Rulers on the Black Sea's edge were archons to Greeks, kings to everyone else
Around the Kerch Strait, a Greek-Scythian kingdom fed Athens with grain and lasted as a Roman client state longer than any other. Its Spartocid rulers wore two faces at once, styling themselves archons to their Greek citizens and kings to neighbouring tribes, an arrangement some historians think had no parallel in the ancient world.
The Bosporan Kingdom straddled eastern Crimea and the Taman Peninsula, on either side of the strait the ancients called the Cimmerian Bosporus. Settlers from Miletus founded Greek towns there in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, including Panticapaeum, modern Kerch, and Phanagoria. Pressure from expanding Scythians in the fifth century BC may have pushed these cities together: a dynasty called the Archaeanactids ruled from 480 to 438 BC, until a man named Spartocus seized power. Once thought Thracian, he is now often considered of mixed Greek and Scythian descent.
Grain made the Spartocids rich. The Peloponnesian War left Athens hungry for wheat, and the kingdom swapped its harvests for silver and Greek goods. King Leucon granted Athenian ships special rights in Bosporan ports, and Athens made him a citizen in return. Theodosia, which Leucon captured, mattered because its harbour stayed free of ice all year. The mixing ran deep: in one royal succession war the king's army reportedly held no more than 2,000 Greeks, but more than 30,000 Scythian cavalry and infantry.
The dynasty ended around 110 BC, when Paerisades V, battered by nomad raids, handed his realm to Mithridates VI of Pontus. After his defeat by Pompey, Mithridates fled to Crimea, killed his own son to claim the throne, and took his life in Panticapaeum in 63 BC when another son rebelled. Rome then managed the kingdom through a chain of client rulers, including Queen Dynamis, until her son Aspurgus founded a dynasty in 8 BC that endured, with interruptions, until AD 341. Its kings all took the Roman names Tiberius Julius.
Wheat, fish and slaves made the kingdom the economic hub of the Black Sea, sometimes called its jewel. Burial mounds known as kurgans, often plundered illegally, still yield gold work, Athenian vases and fine woodwork, the best now held in St Petersburg's Hermitage Museum.
Source: Bosporan Kingdom
