Search Results
Abstract
The article analyses the depictions of archers in so-called 'Scythian' clothes (a high sharp cap or a rounded hood, a caftan and trousers) in Attic archaic vase-painting. The author concludes that these figures were neither conceived as real ethnical Scythians, nor associated by vase painters or their customers with this or any other people. The clothes were rather an iconographic conventionality symbolising a second rank character accompanying a hero. The latter was depicted as a hoplite. The 'Scythian' clothes corresponded to the character's function, not to his ethnical identity. This scheme in vase-painting existed between c. 530 and 490 BC, and then went out of use, because after the Greco-Persian wars these clothes began to be associated with ethnical identity, though not Scythian, but Persian. The real prototype of the 'Scythian' archers were the archers of different ethnical groups first of Median, and later of Persian army. The 'Scythian' attire of the archers on the vases, therefore, has nothing to do with the real Scythians of the North Pontic area.
Abstract
Sinope and the CimmeriansThe article is devoted to the discussion of the literary tradition, according to which the Cimmerians settled for a long time on the place of Sinope. This tradition is not historical, but is probably base on a historical event: a short raid of the nomadic Cimmerians to the shore of Black Sea, during which a first Greek settlement on place of the future Sinope was destroyed. Two foundations of Sinope mentioned in the literary sources (by Habron and by Kretines and Koos) were not separated by a long period and probably belong to the same generation. The Cimmerians did not settled the south shore of Black Sea, but were present in the region close to the south of the Pontic mountains, as it is attested by archaeological data.