ИСТИНА

Excavations have been going on at the city-site of Panticapeum (now Kerch, Autonomous Republic of the Crimea) ever since the first half of the 19th century. For the last 70 years the Bosporan (Panticapaeum) Expedition of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has been excavating there on a regular basis, led by Professor V.P.Tolstikov, Head of the museum’s Department of the Art and Archaeology of the Classical World since 1977. During the field seasons of 2009-2014 researchers were able for the first time to uncover a well-preserved section of the city’s earliest level dating from the end of the 7th and first half of the 6th century BC. This discovery was made in the New Upper Mithradates Trench at the northern edge of the upper plateau of Mount Mithradates. It was established that when the settlement had first been founded on the highest and naturally fortified part of the hill, it had been surrounded by a defensive wall between 2.2 and 2.4 metres thick. The settlement had been founded at the end of the 7th or beginning of the 6th century BC. Around the middle of the 6th century a catastrophe befell the settlement and this was followed by a serious fire. Arrow-heads of Scythian types found in the charred level 1.4 metres thick make it possible to assume that the catastrophe had been of a military nature. The main groups of ceramic material obtained from the charred level and useful for dating purposes consist of fragments from storage vessels, amphorae and painted tableware. A significant proportion of the materials date from the last quarter of the 7th century BC: Clazomenian and Chiot amphorae of various types, Proto-Corinthian, Sub-Geometric and Early Laconian ware. The Lesbian and Ionian amphorae, fragments of Chiot chalices, pottery of the Middle Corinthian period, early Attic vessels, pottery of the Wild Goat Style and Ionian open-type lamps can be dated to the first quarter of the 6th century. Certain types of East Greek amphorae and most of the kylikes and plates can be dated to the second quarter of the 6th century. Important preliminary results have been obtained with regard to the sorting of the ceramic material from the various production centres. Three quarters of the fragments are of North-Ionian origin. Numerous parallels for them can be found in the destruction level of Old Smyrna. A large share of the fragments was from Lesbian vases, amphorae and so-called “Aeolian bucchero”. Among the finds from the earliest level at Panticapaeum there are unique works, such as a large sub-Geometric krater with a previously unknown type of decoration. There is every reason to assume that thanks to the efforts of the museum’s Bosporan Expedition a new page is opening in the study of early Panticapaeum and the colonization of the North Pontic region.