From Yahoo News:
2,000-Year-Old Treasure Discovered In Black Sea Fortress
Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago
buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently
excavated by archaeologists.
More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with "various
items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels" inside an
ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in
Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the
journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia.
"The fortress had been besieged. Wealthy people from the settlement and
the neighborhood had tried to hide there from the Romans. They had
buried their hoards inside the citadel," Nikolaï Vinokurov, a professor
at Moscow State Pedagogical University, explained. [
See Photos of the Buried Treasure]
Artezian, which covered an area of at least 3.2 acres (1.3 hectares)
and also had a necropolis (a cemetery), was part of the Bosporus
Kingdom. At the time, the kingdom's fate was torn between two brothers
—Mithridates VIII, who sought independence from Rome, and his younger
brother, Cotys I, who was in favor of keeping the kingdom a client state
of the growing empire. Rome sent an army to support Cotys, establishing
him in the Bosporan capital and torching settlements controlled by
Mithridates, including Artezian.
People huddled in the fortress for protection as
the Romans attacked,
but Vinokurov said they knew they were doomed. "We can say that these
hoards were funeral sacrifices. It was obvious for the people that they
were going to die shortly," he wrote in an email to LiveScience. The
siege and fall of the fortress occurred in AD 45.
Curiously, each hoard included exactly 55 coins minted by Mithridates
VIII. "This is possibly just a simple coincidence, or perhaps these were
equal sums received by the owners of these caskets from the supporters
of Mithridates," the team wrote in its paper.
A Greek lifestyle
Vinokurov's team, including a number of volunteers, has been exploring
Artezian since 1989 and has found that the people of the settlement
followed a culture that was distinctly Greek. The population's ethnicity
was mixed, Vinokurov wrote, "but their culture was pure Greek. They
spoke Greek language, had Greek school; the architecture and
fortification were Greek as well. They were Hellenes by culture but not
that pure by blood."
Greeks are known to have created colonies on the Black Sea centuries
earlier, intermarrying with the Crimeans. The customs and art forms they
introduced appear to have persisted through the ages despite being
practiced nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from Greece itself.
This Greek influence can be seen in
the treasures the people of Artezian buried. Among them is a silver brooch engraved with an image of
Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and gold rings with gems engraved with images of Nemesis and Tyche, both Greek deities.
When archaeologists excavated other portions of the torched site they found more evidence of
a Greek lifestyle.
"In the burnt level of the early citadel, many fragmentary small terra cotta figures were found depicting
Demeter,
Cora, Cybele, Aphrodite with a dolphin, Psyche and Eros, a maiden with
gifts, Hermes, Attis, foot soldiers and warriors on horseback,
semi-naked youths," the researchers wrote in their paper, adding
fragments of a miniature oinochoai (a form of Greek pottery) and small
jugs for libations also were found.
All this was torched by the Romans and later rebuilt by Cotys I, who
had been successfully enthroned by Rome. However the treasures of the
earlier inhabitants remained undiscovered beneath the surface, a
testament to a desperate stand against the growing power of Rome.
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