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

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tive art. Round the coffin were Greek vases of the best fabrics, often
not only painted but modelled and gilded as well : one of the best
known is the vase with the signature of Xenophantos which represents
King Darius hunting. The bodies laid in the coffins wore festal
the men had weapons with them, the women jewels.
costume ;
Some of the graves, which were discovered intact, have yielded
superb collections of ancient jewellery and goldsmith's work :
engraved stones signed by celebrated artists ; necklaces, bracelets,
earrings, unequalled in the ancient world. The finest objects in the
Hermitage came almost entirely from these monumental tombs. The
same opulence everywhere—at Panticapaeum, at Nymphaeum, at
Theodosia, in the Taman peninsula, at Chersonesus : but not the
same funeral rites. The graves in the Taman peninsula preserve
features which recall the native Thracian and Scythian graves, such
as bloody sacrifices after the funeral ceremony, and the interment of
horses and of funeral chariots.
Such graves are neither purely Greek nor purely native. The
Greeks of this period did not bury their dead under barrows, in
chambers with Egyptian vaults, in sumptuous coffins. They no
longer deposited whole fortunes in their tombs, like the inhabitants
of the Bosphoran kingdom. Again, in the funerary ritual and the
choice and character of the objects placed in them, the Scythian
tumulary graves have nothing in. common with the monumental
tombs of Panticapaeum. There is no trace at Panticapaeum of the
interment of horses, no human sacrifice, and no groups of sacred
objects laid beside the dead. We have two completely different
rituals : moreover, the Panticapaean ritual influenced the Scythian,
not the Scythian the Panticapaean. We cannot claim that the monumental
graves of the Taman peninsula were equally independent of
Scythian practice : Scythian influence is certain. Although they
preserve, in principle, the funerary ritual found at Panticapaeum,
which recalls that of heroic Greece, familiar to us from the Homeric
poems, with its bloody sacrifices and its funeral feasts, they nevertheless
appear to have adopted certain customs from the Scythians,
especially the slaughter and interment of the horses which had been
harnessed to the hearse. Remains of horses and harness were found
in the barrows of Great and Little Bliznitsa and of the Vasyurinskaya
Gora, the richest and stateliest tombs in the Taman peninsula. True
analogies with the funerary ritual and the sepulchral structures of
Panticapaeum are to be found not in Scythian country but partly, as
I have said, in the Greece of heroic times, and partly in those