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

8o THEGREEKSONTHE
the Bosphoran types, not inversely. Doubtless Cyzicus wished to
safeguard its monopoly of issuing gold staters, which, until the
appearance of the Bosphoran staters, had been uncontested except
by Lampsacus ; and endeavoured to oust the Bosphoran gold by
means of an electrum coinage with similar types. It did not succeed.
The fourth-century coins struck in the Bosphorus are masterpieces
of original and forcible art (pi. XVIII, 5). The style is purely Greek.
Not so the types. Look at the heads of bearded silens and beardless
satyrs. We shall see, in the next chapter, how strongly they influenced
the canonical rendering of Scythians in the art of the Greeks. But we
can also trace the influence of the Scythian type on these mythical
heads. We have been bidden to recognize a representation of the
god Pan, and an etymological allusion, in the Greek manner, to the
name of Panticapaeum. I cannot accept this suggestion. We are
familiar with the type of Pan as it was developed in Greek art.
It offers only the faintest of resemblances with the heads on the
Bosphoran coins. They are more likely to represent silens and satyrs,
but they are not faithful reproductions of the established types. I
should be more inclined to take them for heads of some native,
probably Thracian divinity, the great god of vegetation who became
the Greek Dionysos and who sometimes figures, in the guise of a
bearded silen, on coins of Greco-Thracian cities (compare the gold
plaques, in the form of a silen 's head, found by hundreds in the
Crimea and in the Taman peninsula : pi. XVIII, 2). Is it an accident,
that one of the Bosphoran dynasts was named Satyros ?
The types on the reverse of the Bosphoran coins are also of local
origin. The arms of Panticapaeum are not Greek : the griffin
treading upon an ear of corn or a fish, the sources whence the rulers
and the citizens of the Bosphorus derived their wealth. The lionheaded
griffin is the Iranian animal, created in Babylonia, and thenceforward
common throughout Asia, especially in the Iranian area.
I have already mentioned the sculptures from a tomb in Paphlagonia,
which belong, it is true, to the archaic period, but which offer many
points of comparison with the reverses of Bosphoran coins.
It must be recognized, therefore, that the engravers of the Panticapaean
dies were no mere imitators. Masters of Greek craftsman-
ship, endowed with Greek creative genius, they invented original
types which are true emblems of the Bosphoran state, half-Greek,
half-Thracian, with strong Iranian influence. In painting, the art is
of the same partially local kind. True that those masterpieces of
decorative art, the painted wooden and sculptured coffins, may have
been imported from Greece or Asia Minor : I do not believe it, but