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

INTRODUCTORY ii
see in the Paphlagonian sculptures, or in their Assyro-Persian prototypes,
the immediate sources from which the Panticapaean metalworkers
derived their inspiration.
We observe also remarkable analogies between certain products of
Cappadocian art and objects found in Scythian graves of the period
between the sixth and the third centuries B.C. I would draw the
reader's attention to a number of cast bronze pole-heads which
have been discovered in Cappadocia (pi. II and pi. V, : 3) some-
times representing an animal perched on a rattle, sometimes a figure
or a pair of figures, geometrically stylized, of the Great Goddess
of Asia. The only parallels to these curious objects, of which there
are several examples in the Louvre and in the British Museum, are
furnished by pole-tops found in Scythian barrows of the period
between the sixth and third centuries b. c, and in Western Siberia.
Let me also mention the terra-cotta statuettes from Pontus and
Cappadocia in the Ashmolean Museum and in the Louvre, which
undoubtedly represent Scythian horsemen (pi. I). These horsemen are
treated in the same manner and in the same style as the Scythian
horsemen on works of Panticapaean toreutic dating from the fourth
or third centuries B.C.
In conclusion, I would draw attention to a curious coincidence :
terra-cotta wagons have been found in Pontus and in Cappadocia
which reproduce, beyond all doubt, the wheeled abodes of the nomads:
a well-preserved example may be seen in the Ashmolean Museum.
Now, as far as I know, the only analogous objects come from South
Russia. We have two series of them, one belonging to the Bronze Age,
the other to the first and second centuries A. d. A chariot which
closely resembles the Ashmolean specimen was found in a Kuban
grave of the Bronze Age : a whole group, of much finer execution, in
Panticapaean graves of the first and second centuries A. d.
These resemblances between the two shores of the Euxine cannot
be explained by commercial intercourse, but only by community
of race ; by the existence of similar layers of population in both
regions : a layer which may be called autochthonous ; a Thraco-
Cimmerian ; and a Scytho-Iranian layer.
Let us now return to the Scythians of South Russia. We find in
South Russia, as I have already said, a whole group of products
partly manufactured by the Iranians themselves, partly for the Iranians
by the Greeks. This Iranian world is the pre-Zoroastrian one
which disseminated the cults of Mithra and of Anaitis, the two
Iranian divinities who exerted a potent influence on the classical
civilization of Hellenistic and Roman times. Unfortunately these