The epigraphic data show that in the 5th–4th cc. BC a great number of immigrants moved from Asia Minor to the Bosporus. The number of Microasian names (48) and their bearers (62 at least) known on the Bosporus in the 5th and 4th c. BC is second only to the Greek names. Even the names belonging to the onomasticon of North Pontic peoples are on the third place only (max. 25 names of 27 bearers). Apart from the name of the founder of the Spartokid dynasty, Thracian names to be found in that period are only: Dindos and «Graeco-Thracian» Thynos and Kotytion (as well as Kototion).

 It is generally very difficult or even impossible to establish the ethnic identity of a namebearer. One cannot be sure if the descendants of the first colonists of the Bosporus were among the bearers of names typical of Asia Minor. This seems to be true about Sammas and Gyges. The supposition that among the emigrants from Ionia during the colonization period there were people with Carian or Lydian names, has some grounds, if one takes into consideration the Carian name of Thymnes, an epitropos of the Scythian king Ariapeithes in Olbia (Herod. IV. 76. 6). In any case, the majority of other bearers of names typical of Asia Minor came to the Bosporus after the colonization period from the areas of Asia Minor occupied by the Greeks during the Great Colonization. More specifically, this applies mainly to the South Pontic area (Paphlagonia, Cappadocia) and, perhaps, to Phrygia. But the emigrants from Phrygia must have come to the Bosporus via South Pontic cities as well.

Family gravestones with names which are almost all non-Greek (and for the greatest part typical of Asia Minor) give grounds to suppose that whole families would come to live on the Bosporus. The process was not that of gradual and spontaneous increase of population coming from Asia Minor because of vicissitudes of life, but of an organized immigration of a group or successive groups of epoikoi. Why and under what circumstances epoikoi from Asia Minor came to the Bosporus as early as the beginning of the 5th c. BC, one cannot so far say for sure. The data collected in this paper must be subjected to further analysis. But it is clear by now that Bosporan South Pontic cities were from the Late Archaic period connected by some kind of relations to be cleared up.