What were my history teachers thinking?

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

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:

wearing a wreath like this one

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.

 

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.