Archaeology: Thrace's Gold

In the dozen or so centuries before the birth of Christ, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean were bursting with civilization. Pharaohs reigned over Egypt to the south, the empires of Mesopotamia flourished to the east, and the Greeks dominated the Aegean to the north. But just a bit farther north still, another, more enigmatic people ruled the Balkans, where Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Hungary and Ukraine now lie. Known as the Thracians, they left no temples, no great monuments, no massive tombs. They didn't even have a written language; the only accounts of their society--a confederation of tribes that never achieved true political unity and was finally absorbed into the Roman Empire in 45 B.C.--come from the Greeks and Romans, who knew Thrace mostly as a land of poets and warriors.

What the Thracians did leave behind, though, was gold and silver by the ton, expertly and exquisitely worked into jewelry, drinking vessels, urns and other objects. Many of these treasures have been recovered during the past quarter-century from digs all over the Balkans, and now, for the first time, people in the U.S. have a chance to see some of them firsthand. An exhibition titled "Ancient Gold: The Wealth of the Thracians" made its debut in St. Louis and opens next week at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; in July it will travel to San Francisco, New Orleans, Memphis, Tenn., and Boston before ending up in Detroit in June 1999. And for those who can't make it, a lushly illustrated book with the same title (Abrams; $49.50) is a magnificent substitute.

While it is just being rediscovered, Thrace's craftsmanship was well known to its neighbors: in Book X of the Iliad, Homer writes of the Thracian King Rhesos: "His chariot is a masterwork in gold and silver, and the armor, huge and golden, brought by him here is marvelous to see, like no war-gear of men but of immortals." But these are more than gorgeous works of art. The elaborate figures depicted by and on these objects, and the stylistic themes they reflect, give historians their first direct window onto Thracian society, commerce, religion and, in at least one bawdy applique depicting copulating newlyweds, sexuality. Poets and warriors, indeed!