Persia and Greece - Objects in Focus: Oxus Treasure Griffin Armlet

My name is Jamie Fraser and I'm a curator in the Middle East Department at the British Museum and I'm leading on the exhibition Luxury and Power, Persia to Greece. I want to talk to you about one of the most famous objects that has ever come to us from Achaemenid period Iran and that's this extraordinary gold amulet here. What you're looking at is a piece of gold jewellery on its side and you can see coming around the top, rearing out from the top, are two griffin heads with horns, wings of an eagle. These are fearsome creatures of power and prestige. It was discovered with about 180 other gold and silver pieces in what we call the Oxus Treasure. The Oxus Treasure is one of the most fabulous discoveries ever to have been made from the ancient world. It was made in about 1877-1880 by some local Tajik workmen in Tajikistan on the banks of the Oxus River or the Amu Darya River on the border between modern Tajikistan and Afghanistan. And these sorts of objects don't normally survive to us anymore. Objects like gold and silver get collected up, melted down and eventually disappear from any archaeological record. So this one discovery gives us more gold and more silver than we really have from the rest of the Achaemenid world put together. So it's this rare glimpse into the riches, into the prestige, into the luxurious gold goods that adorned the Achaemenid world of ancient Iran and which were part of the sinews holding this empire together. And when I say sinews holding this empire together, what I mean is these sorts of objects had really important political roles to play. Now look at how we've displayed this. It's on its kind of side, like you're holding it. And what we're referencing there is an image from Persepolis where we see some people from the corners of the Achaemenid Empire bringing tribute to the Persian king. And one of the objects they're holding, holding them out in front of them, are armlets like this one, almost identical to what you're seeing here. Were these used as armlets themselves? Well, probably not. We don't really know, but we never see people wearing them like that. And if you look at the nature of the shape, it doesn't kind of fit. These were probably brought as tribute, brought as treasure for the Persian king, bringing largesse, bringing luxury good, bringing wealth from the peripheries of the edges of the empire into the imperial center. But what I love about this object the most is the fact that if you look at all the indentations, all the kind of pockmarks throughout all the griffins, particularly their wings, these were once upon a time infilled by glass, by jewels, by gemstones, which would have been brightly colored. So imagine this piece of pristine, pristine gold bling, but filled with red and green and blue, catching the light, sparkling, and it would have been a really dynamic kind of piece. What I love about that is that when the Greeks were fighting the Persians and picking up material like this from the battlefield, this sort of booty would go into Greek storehouses. And of course, we're talking the imperial treasuries like you would get in, say, Athens at the Acropolis, where people would see them, where these sorts of objects would be brought out as part of annual parades, as trophies, as objects of exotica, of this sort of eastern fabulous east. But we've got one particular pot, Greek Athenian pot here in the British Museum, where the potters have actually drawn in griffins and they're guarding a lump of gold. And what's brilliant about this pot is that the wings of the griffins have been painted with different color dots. And I think quite clearly that Athenian painter has seen this sort of object in the imperial treasure house, in the Acropolis, in the Parthenon, and this has informed to his imagination what a griffin must look like. So you're seeing a very Persian type of griffin being recast, rehit, reimagined into an Athenian world order.