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

THESARMATIANS 143
appear to be the work of an Olbian. Now as before, the Greek
artists or Hellenized natives who Uved in the Black Sea cities
worked for the neighbouring peoples and adapted themselves to their
tastes and requirements. Was it such artists who made the barbaric
objects from Siberia ? I do not know. There may have been a local
industry which imitated the articles imported from the East and from
the Greek cities on the Black Sea.
If we proceed to ask ourselves, now that we have described and
analysed this civiHzation, whether it can be associated with a particular
people, the answer appears to be easy. It is a purely Oriental civiHzation,
which is closely connected with the Iranian ; which slowly
advanced from Central Asia and gradually invaded the steppes of
South Russia and Siberia in the first and second centuries A. D.
which exerted a profound influence, as we shall show in our seventh
chapter, on the Greek colonies of the Black Sea. The furniture
of the tombs which we have examined shows that the warriors buried
there were nomads, mounted hoplites, whose principal weapons
were lance, sword and dagger, whose defensive armour consisted
of a helmet and a corslet of scales or rings, and who were already
acquainted with spurs.
All these data correspond to what we know of the Sarmatians,
who occupied part of the Russian steppes about the end of the fourth
century, who advanced slowly westwards and settled down for a long
while in the basin of the Kuban. I do not hesitate then to identify
the bearers of this civilization with the Sarmatians, especially the
Alans, Iranian tribes who were at the height of their political development
in the first and second centuries a.d., precisely the time at
which this civilization flourished. We can now complete, with the
help of archaeological evidence, the historical picture which we
outlined at the beginning of the chapter.
Setting out from Central Asia, the Sarmatians moved both westward,
occupying the steppes in the Ural region ; and northward, to
the Siberian steppes. At the end of the fourth century B.C., they
appeared, as we know from the pseudo-Scylax, on the Don. At this
period, we found near Tanais a civilization mixed in character but
certainly belonging to nomadic warriors and very different from the
Scythian. Some have supposed, that the cemetery of Elizavetovskaya,
excavated by A. Miller, belonged to the pre-Roman city of Tanais.
I cannot subscribe to this theory. The city of Tanais was founded
by Greek colonists from Panticapaeum. Its cemetery, in consequence,
in the fourth and third centuries, must have been like that of Panticapaeum
: it must have been a Greek cemetery. Now the cemetery
;