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

58
THE CIMMERIANS AND THE
a metal disk, the hollow parts filled with some black substance (fig. 6).
parallels are to be found both
This technique also is purely Oriental :
in Babylonia and Assyria and in Egypt. It is particularly interesting
to note, that the same processes were used for similar objects in Transcaucasia
at the end of the bronze and at the beginning of the iron age :
we have many tombs from this period, thanks to the excavations of
Belck, Roessler, Ivanovski and others, and some of them are astonishingly
rich : in nearly every tomb we find roundels like those of the
Kuban, and openwork pendants, often in the form of birds or animals,
the cavities filled with black inlay. The same technique was in
frequent use for sword-hilts and other articles. We may be sure that
in this matter Transcaucasia acted as the intermediary between the
Euphrates valley and Northern Caucasus. We must avoid, however,
the common error of attributing the Transcaucasian tombs to the
Chaldian kingdom of Van. That kingdom, as far as we know, is
it adopted,
subsequent to the prehistoric civilization of Transcaucasia ;
with only sHght modification, the culture of Assyria.
It is more difficult to class the animal style of objects from the
sixth-century Scythian tombs, both in the Kuban and elsewhere. It
evidently presents distinctive and very primitive features. We shall
discuss the question later ; but it should be observed that several
of these features reappear in Asiatic art. I would mention certain
Hittite figures among the Sinjirli sculptures, the tails of which
end in birds' heads. For the animals with reverted heads—a convenient
attitude for filling a given space, particularly a circular one
I will quote, in addition to the examples mentioned by Reinach in
his paper on the flying gallop, the Assyro-Chaldaean weight found
at Susa, in the form of a recumbent wild ass, a form which frequently
recurs on gold plaques and bridle ornaments from South Russia,
especially during the archaic period. Iranian antecedents can be
found for the custom of representing animals with their foreparts
turned in one direction and their hind-quarters in the other, as on the
sword-sheath found near the mouth of the Don, and in several figures,
from horse-trappings, found on the Kuban : the motive occurs later
in a great number of objects from prehistoric and Sarmatian Siberia.
An example is the axe from Hamadan in Persia, now in the British
Museum (pi. XI, b) : it belongs to a whole series of Persian axes,
decorated in the animal style, which are connected by their shape and
ornamentation with a group of axes from protohistoric Elam, from
Babylon and from Assyria, The British Museum axe has its back
part in the form of a Persian lion-headed griffin, winged and horned,
with its head reverted : the motive appears as early as Babylonian
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