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Digging up the Golden Fleece? New discoveries from Kutaisi, Georgia

Last week, a team of scientists and archaeologists from the Polish-Georgian Permanent Archaeological Research Group, working in Kutiasi, the third-largest and oldest city in the republic, announced they had found a number of Late Bronze Age artefacts, dating from the 14th-12th centuries BCE, which stylistically and typologically suggest contact with Greek civilization. The implication is that there may be some truth to the stories of Jason and the Argonauts, where a band of Greek adventures sail to distant Colchis in the eastern Black Sea in search of the mythical Golden Fleece, shorn from a ram sacrificed to Zeus. 

The tale is first found in full in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, writing in the 3rd century BCE, but is referenced by much older writers such as Homer and Pindar. Traditionally, Jason and his companions are said to have lived two generations before the events of the Trojan War, placing them in or around 1250 BCE. Their journey took them to the court of the Colchian king Aeetes, in the city of Aea, which is generally identified with Kutiasi. 

While their findings are yet to be published, this directly challenges research conducted by the same group earlier this year, which concluded that during the Colchian Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (roughly 1300 - 800 BCE) gold production and outside contact was consciously shunned, with gold seen to symbolise the tyranny and social order of earlier days. The article does not say if gold was found during the excavations, only that axe moulds, pottery and Greek artefacts were, so the previous research may still ring true. The location of the finds, in Kutiasi Central Park, does suggest that there was a significant, possibly royal, site of some repute before the 6th century BCE, when an urban settlement began to agglomerate along hills close to the modern city. 



Ornate grave goods from a 4th century BCE burial in Vani, a Colchian settlement dating back to four centuries earlier.

These new discoveries reinforce archaeological work undertaken within the last decade around the Black Sea, which has built up a picture of a more connected and wealthy maritime zone that ancient Greek sources might betray. The mysterious City of Perpetual Night, the capital of the barbarian Cimmerians mentioned in the Odyssey, has become identified with the archaeological site of Dykyi Sad in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, where a city perimeter, harbour structures, craftsmen' quarters and an elite compound have all been excavated. Further north, the multi-ethnic polis of Gelonus, said by Herodotus to be essentially a Greek cultural enclave amongst the Scythians and other steppe people, has been identified with Bilsk Hillfort, in the Poltava Oblast of Ukraine, mainly because the remains of several wooden walls and enclosures fits with the historian's description of Gelonus being a 'wooden city'. 

If there is an artefactual link between Mycenaean Greece and ancient Georgia, what could those artefacts be? Potentially, they are something mundane but equally interesting, for instance loom weights, used for weaving, or textile imprints, but they are equally likely to be remains of armour, shields, helmets or sword types. The lattermost sometimes came from or were inspired by types in western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, so it might not be a stretch to think they could have travelled north and east. Bronze age western Georgia was known to the Greek writers as Kolkhída from the 8th century BCE, and even earlier by the highland Uratians kings as Qulha; it's not inconceivable that it was an attractive destination for traders and warriors alike.

References:

Hamburg, J., & Lorenzon, M. (2022). Before Meeting the Greeks: Kutaisi Influence in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Colchian Settlements. Journal of Field Archaeology, 47(1), 13-31.

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