Blechkanne. Медные кованые кувшины первых веков н.э. в Северном Причерноморье и Сарматии*

Abstract

The article is devoted to the finds of jugs hammered out of sheet of the Straldzha type in the North Pontic region, which were first investigated by B.A. Raev in the 1970s and 1980s, who assumed that they were made in the workshops of Thrace. An analysis of the chronology of the vessels shows that in Sarmatia, with rare exception, predominate finds in the funeral contexts of the late 1st and the first half of the 2nd century AD., while in the Bosporus and partly in the South-Western Crimea, the finds of such pitchers predominate in the complexes and layers of the mid-3rd – early 4th century AD. Taking into account the finds of recent decades in the territory of the Western and North-Western Pontic area, in the Crimea, as well as in the burials of the nomads of Asian Sarmatia and the mapping of finds, it becomes evident that the center of the conglomeration of finds in the Northern Black Sea Coast is located in the Bosporan Kingdom with the “splashes” on adjacent territories: to the west – to the region of the South-Western Crimea and to the north-east – to the nomads of the Lower Don region. The doubts expressed by J. Kunow and D.B. Shelov over 30 years ago that pitchers of the Straldzha type were manufactured only in Thrace and Shelov’s assumption, that they may have been produced in the northern Black Sea area, become especially relevant now. To consider, as before, that all these pitchers, which were simple, easy in production and used most probably to boil water, found in the Northern Black Sea area (where the number of finds exceeds the Thracian ones by a factor of two) were made in Thrace, becomes more and more complicated and, in my opinion, contradicts logic. I am not going to postulate that the finds from Thrace were made in the Bosporan Kingdom, they could have been made in the local workshops or in Pannonia.