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

INTHEROMANPERIOD 169
walls, present us with hundreds of portraits of Bosphoran citizens, in
civil and in military costume. Their garments at this period are far
from Greek. They wear trousers, soft leather shoes, leather or fur
doublets, and long cloaks probably of wool : just like the Scythians and
the Sarmatians on monuments of the fourth or third century B. C.
Ovid at Tomi, Dio Chrysostom at Olbia, can hardly recognize the
descendants of the ancient Milesian colonists.
The armour is no longer Greek. No doubt the mercenary armies
of the Spartocid period were armed like the Greek hoplites, peltasts
and cavalrymen of the time. But as early as the third or second
century b. C, when the mercenaries were mainly recruited from the
barbarian tribes, a change took place : it affected even the armour of
the citizen troops, which now began to play an important part.
A number of clay statuettes from this period, found exclusively at
Panticapaeum, and undoubtedly made there, represent soldiers of the
citizen army (pi. XXX, i) : their costume is Thraco-Iranian, their
shields Gaulish. In the first and second centuries A.D., we have an abun-
dance of documents for the armour of the citizen troops and of the
contingents recruited among the native population . Hundreds of stelai
reproduce the heroized dead in complete armour (pi. XXX, 2) : mural
paintings in tombs, the battles of the Bosphoran army with the Scythians
and the Taurians (pi. XXIX). The armour is the same everywhere.
The cavalryman, and the Bosphoran nobles are almost always cavalry,
has a conical metal helmet ; a corslet of scale- or ring-armour ; a
long lance ; a dagger fastened to the leg, with a ring on the top as
in the Kuban tombs ; a sword with a round stone pommel and a stone
guard ; a bow ; a gorytus ; and a shield, small in the cavalry, large in
the infantry : a combination of Scythian and Sarmatian panoply, with
predominance of the characteristic Sarmatian weapons, as they are
represented on Trajan's column and on the arch of Galerius at Salonica.
Infantry plays little part in the Bosphoran army. It consists of peltasts,
generally without corslets, armed with lances, javelins, shields and
sometimes bows. The tactics are also Sarmatian. Heavily armed
warriors, cataphracts, fighting
phalanx pitted against phalanx :
tourney-wise in single combat, or
harbingers of the Middle Ages. The
same armour is found in the tombs of the period.
Our principal source of information for the material culture of the
Bosphoran citizens is as usual the tombs. Thousands have been
excavated. They bear witness, first of all, to great prosperity on the
Bosphorus during the first two centuries of our era. The sepulchral
structures are varied and sumptuous. There are three main types.
One continues the old Greek tradition : a tomb dug in the earth
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