Vol 84, No 2 (2024)

The article presents the results of a natural-science study of several figured vessels from Cyprus, originating from the former collection of A.S. Uvarov and now stored in the State Historical Museum. X-ray tomography made it possible to reliably reconstruct the manufacturing technology of Cypriot figured vessels of the Middle and Late Bronze Age.

Most of the vessels are handmade, some of them are made from one piece of clay mass, and some are composite. Additional parts (legs, spout, handle and some decorative elements) were made separately and later attached to the vessel’s body. The volume of these vessels was extremely small – from 20 to 220 ml, which suggests their use for storing aromatic substances.

The composite vessel Б 602/70 has two containers, directly fixed to one another (the upper one is inserted into the lower one), while their insides are isolated, and each container has a separate spout, allowing it to be used independently. The body of the composite askos Б 602/6 is formed by three containers in shape close to spheres, connected to each other with the tubes. To make the body of the rhytons in the form of a bull Б 605/126 and a goat/doe Б 605/127 a potter’s wheel was used, and then body’s ends were closed and smoothed on the outside.

The “Unknown script” of Bactria was partially deciphered as a result of a discovery of an inscription of the king of kings Wima Taktoo with Bactrian and “Unknown script” versions in the Almosi gorge in Tajikistan in Summer 2022. In the present paper the author, after a brief introduction, (1) provides a review of recent studies that fostered the interpretation; (2) publishes previously unknown specimens of this script; (3) specifies the reading of diacritic signs and considers the vocalism of the tongue mirrored in these inscriptions, where, as he proposes, the reflexes of Old Iranian I and U-type vowels merged; (4) puts forward the proofs for reading of the sign for the initial vowel and revisits the reading of signs W and H; in order to do that he analyses the etymology of Bactrian šaonanošao “king of kings”; (5) analyses the inscriptions on silver items and defines the word for “silver” in the inscriptions, ə^rzat; (6) specifies the chronology of the inscriptions (third/second century BC to fourth century CE) and defines the inscribed bowl from the Issyk burial near Almaty as a Bactrian import; (7) locates the position of the “unknown script” in Central Asia: having originated in Imperial Aramaic it had undergone reforms similar to those of the Indic script kharoṣthi and became one of indirect sources of the Old Turkic runic script; (8) puts forward his considerations on the nature of the language coded by the ‘unknown script’: it was a dialect close to Bactrian which was perhaps common among the mountaineers of Hindukush or Paropamises, including the silver mines of Panjsher.

The author uses cartographic material to develop the topic presented in the article by A.V. Makhlayuk published in 2019, “The space of the Roman world in the Res gestae divi Augusti”. While this work is about the “mental-geographical map of Roman imperialism”, the “imaginary, symbolic” geography of the “empire without borders” in a literary text, our article analyzes the imperial spatial ideology on cartographic material, primarily on the material from Peutinger’s map of the world, which, in author’s opinion, reflects precisely this Roman view of the relationship between the Roman Empire and the oikoumene (imperium and orbis terrarum). Researchers who see this map as a product of Hellenistic geography deny the existence of Roman imperial motifs on the map. The article makes an attempt to show that Peutinger’s map is an excellent example of the embodiment in the cartographic form of the ideological program of Roman imperialism, represented also in poetic works of Horace, Vergil, Silius Italicus and other authors.

The article reconstructs the biography of the emigrant historian Leonid Ivanovich Strakhovsky (1898–1963), a nephew of M.I. Rostovtzeff – the son of his younger sister Tatiana (1875–?) and the Senator Ivan Mikhailovich Strakhovsky (1866–1921) who was shot by the Bolsheviks in the ‘Tagantsev conspiracy’ trial. After graduating from the Alexander Lyceum (1913–1917), Leonid Strakhovsky entered the Petrograd University (1917–1918), but had to interrupt his studies because of the revolutions and the Civil War. The young man joined the White Movement and in 1920 fled into exile first to London and then to Berlin; since 1922 he started writing poems under the pseudonym of “Leonid Chatsky”. After graduating from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (1924–1928), he received a Doctorate in History, and started teaching as a professor of Russian history. In the late 1920s, Leonid Strakhovsky moved to the United States where he became a lecturer in the political and diplomatic history of Europe (1928), professor of modern European history at Georgetown University in Washington (1936), professor of European history at the University of Maryland (1937–1942), and taught Russian language and literature at Harvard (1943– 1948). Having moved to Canada, he became a professor of Russian history and literature in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Toronto (1950–1963). In 1953 he published the memoirs ‘Uncle Misha’ about M.I. Rostovtzeff, in the Paris newspaper Russian Thought, telling the story of his meetings with M.I. Rostovtzeff both in Petrograd and in exile. The memoirs have been practically unknown in Russia ever since. Now the article presents their complete text with a commentary.

Stamped vessels made in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor in the first millennium BC are one of the most informative categories of archaeological finds and are widely represented at the sites of the Northern Black Sea region. However, a significant part of the amphora stamps found in excavations cannot be used for dating archaeological compounds due to the state of preservation, which makes them difficult to read and identify. The sequence of methods described in the article can significantly improve the reliability of identification of amphora stamps by introducing digital documentation and using mathematical surface visualization algorithms to create contrasting images. In addition, the article details approaches to creating a modern digital corpus of amphora stamps, which can significantly simplify the identification and introduction of stamps into scholarly use, their publication in print and online, and in the future become a tool for mass statistical analysis.