Scythians

A fortuitous find in 1978 on the 2^nd Mitridatskaya Street in Kerch is a verse epitaph of an unknown (his name has not survived) defender of the walls of Panticapaeum against Scythian aggression in the first quarter of the V^th century BC. The text reads κεῖμαι/ἐν τῶι δὲ χ/ωρίωι Ἀΐδα' εἰν ..., which can be translated as “in this fortress I lie, staying in Hades’ confines”. The inscription points simultaneously to the location of the physical remains and the immortal soul of the deceased.

Interrelations between Macedonia and Scythia in the 30th years of IV cent.BC are discussed here. The decade of these contacts may be divide into 3  phases. Events of each of this phase had a military character.  First of them included the Scythian-Macedonian war 339 BC. Following was the North campaign of Alexander Great against barbarian tribes had been living in the Bas-Danube (335 BC).

According to V.G. Moiseyev's new anthropological polo-age definitions, skulls from the Central tomb of the Aleksandropol’sky kurgan belong to the man enough advanced age for 50 years or more ("tsar"), and the young woman at the age of 20-35 years ("tsarina"). Thanking these definitions the contradiction between structure buried and character of accompanying things is liquidated.   

The article is devoted to analyzis of a data set of 162 Scythian female burials of the Northern Black Sea Region of the Vth –IVth c. BC with mirrors distributed according to the location of the mirrors, taking into account the anthropological definition, the presence of weapons in the burials and the their dating. According to archaeological data, all burials with mirrors are defined as female, 37 cases is confirmed by anthropological definitions, which suggests that the mirrors in the Scythians of the second half mark female burials exclusively.