Double-Sided Glass Gems from the Burial no. 13 of the Kurgan no. 1 of the Group “Bogomol’nye Peski-I”

The article examines five double-sided glass gems found as elements of a bracelet on the left wrist of a child aged 2,5–3 years in the burial no. 13 of the kurgan no. 1 of the “Bogomol’nye peski-I” group near the village of Nikol’skoe, Enotaevskiy District, Astrakhan Region. The inventory of the burial gives grounds for its dating within a broad frame of the 1st – first half of the 2nd century AD. As in the Scythian burials of the Dnieper region, glass gems in the kurgan of the “Bogomol’nye peski-I” group were found in a child’s burial. They were considered by their owners as items of jewelry and amulets, and not as a means for imprinting images. It is worth noting that the images on the sides of the same gem are rarely semantically related to each other, but rather give the impression of a rather random choice of subjects. In many cases, the motives go back to gems of the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. Given the fact that the images on the glass gems were mechanically reproduced from intaglios, there is reason to suppose that these were works of glyptics from the late Hellenistic period, which could theoretically be used for making glass gems at a later period. The uniqueness of double-sided glass gems, on the one hand, and their distribution in the North Pontic region in the 6th–4th centuries BC, on the other hand, give grounds to suggest the possibility of the origin of finds originating from the Sarmatian burials of the Lower Volga region from the workshops of the North Black Sea region, possibly of the Bosporan Kingdom.