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

THE SARMATIANS 125
which they reveal is a curious one : it differs widely from the Scythian,
and closely resembles that of the Orenburg region : it lasted on the
Don for more than three hundred years, from the end of the fourth to
the first century B.C. The shape of the graves—simple trenches lined
with reeds—is almost the same as in the Orenburg region, and totally
different from the Scythian types. The funerary ritual is far simpler
than the Scythian : the dead man is buried by himself, sometimes
with his horse or its bridle. The arms of the warriors are not the
same as in Scythia : just as in the Orenburg group, the principal piece
is a long heavy lance. But the Don graves differ from the Orenburg
group in containing a large quantity of Greek objects and a number
of weapons and other objects of the forms used by the Scythians.
In a word, a cemetery of half-nomadic warriors, closely akin to the
Orenburg type, but noticeably modified.
Much closer to the Orenburg graves are those which have been
discovered on the Volga, in the neighbourhood of Saratov and of
Tsaritsyn, and the great find from the valley of the upper Kuban,
near Stavropol, which has recently furnished a whole series of tores
and bracelets in solid gold, closely resembling those from Orenburg,
and probably of the same date.
At the same period, in the third century b. c, we notice a marked
change in the furniture of the native tombs in the Taman peninsula
and on the Kuban. The tombs of this time are characterized by a
taste for polychromy, which is confined to this period and to graves
with a particular type of furniture. It chiefly shows itself in the gold
objects interred with the dead, which are set with precious stones and
many-coloured enamels. For example, the grave at Buerova Mogila
yielded a gold-plated sword-sheath (pi. XXIV, 5), which in its shape
and in its geometric, probably polychrome decoration, is remarkably
like the Orenburg sheath described above. Very characteristic, also,
the graves in the villages of Kurdzhips and Besleneevskaya. Both are
dated : the former by engraved gems and by a bronze vase with scenes
from the myth of Telephos, of the third or second century B.C.: the
other by engraved gems of the second or first century B.C. Both
retain some of the traditional features which distinguished the native
tombs of the Taman peninsula in the preceding period : gold garment
plaques of
decoration ;
circular form jewels with delicate, purely classical
;
and so forth. But at the same time there are novelties,
unknown in the fourth or third centuries B. c. : gold jewels set with
precious stones ; fibulae, especially a round type with a figure of a
necklace pendants
lion, whose body is set with stones, biting his tail ;
of geometric type ; bronze fibulae, the shapes of which are fore-