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

THE SARMATIANS 127
No Greek or Roman coins have been found in these graves : but
they nearly all contain objects exported from Greece, and these enable
us to date the graves with accuracy. To begin with, the total absence
of Greek vases with black glaze, and of the various classes of Hellenistic
pottery, provides a lower chronological limit. But besides this negative
evidence, we have a good deal of positive, by means of which we
can arrange the graves in three chronological series. The first is dated
by its pronounced predilection for glass vases, either cast or hewn out
of solid blocks of glass (fig. 16, 1-3). In shape, they reproduce the
metal vases of the late Hellenistic and early Imperial epoch. It is well
Fig. 16.
known that cast- and cut-glass vases preceded blown-glass vases, and
belong to the first century before and the first century after Christ.
Such vases have been found in about a dozen tumuli, the contents of
which are uniform : the richest graves were discovered in the kurgans
of Ziibovski, Akhtani'zovka, Vozdvizhenskaya, Yaroslavskaya, Tiflisskaya
and Armavir. The jewels which are regularly found in these
graves are distinctive both in shape and in technique. The artists
have a fondness for filigree decoration, the motives being almost
without exception geometric. But the technique is no longer the true
granulation of classical times, but an imitation of it, pseudo-filigree,
which consists in dividing a gold wire into a row of grainlike sections,
so as to give the impression of a row of separate grains. The artists