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

FOURTH AND THIRD CENTURIES B.C. 93
and Dniester, we regularly find heaps of native potsherds mingled
with less numerous fragments of Greek seventh-century vases ; also
weapons and objects in bronze, iron and precious metal, of Hallstatt
type : but no articles of Oriental origin. So likewise in the oldest
so-called Scythian graves in the Dnieper region. Unfortunately, these
graves have never been carefully studied and arranged in chrono-
logical order. The task is a difficult one, and I cannot undertake it
here : it could only be executed on the spot, above all in the great
archaeological museum of Kiev. But to judge from the reports
published by Bobrinskoy, Brandenburg, Samokvasov and Chvojka,
Fig. 10.
and from the objects reproduced in the works of Bobrinskoy and
Khanenko, it seems that the oldest graves in the Kiev region do not
differ from the oldest strata of the settlements, that is to say, they
present the same mixture of Greek and Hallstatt objects.
The uniform culture of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.
changes towards the end of the seventh century and even more in the
sixth. We find at this period, in the steppes of western Russia, certain
graves of purely Oriental type which resemble those of the Kuban
region. I have already spoken of them. Again, in the common graves,
side by side with Greek and Hallstatt things, which are still very
plentiful, there are products of Oriental art and industry, some of them
decorated in the animal style. Towards the end of the sixth century.