Authors: Neal Ascherson
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, in 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.
This capacity to seem unthreatening made possible the final achievement of the Bosporan Kingdom: the taming of the Goths. This Germanic migration had fought its way down from the Baltic and arrived on the Black Sea in about
200
AD. The Goths had sacked both
Olbia
and Tanais in the early years, but in contact with the Bosporan Kingdom they soon softened and allowed themselves to be transformed into neighbours and customers. Panticapaeum studied their tastes and made some adjustments to the old Sarmatian-Bosporan jewellery designs which had been so successful. Willingly enough, the Goths let the Bosporans enrich their decorative tradition into something distinctly Sarmatian. Under the Goths, who gradually assembled an 'Ostrogothic' state in Crimea and the Pontic Steppe, the Bosporan Kingdom won another century of existence. But then came the Huns. They were not open to taming.
By the fourth century AD, for reasons still not understood with any certainty, the arrivals of successive waves of mounted intruders from Central Asia were not only taking place at shorter and shorter intervals, but were often accompanied by a new degree of savagery and destructiveness. As far as we know, the Huns were the first
major nomad group to enter the Black Sea region as a plundering expedition pure and simple, apparently lacking all interest in settlement or trade. They destroyed Tanais and Panticapaeum for ever. The citizens fled or were murdered, and grass grew over both sites. When the next city was built on the Cimmerian Bosporus, in Byzantine times, it was on the slopes of Mount Mithridates rather than among the ruins on the summit.
As Mikhail Rostovtzeff wrote: 'How curious, this semi-Greek tyranny which lasted for centuries and gradually changed into a Hellenistic monarchy! ... How interesting, the mixed religion which slowly developed in the Cimmerian Bosporus! How singular, this prolific art, working mainly for export to Scythian dynasts and the Scythian aristocracy!.. .
1
Since then there have been nearly two thousand years of contact between literate and preliterate cultures, between wealth-creating cities and tribal empires of the interior. But nothing like the symbiosis of the Bosporan Kingdom has ever reappeared.
Chapter Nine
Sarmatia is an imaginary country - which docs not change the fact that it is the fatherland of us all...
We live like spies, with a foreign biography in our own country. We enter in a forged register: 'place of birth, Sarmatia.' And we are fond of this forgery. A numismatist valuing two old coins will take more interest in the forged one, because it is not just — like the original — a token of value but also a token of aspiration. After a while, the forgery will be more valuable than the original. The scale of values is reversed, and that is why Sarmatia Felix, our fatherland, still lives within us.