PONS ARCIS VS COLUMNAE TRAJANI

Abstract

The article highlights the results of the research of the Castle Bridge in Kamianets-Podilsky, which allowed to deepen the chronology of the bridge’s appearance back to the first centuries AD ‒ the age of Trajan’s Wars, and to insert the Castle Bridge into the context of fortification construction represented by the remains of the defense structures of the first centuries AD that were discovered in Kamianets-Podilsky in 1970 ‒1990. The search of architectural and construction analogues of the bridge has led to the reliefs depicted on the Trajan’s Column in Rome (113 AD), the analysis of which allowed, in its turn, to rebut the generally accepted by the world science attribution of one of the column’s reliefs (XCIX) as the depiction of the Bridge over Danube, constructed in 103‒105 by Apollodorus of Damascus during the Dacian Wars. The author suggest a new attribution of the image of this bridge on Trajan’s Column, interpreting one of the well-known reliefs as the depiction of the bridge (LXXXVI). She argues in favor of the fact that the Bridge over Danube was completely made of stone and had no wooden arches. It became the first attempt of Apollodorus of Damascus, the author of the dome of Pantheon in Rome, to apply the Roman concrete in arches on large-scale constructions. Using the reliefs of the column as analogy allowed the author to reconstruct the image of the bridge in Kamyanets-Podilsky for the period of the first centuries AD. The conducted researches also give grounds to consider the Middle Dniester region as a contact zone on the border of early-Slavic and late-Antique worlds.