Ancient Thrace, located beyond the northern periphery of the Greek world, was an extensive region that occupied part of southeastern Europe during the late second and first millennia BCE, before it was gradually conquered by the Roman Empire in the period from the third decade of the first century BCE to the beginning of the second century CE. Subsequently, the Roman provinces of Thracia, Moesia, and Dacia were set up in Thrace and a powerful process of Romanization unified most of the previous diversity. Due to intensive political developments, accompanied by powerful changes in ethnic landscapes and complex cultural interactions, the frontiers of Thrace were dynamic, flexible, and approximate (Fol and Spiridonov 1983).
The ancient Thracians were non-literary people and, except for some inscriptions in Greek from the Classical and Hellenistic periods or in Thracian language but with Greek letters, no domestic historical sources are known to have existed. The earliest foreign records that may refer to ancient Thrace are several Linear B texts, supposedly testifying to contacts between Mycenaean Greeks and Thracians that presumably occurred over the second half of the second millennium BCE. The earliest close communication and bilateral interaction between Greeks and Thracians, however, were related to Greek colonization in Thrace that began in the middle of the eighth century BCE and continued for several centuries. The Greek colonization caused the gradual Hellenization of the Thracian aristocracy and certain tribes, and was accompanied by intensive and complex multilateral interrelations (Theodossiev 2011a).
An interesting early example of very close contacts, joint state-community, and intensive interaction between Greeks and Thracians, well attested in the historical sources, is furnished by the political activities of the Athenian aristocrat Miltiades the Elder, from the family of the Philaidai, who was a potential rival of the tyrant Peisistratos. In ca. 560 BCE, following the request of the Thracian Dolonkoi who were looking for an ally against the neighboring Apsyntioi, Miltiades the Elder founded a colony in the Thracian Chersonesos, became a tyrant of both the Athenian colonists and Dolonkoi, and built a fortification wall across the peninsula. Miltiades died childless and was succeeded as tyrant by Stesagoras, the son of his half-brother Kimon the Elder. In ca. 524 BCE Stesagoras was assassinated during a war against Lampsakos and the rule was transferred to his brother, Miltiades the Younger, who was sent to protect Athenian interests in the region. The younger Miltiades concluded a dynastic marriage in ca. 515 BCE with Hegesipyle, the daughter of the Thracian king Oloros, and thus reinforced the alliance between the Athenian colonists and the local Thracians. Hegesipyle would give birth to Kimon, the famous Athenian politician and outstanding strategos, ca. 510 BCE. Miltiades the Younger ruled the Thracian Chersonesos until it was occupied by the Persians in 493 BCE, when he fled to Athens and later served as one of the ten Athenian strategoi in the decisive battle of Marathon in 490 BCE (Loukopoulou 1989).
While many ancient Greek authors, like Herodotus among others, provided various secondhand accounts on Thrace, Thucydides, due to his family origins, was the first Greek historian who lived in the region, maintained close relations with Thracian nobles, and acquired a profound knowledge of local realities. Thucydides was a great-grandson of Miltiades the Younger and a great-great grandson of the Thracian king Oloros. Thucydidesâ father even bore a Thracian name unique for Athens: Oloros, evidently named after Hegesipyleâs father. Thucydides possessed family gold mines at Skapte Hyle in Thrace and, during the Peloponnesian War, he was sent as an Athenian strategos to Thasos in 424/423 BCE, because he was well familiar with the Thracians. Thucydides failed to save the strategically important Athenian colony Amphipolis from the invasion of the Spartan strategos Brasidas, however, and was forced to spend the next 20 years, until 404 BCE, in exile, probably living on his family estate in Thrace and devoting his time to historical studies (Cartwright 1997).
Another Greek historian, philosopher, and soldier, who had significant personal experiences in Thrace and gave valuable accounts, was Xenophon. After the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon left Athens and joined a Greek army of mercenaries hired by the Achaemenid prince Cyrus the Younger, who rebelled against his brother Artaxerxes II, the king of Persia. After the defeat of Cyrus at Cunaxa in 401 BCE, the Greek mercenaries, known as the Ten Thousand, returned by marching through Mesopotamia, Armenia, and northern Anatolia. In the winter of 400/399 BCE, the Greek mercenaries were employed by the Thracian paradynastos Seuthes II. They carried out combat operations and helped Seuthes to restore his political control over certain territories and Thracian tribes. Simultaneously, the Greeks were engaged in various other activities in Thrace. Xenophon participated in these events and directly observed the bilateral communication and close interaction between Greeks and Thracians. He left notable descriptions of not only Thracian political history, but also the royal court, social structure, military tactics, and everyday life. Due to his detailed and valuable firsthand accounts of various events and experiences, Xenophon could be considered the first foreign historian who personally explored and described ancient Thrace (Stronk 1995).
In modern times, during more than a century of intensive and rapidly developing research on Classical antiquity, Western scholars rarely studied ancient Thrace, which was usually considered as a peripheral region, related to the protohistoric European Iron Age and partly influenced by ancient Greek civilization. Many readers would be surprised to learn, however, that the first occasional excavations and archaeological explorations in Thrace date to the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, long before the study of the Classical world became an actual academic discipline, distinct from early modern European antiquarianism. The earliest evidence was produced by Reinhold Lubenau, a German pharmacist and traveler who described his travels from 1573 to 1589 in a manuscript completed in 1628, but not published until 1914â1915. There one may find brief reference to an excavation of a Thracian tumulus located near Philippopolis conducted by Jacques de Germigny in 1584; de Germigny, the French Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, excavated with Ottoman approval and discovered human bones and weapons, which were sent to King Henry III of France (Lubenau 1914, 108). Although Lubenau described some notable facts of the ancient history and topography of Thrace later in his manuscript, apparently following his antiquarian interests in the spirit of the Renaissance, he did not provide more information on this interesting archaeological discovery, the earliest known excavation of a Thracian site (Lubenau 1914, 108â112).
About one century later, in the turbulent historical period when the Ottoman Empire, already in possession of a significant part of continental Europe, was preparing to invade the Kingdom of Hungary, Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, a young Italian naturalist and geographer, born in 1658 in a patrician family in Bologna, became an officer in the army of Venice. In 1679, just a few years before the decisive Battle of Vienna in 1683, he was sent on a mission representing Venice to Constantinople in order to examine Ottoman military forces. While the reconnaissance mission was successfully accomplished, Marsigli remained devoted to his scientific interests and explored natural history and the Roman antiquities spread throughout the Ottoman Empire during his travels in 1679 and 1680 (Dimitrov 1946â1947). He not only wrote detailed descriptions and prepared precise maps and informative prints, which showed ancient settlements and monuments along the lower Danube, but also discovered and identified the remains of Ulpia Oescus, one of the major Roman towns in the Province of Moesia Inferior. Most importantly, Marsigli excavated several tumuli located in the vicinity of Ulpia Oescus and provided informative drawings and descriptions of Thracian tumuli that were observed by him. This was a notable moment for the nascent interest in studying antiquities located in the territory of ancient Thrace and, in fact, these were the first ever recorded archaeological excavations of Thracian tumuli conducted by a scholar who published the results. After a long career in the army of the Habsburg Empire and intensive scientific studies, Marsigli finally returned to his native Bologna and founded in 1711 the Istituto delle Scienze ed Arti Liberali. He lived long enough to see his fundamental scholarly work on the Danube published in 1726 in The Hague and Amsterdam (Marsigli 1726).
The first modern, holistic study on ancient Thrace, however, was the book written by the French philologist and numismatist Félix Cary and published in 1752 (Cary 1752). The book presented the history of the Thracian kings, based on numismatic evidence and historical sources. Cary was born in 1699 in Marseille and received an excellent education in the humanities, thus both gaining a profound knowledge of and developing an active interest in ancient history and collections of antiquities. As a young scholar, he acquired a distinguished reputation among the intellectual circles of the Académie de Marseille and soon he was internationally recognized. Later in his life, in 1751, Cary was admitted to the Accademia Etrusca di Cortona and in 1752, the year when his notable book on the Thracian kings was published, he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the most prestigious academy of France in the field of the humanities. Two years later, in 1754, Cary died, but up to the mid-nineteenth century his book remained the most comprehensive and important study of Thracian history. Due to his significant scholarly contribution, Cary is recognized as one of the founders of modern Thracian studies (Danov 1984).
Over the next century, European interest in the antiquities spread across the northern Balkan territories of the Ottoman Empire was steadily growing and many diplomats, army officers, scholars, and travelers left notable reports, while some occasional archaeological discoveries were reported. Thus, in 1851, a monumental Thracian beehive tomb with an intact rich burial dated to the second half of the fourth century BCE was accidentally unearthed during agricultural works carried out by local peasants on the periphery of a tumulus located near the village of Rozovets, or, according to another version of the story, during excavations to collect stones from the tumular embankment. Most of the precious grave goods were collected by Ottoman authorities and temporarily exhibited in Plovdiv. The spectacular archaeological find was immediately reported and described in the Bulgarian press; this was the first discovery of Thracian material in the north Balkans that instigated a wider public interest and awareness (Theodossiev 2005).
Simultaneously, a certain interest in studying ancient Thrace appeared among European academics in the middle of the nineteenth century. For example, Bernhard Giseke, a renowned German scholar in Classical studies, wrote a remarkable monograph exploring the Thracians and the Pelasgians and their interrelations, which was published in 1858 in Leipzig (Giseke 1858). Ten years later, in 1868, at the beginning of his career, Albert Dumont, a leading French scholar in archaeology and art history and an experienced government administrator, who was the founder of both the Ăcole Française de Rome and the Bulletin de Correspondance HellĂ©nique, and served as Director of both the Ăcole Française dâAthĂšnes and lâEnseignement SupĂ©rieur au MinistĂšre de lâInstruction Publique, carried out an archaeological mission in Thrace: this was the first ever organized scholarly expedition specifically devoted to Thracian studies. Dumont died in 1884; his detailed report on Thrace was published in Paris in 1892 (Dumont 1892) and became a landmark study widely recognized by scholars. One year after the archaeological mission of Albert Dumont was carried out in Thrace, another leading European scholar, the German and Austrian geologist Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter, launched his expeditions in the northern Balkans to study the geology of the region. In addition to his detailed geological explorations, von Hochstetter published the first systematic report on Thracian tumuli spread throughout the European part of the Otto...
