Phalerae of horse harness from the illicit excavations of 1930-s  near the Cossack village Dakhovskaya in the Trans-Kuban region
Authors: Трейстер М. Ю. 
Published: October 2023

Our attention is attracted by the lost phalerae from the illicit excavations of 1934–1936 in the area of cossack village Dakhovskaya in the Trans-Kuban region, known after the brief description by B. V. Lunin, judging by which, one of them, with the image of a lion’s head en face, may be compared with a pair of phalerae from the Fedulov hoard, and the other – a phalera with the head of a gorgon – with the piece from the hoard found near cossack village Akhtanizovskaya. Much more information is provided by the phalera “with the image of an eagle and a serpent”. The photograph and dimensions of this phalera were published in 1937 in a short popular article by B. V. Lunin, which remained out of sight of the modern scholars. This pha lera has an oval shape and, it is quite obvious that this is a prometopidion – the forehead deco ration of a horse. On this frontlet in relief, there is shown en face an image of an eagle, with its wings lowered and its head turned to the right, in a fight with a snake. The prometopidion from Dakhovskaya belongs to the type of oval frontlets, which are known from rather rare finds from the Kuban and Don regions, dating back to the 3rd–2nd centuries BC. In terms of shape and size, the closest parallel among the finds from the North Pontic area is an object from the Fedulov hoard – this piece, depicting a scene of Gigantomachy, is smaller in size, and also has rivets located in a similar way on the front side, and on the back – the remains of wide bronze transverse loops. If the oval prometopidia known to us were most often decorated with the image of Nike and scenes of Gigantomachy, then the frontlet from Dakhovskaya represents a still unknown motif for this category of horse bridle phalerae – an eagle in a combat with a snake. In Greek art, this motif plot has been known since the Archaic period, when, in particular, it was used to decorate the shield emblems, although in the Archaic and early Classical Greek art, the eagle was usually depicted flying with a snake in its claws. Also, with widely spread wings, eagles are represented in scenes of a fight with a snake on the reliefs of the late Classical – early Hellenistic period from Attica and Asia Minor. Scenes with images of the combat of an eagle with a snake became widespread in the late Hellenistic period, especially in Asia Minor after 200 BC. On the other hand, such images are completely unusual for the Bosporan steles. It would seem that the fact that the eagle’s wings on the frontlet from Dakhovskaya were lowered, was due to the oval-vertical form of the prometopidion itself, however, it is worth noting that we find images of eagles with their wings lowered down exactly on the grave stele from Asia Minor and Thessaly. The author comes to the conclusion that the prometopidion from Dakhovskaya should be attributed to the early group of phalerae, also represented by finds from the Fedulov hoard and Uspenskaya, and dated within the last quarter of the 3rd – first quarter of the 2nd century BC. The spread of the motif of the combat between the eagle and the snake in the decoration of grave stele from Asia Minor of the Hellenistic period and the absence of such images in the time in question in the Cimmerian Bosporus are indirect arguments in favor of the possible origin of the early phalerae of the horse harness found in the Kuban and Don regions from Asia Minor.