The Thracians

They were ancient masters of cavalry, creators of dazzling treasures, and the ancestors of the legendary Spartacus, but who exactly were the Thracians? Join Tristan Hughes and Dr. Zosia Archibald in today's episode of The Ancients as they uncover the fascinating world of the Thracians, an extraordinary people that lived in the rugged mountains of eastern Europe. From their vital role in Greek mythology and Homer's epic poem The Iliad to archaeological wonders like the Panagyurishte Treasure and the bronze head of Seuthes III, they explore how this overlooked ancient culture shaped Eastern Europe from the Bronze Age to Roman times. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic Sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 0:49Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:34Tristan Hughes?

  and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology. Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:09Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is an episode that many of you have been clamouring for, both in recent polls that we've released on Spotify and in emails that you've sent to me. A regular request for an Ancients episode over the last year has been the Thracians. Now, I'm very excited to say that that is what we're covering today. The Thracians were a culture that's lived in Eastern Europe, largely in what is today Bulgaria. 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, they are mentioned in Homer's epic poem The Iliad,

• 2:52Tristan Hughes?

  with a particular Thracian king siding with the Trojans during the Trojan War. 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. 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. Today, we're going to shine the ancient spotlight on the Thracians and give you a taster of just how interesting they are. Our guest today is Dr. Zosia Archibald, Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool and an expert on the Thracians and their archaeology.

• 3:34Tristan Hughes?

  We cover everything from Thracian expertise as cavalrymen and the strange weapons some of them wielded, like this large bladed weapon called the Romphia, to great archaeological treasures to throw, such the Panegyricti treasure and the remarkable bronze statue head of a powerful ruler called Seuthes III. There's a lot to talk about, so let's get into this long-awaited episode.

• 3:57Tristan Hughes?

  Zosia, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 4:00Speaker 02

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

• 4:07Tristan Hughes?

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

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Well, indeed. We can start with Homer. 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. 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.

• 4:59Speaker 02

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

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And maybe the most spectacular is the leader Rhesus, with his wonderful decorated armour and horse gear. And this is of course, something that we actually find in real burials, but rather later on, several hundred years later, when we have princely tombs that have been excavated in Aegean, Greece and in Bulgaria.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  That reflect these spectacular figures. 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. So we get a little bit of that reflection that first appears in the Homeric poems.

• 6:42Tristan Hughes?

  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. 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. 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? They seem to be fascinated by them.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Well, there are various Greek writings that refer to Thracians. 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. So we get a full spectrum of society in Greek sources, but probably the most important writer about Thrace was the historian Thucydides. Because Thucydides was connected with this region. So Thucydides

• 7:51Speaker 02

  was one of those rare authors who wrote in about the history of his own lifetime. So he was writing about contemporary affairs and he himself had family connections with parts of Thrace that are now in northern Greece around the Great Silver Mountain, Pankaion. He had a A silver concession, a mine concession there. So he quite, 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.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  He mainly tells us about the big picture, the, the politics of his day, the international relations. And that means the Athenians, the Spartans. And of course, these various Thracian rulers who were referred to in his history. And top of the list is King Sitalkes, who invaded the Helkiddic peninsula of northern Greece at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. He was allegedly an ally of the Athenians.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  So this was an alliance which united one side of the war, the Peloponnesian War, with these foreign troops. But the Athenians got a little bit scared because suddenly there were literally hundreds of thousands of people moving south. So this was a bit of a no-no for the Athenians and they decided to pull out of this alliance rather quickly. But what we do learn from later affairs towards the end of the Peloponnesian War and from various inscriptions

• 9:52Speaker 02

  that survive from the fifth and the fourth centuries B.C. is that the international power, the big movers and shakers of contemporary affairs really did feel that they needed to find some kind of political.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Alignment with the rulers of this region because they were big players. And it's mainly the inscriptions that tell us about this history. Because a lot of the writers that we read or that dominate this period were not terribly interested in the locals. 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. So apart from Thucydides and Xenophon, who we might say something about in due course.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Most contemporary writers are not terribly interested in local affairs. They're interested in the region if some of their people go there, if prominent political figure like Alcibiades goes off and occupies a couple of forts on the coastline near the Hellespontine Strait, then they're interested. But otherwise, it sort of rather falls below the radar.

• 11:20Tristan Hughes?

  So the Thracians have this interesting relationship with the Greeks and those inscriptions are interesting, aren't they, Zosia? I mean, I think I remember one where the Athenians are honoring a certain Thracian king who's aligned with them. But as you say, that kind of, those people on the edges of the, what they would see is 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? The whole home region of the Thracians, this, this area of Bulgaria today. Was it a land in antiquity that was very suitable? That helps you understand why there was such a, a large population of people called Thracians who lived there at that time? Was it a rich area of the world?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Well, from an economic point of view, it was. It was and is rich agricultural land. When I first went to do fieldwork in Bulgaria in the last days of communist government in Bulgaria.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  There were lots of very well organised collective farms that produced intensively grown food, 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 parts of North Africa, other regions of the world, and indeed to the UK. The local railway repairworks were involved in negotiations with British Rail over brake production.

• 13:03Speaker 02

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

• 13:41Tristan Hughes?

  And did they get that from the mountain ranges? Because I've got in my notes, the Rodope Mountains, I might completely mispronounce that, but were the mountain ranges where those rich minerals were extracted from?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  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. 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 lowland regions and the upland regions that are in the area between European Turkey and Bulgaria.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  The mountains that are just north of that border with Turkey and further west into the central Bulgarian region, these are the copper mines of that area.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Rodopi is a great source of silver and other minerals that are very good to exploit. Iron was probably produced in central Bulgaria, and this is one of the things that I've been investigating during my field research. 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, river gold is one of the most important minerals from central Bulgaria as well.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  So these are the prime areas that we know about. Other areas were probably also exploited, but we don't know as much about them.

• 15:40Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know much about the emergence of the Thracians? Does it go back to the second millennium B.C.? Is it a powerful place back then? 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?

• 15:54Speaker 02

  So we know quite a lot about the region, the southeast European area, the Balkan region in the Neolithic age. 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, and it's been an excellent project. It's called Plant Cult. And it has really discovered the shared characteristics of plant domestication in the whole of this region.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  And that includes the Greek peninsula and the rest of the East Balkan area. So this is the foundation of.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  South Eastern Europe in terms of settled communities. And on the basis of this very successful 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. That's the the period between the fourth and the second millennium B.C. is the, more or less, the period of the Bronze Age.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And in the second millennium, there are some very close connections between 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. And if anything, recent research has reinforced those connections. So it may be that the stories that we find in written poems such as Homer do reflect something about that Bronze Age background.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  But the poems themselves reflect a later period, the early first millennium B.C., when we find ships travelling regularly up to the north, mainly merchant ships. And the frequency of these visits seems to be what generates the stories. So once these become regular.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Forms of traffic, then we get these stories emerging and they're connected with the difficult journeys right up into Black Sea. So, you know, the Argonautic legends are very much part of that background.

• 19:01Tristan Hughes?

  Jason and the Argonauts, yes.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:18Tristan Hughes?

  Of course, because as I say, you do start to see all of those Greek cities and colonies starting to be constructed, as you say, along the Aegean, Bosporus and into the Black Sea. So there'll 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.

• 19:49Speaker 03

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• 20:35Tristan Hughes?

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

• 20:54Speaker 02

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

• 21:01Speaker 02

  In a small number of writers and big them up. And then we think that that's reality. But the warlike aspect of Thracians that comes across, it's it's a very strong subtext. Is partly connected to people who are thought of as a bit dangerous. Actually quite powerful. You need to take them seriously. And much of that sense of war likeness is reflected in the journey that Xenophon, the historian, made

• 21:41Speaker 02

  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 age of mine.

• 21:56Tristan Hughes?

  And this was in Thrace. That was a Thracian ruler, was that Sasha?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Euthys, who appears in Xenophon's anabasis, where Xenophon recalls how the Greeks, after being defeated by the Persian king, the 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. 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, they try and get across to Byzantium and the

• 22:43Speaker 02

  the Spartan governor of Byzantium doesn't want to know them. He wants them to get away. So this is four hundred B C. 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. Defeat a few villagers using our good Greek.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Infantry tactics and armour and and and get a bit of a bonus in in the process. So they get paid for their services. 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. 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.

• 23:52Tristan Hughes?

  But it's interesting, isn't it? He said that portrayal of the Thracians as well, like, as you say, he's 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 Ares 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 of lightly armed javelin men like a felt cap or in some cases, you hear of some wielding this large kind of curved sword pole arm kind of thing, which seems to be such a powerful image, at least in my brain. But I mean, do you hear cases at least of Thracian warriors going out and and fighting in the world, I guess, as mercenaries?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Well, they weren't just mercenaries, they were regular soldiers. The history of Alexander the Great is peppered with Thracian detachments. And when people talk about Thracian fighters, they they sort of forget about all those Thracians who went off and fought with Alexander the Great. Well, what about them? What were the strengths of Thracian soldiers? Well, particularly cavalry. Cavalry fighting was quite difficult. We're we're dealing with a period where people don't have the sort of equipment that more modern cavalries have. They didn't have stirrups, so they were using their real experience as horsemen.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  To fight effectively from a horse without falling off. 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. And there are various cavalry armies that were really very effective in the period before the Roman Empire. We hear about the Illyrians who defeated Philip the Second 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.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  And at the same time, you've got Thracians being very effective cavalrymen. And that's one of the reasons why we have Thracian units in Alexander's army. They do enhance the cavalry capacity of those troops that cross over into Asia to fight the Persians. So, this is one of the reasons why we hear about lots of Thracians fighting for the successor kings. 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,

• 26:52Speaker 02

  they were there also because of their military skills. 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 not been very easy to find examples of these sorts of weapons. But the Rom Fire, I think, is the type of very sharp and long javelin that you were referring to. So really, this is part of the story of Thracian warfare that hasn't really been

• 27:31Speaker 02

  discovered yet. It would be great to know more about those sorts of tactics. And Thracian horsemen continued to be of great interest 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 one of the, one of the key areas. And the other one was light arm troops who could provide slingers or essentially guerrilla tactics.

• 28:09Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess also, that position, the position of Thrace, isn't it, 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. You can see that influence from all of those cultures. And with the landscape, the political landscape, Zosia, you've mentioned before, like, kind of various kings, it doesn't seem to be this one Thracian people, they're divided up between various smaller powers, entities in that region. But was there ever a time where Thrace, were there particular peoples who were more powerful in the region? That could have potentially have united Thrace into, I guess, one political identity?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Heralditus does adopt this phrase, that if all the Thracians united together, they would be more powerful than, than anyone else. It is a very powerful anecdote. The period between the middle of the fifth century and the time of Philip II of Macedon, so the middle of the fourth century, 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

• 29:34Speaker 02

  kings. And this was partly in response to what happened in the region during the Persian Wars. Because the Persian Wars were really very stressful and damaging.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  For all the European dwellers of South Eastern Europe, there are some traces of massacres in Romanian territory around the city of Histrion, which suggests that the Persians might have been much more vindictive towards those who did not show them absolute sovereignty. So the period between 500 B.C. and the successful battles in 479 B.C.,

• 30:35Speaker 02

  this is a period which is extremely problematic for all the people who found themselves effectively enslaved by Persian authorities. So the reaction to that was to seek some sort of political unification. There was a willingness on the part of various political groupings to unite. And that may have been a stronger sense of unity than there actually was in much of the Greek mainland, where many Greeks continued to fight amongst themselves.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  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 took advantage of that. So the Persian wars were a very difficult time, 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. And we find after the Persian wars, the strengthening and enlargement of Macedonia under...

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Alexander the First and Thrace a little bit later, but 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. And this seems to have been really quite a stable authority. There are lots of historians who think of it as a rather unstable state of affairs, but there is no evidence for this instability. It's largely imaginary.

• 32:41Tristan Hughes?

  Given its size and its strength and its duration, how important and significant does the Drizian Kingdom become over that next century or so, where you see, you know, Alexander the Great ultimately coming to power in nearby Macedonia, the fall of the Persian Empire. I mean, the Drizian Kingdom witnessing all of these things, its rulers witnessing all of these things. How significant a player was this kingdom in the political affairs? I guess in the Mediterranean world affairs over that next couple of centuries from the Persian Wars onwards?

• 33:15Speaker 02

  We don't have much evidence of this in written records, but what we do have is lots and lots of archaeology. 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. And that's reflected in commercial relations, which means import and export of various commodities, the import of wine and olive oil, the export of

• 33:57Speaker 02

  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. These are the kinds of things that were likely exported as well as produced in large quantities for internal consumption. So it's a very lively traffic and we see this in those places that have been excavated intensively. I've been associated with a place called Pisderos, which is bang in the middle of

• 34:40Speaker 02

  the Thracian plain and was a very big city that was importing and exporting various kinds of commodities.

• 34:51Tristan Hughes?

  So we should imagine with this with this kingdom, there were these great kind of centres, almost kind of urban centres idea, that being one of them. I have in my notes, I'd love to talk about Suthopolis 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 Drisian Kingdom too.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, you've mentioned Suthopolis and Suthopolis is is one of those key sites named after the ruler Seuthes III who fought Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great's successors in the region. And there is also Helles, the modern name Sporianovo. This is a big fortress city, very extensive territory, which is perhaps the site of or the headquarters of another opponent of Lysimachus, namely Dromichites.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  So we have a number of of excavated places that we can point to. But it's worth saying that many cities were created in this period that haven't survived.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  And that's true of Macedonia as it is of Thrace. And this is simply because 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. 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 the the critical phase before the Roman Empire, what we call the Hellenistic Age, between the third and the first centuries B.C.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  This is a largely unknown period, and not just in Thrace, also in many other parts of the Aegean. 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? We'd love to know more.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:08Tristan Hughes?

  I hope you don't mind, I would like to ask quickly about one particular set of objects discovered from Thrace, I think Adrizian Thrace, because they are extraordinary. And, once again, I might butcher the name of it, but the Panagy Rushte treasure.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:24Tristan Hughes?

  Because this feels an extraordinary example, doesn't it, Zosia?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  It is. It's a fantastic find. I wrote a master's thesis about the Panagy Rushte treasure. And it is, it's a very, very extraordinary find. It was displayed in the British Museum just over a year ago.

• 38:43Tristan Hughes?

  It's the Persian Greece exhibition, yes.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  It's also part of the finds that are on display at the Getty Research Institute, at the Getty Villa in Malibu. The Panagy Rushte treasure is a collection of drinking vessels made entirely of gold. 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. They've usually been melted down. So the Panagy Rushte treasure is unique because of this factor.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  And it was buried until the late 1940s, so it survived accidentally. But what is even more extraordinary about it is the way in which particular vessel forms are connected with relief imagery, imagery represented in Repuse figures. So we have animal representations, we have figurines from Greek mythology. Now, it is worth considering whether some of these myths were shared myths, rather than being

• 40:06Speaker 02

  exclusively Greek myths. Even to suggest this is a little bit...

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Unusual, 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 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.

• 40:48Tristan Hughes?

  What an object this is. Type in the head of Seuthes III, it is extraordinary.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  It is. It's one of the finest bronze portrait heads. And indeed, one of the earliest surviving portrait heads from antiquity. 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. But this head originally belonged to a complete statue. And the head was cut off rather roughly, presumably after the death of Seuthes III, and placed in the entrance of the tomb.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  So why cut off the bronze head of a statue and put it in a tomb? Because it then becomes a severed head. 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. 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 that sang after death.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  And there are many European traditions. There's the Irish head of Bran. 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.

• 42:35Tristan Hughes?

  It is so interesting and what a remarkable artifact that is and it's lovely to hear that there's still more and more research going into it because it is one of the, one of my favourite artefacts from antiquity. So, thank you, Zosia, for mentioning the head of Suthir's the third. I think we will move on now to that last big part of this discussion, which is 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. I mean, what do we know about the Thracians and how they buried their dead, Zosia?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Quite a lot, because tombs are one of the archaeological phenomena that's been investigated extensively. In the region that we're looking at, one of the commonest forms of burial for distinguished individuals but also ordinary people was the earthen mound, the tumulus.

• 43:34Tristan Hughes?

  The tumulus, yes.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  And if you travel around the East Balkans, you will see lots and lots of these mounds. And many of them are collective burials, but some of them are individual burials. 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. People who had power regionally and locally would be buried under an earthen mound. And this is partly connected to ideas about the afterlife and

• 44:13Speaker 02

  partly to the status of those individuals in life. Those who had leadership responsibilities are buried in these earthen mounds. And sometimes they're buried simply in a, in a pit in the ground and sometimes inside a built stone sarcophagus or chamber.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 45:10Tristan Hughes?

  Are those the types of burials, the ones that survive like that? I mean, I have in my notes this extraordinary, the Thracian Valley of Kings, this Valley of the Roses today, and names like Kazanluq and elaborate burials with wall paintings in and everything. 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? Or is it just those great tumuli that are the ones that have survived?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  We do have a lot of information about elite burials. 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. But there are collective burials, there are secondary burials within these tumuli, not necessarily regularly, but they do exist. On the other hand, we know very little about the burial of what we would call ordinary people.

• 46:19Speaker 02

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

• 46:50Tristan Hughes?

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

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Oh, certainly. It was a major province and the major centres, the big urban foci of Thrace, actually flourished to an extraordinary degree. 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 in response to external threats. But in, under the Roman Empire, Thrace is a very successful region. It's a province that continues to flourish. It has very big cities.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  It has an educated and successful population. So this really takes forward that whole history of urban development that began much earlier. There are Thracian gladiators who fight in a particular way. And this is a bit different in style from what we find earlier. But perhaps the development of the Thracian gladiator owes something to the story of Spartacus and his great reputation as a leader of the slave revolt in seventy-three to seventy-one B.C.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  The story of Spartacus has obviously been an enormous inspiration for people then and since. I was surprised how many references there are, even in Cicero, to Spartacus. You don't expect the name Spartacus to have become a rather everyday reference amongst certainly educated Romans. And I think that does reflect the way In which Spartacus clearly had an effect even on those who considered the slaves to be

• 49:18Speaker 02

  people who should be put down. Spartacus made that impression. Kirk Douglas was a very worthy representative of that tradition. And I think he has continued to live in people's imagination as a visual representation of how we imagine Spartacus. And if you only think of all the football teams that have Spartak in their names, I'm astonished that this has continued to have have such an impact. And it has had tremendous afterlife in politics. Karl Marx, who thought

• 49:57Speaker 02

  of Spartacus as a hero, and an enormous industry in the communist era that generated works about Spartacus, the proletarian leader. So the afterlife of Spartacus has been a tremendous one.

• 50:17Tristan Hughes?

  Zosia, this has been a fantastic chat. We've covered lots of aspects of Thracian society and Thracian ancient history and big figures dotted in there from Rhesus, the king in serving in the Trojan War, to Suthas the Third, an extraordinary head, to finishing off with the Thracian gladiator Spartacus. I could ask so many more questions about this, but we have to wrap up now. And it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Thank you very much, Tristan. It's been a pleasure.

• 50:48Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Zosia Archibald giving you a taster, an overview of the story of the Thracians and their remarkable archaeology, and just how interesting this ancient culture is, often overshadowed by the likes of Greece and Rome. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. We'll also put on Spotify a new poll for which overlooked civilization of the ancient world you would like us to cover next. Last time, the Thracians topped that poll. Let's see what tops the poll this time.

• 51:29Tristan Hughes?

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