Nikolai Vinokurov

Мikhail Treister

A bone tessera with Graeco-Latin inscription XII / IB was unearthed in the Artezian site on the Azov Sea coast (Crimea) in Building 10 of the earlier citadel destructed during the 46/47 AD war between Rome and the Bosporan kingdom. The tessera was found in a homogenous layer of fi re among other artifacts: jewelry, beads and coins. Their concentration implies that at least a part of them had been deposited in a wooden casket. Similar tesseras with double numbers (Greek and Roman) had been found only in Olbia, Chersonesus and Panticapaeum. The discovery of such a tessera in the Artezian site proves that the settlement had a high status: it could hold games presumably of Alexandrian origin. The tessera published here was most probably brought not from Alexandria or the Eastern Mediterranean, but from Italy where tesseras of this type (with a graffito recto and a profiled decoration verso) were most usual. The question whether it could have belonged originally to a roman military man is still open. The only other find of the same type on the Bosporos comes from a child’s grave.