Buried Treasure
At the Sackler Gallery, the Gilded Graves of a Doomed Nation

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 8, 2007; Page C01

T wo and a half millennia ago, what was not to like about being an aristocrat in Colchis, a country at the eastern end of the Black Sea?

You were in the land that had invented wine. Your workers had been busy smelting iron when other nations were still stuck in the Bronze Age. You could choose between luxury goods imported from your showy Persian neighbors to the east or from the Greek aesthetes who lived farther west. Since Colchis was famous in antiquity for gold and precious metal -- it's where the Greek hero Jason went to grab the legendary Golden Fleece -- you'd be wearing gold-spangled robes while pouring and drinking your famous Colchian wine from gold or silver vessels. You'd also be so rich you could afford to bury your wine service with you. (Your equivalents in Greece made do with ceramic copies once they hit the afterworld.) If you had a kinky streak, you might get off on the idea that your fine horses -- and some of your best servants -- might be buried with you, too.

A fascinating exhibition called "Wine, Worship & Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani," which showed up almost unannounced earlier this month at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, gives a thrilling image of the plenty that nobility enjoyed in that far corner of the ancient world. Over the past 60 years, scholars have excavated a few dozen graves from the ancient city of Vani, now buried under the vineyards and orchards and farms of western Georgia. Their contents make clear just how good life (or at least death) could be for the lucky few in Colchis.

The exhibition at the Asian art gallery is a treasure show, full of gold and gorgeous objects. Scholars complain that such splashy events overshadow the kind of sober archaeology that might actually tell us more about how most ancient people lived. I'm sure they're right. But it's hard to persuade your average art lover to give up a pile of gold in favor of potsherds and midden finds.

The stunning necklaces on Vani's well-heeled dead were made of little golden beads immaculately cast as tortoises, birds, crouching gazelles or rams' heads. These same nobles' grave clothes sparkled with tiny plaques of gold hammered out to look like eagles, ducks and sphinxes. One big shot got buried with an absolutely massive silver belt (more like a cummerbund -- I'd love to see the bow tie that went with it) featuring a banqueting scene of someone very like himself, complete with playboy stubble, being poured a cup of wine. A few of his peers traveled to the afterlife wearing golden diadems engraved with scenes of lions killing boars and bulls. Some of these treasures, aggressive and bold and ostentatious, show a heavy influence of Persian-style pomp and circumstance. (Some of the grave goods of Vani seem to have had their gold weighed according to Persian measures: multiples of 66.66 commonly occur, based on the "two-thirds-of-a-hundred" unit favored by the Persians. Pity the kid who had to learn arithmetic in ancient Persia.)

Other objects from Vani are elegantly Greek. There's a gorgeous little statuette of a satyr, cast in bronze and wearing gold circlets around his neck and wrists. (Like most bronze objects from antiquity, this one would originally have been polished to a brassy, golden sheen. Only age has turned it green.) Colchian metalworkers produced bronze and iron figures at almost exactly the same scale as the satyr, wearing precisely the same gold jewelry, but looking more like stick figures than an actual human. Same ritual object; we assume same ritual function; absolutely different look. The contrast is one of the most interesting moments in the show.

Vani was sacked and destroyed somewhere around 50 B.C. In its final century, stylish Greek influence had won out entirely, and you have to wonder whether the city's nobles hadn't also started going soft. In 1975, digging under one old farmer's chicken coop, Georgian archaeologists discovered a whole shrine dedicated to the god of wine. With a floor in genteel pink and white mosaic, its main hall would once have featured a huge, gloriously ornate bronze cauldron to contain the god's libations. The beaten-metal vessel itself has long since turned to dust, but its fancy cast-bronze fittings have survived. A stern eagle looks like something from the insignia of a U.S. Marine. On the other hand, a slender winged victory and three delightful little tipsy heads look like figures straight out of baroque Rome.

They're enough to make you leave your town's defense to someone else, while you pour another drink and toast the god of wine.