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

SHORES OF THE BLACK SEA 77
barbarian lands which were strongly influenced by heroic Greece.
In Thrace, especially, we observe the same characteristics. Besides
the barrows in Macedonia, excavated by Heuzey and Kinch, which
contain painted sepulchral chambers with barrel vaults, I would
mention the sepulchral chambers discovered near Salonica, and near
Lozengrad in Bulgaria. The latter is particularly interesting : the
mode of construction recalls the Mycenaean tholos, and the plan is
exactly like those of the Tsarski tombs and the Golden Tumulus :
the date is that of the Panticapaean graves, the fourth century B.C.
Similar monuments have come to light in Asia Minor, especially
in Pontus, Caria and Lycia ; as well as in Etruria. It must be
remembered that Asia Minor was partly peopled by Thracian tribes.
Throughout these countries, we come across tumuli, sepulchral
chambers of dressed stone, rich coffins, varied and sumptuous tomb
furniture. The funerary ritual is almost the same, and here also it
vividly recalls heroic, that is to say pre-Hellenic Greece. Everything
suggests that the great tombs in the Bosphoran kingdom were built
for members of the ruling class, which, as we have already seen, was
not of pure Greek origin, but of mixed stock, a combination of native
elements with the aristocracy of Greek colonists.
What strikes us particularly in the monumental tombs of Panticapaeum
and the Taman peninsula is not the tumuli themselves, for
the shape of these huge earthen mounds does not greatly vary from
one place or one period to another : much more interesting, both
historically and artistically, are the sepulchral chambers of dressed stone.
Some dozens of them have been found ; not a few are in almost perfect
preservation. The chambers of the Golden, Tsarski, and MelekChesme
tumuli, in the neighbourhood of Kerch, are all three well known :
the two latter are accessible and attract a great number of visitors.
Not so well known are the chambers of the Yiiz-Oba kurgans,
near Kerch, which are partially destroyed, those in the Taman peninsula,
and those in the vicinity of Gorgippia (see figs. 7 and 8). Some
of these can be dated by means of their contents : none are as old as
the fifth century : the grandest belong to the beginning of the fourth
century b. c, the more summary to the second half of the fourth and
the first half of the third. It has been proposed to place the finest
examples of the first series, the Golden and Tsarski kurgans, in the
fifth century B. c. : but without good reason. The mode of construction
is exactly the same as in the sepulchral chambers of Yiiz-Oba,
which date from the first half of the fourth century. Now we have
seen that the fourth century was a period of great prosperity in the