Description:
Paul Stonehill on Imereti in western Georgia, which he calls the land of the Golden Fleece. He retells Jason's voyage to King Aeëtes of Colchis, with help from Hera and Medea, and says local belief still places the sacred grove and its dragon in a relict forest that has survived there.
At Sataplia Nature Reserve he describes dinosaur tracks and gives them ages from about 60 million years to 150 million years, in layers he says are far enough apart that the animals never met. Prometheus Cave, in the Imereti mountains, he says was found in the early 1980s while scientists searched for nuclear shelters. He treats its underground rivers as one way the Argonauts could have reached the Colchian forest, and says the fleece was sheepskins used to catch gold dust in Caucasian streams.
He sketches Colchis as an early kingdom on the Black Sea that traded flax, timber, honey, iron, and gold with Milesian Greeks, later taken by Mithridates VI and Rome, and joined in the 10th century with the eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia. The talk ends at Vani, where excavations from 1947 uncovered a Colchian city destroyed in the mid-1st century BCE. Its museum, opened in 1985, holds gold, silver, and bronze from about 800 BCE to 100 CE.
At Sataplia Nature Reserve he describes dinosaur tracks and gives them ages from about 60 million years to 150 million years, in layers he says are far enough apart that the animals never met. Prometheus Cave, in the Imereti mountains, he says was found in the early 1980s while scientists searched for nuclear shelters. He treats its underground rivers as one way the Argonauts could have reached the Colchian forest, and says the fleece was sheepskins used to catch gold dust in Caucasian streams.
He sketches Colchis as an early kingdom on the Black Sea that traded flax, timber, honey, iron, and gold with Milesian Greeks, later taken by Mithridates VI and Rome, and joined in the 10th century with the eastern Georgian kingdom of Iberia. The talk ends at Vani, where excavations from 1947 uncovered a Colchian city destroyed in the mid-1st century BCE. Its museum, opened in 1985, holds gold, silver, and bronze from about 800 BCE to 100 CE.