This article examines the phenomenon of the so-called royal tamga signs issued on stone stelae in the Bosporan Kingdom in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Tamgas were symbols commonly used by Eurasian nomads throughout the first millennium BCE. The appearance of tamgas in the northern shores of the Black Sea in the 2nd/1st BCE, followed by their adoption into the Greek epigraphic culture of the kingdom, represents an intriguing example of symbolic integration and another step in the formation of Bosporan culture. Research on cultural interactions between the inhabitants of the Bosporus has rarely focused on epigraphic material in its own right. Analyzing a small group of public stone slabs that feature tamgas, this article contributes to existing studies on numerous private funerary reliefs. Furthermore, the current work aims to incorporate several examples of stelae with royal tamga signs into the growing interest in syncretism, which is occurring in other epigraphic cultures of the Greco-Roman world. The case of the Bosporan Kingdom shows that such processes can also occur in places where no literate culture had previously been firmly established.

中文翻译：

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皇家塔姆加标志及其对博斯普鲁斯王国铭文文化的意义


本文探讨了公元 2 世纪和 3 世纪博斯普鲁斯王国石碑上所谓的皇家塔姆加标志的现象。 Tamgas 是公元前第一个千年欧亚游牧民族常用的符号。塔姆加斯于公元前 2/1 世纪在黑海北岸出现，随后被纳入该王国的希腊铭文文化，代表了象征性整合的有趣例子，也是博斯普鲁斯文化形成的又一步。对博斯普鲁斯海峡居民之间文化互动的研究很少关注其本身的铭文材料。本文分析了一小群以塔姆加斯为特色的公共石板，为现有的众多私人丧葬浮雕研究做出了贡献。此外，当前的工作旨在将几个带有皇家塔姆加标志的石碑的例子纳入对融合主义日益增长的兴趣中，这种兴趣正在希腊罗马世界的其他铭文文化中发生。博斯普鲁斯王国的案例表明，这种过程也可能发生在以前没有牢固建立文字文化的地方。