Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

SCYTHIANS IN SOUTH RUSSIA 57
Thus costume, armour and funeral outfit of the sixth-century
Scythians, are all purely Oriental with hardly any Greek influence.
Oriental also, as we have seen, the style and technique of most of the
objects found in sixth-century Scythian tombs. I need not dwell
upon the imported Oriental articles mentioned above : their neo-
Assyrian and Ponto-Cappadocian style can be recognized at a glance.
Some of the objects in this style are enriched with amber inlay. They
need not perplex us. Oriental art, especially Elamitic and Sumerian,
used inlay at all periods to diversify the surface of statues, metal
objects and palace walls. It is true that the cloisonne method of inlay
was not practised till after this period. But we may believe that
Hors^-trappin^s Jrom the Southern Caucasus
and the Kc^n of the Kuban.
Fig. 6.
cloisonne also was invented somewhere in Babylonia or Assyria.
Almost the same process was employed for ivory in the neo -Assyrian
objects from Nimrud, lately pubUshed by Hogarth and by Poulsen,
and similar processes were current in Egypt, from the earhest times,
for metal objects decorated with precious stones. That the same technique
continued to be used in Iranian art, may be seen from two great
finds of Iranian objects, both belonging to the fourth century b. c: the
treasure from Turkestan in the British Museum, published with a
commentary by Dalton, and the Susa find published by de Morgan
and now in the Louvre. These two finds offer striking analogies with
the jewellery from the Kuban, and give undoubted proof of common
origin. With the inlaid objects I should connect a group of metal
articles, chiefly of bronze and of silver, which belong to Scythian
horse-trappings of the archaic period : openwork roundels attached to
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