‘mainland’, those who‘dwelt by the sea’, or those‘beyond the sea’, in the
terms familiar from Greek accounts—Ionians, Athenians, or others,
indeed between these and Karians, or Lydians, or Thracians.‘Yaunā
refers to anethnosor a conglomeration of peoples, who lived at the
western fringes of the empire and possibly beyond.’^68
Bearing in mind this ratherfluid categorization of peoples, both the
‘ethnographic’distinctions made by Herodotus and the apparent lack of
ethnic differentiation in Persian documents, we may understand why
references to‘Thrace’infifth-centurybcdocuments and in later authors,
including Strabo, are so imprecise and wide-ranging.^69 ‘Thrace’,asit
appears in Athenian documents, is a handy umbrella concept, which was
applied unsystematically by Greek agents and writers. As a result, the
territory to which the term was applied did notfit logically and consist-
ently over the peoples who in practice occupied the designated terrain.
Athenians still talked about‘Thrace’in thefifth centurybcwhen refer-
ring to areas that were already being subsumed into the expanding
kingdom of Macedonia. Meanwhile, other parts of‘Thrace’were being
divided up—by the peers and rivals of the Macedonian kings—farther
east and north. Stories circulating in the Aegean about distant peoples
were not keeping up with what was actually happening there.^70
If we now consider the suggestion that the Odrysian treasury was
copying or continuing Persian royal custom through the practice of
inscribing royal names on silverware,^71 then the evidence is not quite
what it seems. The inscriptions that appear to refer to geographical
locations (Apros, Beos, Ergiske Sauthaba, perhaps Geiston)^72 are
puzzling, precisely because the names are all concentrated in a small
area of south-eastern Thrace, while thefind spots are without exception
located north of the Balkan mountains, in other words outside the
(^68) Rollinger 2006, 205; 213 Table 11.1 (‘Greeks’in the inscriptions of the Achaemenid
kings).
(^69) ‘[Thrace] Ce nom désigne dans Strabon, et dans l’antiquité en général, la partie de
l’Europe où prédomine une population thrace; c’est en gros l’angle S.-E. de la péninsule
balkanique. Ses limites sont au nord le Danube... à l’est l’Euxin et le Bosphore, au S.-E. et
au sud la Propontide, l’|Hellespont, l’Égée au S.O. la Macédoine où la frontière fut le Strymon
d’abord, puis après Philippe II et Alexandre, le Nestos—étant entendu qu’il resta dans les limites
de la Macédoine des enclaves et un fonds de la population thrace.’(Baladié 1989, 331 with
copious text refs.) See e.g. F25 (Bermion, formerly occupied by Bryges, a Thracian people, some
of whom crossed to Asia).
(^70) See the discussion in Archibald 2010, 326–7 with further refs.
(^71) Zournatzi 2000, 689–702.
(^72) Loukopoulou 2008, 153–63, suggests that the formula [ ̊üôıïò] ̄ˆˆ ̄IÓÔÙ ̋
should be readKŒ/Kª ºåØóôHíorºÅØóôHí(with comparanda, 158–9); this is possible, though
not entirely convincing (see Avram,RÉG122 (2009)= BullÉp2009, 489–90).
220 Regionalism and regional economies