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

SCYTHIANS IN SOUTH RUSSIA 41
geometric ornaments, and with a figure of a goat or deer, engraved in
a style which resembles that of Mikhalkovo and of Koban. It was
said by the vendor to have come from Kerch.
All these data, however, are too meagre and too doubtful for
convincing conclusions.
It is a curious coincidence that the features of armament and
costume—bow, spear, and battle-axe— ^which distinguish the warriors
whom we have supposed to be Cimmerians, are reported as characteristic
of the Massagetians, whose name recalls that of the Getians,
a Thracian people. May we not hazard the hypothesis—a slight
modification of Franke's theory—that the Cimmerians were a Thracian
people who formed part of the great Indo-European migration :
the migration taking place in two bodies, one composed of Iranian
the Thracians occupying, in the
and the other of Thracian peoples ;
course of the migration, the shores of the Black Sea and the region of
the Danube ? We shall see that the Thracians were always the bitter
enemies of the Scythians, and that, though driven back iDy the
Scythians, they made many efforts to reconquer the steppes of
South Russia.
We do not know the exact date of the events and conflicts which
led to the substitution of Scythians for Cimmerians in the South
Russian steppes. Herodotus makes these struggles contemporaneous
with the invasion of Asia by Cimmerians and Scythians. There is no
objection to this date. If we accept it, we must place the conflict of
Scythians and Cimmerians in the seventh century. We must notice,
however, that this period of expansion has left no traces in the archaeology
of South Russia. We have no Scythian graves of the seventh
century : the earliest
The reason is simple.
dateable Scythian graves belong to the sixth.
The seventh century, in South Russia as in
Asia Minor, was a period of perpetual struggles, and the Scythian
state, as we know it from Russian tombs and from the description in
Herodotus, was not consolidated until the sixth century.
In the sixth century, however, the Scythian kingdom is firmly
estabhshed, and presents all the features of a settled and centralized
state, although it rested, as we shall see, on a feudal basis. For its
frontiers we have the account in Herodotus, supplemented by
archaeological evidence. An important centre, not mentioned by
Herodotus, was the valley of the^Kuban. The barrows of Kelermes,
the barrows in the villages of Ulski, Kostromskaya, Voronezhskaya,
Maryinskaya, EHzavetinskaya, and others, give us a splendid series
of graves, several of which belong to the sixth century, others to the
fifth and some to the fourth. Only one later tomb can be attributed
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