Black Sea Ethnicities 313natural resources, possessing fish, game, and large, fertile plains. We do not know what
the Thracians called themselves, if indeed they had a common name. The Odrysian king-
dom established in Thrace in the middle of the fifth centuryBCor slightly later was
extremely powerful, wealthy, and organized on Achaemenid lines (reflecting the Per-
sian control of Thrace between ca. 513 and 479BC), demanding taxes/tribute from
both other local Thracian tribes and Greek cities (Thuc. 2.97; Xen.,Anab. 7.3.26–28,
Mihailov 1991, Zournatzi 2000). In the fifth centuryBC, Odrysian dominance reached
the Danube, probably in the form of overlordship rather than direct rule, again based
on exacting tribute. The Getae, a Thracian sub-group in and around Dacia composed
of several tribes, occupied extensive lands on both banks of the Danube. Later, when
the Getic kingdom was established, it, similar to the Odrysian, demanded tribute and
taxes from the Greek cities along the Dobrujan coast as protection (Avram 2011: 64–5).
Herodotus observed that the Thracians, united, would be the strongest people on earth,
but the prospects of this happening were slight, so they remained weak (Hdt. 5.3). From
the third centuryBC,both Thracians and Getae were under Macedonian domination
(Avram 2011: 69–73).
The archaeology of Early Iron Age Thrace (roughly, modern-day Bulgaria) does not
provide great insight into the material culture of the Thracians—rock-cut monuments
and pit sanctuaries, both very difficult to date, and burials. Burial constructions and
practices varied from region to region. Inhumation and cremation are often found in
the same cemetery. Cremation arose in the Late Bronze Age (in urns or below tumuli),
but crouched inhumations (flat grave and tumular) continued in the northeast and the
eastern parts of the central plain; double graves characterize several regions; and multiple
and secondary burials were common in the Rhodopes. In the time of the Odrysian king-
dom and later, local rulers and chieftains and their elites were buried, accompanied by
very precious grave goods, in stone chamber tombs, sometimes decorated with murals,
under mounds. Herodotus (5.8) describes the ritual: “They lay out the dead for three
days, then after killing all kinds of victims and first making lamentation they feast; after
that they make away with the body either by fire or else by burial in the earth, and when
they have built a barrow they set on foot all kinds of contests...”
Settlement patterns in Iron Age Thrace are known from surveys, the coverage rather
patchy, with few sites excavated. Commonest were lightly fortified, open settlements,
both on the plains and in hilly terrain. These probably equate to the Thracian villages
described by Xenophon (Anab. 7.4)—scattered wooden huts within fenced cattle enclo-
sures. Little is known about Early Iron Age domestic architecture; excavation at later
settlements has yielded rectangular, single-room, semi-dugouts with a wattle-and-daub
superstructure on a stone-lined base, gable or slant-roofed with branches or straw mixed
with mud. Hill forts are also known at elevations of over 1,000m. Investigation has sug-
gested that these were not, in fact, fortified in the Early Iron Age but in the late first
millenniumBC. These forts became the residences of local rulers and their entourages
(Xen.,Anab. 7.2, 21), with the larger of them used as places of refuge for the inhabi-
tants of nearby open settlements in times of trouble. Buildings and fortifications in stone
appear at the time of the creation of the Odrysian kingdom, an event with which they
have been linked, first at Vasil Levski and Vetren, residences of local rulers. Urbanization
comes after Greek colonization of Thrace, rising in intensity from the Early Hellenistic
period (Bouzek 2000–01, 2005; Theodossiev 2011).