Tanais

Tanais (Greek: Τάναϊς, Tánaïs; Russian: Танаис) was an ancient Greek city in the Don river delta, at the northeastern edge of the Sea of Azov, called the Maeotian marshes in classical antiquity. Founded in the first quarter of the 3rd century BC by Greeks of the Cimmerian Bosporus, it was the northeasternmost permanent settlement of the Hellenistic world and the principal point of exchange between the Greek cities of the Black Sea and the Sarmatian, Maeotian and Scythian peoples of the steppe. Strabo describes Tanais as "the common emporion of the Asiatic and the European nomads", where the nomads brought slaves, hides and pastoral produce and received in exchange clothing, wine "and the other things that belong to civilized life". He also records that a part of the Asiatic Maeotians was subject to "those who possessed the emporion on the Tanais", which makes the city a territorial power alongside the Bosporan kings. A further notice states that the city had "recently" been sacked by King Polemon for refusing him obedience. That sack is usually placed around 8 BC and is visible archaeologically as the burning and permanent abandonment of the city's western district. The population was mixed from the outset. Inscriptions of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD show a civic body divided into two named groups, the Hellenes and the Tanaitai, each headed by its own magistrates, and a very high proportion of Iranian personal names. Whether that duality goes back to the Hellenistic city, and whether Tanais was politically independent of the Bosporan kings before the 1st century BC, remain the central disputes in the study of the site. Destroyed in the mid-3rd century AD and again in the later 4th, the city was abandoned in the second half of the 5th century. The name survived in the...