The Thracian religion comprised the mythology, ritual practices and beliefs of the Thracians, a collection of closely related ancient Indo-European peoples who inhabited eastern and southeastern Europe and northwestern Anatolia throughout antiquity and who included the Thracians proper, the Getae, the Dacians, and the Bithynians.
The Thracians themselves did not leave any written corpus of their mythology and rituals, but information about their beliefs is nevertheless available through scarce references in various ancient Greek writings, as well as through epigraphic, iconographic and archaeological sources.
Sources There is little information available on the Thracians, which makes reconstructing their religious life uncertain and problematic. Epigraphic texts written in Greek form the only Thracian written evidence, although these were rare even in the Hellenistic period.
Imagery is a useful source on Thracian religion: coins were used as official royal propaganda, and images on imported luxuries such as tableware, jewellery, and weapons were used to communicate specific messages.
Information on Thracian religion is also obtainable via the archaeological analysis of cult, and evidence from the Roman period also provides knowledge on earlier Thracian religious ideas and practices.
Written Textual The main textual sources for Thracian religion come from Ancient Greek poets and writers, who were primarily interested in describing the mythology and philosophy of the Thracians rather than their cultic practices, due to which there is significant disparity in the amount of information recorded on Thracian myth compared to that of Thracian cult. Moreover, while these Greek sources recorded the names of some deities, the information they contain on Thracian religion is very fragmentary.
The earliest source on the religion of the ancient Thracians is the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus. However, Herodotus's writings combined descriptions of Thracian religious beliefs with Greek philosophical concepts so that it is difficult to disentangle them from each other, and they also described different practices belonging to specific regions or tribes, which themselves were few in number and were ambiguous in nature.
Epigraphic Aside from compositions by ancient authors, inscriptions on stone are the main other source on ancient Thracian religion. These inscriptions are natively Thracian in origin, and are useful in providing information on the locations of sanctuaries, on the preferred depictions of the deities, as well as on Thracian devotees.
The earlier epigraphic sources on Thracian religion are from the 4th century BCE.
In the Odrysian kingdom The region of Thrace for which there is the most comprehensive evidence for its religious practices is the Odrysian kingdom, which occupied the territory ranging from the Haemus Mons in the north to the Aegean Sea in the south, and from the Strymon river in the west to the Black Sea in the east. Information regarding religion within the Odrysian kingdom is recorded not only by Greek writers and playwrights, but also in inscriptions from Athens, Seuthopolis, Batkun and Vetren-Pistiros.
Archaeological Archaeological research has provided a large amount of data on ancient Thrace, such as sites including settlements and cult places, burials, shrines, various deposits, objects depicting cultic scenes, and images like tomb paintings, coins, metal vessels, plaques, and jewellery.
Attempts at reconstruction The Greek gods Ares, Dionysos, and Hermes, were considered to have originated from Thrace in early scholarship until the decipherment of the Linear B script and etymological research provided evidence that they were all of Greek origin.
In the early 20th century, Gavril Katsarov based himself on dedications to Graeco-Roman deities to describe Thracian religion as having been "primitive and animistic" until it came into contact with Mediterranean religions traditions and borrowed Graeco-Roman religious concepts and iconography, and therefore as passively accepting more "sophisticated" religious practices from the Aegean world.
J. E. Fontenrose in the later 20th century had an assessment similar to that of Katsarov, describing Thracian religion as "crude and barbaric" before Greek influences transformed it, and positing that Thracian gods might have been "vaguely conceived" until they were individualised due to Greek influence.
Due to these earlier negative assessments, Thracian religion became under-studied academically, and therefore native Thracian religious concepts have been mostly ignored in studies, leaving pre-Roman Thracian cults largely unknown.
In the second half of the 20th century AD, Thracologists have attempted to draw from heterogeneous texts from different periods to reconstruct Thracian religion, such as the thesis of "Thracian Orphism" by Alexander Fol and Ivan Marazov.
Fol's and Marazov's thesis posits that the Thracian religion consisted of an oral doctrine about a universal principle which was one of harmony between the chthonic Zagreus and the solar Orpheus in the cosmogonic cycles created in the intercourse between the Mother-Goddess and her solar son, who was politically identified with the king. This doctrine would have constituted a parallel to the Greek Delphian reform, according to which Dionysos appears in the winter to replace an absent Apollo.
However, their use of sources from significantly later periods means their reconstruction has been criticised as unreliable, and the literary and material evidence regarding Thracian religion is too contradictory to allow for such a coherent reconstruction.
Fol's and Marazov's interpretation of the figures of Zalmoxis and Rhesus through an Orphic lens is also at odds with more recent findings on the Thracian afterlife, since Orphism saw the body and the soul as opposites whereby the soul was trapped by the body until it was released through death, while the Thracian afterlife conceived of a unity of the soul and the body which was preserved after death.
Development The earliest manifestations of the Thracian religion were from the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age: the first trace of personified divine power in Thrace is from a Late Bronze Age stone slab depicting an ityphallic warrior in front of a "solar boat."
Stylised terracotta figurines bearing Central European influence have been discovered in the Inlaid Pottery culture of the Lower Danube, and schematic stone sculptures of warriors were used to mark the burial mounds of the nobility, being the result of steppe influence from the Pit-Grave culture in the Early Bronze Age.
The depiction of an ityphallic warrior fighting a snake-like monster swallowing the Sun on a stele from a sanctuary or a tombstone near present-day Razlog shows Mycenaean influence.
These Bronze Age images did not represent deities, but instead represented heroes or substitutes of men in mythological settings, and all of them showed foreign influences.
There is no evidence of deities being personified in Thrace during the Bronze Age. However, painted and engraved circles on Late Bronze Age ceramics might have been symbols of a solar cult, and human images have been found in sacred contexts as burial gifts and votive offerings in sanctuaries, including figurines made of clay, which were popular in Thrace during the whole Iron Age.
However, it was only in the 5th century BCE, when the Odrysian kingdom emerged and Greek appeared in the Thracian heartland that the names of Thracian deities began to be recorded by Greeks in Thrace and that the first depictions of deities appeared in Thrace on goods imported from Greece.
Cosmology The account of Polyaenus of Bithynia, that the king Cosingas of the Cebrenii and Sycaeboae threatened to ascend by ladder to Heaven to complain about their disobedience to a goddess, suggests that the Thracians envisioned their deities as inhabiting the celestial realm.
That the king Kotys I celebrated sacrifices to the gods in symposia at places he had chosen which were shaded with trees and watered with springs also implies that Thracians believed their deities to be omnipresent.
Pantheon The names of Thracian deities are not well-attested because of a taboo against mentioning them due to what was believed to be the ineffable nature of the deities, due to which the names of only some Thracian gods have been preserved. Greek sources identify some Thracian deities, although the information contained within them is fragmentary: these gods appeared primarily with Greek names due to the Hellenisation of the Thracian religion.
According to the Ancient Greek author Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the Thracians worshipped a pantheon of three deities, whom he identified, following the , with the Greek gods without providing the Thracian names of these deities: Artemis, was the goddess of hunting; Ares, was the god of war; Dionysos, was the god of feasting with wine; a fourth Thracian god was identified by Herodotus with the Greek Hermes. These four Thracian gods thus represented the activities of the Thracian aristocracy, among whom the indolent who fought war for prestige and feasted with wine were honoured, while agricultural work was derided.
The attested Thracian deities were worshipped by the Thracian elite, showing the political function of the Thracian religious cults.
The Thracian religion was aniconic, and representations of deities were present only on utilitarian artifacts, but not in sanctuaries save for those related to Greek cults in towns. This was similar to the Scythians, who also had no statues or altars and temples to their gods. Nevertheless, a comment by Xenophanes of Colophon, that the Thracian gods were red-haired and blue-eyed because mortals imagined their gods as alike to themselves, suggests that Thracians viewed their deities as being anthropomorphic in appearance.
Due to the various different names attributed by Ancient Greek authors to Thracian deities as well as the fragmented tribal social organisation of the Thracians, it is uncertain whether the Thracians had no common pantheon, or whether certain deities were simply known by different names across different parts of Thrace.
The Thracian "Hermes" The Thracian "Hermes" was the progenitor of the kings: this god was worshipped supremely by the Thracian kings, who swore only by him.
Bendis
The Thracian goddess Bendis () was the Great Mother of Gods, similar to the Phrygian goddess Kubeleya, and was a mistress of animals who was associated to wild animals, as well as a power-giver connected to the Thracian elite, thus being a fertility deity and a .
Bendis was identified with the Greek goddess Artemis, whom Herodotus of Halicarnassus described as one of the four main deities worshipped by the Thracians. According to Herodotus, Thracian and Paeonian women offered sacrifices to (). The cult of Bendis in Thrace was performed in open-air rock sanctuaries.
Bendis as identified with the Greek was the main deity of the city of Kabyle, where was located a Phōsphorion (), and where she enjoyed a cult along with the Thracian "Apollo." The civic coins of Kabyle depicted Phōsphoros as wearing a long-belted gown and holding a torch in each hand, and this same image was crudely carved at the peak of Zayči Vruh, that is the acropolis of the city. Phōsphoros is also attested in an inscription from the city of Helis, which was the capital of the Getic king Dromichaetes.
Bendis is depicted on several Thracian gold and silver objects and on paintings in aristocratic Thracian tombs, implying that she was a protector of dynasts and aristocrats similar to the Phrygian Kubeleya; in the Sveshtari tomb, Bendis is depicted standing on a pedestal while she reaches out to an approaching horseman with a crown in her hand.