Provenance
On June 8th, 1907, Kseniia Fedorovna Klimova found five vessels– a bucket, a plate decorated with a rosette (which she described as the bucket’s lid) and three other plates– in a pit along a trail between the villages of Klimova (Климова) and Bol’shaia Serva (Большая Серва) in the Solikamskii County (Соликамский Уезд) of the Perm Governorate (Пермская Губерния) of the Russian Empire. A few days later, on June 16th, Petr Kirillovich Klimov (not her husband, perhaps related) found another three vessels in a different pit along the same trail (Trever and Lukonin 1987, 125). The pits were extremely close to one another on a terrace known as Niur-Gep (Darkevich 1976, 23). In exchange for 400 and 500 rubles, respectively, the Perm Gubernator sent the vessels to the Imperial archaeological Commission in August (Trever and Lukonin 1987, 125). The Commission then gave the eight vessels found near Klimova to the Imperial Hermitage Museum in 1908. The plate is still housed in the renamed State Hermitage Museum with the number ω-277.
In the 1960s Vasilii Leshchenko located this terrace which is about 1 kilometer east of Dzerzhinskaia Street in Kudymkar), and 1 kilometer north of Klimova, then an outer neighborhood of Kudymkar. Klimova fell off of map labels ca. 2000. Klimova– now within Kudymkar– is located in the Kudymkarskii District (Кудымкарский Район), Perm Province/Krai (Пермский край), Russian Federation.
Inscription & Other Marking Notes
Five different control stamps– monograms and busts– on the base of the vessel, within the foot ring. One stamp was damaged when the foot was soldered to the vessel (Matsulevich 1929, 113). The stamps date the vessel to the reign of Justinian I (527-565 CE) (Dodd 1961, 70). The foot is dented and has a break (Bank 1977, 280).
Technical Notes
silver / 23.8 cm diameter (9 cm foot ring) / 1380 g weight
Major Eurasian Silver Publications
*Only mentioned in itemized lists in K. V. Trever and V. G. Lukonin, Sasanidskoe serebro: sobranie Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha: khudozhestvenniia kul’tura Irana III-VIII vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 125; V. P. Darkevich, Khudozhestvennyi metall Vostoka VIII-XIII vv.: proizvedeniia vostochnoi torevtiki na territorii evropeiskoi chasti SSSR i Zaural’ia (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 23.
Additional Publications
Bank, Alice V. Byzantine Art in the Collections of Soviet Museums. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977.
Dodd, Erica Cruikshank. Byzantine Silver Stamps. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1961.
Matsulevich (Matzulewitsch), Leonid. Byzantinische Antike: Studien auf Grund der Silbergefässe der Ermitage. Berlin; Leipzig: W. de Gruyter & Co., 1929.
Otchet Imperatorskoi Arkheologicheskoi Komissii za 1907. Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia glavnogo upravleniia udelov, 1910.
Image Credits
Featured Image
Alice V. Bank, Byzantine Art in the Collections of Soviet Museums (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), № 55.
Page Images
(1, 3) Alice V. Bank, Byzantine Art in the Collections of Soviet Museums (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), № 55-56.
(2) Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1961), № 9.