UC Riverside

Although widely attested in the historical record, the people known in antiquity as the Thracians (who inhabited a region north of Greece called Thrace) remain poorly understood on the whole and largely stand at the margins of mainstream scholarship. This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the Thracians by exploring how they came to be recognized as a distinct ethnic group to both themselves and outsiders as a result of various cross-cultural interactions. Centered around four case studies, my investigation covers a chronological span from the seventh to first centuries B.C.E. and analyzes a wide array of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological data. I begin with a consideration of Thracian cultural influences in five Greek colonies in Thrace—Mesambria, Zone, Odessos, Dionysopolis, and Apollonia—the residents of which, I argue, possessed mixed Greco-Thracian identities. The second case study reconstructs the history of the Thracian slave and freed population in Attica and how they eventually developed a sense of ethno-religious solidarity. The third focuses on the Thracians’ encounters with the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the conceptualization of Thracians within ancient Near Eastern ideological paradigms of imperial space. The fourth discusses Thracian military service, resettlement, social mobility, and identity formation under Alexander the Great and the Macedonian “Successor” states of the Hellenistic East. Altogether, I attempt to demonstrate that both Thracians and non-Thracians contributed to the construction of Thracian identity over time, with expressions of “Thracianness”—that is, the experiences, practices, beliefs, and forms of self-identification that marked out Thracians in the eyes of their contemporaries—being most pronounced and noticeable in settings where Thracians constituted a minority.