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

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THESARMATIANS
was found in one of the tombs. Like the Scythians, the warriors of
Orenburg and their wives were fond of gold and silver articles. But
these articles differ widely from the Scythian . The animal style is rare :
the geometric style predominates. There is a strong tendency to
polychromy, rarely observable in the Scythian kurgans. A gold-plated
dagger-sheath, from a third-century grave at Prokhorovka, is covered
with floral and geometric ornaments, embellished -with enamels in a
technique which already brings to mind the cloisonne of the so-called
Gothic period (pi. XXIV, 4). The gold tores from the same find are
The use of tores for the neck
particularly interesting (pi. XXIV, 2, 3).
is common to several races and peoples, but the shape varies. At
Orenburg the shape is purely Oriental : a thick wire of solid gold,
twisted twice or thrice, and ornamented at either end, in Eastern
fashion, by an animal or an animal's head—the well-known dragon
with the characteristic crest, large ears and sharp teeth. We shall
come across the same type in the South Russian steppes during the
last centuries before Christ and the first centuries of our era. Scythian
tores, of which we have many specimens, are almost all Greek work,
and the shapes are very different.
The jewels, which are somewhat rare, are clumsy and primitive ;
the shapes are purely Oriental. The gold garment plaques differ
greatly from the Scythian forms, and their prototypes must be sought
in the Assyro-Persian world.
Speaking generally, the furniture is extremely rude. To a few
imported articles, we have a great number of local products : iron
weapons, and objects in bone. Both classes of local products present
striking analogies with certain objects, of the same shape and purpose,
found in the Altai Mountains and in eastern Russia, especially on the
Kama. These belong to the earliest iron age.
It is impossible to assign an exact date to this group of tombs. As
far as we can judge from the imports, the oldest tombs belong to the
sixth, the Pokrovka group to the fifth, and the Prokhorovka to the
fourth and third centuries B.C. Others are certainly later : some of
these may be placed in the last centuries before and the earliest after
Christ. From first to last, and this is important, there are few changes:
the group is homogeneous and distinctive : the civilization which it
reflects is a jprimitive civilization of nomadic warriors, whose only
relations were with east and north, and who were not in regular
contact with their neighbours beyond the Volga.
Of almost the same date as the Orenburg group are the tumulary
graves which were excavated by Alexander Miller in the vicinity of
Elizavetovskaya Stanitsa, a village in the Don delta. The civiHzation