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

THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS 31
primitive forms coincide—the spherical and the wide-necked ovoid.
The more complex forms are represented in the Trojan finds alone.
The Kuban vases have no true handles, only riveted suspension tubes.
In Troy handles are common enough, though some of the vessels
preserve the old fashion. Nooffsetfeet at Maikop, many at Troy. The
copper vessels of Maikop and Tsarskaya have the same primitive shape ;
they have no handles : at Troy, handles had already begun to be used.
Now let us turn to the diadems. The foundation is the same at
Troy and in the Caucasus—a long narrow strip with rounded ends
and holes for sewing the ornaments through. But the ornaments diifer
greatly. They are much richer and more complex at Troy, although
the forms of the individual ornaments remain very primitive.
The same is true of the necklace and bracelet beads. Great
quantities of gold beads were found both at Troy and in the Caucasus.
There were no stone beads in the Trojan treasure. All the plainest
forms of bead, at Troy and in the Caucasus, coincide : pearl-shaped
beads ; the same with ribs ; annular ; hemispherical ; beads like pairs
of truncated cones ; others like perforated quadrilateral tubes. But
more elaborate forms, rosettes, spirals, leaves, and so forth, are peculiar
to Troy. Many of the types, chiefly the simplest, have been found
in Sumer as well. The Kuban earrings are very primitive : plain rings,
rings with beads appended, sets of rings. In Troy the earrings may
be reduced to the same prototypes, but they are often very elaborate.
The pins at Troy are various and complex, especially the heads.
On the Kuban they are very simple, as in the burials with contracted
skeletons generally. The only effort to improve the form consists in
bending the upper part of the pin : there is no trace of an attempt to
wind this bow into a spiral or to give it^the shape of a swan's neck,
as was usual in the bronze age. In the Ulski grave, but there alone,
the crooked ends of the pins were provided with balls, just as in the
burials of the middle Hittite period near Carchemish.
Finally, we must notice that in Troy the ornament is already pure
geometric, with no traces of the elaborate animal style which we found
in Elam, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, and in the Caucasus,
The foregoing analysis proves that the finds of Troy and the finds
of the Kuban, though akin, are not contemporaneous, the Kuban finds
being much older. ^
I have already pointed out more than once that the Ulski grave
is later than the other burials in the Kuban. It is interesting
to note, that in this grave, and there only, female statuettes, of
a very primitive type, were found. These statuettes, as is well
known, are common in Europe as well as in Asia. The typology of