Tanais (, ; ) 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 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 and the , 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 medieval Italian trading colony of Tana, established at the site of modern Azov, some 18.5 km to the south-southeast. Tanais was a bishopric as Tana and remains a Latin Catholic titular see.
Name Greek and Roman geographers called the city Tanais, after the river. Alexander Polyhistor, the earliest surviving author to mention it, states that "at the mouths of the Tanais into Lake Maeotis is founded the Hellenic city Tanais, which is also called Emporion".
That second name appears to have been the official one. No inscription from the site uses "Tanais" as the name of the civic community. Where the city is designated as a whole, it appears as () or simply (), and CIRB 1237 describes a royal envoy as having been "sent by the king to Emporion". An honorary decree found in 1993 preserves the formula (), "the of the Council [of the Emporitai who are] in the Bosporos". The qualifier was necessary because Emporion was an appellative rather than a distinctive toponym. Askold Ivantchik compares Panticapaeum, commonly called Bosporus, and Olbia, commonly called Borysthenes: neither name was used officially in local documents.
The only occurrence of "Tanais" in an administrative context is the title (, CIRB 1237), which the context shows to be synonymous with (), the head not of the whole city but of one of its two constituent groups. Stephanus of Byzantium gives the ethnic as (); the inscriptions use ().
A deity named Tanais was also worshiped in the city. A thiasos inscription of the 2nd or first half of the 1st century BC contains the name in the dative, (), declined as an i-stem. Ivantchik takes this to be the river god rather than a city god, since Tanais was not the city's official name.
Location and topography
The site lies at the modern khutor of Nedvigovka, about 30 km west of Rostov-on-Don, on the high right bank of the Mertvy Donets, the northernmost arm of the Don delta. Hydrologists regard this channel as the main bed of the Don during the city's lifetime. The central city site occupies a limestone terrace. The natural rock lies close beneath the surface, and cellars, cisterns, and grain pits were cut directly into it. The plateau is bordered by deep gullies to the east and west and by a ditch to the north, with a fall of up to 20 m to the south.
The site is now about 10 km from the sea, but Shelov argued that in antiquity the western part of the delta did not yet exist and the city stood directly at the river mouth on the shore of the Sea of Azov. He based this on Strabo's phrase (), "on the river and on the lake" rather than merely near their junction, and on the mismatch between Strabo's 60 stades (c. 11 km) for the distance between the two outermost mouths of the Don and the modern figure of some 18 km. He placed the ancient western limit of the delta roughly on the line Nedvigovka–Rogozhkino. East of that line lie the dunes carrying Bronze Age and Scythian-period camp sites; west of it no ancient material has ever been found.
Strabo places an island called Alopecia, "a settlement of promiscuous people", 100 stades from the emporion. Shelov identified this with the island on which the Elizavetovka settlement stood, 17 km from Nedvigovka in a straight line. He rebutted Viktor Gaidukevich's objection that () would require Alopecia to lie west of Tanais by surveying Strabo's use of the verb with islands throughout Books I–VI, where in every case it means only that the island lies opposite a point on the mainland coast.
History
Earlier settlement in the Don delta Greek contact with the lower Don long predates the city. Pliny the Elder preserves a notice, drawn from an earlier source, that "Carians held the neighboring parts first, then Clazomenians and Maeones, afterward Panticapaeans". Archaic Greek pottery has been recovered repeatedly from the seabed of Taganrog Bay: amphorae and banded Ionian wares, mostly of the later 6th and early 5th centuries BC, with occasional Rhodian Late Geometric kylikes. Underwater survey in 1960 confirmed the existence of a submerged settlement, and B. V. Lunin and V. D. Blavatsky took the earliest material to indicate a Greek trading factory or established at the turn of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, flourishing through the 6th. It has been suggested that this archaic market town or fishing settlement was itself colonized from Miletus in Ionia around 625–600 BC, and even that it was the original Tanais, though both conclusions are disputed.
From the later 6th century, the principal center of exchange in the region was the Elizavetovka settlement, a large fortified site on an island in the delta. Shelov argued at length that this was not a Greek colony but a native settlement drawn into Bosporan trade. Handmade pottery outnumbers plain wheel-made ware more than five to one, the buildings are of wattle and daub, the ramparts are not fortifications of Greek type, and the kurgan cemetery is barbarian throughout, with , quivers, horse burials, and obligatory food offerings in the graves. Its ethnic attribution has been disputed at length, with proposals ranging from Royal Scythian to Maeotian to Sarmatian. Shelov concluded that the material shows a mixture of traditions rather than a single people, and that the disagreement among scholars is itself symptomatic.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship held that Elizavetovka was the earlier Tanais, transferred to Nedvigovka after Polemon's sack or after a shift in the hydrography of the delta. This "two Tanaises" theory originated with Pavel Leontiev's mistaken dating of the Nedvigovka material. Shelov demolished it on two grounds: the Nedvigovka site produced continuous occupation from the early 3rd century BC, and amphora stamps show that Elizavetovka survived into the first half of the 2nd century BC, overlapping Tanais by roughly a century.
Foundation Strabo states that the city was (), a foundation of the Hellenes who held the Bosporus. Three classes of evidence point to a date in the first quarter of the 3rd century BC:
Coins. Only five pre-Roman coins are known from the entire site, against several hundred of Roman date. Three are Panticapaean bronzes of the first quarter of the 3rd century BC, issues that dropped out of circulation quickly during the Bosporan monetary crisis. Amphora stamps. About thirty Rhodian stamps fall within the first half of the 3rd century, and at least a dozen belong to the turn of the 4th and 3rd centuries or the very beginning of the 3rd. They include the eponyms Eukles and Hagesias, a two-line (), and the workshop stamps of Kreon, Dionysios, Zenon and Sthennidas. Thasian and Heracleote stamps, common at Elizavetovka, are entirely absent. Fine pottery. Black-glaze kantharoi and cups and a Gnathia-style sherd come from the earliest grain pits. There is no red-figure ware and nothing securely of the 4th century apart from a single small black-glaze wall fragment.
Who founded the city Sergei Zhebelev read Strabo's phrase as meaning that the Bosporan government, "evidently in the person of the very first Spartocids", established a properly organized at the Don mouth to serve the interests of Bosporan trade. On that reading, the city's subjection to the Spartocids follows automatically. Gaidukevich took the same view, differing only in placing the foundation in the 3rd century BC rather than under the earliest Spartocids.
Shelov accepted that the economic situation in the Bosporus at the start of the 3rd century BC would make such an initiative intelligible, but held that no source attests it. However, he conceded that Strabo elsewhere uses the very similar phrase () of the Bosporan rulers, in the passage on their dealings with the pirate tribes of the Caucasian coast, which would lend credence to a Spartocid foundation. Against this he set the word (). The Spartocid dynasty was ordinarily regarded by Greeks as barbarian, and the application of the term "Hellenes" to the rulers of the Bosporus is not otherwise attested. He concluded that Strabo's text gives no grounds for asserting direct Spartocid initiative. Participation by the Bosporan state is possible, but so is foundation by a group of private Bosporan citizens, merchants without official authority acting at their own risk. I. S. Kamenetsky's further suggestion that the founders were political fugitives or a faction in opposition to the Bosporan government, Shelov rejected as conjecture with no basis in the sources.
He drew a second conclusion from the same passage: that foundation by Bosporans does not in itself entail subsequent subjection, since "the independent and autonomous development of the newly created city was entirely within the traditions of Greek colonization".
Pliny's mention of Panticapaeans led Gaidukevich to suppose that they formed the nucleus of the colony. However, this must be taken with caution. Pliny may simply have called all Bosporans "Panticapaeans" after their capital, and his text in any case enumerates those who held influence in the district before the city was founded, not its founders. Shelov connected the notice instead with the demonstrable role of Bosporan, and perhaps particularly Panticapaean, traders during the Elizavetovka period, Panticapaean material being a significant proportion of the ceramic finds at that site. In the later history of Tanais, he noted, no specific link with Panticapaeum is detectable; the evidence points the other way, toward the Asiatic side of the Bosporus.
Economic background Shelov set the foundation against a restructuring of the Bosporan economy at the start of the 3rd century BC. Against the Rostovtsev–Zhebelev model of decline caused by Egyptian grain undercutting Bosporan grain at Athens, he argued that the contraction of grain export had domestic causes: agrarian expansion had reached its limits by the later 4th century, craft production, urban population and local viticulture were raising internal consumption, and Sarmatian movement was eroding the purchase of grain from neighboring tribes. The substitute exports, slaves, livestock and pastoral produce and fish, are the goods Strabo names as traded at Tanais.
Hellenistic Tanais and the Bosporan Kingdom