This book is devoted to the only hoard of the earliest silver coins minted in the Cimmerian Bosporus (Kerch Strait). It was hidden in a dwelling destroyed by fire in 480 BC during an enemy attack on Phanagoria. The widespread opinion in academic literature is that Panticapaeum was the first Bosporan city to mint coins - in the middle of the 6th century BC or a little later. But the discovery of a hoard whose deposition date is very well established enables us to date the beginnings of coinage on the shores of the Kerch Strait to the 490s BC. The authors propose that the coins were minted not in Panticapaeum but by a union of Greek cities under the umbrella of the temple of Aphrodite Ourania Apatouros, an extra muros temple, 'most famous' in the words of Strabo, already established in the 6th century BC in Phanagoria. With the coming to power of the Archaeanactids in Panticapaeum, about which Diodorus Siculus provides information, that became the dominant city of the Cimmerian Bosporus. It started to mint coins with the (Greek) inscription 'pan'.

"Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south (as the poet Xenophanes would describe around 540 BCE), Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's 'racial imaginary'-a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy-emerged out of the context of cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors over the Archaic and Classical Periods. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the 'exotic' provenance of their goods to consumers; it might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports. Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative. But at in the early Classical Period-as Achaemenid Persia loomed, and as Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor-such images coalesced into the charged, idea of the barbaros, 'barbarian.' Drawing from the historiography of trade in the eighteenth century Atlantic world, Racialized Commodities adopts the model of 'commodity biography' to investigate the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. Starting in the period c. 700-450 BCE, Part 1 focuses on the earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, in Greek art. Part 2, which concentrates on the period between 550-300 BCE, seeks to explain how and why negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians were so widespread in ancient Greece"--

In two earlier publications (BAR S56 and BAR S166) Nina Frolova analysed the products that characterised the Bosporan Kingdom in the 300 years between the reforms introduced under Nero and the final demise of autonomous Bosporan coinage in the mid-fourth century. The present volume takes that historical process one stage back in time by detailing the issues produced between the incorporation of the Bosporus into the kingdom of Mithradates VI of Pontus and the Neronian reforms. By providing a detailed catalogue of the material held in the State Historical Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, together with subsidiary collections, it is hoped that this volume will enable scholars throughout the world to renew their interest in a region which for so long has suffered from the isolation imposed by politics.

The eleventh volume of Coin Hoards is dedicated solely to hoards of Greek coins found in the Cimmerian Bosporus. The inventory contains records of 271 new hoards or re-evaluations of old ones, and provides an indispensable supplement to the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards and previous volumes of Coin Hoards. The volume includes many hitherto unrecorded hoards from the early 5th century BC to the 6th century AD. The majority of them were recently acquired by museums in Simferopol, Kerch, Tman, Phanagoria, Temryuk, Anapa, Krasnodar, Novorossiysk, Moscow and St Petersburg from the archaeological missions which had conducted wide-scale excavations in the Krasnodar region and the eastern Crimea. Among the significant recent finds are large hoards of Late Archaic silver coins and Late Bosporan staters from Phanagoria, as well as a group of purses from Mithradates VI's residence there, burnt in 63 BC; a Myrmicium hoard of Cyzicenes; big hoards of Bosporan gold staters from the Taman Peninsula; huge hoards of 3rd-century BC bronze coins (more than 21000 pieces) and coins of the Mithradatic period (15000 and 8000 coins) from the Asiatic Bosporus; and a group of hoards from Mithradates III's fortress in Parosta, a small Bosporan city, which met its end during the Roman-Bosporan War of AD 45-49, etc. Nine notes are devoted to brief publication of a group of the most significant new hoards, related mostly to Phanagoria and the Asiatic Bosporus. Huge Phanagorian hoards of the early 1st century BC are of special interest, containing coins of Euboea, Delos and Crete, the Pontus, western and southern Anatolia and the adjacent islands. These non-native coins are exceptional finds for the Cimmerian Bosporus, as well as in the numismatic profile of the northern Black Sea region as a whole. The distant coins form evidence for the voyages of Phanagorian merchantmen to the eastern Mediterranean - to Hierapytna and Patara. These studies significantly expand our understanding of the Bosporan coinage and Greek economy of this period. The volume is accompanied by 311 plates.

List of members in each volume beginning with new ser., v. 1 (except new ser., v. 3 )

A collection of primarily archaeological papers given at a 2000 conference in Taman, Russia. Topics explored include trade, colonisation, agriculture, art and cultural influences. Essays range from specific excavation reports to broader surveys of phases of history in the region.