New insights on the hoard of Nagyszentmiklós, following a major publication on the subject

The hoard of Nagyszentmiklós (present-day Sânnicolau Mare, Rumania), discovered in 1799, enriched the collections of Vienna with an unusual set of twenty-one gold vessels including jugs, plates and drinking cups, of which some were made into strange animal shapes and most of them were covered by figures in a vegetal back-ground. The new publication of Csanád Bálint is the result of a lifetime of research. Past works on the hoard concentrated on the question of its ethnic attribution. Cs. Bálint explains why most of the scholars discuss it now as the highest production quality of the Late Avar goldsmiths (around the 8^th century AD). But the main contribution of Cs. Bálint is the interesting cultural questions that such a princely hoard buried by a largely settled semi-nomadic chieftain-type society dwelling on the borders of the Byzantine Empire implies. Contradicting most of his predecessors, he shows the weaknesses of the ‘migrationist’ theories that stressed the ‘Oriental’ character of this art and focuses on its development largely after the settlement of the Avars on the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, which provided much of the artistic and technical models for this assemblage.