Carved Bone Objects from the Late Antiquity in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: the Issue of the Collection Origin and Composition Revisited

The paper provides an overview of the collection consisting of bone objects from the late Antiquity kept in Department of the Ancient Orient in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (168 items), a greater part of which has not been published. The paper touches upon the provenance of these objects and proposes their initial systematization. It reviews main types of the objects and visual motifs they exhibit. It does not appear possible to conduct in-depth physical, typological and stylistical analyses in one paper. For this reason, this paper is basically a preliminary and descriptive introduction into this part of the museum collection which is largely archaeological in nature.