The Daily Mail: "Legend of the Golden Fleece was REAL”

The ancient Greek legend of Jason and his Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece may have been based on a real expedition to an ancient kingdom on the Black Sea, writes Richard Gray for UK news website dailymail.com.

The Greek myth is now believed to have originated near the Black Sea where miners used sheepskin to filter gold from mountain streams.

Geologists have uncovered evidence that a mountainous area of Svaneti in what is now northwest Georgia was the country ‘rich of gold’ described in the legend,” writes Gray.

Dr Avtandil Okrostsvaridze, a geologist from the institute of earth sciences at the Ilia State University, Georgia, said the story of Jason and his Argonauts quest to find the Golden Fleece may have been a real event to learn about the sheepskin gold mining technique – where a fleece was used to line the bottom of the sandy stream beds, trapping any tiny grains of gold that built up there.

"The end result of this technique of gold recovery river gravels was a gold imprinted sheepskin, giving rise to the romantic and unidentified phenomena of the "Golden Fleece” in the civilized world,” he said.

Read the full article here: www.dailymail.co.uk