Ахеменидская цилиндрическая печать из Косики

Abstract

This article is devoted to the Achaemenid cylinder seal, representing a fight of the Persian hero with two lions, from the princely burial in Kosika in the Lower Volga region dated to the third quarter of the 1st century BC. The analysis has shown that the seal is dated to the 5th century BC, more likely to its first half. There is a good chance that it could be carved in a peripheral workshop in Mesopotamia or in Syria. The seal, made of a high quality-material at the high level, represents a complicated and in certain aspects very rare composition, clearly standing out in the context of the Achaemenid glyptics. At least 400 years passed between the time the seal had been carved and its use as part of the burial inventory in Kosika. It is hardly to suggest that the seal belonged to nomads all this time, especially since the finds of the Achaemenid seals in the nomadic burials in Eurasia of the 5th–4th centuries BC are extremely rare, unlike their finds in the necropoleis of the Bosporan Kingdom. The Achaemenid seal from Kosika along with a Kassite cylinder seal found in the same burial belongs to the circle of the Western Asian and Near Eastern seals of the mid-2nd — mid-1st millennium BC which were found also in the burials of Sarmatian elite of the 1st century BC — early 2nd century AD in the Bug, the Don and the Kuban regions. They probably fell into the hands of the nomads during robbery of sanctuaries at Transcaucasia.