scholarly journals Brooches from the Cemetery of Opushki and Their Role in Costume (According to the 2003–2020 Excavation Materials)

Author(s):  
Anastasia А. Stoianova

This paper presents a review of the brooches from the cemetery of Opushki located in the central area of the Crimean foothills. The cemetery was used from the first century BC to the fourth century AD by peoples of various archaeological cultures. 72 of 318 graves excavated there contained brooches. The total number of complete and fragmented brooches discovered there is 190. The largest group comprises one-piece bow-shaped brooches with returned foot and the brooches with flattened catch-plate from the first to the first half of the third century AD. There is a series of brooches made in the Roman Empire, with the most numerous group of plate brooches. There are a few violin-bow-shaped brooches, highly-profiled brooches of the Northern Black Sea type, two-piece violin-bow-shaped brooches with returned foot, and brooches with curved arched bow (P-shaped): great many pieces of these types occurred at other sites from the Roman Period in the Crimean foothill area. In Opushki, brooches appeared in all types of burial constructions, and mostly in the Late Scythian vaults from the first century BC to the second century AD. They accompanied graves of women, men, and children. In the overwhelming majority of cases, one burial was accompanied with one and rarely two brooches; there is only one burial of a child with three clasps. Most often brooches occurred at the chest, in rare cases on the shoulder, near the cervical vertebrae, pelvic bones, or outside the skeleton. It is noteworthy that a great number of brooches was found in the burials of children of different ages, from 1- to 8-12-year-old. Apparently, brooches as a part of the child’s costume were used throughout the child’s life from the very infancy. Generally, the brooch types from the cemetery of Opushki, their distribution in the assemblages and location on the skeletons correspond to the general pattern typical of barbarian cemeteries in the Crimean foothill area dated to the Roman Period.

Author(s):  
Simon James

Dura-Europos was a product and ultimately a victim of the interaction of Mediterranean- and Iranian-centred imperial powers in the Middle East which began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persian empire in the later fourth century BC. Its nucleus was established as part of the military infrastructure and communications network of the Seleucid successor-state. It was expanding into a Greekstyle polis during the second century BC, as Seleucid control was being eroded from the east by expanding Arsacid Parthian power, and threatened from the west by the emergent imperial Roman republic. From the early first century BC, the Roman and Parthian empires formally established the Upper Euphrates as the boundary between their spheres of influence, and the last remnants of the Seleucid regime in Syria were soon eliminated. Crassus’ attempt to conquer Parthia ended in disaster at Carrhae in 53 BC, halting Roman ambitions to imitate Alexander for generations. The nominal boundary on the Upper Euphrates remained, although the political situation in the Middle East remained fluid. Rome long controlled the Levant largely indirectly, through client rulers of small states, only slowly establishing directly ruled provinces with Roman governors, a process mostly following establishment of the imperial regime around the turn of the millennia. However, some client states like Nabataea still existed in AD 100 (for overviews see Millar 1993; Ball 2000; Butcher 2003; Sartre 2005). The Middle Euphrates, in what is now eastern Syria, lay outside Roman control, although it is unclear to what extent Dura and its region—part of Mesopotamia, and Parapotamia on the west bank of the river—were effectively under Arsacid control before the later first century AD. For some decades, Armenia may have been the dominant regional power (Edwell 2013, 192–5; Kaizer 2017, 70). As the Roman empire increasingly crystallized into clearly defined, directly ruled provinces, the contrast with the very different Arsacid system became starker. The ‘Parthian empire’, the core of which comprised Iran and Mesopotamia with a western royal capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, was a much looser entity (Hauser 2012).


1996 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 22-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Woolf

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That explosion of new inscriptions, and the subsequent rise and fall of an epigraphic culture, was experienced by eastern and western provinces alike, in Greek as well as in Latin epigraphy. Many regional epigraphies remain to be characterized in terms of their chronology, but such local studies as have been done strongly suggest that, although there was certainly some inter-regional variation in the scale, rate, and timing of this phenomenon, in its broad outlines this pattern was very widespread. Across the entire Empire, the number of inscriptions set up each year began to rise from the Augustan period and increased more and more steeply through the second century. In every region that has been examined in detail, the majority of extant inscriptions were produced in the late second and early third centuries. The peak or turning-point seems to have been reached at slightly different times in each area. But everywhere the subsequent decline was much faster than the original rise, reaching a new low between the middle and the end of the third century A.D. Epigraphy does survive into the fourth century — in most areas of the Empire, if not in most cities — but late imperial inscriptions are very much rarer and differ markedly from early imperial examples in genre, form, and style.


Author(s):  
Igor Khrapunov ◽  
◽  
Anastasiya Stoyanova ◽  

The cemetery of Opushki is located at 15 km to the east of modern Simferopol, in the central area of the Crimean foothills. The site has been being excavated since 2003. So far more than 300 graves of various types have been uncovered. They belong to the Late Scythian, Middle Sarmatian, and Late Sarmatian archaeological cultures. There is one cremation complex appeared as a result of the Germanic migration to the Crimea. The complex under present publication belongs to a large group of burial vaults with a short dromos (entry corridor) of the Late Roman period; this type of crypts is found in various cemeteries of the Crimean foothills. Burial constructions of this type are associated with the mediaeval Alans’ ancestors who migrated to the Crimea from the North Caucasus. Although the earliest crypts featuring dromos appeared in the foothill area of the Crimean Peninsula in the first half of the 3rd century AD, most of burials in these constructions were made in the fourth century AD. Burial vault no. 158 has two interesting features. It contains multiple burials typical for the Late Scythian vaults of the 1st and the first half of the 2nd centuries. Such a phenomenon is encountered for the first time in the Late Roman vault. According to the analysis of the grave goods, the complex under study is one of the earliest or even the earliest short-dromos vault discovered in the Crimea. It was constructed in the second half (or at the end) of 2nd or very early 3rd century AD and was in use throughout the first half of the 3rd century. The results of research of this burial construction supply new materials for the solution of highly disputable problem of the Crimean vaults with short dromos origin and of the reconstruction of ethnic processes in the Crimea in the Late Roman period.


1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 195-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. P. Winnington-Ingram

Ancient Greek music was purely or predominantly melodic; and in such music subtleties of intonation count for much. If our sources of information about the intervals used in Greek music are not always easy to interpret, they are at any rate fairly voluminous. On the one hand we have Aristoxenus, by whom musical intervals were regarded spatially and combined and subdivided by the processes of addition and subtraction; for him the octave consisted of six tones, and the tone was exactly divisible into fractions such as the half and quarter, so that the fourth was equal to two tones and a half, the fifth to three tones and a half, and so on. On the other hand we have preserved for us in Ptolemy's Harmonics the computations of a number of mathematicians, who realized correctly that intervals could only be expressed as ratios (e.g. of string-lengths), that the octave was less than the sum of six whole tones and that this tone could not be divided into equal parts. These authorities are Archytas, the Pythagorean of the early fourth century, Eratosthenes (third century), Didymus (first century) and Ptolemy himself (second century A.D.). To these we must add the scale of Plato's Timaeus (35B) and, closely related to it, the computations of the pseudo-Philolaus (ap. Boethium, Mus. Ill, 8) and of Boethius himself (IV, 6). Aristoxenus is less easy to understand than the mathematicians because of the unscientific nature of his postulates. His importance, however, is very great, not only from his comparatively early date but because he claims to champion the direct musical consciousness against the scientific approach of some of his predecessors and contemporaries.


1973 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 18-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Riley

The quantity of stratified coarse pottery from Sidi Khrebish has been considerable and preliminary study has of necessity been concentrated on important groups from sealed contexts which span the period from the second century B.C. to the seventh century A.D.The earliest group is from a cistern of second century B.C. date; the next is from excavation underneath Roman period concrete floors which produced mid-first century A.D. material, while the largest group is from the infill of Roman period cisterns and destruction levels and can be dated to the mid-third century A.D. Information is somewhat scanty for the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. but groups of pottery representing the Byzantine period were recovered in some quantity from the destruction levels of the church and its cistern. A good group of Islamic glazed fine ware and coarse ware was associated with late occupation within the church.Space does not permit more than a brief survey of the most common and distinctive coarse ware forms from the excavation.In general, throughout the period of Berenice, the locally made coarse ware form shapes seem to have been influenced from the Eastern Mediterranean, especially in the second and third centuries A.D.The commonest form of second century B.C. cooking pot is rounded, having a short neck with two vertical ‘strap’ handles from the shoulder merging with the rim (fig. 1). Another distinguishing feature of pottery from this period is a semicircular handle from the body with an indentation at the top where it has been pressed to the rim (fig. 2). Both types are of the distinctive local ‘fossil gritted ware’, the fabric of which ranges from orange brown to dark pink. The clay contains fairly large roughly circular flat flakes of bluish-grey grit, which, when split open, reveal segmented spiral fossil remains. This fabric is very common in all periods.


Author(s):  
Katerina Chatzopoulou

This chapter examines sentential negation during the Hellenistic Koine stage of Greek based on non-atticizing texts mainly from the first century BC to the second century AD. Structural developments of the language are presented that support a treatment for nonveridicality as encoded in a syntactic projection, independent from morphological mood and independent from complementizer position. A treatment of the licensing of polarity items is proposed—among which is the Greek NEG2—in terms of syntactic agreement. Nonveridical operators are taken to introduce the Nonveridicality Phrase (NONVERP) in syntax, encoding the observation that nonveridical environments tend to be morphologically marked in ways that can be distinct from mood marking. Furthermore, in the Koine Greek stage, NEG2 gets more specialized in its lexical negation function at the expense of NEG1, while Negative Concord structures get significantly reduced, a change that was linked to Greek word-order particulars.


Ramus ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Katerina Carvounis

Quintus' Posthomerica in fourteen books covers events from the Trojan saga that take place between the funeral of Hector, which marks the end of the Iliad, and the homeward journey of the victorious Greeks after the sack of Troy. Various hints in the text help us place the epic within the Roman Empire but do not allow much scope for further speculation on a more specific date. Relative chronology with other hexameter poets in the Roman period sets the composition of the Posthomerica in the third century, which saw a floruit of mythological poetry. For material shared between Quintus' Posthomerica and Oppian's Halieutica, which is placed between 177 and 180 CE, it is generally agreed that Quintus is drawing on Oppian, and the end of the second century is thus a plausible terminus post quern for the Posthomerica. Key to establishing a terminus ante quern for this epic is Triphiodorus' epyllion on the Sack of Troy, which is now dated to the late third century: scholarly opinion is divided about the direction of the borrowing between the two poets, but if Triphiodorus is drawing on Quintus, which seems to be more likely, then the Posthomerica can be placed before the end of the third century.


2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 452-467
Author(s):  
M. Nel

The Hellenistic and Roman world and the origin of the apocalypticism and gnosticism The world view and culture created by the oikoumene of the Hellenistic-Roman era (331 BC to early fourth century AD) was conducive to the rise of several philosphico-religious movements, like Mithraism and other mystery religions; Stoicism, Epicureanism and Middle Platonism; apocalypticism and wisdom literature in Hellenistic Judaism and Gnosticism. These movements have in common that they originated in a world defined by change and insecurity, leading to an attitude of alienation, despair and agony amongst many people. These people looked for a soter, and the philosophico-religious movements offered such soteria, salvation from an alien and evil world and entrance to a new world. Jewish apocalypticism flourished during the period from the third century BC to the first century AD, when orthodox rabbi’s started purifying Jewish religion from all foreign hellenistic elements like the dualistic views of apocalypticism. When this happened Christianity had already adopted the essence of Jewish apocalypticism. During the second century AD some Christians were disappointed that the parousia had not realised as expected imminently, and from their disappointment grew their involvement in gnostic Christian movements, centered around strong leaders (guru’s). Our age is also characterised by change and insecurity, just as the case was during the Hellenistic-Roman age, and the hypothesis of the article concludes with the assertion that the phenomenal growth in the New Age movement and neo-paganism can be explained in the same terms as apocalypticism and gnosticism.


Author(s):  
Igor Khrapunov ◽  

The cemetery of Opushki is located about 15 km east of Simferopol, in the Crimean foothills. In the process of excavations, carried out since 2003, a variety of funerary constructions belonging to different archaeological cultures have been discovered. The crypt researched in the current article contained four burials, which were especially interesting because of the find of six coins inside of them. The excavation above the burial chamber of this vault discovered a childs burial accompanied with varied grave goods, similarly to those made in the crypt. The burials discussed in the present study were made in the second half of the third century AD. The second half of the 3rd century AD was the period represented in Crimea by the smallest number of complexes in comparison with the previous and the following periods. Varied grave goods from the crypt and the childs grave greatly expand our notion of the material culture of those people who inhabited the Crimean foothills in that half of the century, which is difficult to be discovered by archaeological methods. Furthermore, the crypt No. 133 belongs to a big group of grave constructions which were widely spread in Crimea in the Late Roman period. Their distinctive feature is a short dromos. Initially, the latter crypts appeared in the first half of the 3rd century AD. However, several of them as well belong to the second half of the 3rd century AD. In the fourth century AD, the majority of burials were made in such crypts close to the Crimean foothills. Many researchers interpret specific construction of these crypts as an evidence of the penetration into Crimea of the forefathers of mediaeval North Caucasian Alans. The material culture of the population of the Crimean foothills in the Late Roman period could be interpreted as eclectic, developed under the influence from various factors. Its sources were ancient and the Sarmatian cultures. Besides, the research showed that there were found some local hand-made vessels, analogies of which were never found outside of the peninsula. Some of the artefacts had penetrated to Crimea area from the areas populated by Germanic tribes.


1985 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Fulford

A research excavation was commenced on the site of the basilica which forms the western side of the forum of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester, Hants) in IQ80. Its aim is to examine the Late Iron Age and early Roman occupation which, despite extensive Victorian excavations, was preserved beneath the masonry basilica. So far there is evidence of the Iron Age sequence dating back to the last quarter of the first century B.C.; it ends with the construction of a palisade dating to about the time of the Roman conquest. Two major phases of Roman timber building have been recorded, of which the later consists of a large basilica, interpreted as part of a forum-basilica and of Flavian date. The masonry basilica dates to the early second century. From the mid third until the later fourth century the basilica was given over to metalworking. The amphitheatre, with its well-preserved earthen seating banks, was first constructed during the third quarter of the first century A.D., when the seating, arena wall and entrance passages were built of timber. After several phases of repair the arena wall and entrance passages were rebuilt in stone in the first half of the third century. The full plan of this phase has been recovered; it consists of two opposing entrances on the long axis and two apsidal recesses on the short axis. The monument enjoyed a brief period of reuse in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.


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