work in Bulgaria in the last days of communist government in Bulgaria, there were lots of very well organised collective farms that produced intensively grown food.

Speaker 2 And this is in the Thracian Plain, the central part of Bulgaria. And Bulgaria was a very big exporter of agricultural produce to the Soviet Union, but also to

Speaker 2 parts of North Africa,

Speaker 2 other regions of the world, and indeed to the UK.

Speaker 2 The local railway repair works were involved in negotiations with British rail over

Speaker 2 break production. So we have two foundations really of economic success.
One is this agricultural one and the other one is about minerals, the mineral exploitation of the region.

Speaker 2 So it's a very good source of a wide range of minerals and some of them continue to be exploited on a significant scale today. But in antiquity, it was about silver and iron, as well as copper.

Speaker 2 These were really the prime minerals. And that's what people were very interested in getting from this region.

Speaker 1 And did they get that from the mountain ranges? Because I've got in my notes, things like the Rodope mountains.

Speaker 1 I might completely mispronounce that, but were the mountain ranges where those rich minerals were extracted from?

Speaker 2 Well, in order to determine where metals come from, you've got to understand the geology and you've got to be able to match objects that are made from particular metals to particular sources.

Speaker 2 And there are various ways in which that can be done scientifically. But we can be reasonably sure that copper was mined in eastern Bulgaria in the

Speaker 2 lowland regions and the upland regions that are in the area between European Turkey and Bulgaria, the

Speaker 2 mountains that are just north of that border with Turkey and further west into

Speaker 2 the central Bulgarian region. These are the copper mines of that area.

Speaker 2 Rhodope

Speaker 2 is a great source of silver and other minerals that are very good to exploit.

Speaker 2 Iron was probably produced in central Bulgaria, and this is one of the things that I've been investigating during my field research.

Speaker 2 Iron objects are produced in very large numbers in central Bulgaria, and this probably reflects local exploitation of particular iron deposits within that region, as well as gold.

Speaker 2 River gold is one of the most important minerals from central Bulgaria as well. So these are the prime areas that we know about.

Speaker 2 Other areas were probably also exploited, but we don't know as much about them.

Speaker 1 Do we know much about the emergence of the Thracians? Does it go back to the second millennium BC? Is it a powerful place back then?

Speaker 1 I mean, what do we know about going that far back when talking about, shall we say, like the early Thracians and who they were?

Speaker 2 So we know quite a lot about the region, the South East European area, the Balkan region, in the Neolithic age.

Speaker 2 The Neolithic is the period of the first settled farming communities in Southeast Europe. And there's been a big project recently looking at the development of domesticated plants in this whole area.

Speaker 2 And it's been an excellent project. It's called Plant Cult,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 it has really discovered the shared characteristics of plant domestication in the whole of this region, and that includes the Greek Peninsula and the rest of the East Balkan area.

Speaker 2 So, this is the foundation of

Speaker 2 Southeastern Europe in terms of settled communities,

Speaker 2 and on the basis of this very successful

Speaker 2 plant and animal domestication, you have the emergence in the early Bronze Age of settled communities living on tells, these man-made mountains that represent the best known settlements of the Bronze Age.

Speaker 2 That's the

Speaker 2 period between

Speaker 2 the fourth and the second millennium BC is the more or less the period of the Bronze Age.

Speaker 2 And in the second millennium, there are some very close connections between

Speaker 2 this area and northwestern Turkey. So the area of ancient Troy.
There is a commonality of various cultural features. So there clearly were connections between these regions.

Speaker 2 And if anything, recent research has reinforced those connections.

Speaker 2 So it may be that

Speaker 2 the stories that we find in written poems such as Homer do reflect something about that Bronze Age background. But the poems themselves reflect a later period, the early first millennium BC,

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 we find ships travelling regularly up to the north, mainly merchant ships.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the frequency of these visits seems to be what generates the stories.

Speaker 2 So once these become regular

Speaker 2 forms of traffic, then we get these stories emerging. And they're connected with the difficult journeys right up into the Black Sea.

Speaker 2 So, you know, the Argonautic legends are very much part of that background.

Speaker 1 Jason and the Argonauts, yes.

Speaker 2 Because it's connected to the stopping off points along the North Aegean coast, as well as the difficulties of actually penetrating the dangerous waters of the Bosporus.

Speaker 1 Of course, because I say you do start to see all of those Greek cities and colonies starting to be constructed, as you say, along the Aegean Bosphorus and into the Black Sea.

Speaker 1 So there will be interactions with the local people, with the Thracians, and hence how they become such an interesting part of Greek thought for some Greek writers, as you've mentioned earlier, Sasha.

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Speaker 1 You mentioned before recording how you thought that there might be one aspect of Thracian society that people might think of straight away.

Speaker 1 I I think I know what you're talking about because I played Rome Total War growing up and it seemed to come up quite a lot then. Did the Greeks perceive the Thracians as being very warlike?

Speaker 2 I think part of the problem with this question is that we use a few small statements

Speaker 2 in a small number of writers and big them up, and then we think that that's reality.

Speaker 2 But the warlike aspect of Thracians that comes across, it's a very strong subtext, is partly connected to

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 2 who are thought of as a bit dangerous,

Speaker 2 actually quite powerful. You need to take them seriously.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 much of that sense of warlikeness is reflected in

Speaker 2 the journey that Xenophon the historian made

Speaker 2 to become a mercenary of the prince Euthys and spend about a month or so as a mercenary with some of his fellow Greeks who were trying to get back to Greece from Asia Minor.

Speaker 1 And this was in Thrace. That was a Thracian ruler, was that, Zosha? Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 Euthys, who appears in Xenophon's Anabasis, where Xenophon recalls how the Greeks, after being defeated by the Persian king,

Speaker 2 the Persian prince who managed to defeat his brother Cyrus, all the supporters of Cyrus had to somehow get away. Some of them were killed, but some of them got away.

Speaker 2 And Xenophon was one of them, and he tells us all about their adventures trying to get back to Greece. And on the final leg of their journey,

Speaker 2 they try and get across to Byzantium. And

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 Spartan governor of Byzantium doesn't want to know them. He wants them to get away.
So, this is 400 BC.

Speaker 2 And Xenophon and his chaps decide: well, we can't get back to Greece yet. We might as well make the most of this and go and fight for this Prince Euthys,

Speaker 2 defeat a few villagers using our good Greek infantry tactics and armour, and get a bit of a bonus in the process. So they get paid for their services.

Speaker 2 And Xenophon is sort of in two minds about how he describes this, because on the one hand, he wants to show how he and his men got into some scrapes and managed to escape from them because he's telling all his friends back home about what it's like.

Speaker 1 And at the same time, he's a little bit embarrassed about being a mercenary in this area so he bigs up what the mercenaries do and downplays the opposition but it's interesting isn't it you said that portrayal of the thracians as warlike as you say is just actually that portrayal that has come down to us is the taking of a few small mentions in sources like i think one calls them having hearts of aries and and stuff like that but keeping on that mercenaries vibe is there clearly times when the thracians certain thracians do go out and serve as mercenaries and i think think of lightly armed javelin men like a felt cap, or in some cases, you hear of some wielding this large kind of curved sword polearm kind of thing, which seems to be such a powerful image,

Speaker 1 at least in my brain. But I mean, do you hear cases of at least of Thracian warriors going out and fighting in the world, I guess, as mercenaries?

Speaker 2 Well, they weren't just mercenaries, they were regular soldiers. The history of Alexander the Great is peppered with Thracian detachments.

Speaker 2 And when people talk about Thracian fighters, they sort of forget about all those Thracians who went off and fought with Alexander the Great. Well, what about them?

Speaker 2 What were the strengths of Thracian soldiers? Well, particularly cavalry. Cavalry fighting was quite difficult.

Speaker 2 We're dealing with a period where people don't have the sort of equipment that more modern cavalries have.

Speaker 2 They didn't have stirrups, so they were using their real experience as horsemen to fight effectively from a horse without falling off.

Speaker 2 And that's not something that you can learn quickly. So successful cavalry warfare is something that we associate with northern Greece and with the Balkans.

Speaker 2 And there are various cavalry armies that were really very effective in the period before the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2 We hear about the Illyrians who defeated Philip II of Macedon's older brother and killed him off. That was a tremendous defeat for the Macedonians, and they had to improve their cavalry tactics.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, you've got Thracians being very effective cavalrymen. And that's one of the the reasons why we have Thracian units in Alexander's army.

Speaker 2 They do enhance the cavalry capacity of those troops that cross over into Asia to fight the Persians.

Speaker 2 So this is one of the reasons why we hear about lots of Thracians fighting for the successor kings.

Speaker 2 We get Thracians in Egypt who were given land by the Ptolemies because they were effective military fighters, because these were people who were there not just as settlers, they were there also because of their military skills.

Speaker 2 And we have Macedonians like that, and we also have Thracians. So when we think about Thracians, we shouldn't just be thinking about the unusual equipment, which is certainly true.
It's

Speaker 2 not been very easy to find examples of

Speaker 2 these sorts of weapons. But the wrong fire, I think, is the type of very sharp and long javelin that you were referring to.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 really,

Speaker 2 this is part of the story of Thracian warfare that hasn't really been discovered yet. It would be great to know more about those sorts of tactics.

Speaker 2 And Thracian horsemen continued to be of great interest

Speaker 2 in the period when the Romans expanded into the Balkans. And we find Thracians and then Sarmatians all over the place because they're jolly useful cavalrymen.
So cavalry fighting was really

Speaker 2 one of the key areas. And the other one was light-armed troops who could provide slingers or essentially guerrilla tactics.

Speaker 1 And I guess also that position, the position of Thrace, isn't it?

Speaker 1 You have to the north the Great Steppe and the Scythians, and you mentioned the Sarmatians as well, these great horse riders, the Greeks to the south, Persians and Asia to the east.

Speaker 1 You can see that influence from all of those cultures. And with the landscape, the political landscape, Zosha, you've mentioned before

Speaker 1 various kings. It doesn't seem to be this one Thracian people.
They're divided up between various smaller powers, entities. in that region.

Speaker 1 But was there ever a time where Thrace, were there particular peoples who were more powerful in the region? That could potentially have united Thrace into, I guess, one political identity?

Speaker 2 Herodotus does adopt this phrase that if all the Thracians united together, they would be more powerful than anyone else.

Speaker 2 It is a very powerful anecdote. The period between the middle of the fifth century and

Speaker 2 the time of Philip II of Macedon, so the middle of the fourth century.

Speaker 2 This is a period when a large part of Thrace between the Danube and the Aegean coastline was effectively united under a single dynasty, the Odrysian kings.

Speaker 2 And this was partly in response to what happened in the region during the Persian wars, because because the Persian wars were really very

Speaker 2 stressful and damaging

Speaker 2 for all the European dwellers of southeastern Europe.

Speaker 2 There are some traces of massacres

Speaker 2 in Romanian territory around the city of Histria, which suggests that the Persians might have been much more

Speaker 2 vindictive towards those who did not show them absolute sovereignty. So, the period between

Speaker 2 500 BC and

Speaker 2 the successful

Speaker 2 battles in 479 BC,

Speaker 2 this is a period which is extremely problematic for all the people who found themselves effectively enslaved by Persian authorities.

Speaker 2 So the reaction to that

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 seek some sort of political unification. There was a willingness on the part of various political groupings to unite.

Speaker 2 And that may have been a stronger sense of unity than there actually was in much of the Greek mainland, where

Speaker 2 many Greeks continued to fight amongst themselves. And of course, some of them were fighting on the Persian side in the Persian wars.
Some of them were forced into that. Some of them

Speaker 2 took advantage of that.

Speaker 2 So the Persian Wars were a very

Speaker 2 difficult time.

Speaker 2 And they did create particular new perspectives on international affairs. Before that time, there hadn't really been any incentive to create any sort of unitary authority.

Speaker 2 And we find after the Persian wars the strengthening and enlargement of Macedonia under

Speaker 2 Alexander I

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 Thrace a little bit later,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 in the immediate aftermath. we're not quite sure exactly how that panned out, but the same process seems to have taken place in much of the area south of the Balkan range.

Speaker 2 And this seems to have been really quite a stable authority. There are lots of historians who think of it as a rather unstable

Speaker 2 state of affairs, but there is no evidence for this instability. It's largely imaginary.

Speaker 1 Given its size and its strength and its duration, how important and significant does the Adrysian kingdom become over that next century or so where you see Alexander the Great ultimately coming to power in nearby Macedonia, the fall of the Persian Empire?

Speaker 1 I mean, the Adrysian kingdom witnessing all of these things, its rulers witnessing all of these things. How significant a player was this kingdom?

Speaker 1 in the political affairs, I guess, in the Mediterranean world affairs over that next couple of centuries from the Persian Wars onwards?

Speaker 2 We don't have much evidence of this in written records, but what we do have is lots and lots of archaeology.

Speaker 2 And it's the archaeology that really gives us most of our information about what was actually going on. And this period between about 450 onwards is one of real economic boom in this region.

Speaker 2 And that's reflected in commercial relations,

Speaker 2 which means import and export of various commodities, the import of wine and olive oil, the export of iron objects, weapons, tools, and all kinds of other products, probably textiles, the textiles that appear on Athenian vases, the sort of nice patterned cloaks.

Speaker 2 These are the kinds of things that were likely exported as well as produced in large quantities for internal consumption.

Speaker 2 So it's a very lively traffic, and we see this in those places that have been excavated intensively.

Speaker 2 I've been associated with a place called Pisteros, which is bang in the middle of the Thracian plain,

Speaker 2 and was a very big

Speaker 2 city that was importing and exporting various kinds of commodities.

Speaker 1 So we should imagine with this with this kingdom, there were these great kind of centers, almost kind of urban centres idea.

Speaker 1 That being one of them, I have in my notes, I'd love to talk about Soothopolis a bit later, which seems extraordinary, but like the archaeology from this period is revealing a lot about that whole structure and I guess kind of the wealth and riches of the Adrysian kingdom too.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. You've mentioned Seuthopolis, and Seuthopolis is one of those key sites named after the ruler Suthes III, who bought Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great's successors in the region.

Speaker 2 And there is also Helles, the modern name Sporianovo. This is a big fortress city, very extensive territory, which

Speaker 2 is perhaps the site of

Speaker 2 or the headquarters of another opponent of Lysimachus, namely Dromikaites.

Speaker 2 So we have a number of

Speaker 2 excavated places that we can point to. But it's worth saying

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 many cities were created in this period that haven't survived. And that's true of Macedonia as it is of Thrace.
And this is simply because

Speaker 2 cities were a relatively ephemeral phenomenon for a long time. And it's only the ones that have survived into the Roman Empire that we've really paid attention to, because they've survived.

Speaker 2 And there are lots of reasons why they survived. But the survivors conceal a lot of what we would like to know about earlier periods.
So

Speaker 2 the critical phase before the Roman Empire, what we call the Hellenistic age between the third and the first centuries BC, this is a largely unknown period, and not just in Thrace, also in many other parts of the Aegean.

Speaker 2 We'd like to know more about it, and this is true of the Levant, the great cities. I mean, you think about Antioch on the Orontes.
What do we really know about Antioch in this period?

Speaker 2 We'd love to know more.

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Speaker 1 I hope you don't mind I would like to ask quickly about one particular set of objects discovered from the race I think Adrysian Thrace because they are extraordinary and once again I might butcher the name of it but the Panagirushti treasure yes because this feels an extraordinary example doesn't it Zosha it is it's a fantastic find

Speaker 2 I wrote a master's thesis about the Panagirishte treasure and it is it's a very very extraordinary find it was displayed in the British Museum

Speaker 2 just over a year ago it's the Persian Greece exhibition yes it's also part of the

Speaker 2 finds that are on display at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Villa in Malibu. The Panagirishta treasure is a collection of drinking vessels made entirely of gold.

Speaker 2 This is absolutely extraordinary because very little gold tableware survives from any period. We hear about Renaissance gold plates and things, but you don't often find them surviving.

Speaker 2 They've usually been melted down. So the Panagirishta treasure is unique because because of this factor, and it was buried until the late 1940s, so it survived accidentally.

Speaker 2 But what is even more extraordinary about it is the way in which particular vessel forms are connected with relief imagery, imagery represented in repusé

Speaker 2 figures. So, we have animal representations,

Speaker 2 we have figure scenes from Greek mythology.

Speaker 2 Now, it is worth considering whether some of these myths were shared myths rather than being exclusively Greek myths. Even to suggest this is a little bit

Speaker 2 unusual,

Speaker 2 but many myths from the remote past were Indo-European myths. They weren't exclusively Greek or Italian or Anatolian, but they take different forms

Speaker 2 in different linguistic traditions. And here I'd like to point to another truly remarkable piece of archaeology, which is the head.
of King Seuthes III.

Speaker 1 What an object this is. Type in the head of Seuthes III.
It is extraordinary.

Speaker 2 It is. It's one of the finest bronze portrait heads, and indeed one of the earliest surviving portrait heads from antiquity.

Speaker 2 And it was found in the entrance to a tomb, a tomb that was not looted and therefore contained a lot of the original artefacts.

Speaker 2 But this head originally belonged to a complete statue, and the head was cut off rather roughly, presumably after the death of Cethes III,

Speaker 2 and placed in the entrance of the tomb. So why cut off the bronze head of a statue and put it in a tomb?

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 it then becomes a severed head.

Speaker 2 And in a recent article, which is freely available online, I have suggested, and I'm not the first person to suggest this, but I think it's an independently suggested thing.

Speaker 2 I've suggested that the reason why this head was cut off the statue was because then you have the full power of the individual concentrated in this head, and it becomes a prophetic head, like the head of Orpheus.

Speaker 2 that sang after death. And there are many European traditions.
There's the Irish head of Bram.

Speaker 2 There are other versions of these severed heads that become prophetic. And that's what I would suggest this head is doing.
It is becoming a prophetic head.

Speaker 1 It is so interesting, and what a remarkable artefact that is. And it's lovely to hear that there's still more and more research going into it because it is

Speaker 1 one of my favourite artefacts from antiquity. So thank you, Zosha, for mentioning the head of Suthes III.
I think we'll move on now to that last big part of this discussion, which is

Speaker 1 something you've already hinted at earlier. You said that head was found at the entrance to a tomb.
We can't talk about the Thracians and not talk about death and burial.

Speaker 1 I mean, what do we know about the Thracians and how they buried their dead, Zosha?

Speaker 2 Quite a lot, because tombs are one of the archaeological phenomena that's been investigated extensively. In the region that we're looking at,

Speaker 2 one of the commonest forms of burial for distinguished individuals, but also ordinary people, was the earthen mound, the tumulus. The tumulus, yes.

Speaker 2 And if you travel around the East Balkans, you will see lots and lots of these mounds.

Speaker 2 And many of them are collective burials, but some of them are individual burials.

Speaker 2 So typically, the ruling class, and we're not talking about a narrow range of individuals, we're talking about quite a wide social group.

Speaker 2 People who had power

Speaker 2 regionally and locally would be buried under an urban mound.

Speaker 2 And this is partly connected to ideas about the afterlife and partly to the status of those individuals in life.

Speaker 2 Those who had leadership responsibilities are buried in these earthen mounds. And sometimes they're buried simply in a pit in the ground and sometimes inside a built stone sarcophagus or chamber.

Speaker 2 And the purpose there is to enable that individual to continue an existence after death. And we have some hints about what that otherworldly existence involves.

Speaker 2 But one of the things that it is thought to involve is coming back, coming back as a prophet or as a seer or some sort of unearthly return.

Speaker 1 Are those the types of burials the ones that survive like that?

Speaker 1 I mean, I have in my notes this extraordinary, the Thracian Valley of Kings, this Valley of the Roses today, and names like Kazanluk and elaborate burials with wall paintings in and everything.

Speaker 1 The tombs that you have to examine today, Zosha, are they largely for the elite, for elite men and women? Or I mean, do we know much about everyday burials in Thrace?

Speaker 1 Or is it just those great tumuli that are the ones that have survived?

Speaker 2 We do have a lot of information about elite burials.

Speaker 2 And when we talk about the elite, as I said, we're actually talking about quite a large social group because they seem to represent local leadership, dynasties, or social groups.

Speaker 2 But there are collective burials, there are secondary burials within these tumuli, not necessarily regularly, but they do exist.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, we know very little about the burial of what we would call ordinary people.

Speaker 2 We don't have extensive cemeteries until later in the Hellenistic age and the Roman Empire. And even then, they're not really as common as we would like them to be.
So there's a lack of comparison.

Speaker 2 We don't quite know what to do with this. What happened to everybody else? Were they actually buried in some other manner? We just don't really know enough about that.

Speaker 2 That's something else that people ought to think about, not just thinking about the elite.

Speaker 1 I must ask quickly then about the Romans when they come to Thrace, because my mind will think of Spartacus, the slave, and saying that he was a Thracian, or with gladiators, that class of gladiator called a Thracian.

Speaker 1 Does Thrace remain important and its people remain important after the Romans take over?

Speaker 2 Oh, certainly. It was a major province, and the major centers, the big urban foci of Thrace, actually flourished to an extraordinary degree.

Speaker 2 And Thrace was even the source of some of the later emperors. So, this partly reflects the way in which the Eastern Mediterranean was refocused

Speaker 2 in response to external threats. But

Speaker 2 under the Roman Empire, Thrace is a