territory of the Odrysian kingdom proper. Louisa Loukopoulou has
restudied the inscriptions preserved on some of the vessels in the Rogozen
hoard and has suggested that not only did these items come originally from
the treasury of the most powerful Odrysian monarch defeated by Philip II,
namely Kersebleptes, but that they were originally acquired as booty, and
ended up as divided-up booty in élite burials of northern Thrace, having
been stolen by the Triballians from Philip and parcelled out amongst local
leaders.^73 She concedes that the Odrysian royal treasury probably con-
tained a heterodox collection of items acquired in a variety of ways,
including tribute, gifts, and as war booty. Individual inscribed silverware,
or groups of silver, such as the set of rhyta from Borovo, Rousse, does not
reallyfit the interpretation that all the items north of the Balkan range were
acquired by theft. Examples like Borovo are still best interpreted as gifts,
even if the inscriptions reflect an earlier‘treasury note’.^74
So it is difficult to use these inscriptions as a basis on which to
speculate about the methods used for documenting items that came
into the Odrysian royal treasury. Notwithstanding the number of items
preserved at Rogozen, the silverware it contained represents only some of
the kinds of silverware in circulation. Precious metalwork that has
survived into the twenty-first century was buried below ground, so that
it could not easily be violated by robbers. Many of thefifth- and fourth-
centurybctombs in central and southern Thrace were above-ground
masonry structures, vulnerable to interventions. So far fewer of the
gifts granted by Odrysian kings to their immediate followers survive.^75
There may be a broad similarity between Odrysian and Persian
methods of inscribing ownership on silverware, but in Thrace the
inscriptions include at most, besides the royal name, weight marks
alongside the apparent place name in the genitive case, but without any
additional information relating to manufacture, to royal treasuries, or
to the‘king’s house’, as Achaemenid ones might. Plate that found its
way into funerary contexts may have had texts added for other, more
(^73) Loukopoulou 2008, 158–63; see also 162–3 for the weight inscription on a cup and
oenochoefrom Golyamata Kosmatka tumulus, attributed to Seuthes III, which refers to
Seuthes in the genitive, as on the Rogozen and other inscribed vessels, but add weights in
drachms, including Alexander drachms (cf.BullÉp2008, 102).
(^74) Borovo, Rousse: Archibald 1998, 160–1, 327 on gift-giving; see also Miller 2010; 867,
871 – 4, on Achaemenid echoes in Macedonian and Thracian silverware.
(^75) Archibald 1998, Chs 6, 11, and 12; Kisyov 2005, for the unlooted tombs at Chernozem;
cf. Delemen 2006. See also now the huge collection of (unprovenanced) plate in the Bojkov
Collection, including more examples of the heterodox styles in circulation, although not all
the items in the collection need have come from Thrace and some belong to distinctly
different traditions, unknown on the European side of the Bosporus (Marazov 2011).
Regionalism and regional economies 221