A night at the museum
One evening last week I went along to the opening of the British Museum’s new exhibition Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece which runs till mid August. There’s a lot of gold in it, displayed to best effect often in walk around glass cases. In his introductory speech the BM’s director, Hartwig Fischer, reminded us all that because the written material from the classical period was overwhelmingly produced by Greeks, we have a very sketchy idea what the inhabitants and rulers of the Achmaenid Empire of Persia thought about things. It was a useful reminder of how our perceptions can be warped by circumstance.
Following on from Mr Fischer there was a short address from the deputy prime minister of Bulgaria whose name I never quite grasped. She was present because the centrepiece of the exhibition is a collection of nine golden artefacts that can only be called stupendous, and which were being lent by the National Museum of Bulgaria in Sofia. The Panagyurishte Treasure was discovered in 1949 by three brothers who were digging in the clay near a tile factory in the town of Panagyurishte. The pieces (one is shown above) were probably rather too well hidden from bandits and are dated back to a Thracian entity - the Odrysian kingdom - that existed for about two hundred years, from the early fifth century BCE. Its capital was named Seuthopolis after Seuthes III who founded it and it stood at a site now, alas, covered by the waters of a reservoir. A Peoples Democracy in a hurry gave archaeologists six years to uncover what they could before the waters rose forever.
I am a history nerd, but I had never heard of the Odrysian kingdom before last week, or of any of its kings, or even - beyond the word “Thracian” - of its civilisation. No wonder the Bulgarian deputy prime minister was keen to remind us that a civilisation in ancient Thrace had existed and that much of it had lived, fought and made extraordinary things on the territory of her so-often overlooked (and when not overlooked, usually maligned) country.
But the overlooked is often so much more interesting than the well-known. It is one thing to visit a palace or an abbey which is on all the tourist trails, another to discover for yourself an old chapel, an unexpected plaque, a hill-fort in remote country. One of my favourite books that blends travel writing and history is Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea which uncovers for the reader the civilisations and tribes who inhabited the shores of that expanse, from the lost Jews of the Crimea to the Pontic kingdoms of Northern Anatolia, and of whose existence we are mostly entirely unaware.
So if there was something a little fierce about the Bulgarian minister’s speech, then it’s understandable. In countries like Britain and America, as with France, Italy, Germany, China, Japan and Greece, there is an expectation that the world will know something of your deep history - or at least be aware that something valuable existed there. Smaller nations on the margins of great empires also have extraordinary stories, and it is rather wonderful when you suddenly encounter them. If you get a chance go and see the Treasure at the BM. It is gorgeous.
There’s also Travels with Herodotus by Ryzard Kapuscinski.
Regarding your final point about small nations with extraordinary stories, “Vanished Kingdoms” by Norman Davies covers many fascinating and forgotten crevices of Europe. There is a bit of repetition, at times, but the cumulative effect is to completely dash received notions of cultural and political borders.