What were my history teachers thinking?

How come I know a bunch of boring stuff about Henry VIII and didn’t know about this?

helmetfromcoteofenestim

As part of my ongoing love affair with all things Romanian, I now discover that in Roman times they had artifacts of spectacular weirdness and opulence. Why have I not heard of the Dacians before? I was assuming a people the Romans thought of as ‘barbarians’ would be at a level of sophistication comparable with Dark Ages Saxons, not living in cities whose watercourses could be blocked to end a siege, and dining in such splendour as this:

kazanlik

wearing a wreath like this one

Sofia - Odrysian Wreath from Golyamata Mogila

Although, speaking of Dark Ages Saxons, this is described as Dacian gold, but I’d have pegged it as Anglo-Saxon any day:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/62744336@N03/8187681955/in/faves-cristianpetermarinescu/

I do honestly feel quite cheated that I was pretty much taught that the Romans were the only interesting people out there at the time, and everyone else was a mud-covered bog dweller. History (like the Truth) is out there, but sometimes you don’t know it’s there to be found until you stumble over it by accident.

 

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