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

THESARMATIANS 145
tians. The Siracians were probably the first tribe to arrive, and it
was probably they who expelled the Scythians. If the name of the
Siracians is correctly restored in a corrupt passage of Diodorus, they
took an important part in the struggle of two pretenders, -Eumelos and
Satyros, for the tyranny of the Bosphorus, in the year 309. The
advance of the Sarmatians from east to west was comparatively slow ;
towards the second century B.C., they occupied the whole valley of the
Kuban, with the exception of the delta, that is, the Taman peninsula ;
and even penetrated into the peninsula in the first century. They
thus became immediate neighbours of the Bosphoran kingdom, with
which they entered into relations. Thence they moved still farther
west, and subdued the whole of South Russia. We have seen that
the valley of the Don preserves numerous archaeological traces of their
prolonged sojourn on the Don and between Don and Dnieper in the
second and first centuries B.C.
On their arrival in the valley of the Dnieper and the Bug, the
Sarmatians were faced by a much more complicated situation. In
the second century b. c, when the first Sarmatian tribes appeared,
the ethnological and political aspect of the region between Dnieper
and Danube was extremely varied and complex. As early as the
third century B.C., Celtic tribes possessed themselves of a number of
districts in South Russia, and advanced as far as the Black Sea.
German tribes followed at their heels. Moreover, the revival of a
Thracian state, that of the Dacians, in the first century B.C. and the
first A.D., led to constant invasions of South Russia by Thracians.
One of these brought about the capture and sack of Olbia. The
Sarmatians also settled in the same localities. The varied ethnographical
character of the steppes between Dnieper and Danube is
reflected by the archaeological finds. The period in which Scythian
influence predominates, the fourth and third centuries B. c, with its
sumptuous tombs of Scythian chieftains, is succeeded, in the steppes
of the Dnieper region and in the wooded country northward, by a
period in which the graves gradually lose their Scythian stamp, and
in which a number of new strains are observable, very different from
the Scythian. A great number of objects have recently been discovered
in the basin of the Dnieper, which certainly belong to the civilization
of La Tene : bronze and clay vases, and weapons. I have already
referred to the appearance of the fibula of the latest La Tene period.
These are the remains of the Galatians, a portion of whom, the Celto-
Scythians of Posidonius, settled on the shores of the Black Sea. There
is also a series of graves which closely resemble the Orenburg graves
and which probably date from the third century B.C.: these are
2353
U