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

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Cimmerian Bosphorus, whereas in the fifth century Nymphaeum and
the other Athenian cities grew rich at the expense of iPanticapaeum.
This is shown, on the one hand, by the rich fifth-century finds at
Nymphaeum—a mixed cemetery with Greek and Greco- Scythian
tombs, and several tumuli—and in the Taman peninsula—the
barrows of the Seven Brothers; on the other, by the rarity and
poverty of fifth-century tombs at Panticapaeum, not one of which has
yielded jewellery comparable with that of the fifth-century tombs in
while
the Taman peninsula and in the cemetery of Nymphaeum ;
the vases of severe red-figured style are very poorly represented at
Panticapaeum, especially compared with the vases of the sixth and
fourth centuries. We have no right to suppose that costly monuments
were constructed in Panticapaeum at a time when the city and her
rulers were impoverished by dissension at home, by wars abroad, and
by complete subordination, if not vassalage, to all-powerful Athens.
I said above, that technically and architecturally, the tomb
chambers of Panticapaeum were real creations. The forms are
various and elaborate. The roof is sometimes a rectangular corbelled
vault, sometimes corbelled but rounded : some architects used the
barrel vault, combining it, in the double chambers, with the corbelled
vault. It has been conjectured that in constructing tomb-chambers
with the so-called Egyptian vault, the Panticapaean architects were
following an archaic custom, were imitating heroa and tombs of the
Mycenaean period : in short, that they acted like the Augustan
sculptors when these carved their archaizing statues. I do not believe
this conjecture to be correct. As soon as Greek architects learned to
construct barrel vaults they put their knowledge into practice, and
the barrel vault gradually supplanted the older corbelled vault. But
the barrel vault, which apart from the Egyptian vault, is the only
suitable method of roofing a sepulchral chamber surmounted by a
tumulus several metres high, was not introduced into Greece until
the middle of the fourth century. Moreover, the Greek barrel vault
is very imperfect compared with the Roman. It must be borne in
mind, that in the Bosphoran barrel vaults of the fourth century, the
stones are almost always held together by metal clamps, a process
which the Romans never employed. Now before the Greek architects
adopted the Oriental system of barrel vaults, what processes did they
know of for constructing a tomb-chamber surmounted by a tumulus ?
The only process known to them was the corbelled vault, rectangular
or circular, the same which was used in the Mycenaean period. I have
no doubt, although we possess no examples, that the corbelled vault
was continuously employed in Thrace, and in Greece and in Asia