HERMITAGE MUSEUM

i. COLLECTION OF THE PRE-ISLAMIC PERIOD

Among the most ancient objects of Iranian art in the Hermitage collection are 55 Elamite painted vessels of the late 4th-3rd millennium B.C.E. donated by the French Archaeological Mission in Persia at the beginning of the 20th century. Antiquities from Luristan (13th-8th century B.C.E.), among them bracelets, pins, bronze figurines and pottery, make a comparatively small collection. The Iron Age is represented also by several earthenware vessels of the Hasanlu type (10th-9th century B.C.E.) and by a varnished red-slip vessel from the area of Amlash donated to the Hermitage by Arthur Pope.

Among the objects of the Achaemenid period (6th-4th century B.C.E.) there is a fragment of one of the Persepolis reliefs—the head of one of the “immortals” of the royal guard (donated by the government of Iran in 1935 on the occasion of the international exhibition of Iranian art held in the Museum), a profiled golden bowl with lion-shaped handles (found in the 18th century near Astrakhan), several pieces of jewelry: gold torques with semi-precious stones, a plaque with the image of a winged man (called by some the Ahuramazdā symbol), and animal figurines. Most of these objects come from the Siberian collection of Tsar Peter I. A small collection of Achaeme-nid seals include a cylinder seal of the late 5th century B.C.E. representing the triumph of a Persian king over Egypt, several chalcedony and carnelian stamp-seals of the Greco-Persian style, among them a remarkable seal with a combat between a horseman and a foot-soldier.

The Parthian period is represented mainly by finds from the site of Old Nisa (Turkmenistan), from the excavations of one of the first palaces of Parthian kings carried in 1947-63. Most of the objects coming from the excavations are now in the Museum of History in Ashkhabad (Hellenistic marble sculpture, clay bullae, ivory rhyta, silver and bronze figurines). The government of Turkmenistan donated to the Hermitage four ivory rhyta (2nd century B.C.E.) and several terracotta plaques once decorating the Parthian palace. The Nisa ostraca, over 2600 documents from the archives of the royal wine-cellars (last quarter of the 2nd–middle of the 1st century B.C.E.) are also in the Hermitage. Ivory rhyta from Nisa, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as pieces of Iranian art. They were produced by Greco-Bactrian craftsmen and came to the treasury of the Parthian kings as spoils of war ca. 150 B.C.E. The Nisa ostraca, most valuable documents on Parthian economics and history, are now published in Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (Part II, Vol. II). Recently, in 1996, the Hermitage acquired a rare piece of Parthian metalwork, a silver gilded lobed plate decorated with a figurine of an ibex, presumably of the 1st-2nd century C.E., with a long Parthian inscription. The inscription records that in the middle of the 3rd century C.E. it belonged to the Sasanian viceroy of the Transcaucasian region (bidaxš), Narseh, son of Ardašir.

The Hermitage has the largest collection of silver vessels manufactured in Iran and Central Asia in the 3d-9th centuries. Pre-Islamic traditions in silverwork continued to the 9th century; therefore it is more convenient to consider the whole collection in the article dedicated to the pre-Islamic period. Most of these vessels come from chance finds and hoards discovered in the Kama and Ob’ basins from the 1780s; some Hellenistic Iranian and Bactrian gold and silver vessels had been in the Siberian collection of Peter I. Oriental silverware were brought to the Kama and Ob’ area mostly by Central Asian merchants in exchange for furs starting from the 6th century C.E. When Sasanian treasuries were looted by Bahrām Čōbin (in 589) and then by the Arabs in the 7th century, merchants obtained earlier vessels (3rd-5th century). There are finds of even earlier dates, e.g., a medallion representing one of the 1st century C.E. Parthian kings from the Ob’ region. The Kama and Siberian finds were transferred to the Hermitage mainly through the Imperial Archaeological Commission (from the 1860s). After the revolution of 1917 a large collection of the Stroganoff family came to the museum (1925), as did several other silver vessels from private collections. Between 1920 and 1940 the Hermitage received several finds and hoards from different parts of Russia. Several vessels came from finds in the Ukraine, North Caucasus, the Don region and from Georgia. Of the Ukrainian finds the most famous is the Perestchepino hoard, from the burial of some 7th-century nomadic chieftain found in the Poltava district in 1912. It contained several unique Sasanian gold vessels.