A Bronze Jug with Scenes of the Trojan Cycle from the Sarmatian Burial in the Lower Don Region
A Bronze Jug with Scenes of the Trojan Cycle from the Sarmatian Burial in the Lower Don Region

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to the publication of a unique bronze jug from the cache of the burial of a young woman in a burial mound excavated in 1989 near the Krasny Kut Farmstead on the left bank of the river Manych, dating from the second half of the 2nd – early 3rd century AD. The jug has already been described and discussed several times in the 1990s, so in this article I shall limit myself to the main conclusions and also present new parallels and considerations. The images on both the handle and the body of the jug are associated with the Trojan cycle, a description of the events that took place during the siege of Troy, the death of Achilles and the story of the sacrifice of Polyxena by Neoptolemus at the tomb of his father. If we accept the dating of the jug in question, substantiated here, to the 2nd century AD, and even more to the period of the Marcomannic Wars, it is obvious that there was not a big gap between the time of manufacture of the jug and its deposition in the burial, although there is no need to talk about the connection between the context of the find and the symbolism of the jug – it was hidden in the cache of the burial of a young Sarmatian woman, probably not its first owner, and the routes along which it travelled to the nomads in the vicinity of Tanais could have been different, including that via the Cimmerian Bosporus.

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