Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)
HALL 6 - Barbarians of the Roman Age (turn of the millennium-early 5th century A.D.) (Eszter Istvánovits, Valéria Kulcsár)
106 BARBARIANS OF THE ROMAN AGE (Turn of the millennium-early 5th century A.D.) "Just as quiet and peaceful men find pleasure in rest, so they delight in danger and warfare. There the man is judged happy who has sacrificed his life in battle, while those who grow old and depart from this world by a natural death they assail with bitter reproaches as degenerate and cowardly." (Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, XXXI. 2.22) thian Basin from the northern Pontic (the westernmost part of the their eastern territories). The first Iranian speaking group of mercenaries provided the cavalry troops for Vannius, the Quadic king, somewhere in the Vág and Morava valley. It is unclear whether the Danube-Tisza Interfluve was occupied by these mercenary troops or by other, newly arriving Jazygian groups from the east. Be as it may, the earliest Sarmatian finds of the socalled 1st century gold horizon (assemblages made up of chiefly gold articles which can be dated to a fairly brief span of time) show a concentration in the northern part of the Danube-Tisza Interfluve. Most of the gold finds in question - horseshoe shaped ear-rings and lunulae inset with blue stones, bracelets, and geometric or animal shaped dress ornaments of sheet gold - had been made in the antique goldsmithing tradition by craftsmen working in the Greek towns of the northern Pontic (Pantikapaion, Olbia, Chersonesos). The perhaps most outstanding piece among the displayed gold finds (Fig. 81) is the gold plaque, most likely a belt ornament made in the Sarmatian animal style and bearing the tamga sign of a Sarmatian king, brought to light from a plundered grave at Dunaharaszti. The meaning and function of these tamga signs, usually interpreted as the sign of a particular tribe or a mark of ownership, is still debated. What is clear is that the tamga sign on the gold plaque from Dunaharaszti is identical with the one appearing on the coins of Pharzoios, a Sarmatian (Alanian?) king who reigned in the 60s and 70s, minted in Olbia. The horse head shaped gold plaque, also found at Dunaharaszti, is another rare find of the Sarmatian animal style. This animal style recalls several elements of Scythian art, which had much in common with Sarmatian culture. The form, the manufacturing technique and the style of the Sarmatians ' artefacts changed within the span of one or two generations after their settlement in the Great Hungarian Plain. This can in part be attributed to the transformation of their lifestyle, the shift from Adopting the Greek term, the Romans called the peoples living beyond the empire's frontiers barbarians, whose language and culture they regarded as vastly inferior to their own. The passages discussing the barbarians in works written by historians and geographers of Antiquity contain many references to the peoples living in the areas bordering on Pannónia. The tribes on the left bank of the Danube in the Carpathian Basin were part of three major culture provinces: the Germanic peoples in the north, the Dacians and, later, the Sarmatians in the Great Hungarian Plain. 1. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN-BARBARIAN INTERACTION The Romans occupying Transdanubia in the 1st century soon came face to face with various peoples on the other side of the Danube. In the Annales, a brilliant chronicle of his age, Tacitus records that the first groups of Sarmatian Jazygian warriors made their appearance at roughly the same time as the organisation of the province was begun. Writing much earlier, Herodotus, the Father of History, notes that the Scythians, famed for their lavish royal burials and military prowess, and the Sarmatians were kindred peoples, speaking a related language. The Jazygians were originally part of the nomadic Sarmatian tribal alliance controlling the extensive Eurasian steppe; They probably migrated to the Carpa-
