Antiquity

The Classical Antiquity of the Northern Black Sea (800 BCE–476 CE) spans more than a millennium of Greek and later Roman presence across what is now Ukraine's south. Beginning in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, settlers from Miletus, Heraclea and other city-states founded colonies that became outposts of high Mediterranean culture: Olbia at the mouth of the Southern Buh, Tyras on the Dniester, Chersonesus near modern Sevastopol, and Panticapaeum — capital of the Bosporan Kingdom — on the site of Kerch. These cities featured regular planning, temples, theatres, agoras, defensive walls and their own minted coinage. The art of the age is represented by marble and terracotta sculpture, painted and black-glaze pottery, jewellery, funerary stelae and mosaics, as well as the fresco painting of Bosporan burial vaults. Chersonesus preserved a unique stone-inscribed "citizens' oath" and a grid of streets still legible on the excavation site. Through these poleis Greek artistic forms reached the steppe peoples, while the grain, fish and slaves of the Pontic region flowed to Hellas. In the first centuries CE the region entered Rome's sphere of influence, which garrisoned troops here. The decline of the antique cities is bound to the incursions of Goths and Huns in the third and fourth centuries and the general crisis of late antiquity, symbolically closed by the year 476. The Pontic classical heritage is the oldest stratum of urban civilisation on Ukrainian lands.