Bosporan Kingdom

On both shores of the Kerch Strait, which the Greeks called the Cimmerian Bosporus, Greek colonists and their Scythian neighbours built a kingdom that lasted for close to a thousand years. From its capital at Panticapaeum, today's Kerch in eastern Crimea, the Bosporan Kingdom grew rich exporting grain, fish and slaves, and from the first century BC it survived as one of Rome's longest-lived client states. Some of our maps spell it the Bosporian Kingdom.

Settlers from Miletus founded towns around the strait in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, among them Panticapaeum, Nymphaeum and Myrmekion on the Crimean side and Phanagoria, a colony of Teos founded around 540 BC, on the Taman Peninsula. Pressure from the expanding Scythians may have pushed these cities together: according to the historian Diodorus, a ruling family called the Archaeanactids governed the region from 480 to 438 BC.

In 438 BC power passed to Spartocus, whose dynasty ruled until about 110 BC. Though once thought Thracian, he may have been of mixed Greek and Scythian descent. His successors called themselves archons, magistrates, to their Greek subjects and kings to the surrounding peoples, a double role some historians regard as unusual. Satyrus and his son Leucon added Nymphaeum and the ice-free harbour of Theodosia. Athens, short of grain during and after the Peloponnesian War, became the kingdom's best customer; Leucon granted Athenian ships privileges and was honoured with Athenian citizenship. The kingdom's armies were largely Scythian, and in a succession war of 310 BC one side reportedly fielded 10,000 cavalry and more than 20,000 infantry.

Under growing pressure from steppe nomads, the last Spartocid, Paerisades V, turned to Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus and left him the kingdom. After his defeat by Pompey in 66 BC, Mithridates retreated to Crimea, but his son Pharnaces led a revolt in 63 BC and the old king died by suicide in the citadel of Panticapaeum. Pharnaces II was later beaten by Julius Caesar at Zela. Queen Dynamis and a succession of husbands and rivals followed, until her son Aspurgus founded a line of client kings, all bearing the Roman names Tiberius Julius, that lasted with interruptions until AD 341.

Roman garrisons and fleets helped the kings fight Scythian and Sarmatian neighbours, and the realm reached north-east to Tanais at the mouth of the Don. Nero deposed Cotys I and briefly attached the kingdom to the province of Moesia Inferior from 63 to 68, before Galba restored it. The first and second centuries AD were a second golden age; around the end of the second century Sauromates II defeated the Scythians and brought the whole Crimean peninsula under his rule. Jewish communities grew in the cities, and a local cult of the "Most High God" appeared.

Grain, fish and slaves passed through the Bosporan ports, and the wealth of the elite is visible in burial mounds, or kurgans, which have yielded gold work, Athenian vases and textiles now largely held in the Hermitage Museum.

In the 250s Goths and Borani seized Bosporan shipping to raid Anatolia, and the last known coins date from 341. The kingdom was long said to have fallen to the Goths and Huns, but an inscription of a ruler named Douptounos from around 483 and signs of economic growth suggest otherwise. Goths held power in Crimea from about 380, and the region probably fell under the Hunnic Empire for a time. After the Hunnic ruler Gordas was killed in a revolt in 527, Justinian I sent troops and brought the Bosporus under Byzantine control.

Our maps from 323 BC to AD 200 show the kingdom, spelled Bosporian Kingdom on some of them, with the Scythians and Sarmatians on the steppe beside it and the Roman Empire across the Black Sea in the later years.