Provenance
In 1872, this bottle was discovered near the settlement of Limarovka (Лимаровка) in the Starobel’skii County (Старобельский Уезд) of the Kharkov Governorate (Харьковская Губерния), Russian Empire (Trever and Lukonin 1987, 122). By the 1900s, Grigorii S. Stroganov (1829-1910) had acquired the bottle and kept it in Rome, where he displayed it in his Palazzo Stroganoff (Smirnov 1909, 11). After his death, his daughter, Mariia G. Shcherbatova, gifted her father’s collection of antiquities to the Imperial Hermitage Museum. The bottle is still housed in the renamed State Hermitage Museum. The bottle has the number S-35.
Today the village is called Lymarivka (Лимарівка) and located in the Bilovods’kii District (Біловодський Район), Luhansk Province/Oblast’ (Луганська Область), Ukraine.
Inscription & Other Marking Notes
The bottle has two distinct inscriptions. The first is in cursive Middle Persian, in one line of stippled dots, on the base of the vessel. Livshits and Lukonin read the bottle’s weight as ‘206 drachm, 3 dang’ (Livshits and Lukonin 1964, № 15); Brunner reads it as ’46 staters, 1 drachm, and 3 dang’ (Brunner 1974, № 13). The Sogdian inscription (cursive Samarkandian script; pictured in photograph 6) is also on the base in a single line. The Sogdian inscription names an owner as ‘m(?)drk’ (Livshits and Lukonin 1964, № 22).
Technical Notes
silver with gilding / 16.5 cm height x 10 cm width / 611.9 g weight
Major Eurasian Silver Publications
Orbeli, I. A., and K. V. Trever. Sasanidskii metall khudozhestvennye predmenty iz zolota, serebra, i bronzy. Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia, 1935. [T. 45]
Smirnov, Ia. I. Vostochnoe serebro: atlasʺ drevnei serebrianoi i zolotoi posudy vostochnago proiskhozhdeniia naidennoi preimushchestvenno vʺ prědelakhʺ Rossiiskoi imperii. Saint Petersburg: Publishing House of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, 1909. [T. XLVI № 80]
Trever, K. V., and V. G. Lukonin. Sasanidskoe serebro: sobranie Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha: khudozhestvenniia kul’tura Irana III-VIII vekov. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987. [T. 42-46 № 19]
Additional Bibliography
Brunner, Christopher J. “Middle Persian Inscriptions on Sasanian Silverware.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 9 (1974): 109–21.
Livshits, V. A., and V. G. Lukonin. “Srednepersidskie i Sogdiiskie nadpisi na serebrianykh sosudakh.” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii, no. 3 (1964): 155-176.
Overlaet, Bruno, ed. Splendeur des Sassanides: l’empire perse entre Rome et la Chine, 224-642. Brussels: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, 1993.
Image Credits
Featured Image
K. V. Trever and V. G. Lukonin, Sasanidskoe serebro: sobranie Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha: khudozhestvenniia kul’tura Irana III-VIII vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), T. 46.
Page Images
(1-5) K. V. Trever and V. G. Lukonin, Sasanidskoe serebro: sobranie Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha: khudozhestvenniia kul’tura Irana III-VIII vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), T. 42-46.
(6) V. A. Livshits and V. G. Lukonin, “Srednepersidskie i Sogdiiskie nadpisi na serebrianykh sosudakh,” Vestnik Drevnei Istorii, no. 3 (1964): ris. 2.