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

i62 GREEK CITIES OF SOUTH RUSSIA
described. Strabo gives a similar account of the economic and social
conditions in the great temples of Pontus and Cappadocia.
The serf-reaped harvest passed into the hands of the kings,
priests and great landowners : after feeding the city population, they
exported the remainder, on the Bosphoran merchant fleet and on
foreign trading vessels, to Greece, and especially to the Greek towns
on the southern shore of the Black Sea. The traffic between Panticapaeum
and the cities of Pontus and Bithynia was livelier than ever
before, as we know from the numerous Panticapaean inscriptions
which mention citizens of Amisos, Sinope and other cities, domiciled
at Panticapaeum. We should naturally suppose that the chief exporters
of corn were the shipowners. But they were not alone. The kings
and the rich landowners also maintained a considerable merchant
fleet. From an inscription recently discovered at Gorgippia in the
Taman peninsula, we learn that a religious corporation of naucleroi
existed in this city, its honorary president being the king himself.
The royal president bestowed a gift upon the corporation : it consisted
in a large quantity of corn, reckoned in Persian artabai.
The corn which was exported did not come exclusively from the
territory of the kingdom. It is highly probable, that the Bosphoran
naucleroi played the middleman between the foreign purchaser and
the neighbours of the Bosphoran state, the Scythians of the Crimea
and the Sarmatians in the district of the Kuban. Considering the
political situation from the first to the third centuries A.D., I question
whether the Don and Dnieper regions still produced a great quantity
of corn for export. As early as the time of Polybius, who had the
Dnieper region particularly in mind, the export of corn through
Olbia and Tyras was by no means regular, the Scythian power, which
protected agriculture, having disappeared. It is possible, of course,
that circumstances changed in the first century A. d. and subsequently :
the geographer Ptolemy mentions scores of cities on the lower
Dnieper, which shows that Olbia, under Roman protection, was able
to recover part of the Dnieper trade. In any case, the existence of
a firmly-established Scythian state in the Crimea, and the prolonged
supremacy of the Sarmatians on the Kuban, created conditions in both
places which furthered extensive production and active commerce.
We must remember that these are the richest agricultural districts
in modern Russia, and that they had been tenanted, from the earliest
times, by a sedentary agriculturalpopulation, which changed masters,
but itself remained unchanged. The constant efforts of the Scythians,
in the first three centuries of our era no less than in the three preceding,
to get possession of the Greek cities on the shores of the Black