Panticapaeum, capital of the Bosporan Kingdom, stood on the broad, flat summit of Mount Mithridates. Half-excavated ruins and foundations still cover the plateau, and most of the old houses at the top of Kerch are made of square stones looted from Hellenistic buildings. I clambered over a temple of Aphrodite and sat on the hot stone paving of the Palace of the Basileus. A green praying-mantis made its way along the footings of a wall, and a fritillary sunned itself on the palace threshold. Lara, poking about in the grass, found the handle and rim of a Scythian cooking pot.
To reach the hill-top from the town, you climb a marble staircase, a hundred steps whose landings are decorated with griffins. Once this led up to a fake temple, the Theseum', which held the main Kerch museum with all the finds from the excavations which had not been taken off for permanent exhibition in St Petersburg. Now there is nothing at the top of the stairs but thin air. During the Crimean War, the museum was broken open and looted by Allied troops, some of them British, and the contents — statuary, glass and pottery — were never seen again. When shaken scholars protested after the war, it was pointed out that Mrs Cattley, the British consul's wife, had bought a quantity of Greek jewellery, coins and architectural fragments from local dealers during her stay, and that when war broke out she had shipped her collection back to London and presented it to the British Museum. What more could anyone ask for?
Panticapaeum began in the usual way, as a Milesian-Greek colony established in the sixth century BC. But then, around 480 BC, trouble with the Scythians drove about thirty Greek colonies to combine for their own safety. Back in Greece, such a provisional league' would have been no more than an alliance of independent city-states, ready to dissolve again when the emergency was over, intending no permanent central government. But out here, in the colonies, city-state sovereignty seemed less important. The Greek expatriates set up a 'Bosporan' state (named for the Cimmerian Bosporus), and made Panticapaeum its capital.
This was already an un-Greek thing to do. This was not the normal pattern of small city-states, each set in its chora or hinterland. Instead, it resembled the Greek idea of a 'barbarian' kingdom, in which a single magical ruler and his tribe occupied a whole extended territory. Soon the resemblance grew closer. In 438 BC, a certain Spartocos, probably a Thracian mercenary officer, carried out a putsch and emerged as sole ruler. The Bosporan state began to expand; the rulers hired an army of Greek and Thracian infantry, with Scythian and Sarmatian cavalry, and soon controlled the shore of the Sea of Azov up as far as Tanais on the Don and down the other side to the Kuban and the Taman peninsula, bringing into their dominions most of the Maeotian and Sindi peoples on the eastern shore. Around 400 BC, the descendants of Spartocos declared themselves kings or 'tyrants', and Satyrus I and his son Leuco inaugurated the 'Spartocid' dynasty which ruled the Bosporan Kingdom from Panticapaeum for more than three hundred years.
The kingdom grew into an empire, an early Byzantium of the north whose merchants, shipping magnates and urban governors were Greek but whose rulers and soldiers were Thracian, Scythian and, increasingly, Sarmatian. In its first years, the Kingdom had been a satellite of Athens, an outpost of the short-lived maritime empire established by Pericles, and its importance was as a source of food. Half the wheat sold and distributed in Athens came from the Bosporan Kingdom, and until the power of Athens was crippled by defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, all grain exports to Greece from the Black Sea had to be shipped to the Athenian market. After 404 BC, the kings at Panticapaeum were free to sell to anyone they pleased, and the kingdom entered an enormous wealth boom which lasted for almost a century.
When Olbia weakened and grew beleaguered, as the Sarmatian advance spread unrest and instability across the Dnieper steppes, Panticapaeum took over its markets. Wheat remained the great export commodity. Grown in eastern Crimea or the plains round the Sea of Azov, on huge estates leased from Scythian or Sarmatian rulers and worked by slave labour, the production costs were minimal and the profits enormous. But fish from the Sea of Azov was almost as important, and near Panticapaeum the ruins of a fish-processing factory with twenty-four tanks for salting Azov herring have been found. Caviar from Black Sea sturgeon was exported to the Mediterranean, with furs and slaves brought from the forest zone far to the north.
The grain trade transformed the lives of the Scythian and Sarmatian steppe lords, and of the settled peoples in the plains east of the Sea of Azov. The cash economy burst over them like a flood. Even after the grain dealers and shippers in the port-cities had taken their cut, the profits were colossal. They could afford to buy anything which the ancient world had to sell. But what did they really want? They already had all the slaves and livestock they could use. This is a familiar colonial problem, and it was solved in a way which was to become equally familiar. The Greeks invented new needs for them. They supplied the up-country chieftains with luxuries: above all, with the most magnificent goldwork and jewellery ever produced in the classical world.
At first, the gold and silver articles seem to have been produced in Greece itself or in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, although the gold itself came mostly from Transylvania, from Colchis or from as far east as the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. The form of the bowls of vases and their decoration were Greek, and made no allowance for alien tastes or habits.
Then a change set in. New craftsmen in gold and silver opened up workshops in Panticapaeum, next to their clients and markets, and the product itself started to alter. An example of that change was the gold-covered wooden gorytus (that very Scythian article which was a combined bow-case and quiver) found under one of the Five Brother kurgans near Rostov - under the very mound which I had discovered to be still in use as a modern Russian graveyard. This gorytus had been made by Greek or Greek-trained goldsmiths in the fourth century BC, probably in Panticapaeum. The repousse scenes on it were impeccably Greek, but the object itself, the main item of a steppe horseman's armoury, was an entirely Iranian form.
Soon the Bosporan goldsmiths and silversmiths took another step. They began to produce custom-made work for rich Scythians, whose decoration showed Iranian rituals and celebrations rather than Homeric myths. At the same time, the style remained absolutely non-Iranian: the human figures and animals are naturalistic and physically detailed in the Greek manner, and owe nothing to the magical stylisation - the 'animal style' - which the nomads had brought with them out of Central Asia.
The result, for us, is what Rostovtzeff called 'illustrations to Herodotus': scenes from Scythian life. The globular electrum bottle from the tomb of a prince at Kul-Oba, just outside Kerch, shows bearded warriors in trousers apparently after a battle: talking, stringing bows, bandaging a leg wound, even extracting a tooth. The Gaymanova Mogila bowl, of gold-plated silver, has two pairs of fat, expansive little chieftains in flapped tunics exchanging stories, while servants creep towards them with a skinbag of kumis (fermented mare's milk) and a live goose. On a huge gold pectoral from the Tolstoya Mogila barrow near the Dnieper, Scythians are milking sheep and shaping a fleece into a coat, while a silver amphora from Chertomlyk is decorated with scenes of men with horses: a bald old servant hobbling a saddled horse for grazing, a young cavalry trooper with a gorytus training a recalcitrant pony to lift its forelegs.
The Panticapaeum goldsmiths not only represented daily life. They were trusted with Iranian religious subjects as well, like the mounted god giving a 'communion' drink to a mounted king on a drinking-horn from Karagodeuashkh, or the strange ceremony shown on a huge gold tiara-plate from the 'queen's grave' in the same complex, where an enthroned goddess holds the sacred cup and an androgynous figure -probably one of those gender-crossing, transvestite 'Enareis' shamans - prepares to serve her from his bottle. (Most of these treasures can be seen in the Hermitage at St Petersburg, and nobody has seriously challenged Rostovtzeff's attribution of them to the craftsmen of the Bosporan Kingdom.)
This symbiosis of Greek (or Greek-trained) artists and Iranian nomad patronage is
an extraordinary moment. Nothing quite like it has happened before or since. As Timothy Taylor writes: 'uniquely in the ancient world, and perhaps within the history of art in general, literate, urban colonisers produced their greatest art-works to the order of a nomad élite ... It is somewhat as if Velazquez had heroised native Mexicans in his major commissions.'
Rostovtzeff, seventy years earlier, had made the same point, but he related it to a profound change in the Greek world-view which was setting in even before the imperial conquests of Alexander of Macedón. This is the dawn of Hellenistic art ... which was influenced by the interest taken by science and literature in the hitherto barbarian peoples who were now entering into the great family of civilised, that is, Hellenised nations ... an art which was glad to place itself at the disposal of foreign nations.'
The trade continued with new customers, after the Sarmatians had begun to displace the Scythians in the third century BC. But the relationship of Greeks to Sarmatians was very different. In spite of the common Iranian source of their languages, the Sarmatians were in many ways unlike the Scythians. As warriors, they were not lightly equipped horse-bowmen but heavy cavalry, wearing metal helmets and iron coats of mail and carrying long lances. This armament, much later to become the battle outfit of mediaeval chivalry, was quite unknown to Europe and the Eurasian fringe, and was for a time irresistible. A few centuries later, after the Sarmatian Alans had charged and slaughtered a Roman legionary army at Adrianople in 375 AD, the Roman Empire changed its whole mode of warfare and raised heavy cavalry units of its own.
The Sarmatians were in some respects closer to their Central Asian cultural roots than the Scythians. They brought with them a new decorative tradition, adding to the Central Asian 'animal style' a taste for heavy, ornate forms and for metalwork encrusted with coloured enamel and semi-precious stones — the style which in the nineteenth century was misleadingly called 'Gothic'. While Sarmatian nobles bought or commissioned ornaments and luxury articles from the Hellenistic world, as the Scythians had done, they also kept in contact with other, developed Iranian cultures far to the east. The great golden collar of Volodya Guguev's princess, buried by the Don, probably came from some sacred treasury in Bactria.
Above all, the Sarmatians were more intrusive. It may be wise to think of them as a number of small military elites, or warrior clans, who conquered and then assimilated to the peoples they encountered. The Scythians had by and large stayed outside the walls of the Greek cities. The Sarmatians entered, not necessarily by siege or cavalry charge but more often as powerful settlers whose request to be let in could not easily be denied. They intermarried with Greeks, and took a growing part not only in government but in trade and manufacturing. At Panticapaeum this assimilation was not difficult; the ruling Spartocid dynasty had never been Greek but had Thracian or Scythian ancestry, and by the Roman period the Bosporan Kingdom was thoroughly Iranianised. Greek was still its official language, but most people probably spoke Sarmatian or Thracian, and the gods they worshipped were the Mother Goddess, or heroes of Persian solar cults like Mithras, rather than the Greek pantheon.
Up on its acropolis above the Kerch Straits, the city of Panticapaeum flourished. Its coins showed a rampant griffin, symbol of gold, grasping an ear of wheat in its claws. On each side of the main gate stood a relief of the Mixoparthenos, the snake-legged Mother of the Scythians. Its kings were honoured and flattered all over the Greek world, and the annual Athenian festival, the Panathenaia, presented them with wreaths of oak or olive leaves fashioned from beaten gold. But then, in the first century BC, a tortuous political crisis began.
A new Scythian-Crimean kingdom, established by princes driven out of their old capital on the Dnieper by the Sarmatians, attacked Chersonesus and the other Greek coastal cities. Unable to dislodge the Scythians, the Spartocid king, Peirisades the Last, took the fatal step of appealing to Mithridates Eupator, king of Pontus.
This was the equivalent of inviting a cat to chase a mouse out of a fish shop. Mithridates ('the Great') was a brilliant, erratic imperialist whose dream was to expand his Anatolian kingdom into a pan-Iranian empire and to conquer the rising power of Rome by an offensive from the east. His generals subdued the Crimean Scythians, but then provoked a Sarmatian riot within Panticapaeum in order to overthrow the Spartocids and seize their throne. Mithridates conquered the whole eastern shore of the Black Sea and dragged the Bosporan Kingdom into his twenty-five-year war with Rome. After his defeat by Pompey and his death at Panticapaeum in 63 BC, more upheavals finally produced a new royal dynasty, again of mixed Indo-Iranian descent, which accepted Roman sovereignty and ruled the kingdom until it was occupied by the invading Goths in the fourth century AD.
The director of the Kerch archaeological museum drove us out in her own car to the Tsarski Kurgan. Beyond the last allotments and gardens, where the grassland begins, it rises like a hill; a fifty-foot turf mound covering one of the royal tombs of the Spartocids.
In front of the tumulus is a little wooden cottage with a garden and fruit-trees. The director stood at the fence and shouted, 'Maria Andreyevna! Maria Andreyevna!' Presently a very old lady in a headcloth, grinning through gold teeth, appeared and picked her way towards us through a confusion of geese, kittens and broken white enamel buckets. She was, explained the director, the hereditary storozh (guardian) of the kurgan. When the great Ashik, first director of antiquities at Kerch, had completed his excavations here in 1837, he appointed one of his men as storozh and ordered him to remain on the site, and — in the absence of any instructions to the contrary - his descendants have lived here and kept the keys ever since. Maria Andreyevna, great-great-granddaughter of the first guardian, hobbled over to an iron gate and unlocked it.
What we saw is one of the architectural wonders of the world. A deep, V-shaped cutting, lined with masonry, leads into the centre of the hill. At the end of this tapering slit is a portal of darkness, a crack framed in corbelled freestone, the door to the underworld. It is like the crevice of darkness which leads into the Sibyl's cave at Cuma, near Naples. It is also, inescapably, the mouth of the Mother Goddess's womb. A deliberate trick of perspective, done by a subtle narrowing of the slabs in the cutting, makes the distance to the portal seem less than it really is, so that each step forward seems to rush you towards the blackness at the end.
Inside the hill is a square stone chamber supporting a cupola. There is nothing else there, for when Ashik cleared the approach-cutting of the earth and rubble which had filled it and reached the chamber, he found that it had been robbed, probably only a few centuries after it had been constructed. But when you look back down the empty passage, you see that it has been carefully aligned. Far away in the sunlight glitters Mount Mithridates, acropolis of the Bosporan Kingdom, outlined for dead eyes at every dawn by the rising sun.
In the Tsarski Kurgan, Iranian and Greek senses of holiness have fused. The tomb dates from the early fourth century BC, but it is not known for whom it was built. Possibly it was Peirisades I, but it seems more likely that it was the grave of Leuco, son of Satyrus I, who reigned in Panticapaeum from 389 to 349 BC. This was a king renowned for political and economic cunning, who spent much of his reign successfully manipulating the Greek business community into subsidising his budget for war and internal security. Leuco, in fact, managed to defy the laws of orthodox economics: he financed the budget by increasing money supply, without precipitating inflation. In his Stratagems of War, Polyaenus relates that Leuco, when his treasury was very low, issued a proclamation for a new coinage, and directed everyone to carry in his money and to receive the same in value struck in a new die. A new die was accordingly struck, and every piece of money bore a value double to that it possessed before. One half he kept for himself, and every individual received the same current value he gave in.
Leuco was almost the first Bosporan monarch to strike coins. The last were minted at Panticapaeum in 332 AD, and the last ruler, King Rheskuporis IV, died in about 360 AD. The Bosporan Kingdom, i
n other words, survived as the centre of power, wealth and industry in the north-eastern corner of the Black Sea for no less than seven hundred years.
There were two reasons for this survival. The first was economic. For even the most aggressive nomad leaders (until the arrival of the Huns in the fourth century AD), the advantages of finding a way to live with the Bosporan Kingdom rather than conquering and looting it were obvious. Wheat and fish from Crimea, slaves, furs and Chinese textiles from further inland, went to the Mediterranean markets, and in return for their assistance the chieftains and their families grew magnificent in Panticapaean goldwork and silverwork, clothing and weaponry.
The second reason for Bosporan survival was pragmatism. The kingdom was a state, but not what we would now call a nation.
All the strongest powers in the region could share in its political control through dynasties whose origins were a mélange of Scythian, Thracian, Sarmatian and Maeotian. At the same time, trade and industry was carried on by a literate citizenry who were Graeco-Iranian in their speech, clothes and religions, and as diverse as the royal family in their descent. On the whole, the court and the business community respected one another. They were mutually dependent, as the Leuco story suggests. This was a show which had to be kept on the road, and there was no place for imperial aggression, or for defending 'national independence' to the last drop of blood. In the Bosporan Kingdom, there was plenty of intrigue but no Quixotry. If Mithridates the Great or the Romans wanted to impose a protectorate, then there was no reason to risk the destruction of Panticapaeum for the sake of an abstract like sovereignty. The kingdom, like a chameleon, took on the colouring of its strongest neighbours. It was Grecianised, and then Iranianised itself and then adapted to the Roman Empire. Politically, it was unprovocative. Unlike Constantinople-Byzantium, its capture did not promise to change the history of the world or even to make its conqueror a hero.
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