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

ONTHEDNIEPER 213
product of the lively commerce which naturally grew up between
the inhabitants of the Scythian kingdom and the independent Finnish
tribes of Central and Eastern Russia, who dwelt on the middle and upper
courses of the great Russian rivers : Volga, Oka, Kama, Don, Donets,
Dnieper, Pripet, Desna. Moreover, products of the Far East were
brought to South Russia by the caravans which started from Central
Asia and Western Siberia and made for the shores of the Black Sea.
The merchants of Central Asia and Siberia were doubtless obliged to
sacrifice a proportion of their merchandise as tribute or custom
duties to the Scythian rulers of South Russia, who retained part for
their own use, and sold part to the Greek merchants. Here again,
a traffic between these merchants and the inhabitants of South Russia
was bound to grow up.
The age-long existence of such commerce, protected by the military
forces of the Scythian state, contributed on the one hand to increase of
productivity in the Scythian state itself and in the neighbouring
countries, and on the other hand to the development of numerous
commercial centres of the city type on the banks of the Russian
rivers. The Greek geographers of the fourth and third centuries B.C.
do not tell us the names of these cities, as they had no independent
knowledge of South Russia and mostly repeated the data of the Ionian
geographers of the sixth century B.C. But the geographers of the
Hellenistic and Roman epoch, especially Ptolemy, enumerate scores
of such places on the banks of the Bug, the Dnieper, the Don and the
Kuban. The half-Greek city of the Gelonians, mentioned by Herodotus,
was undoubtedly of this type. I have already mentioned the
remains of such cities, partially but unsystematically excavated by
Russian archaeologists, and the large rich cemeteries which surround
them. The most brilliant period of these native cities is shown by
the contents of the graves to have been the fourth and third centuries
B.C. The population of the cities, according to the objects found
in the graves, was a mixture of Greek, Scythian and native elements.
Most of the inhabitants must have been merchants.
These cities contributed largely to the formation of constant and
regular commercial relations between the shores of the Black Sea and
the whole of Central and Northern Russia including the shores of the
Baltic. They indicated for all future generations the main commercial
highways of Russia, and above all, the great river route from Scandinavia
to Constantinople, the future route ' from the Varangers to the
Greeks '.
When the Scythian state was destroyed by the joint efforts of the
Sarmatians, the Bosphoran kingdom, the Thracians and thfe Celts, the