Glass beaker decorated with grapevine from the Aleksandrovskiye skaly 1 cemetery (Eastern Crimea)

A mold-blown glass beaker was found in the Aleksandrovskiye Skaly 1 cemetery near Kerch not far from Panticapaeum, the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom. It is decorated with grapevine and, most likely, originates in the Syro-Palestinian region. The grave containing this beaker is dated to the middle of the 1st - early 2nd centuries AD. It was a grave of a man buried in a wooden sarcophagus with plaster decoration. The chemical composition of the beaker is typical for Roman glass of Levantine provenance. There is only one parallel to this beaker in the North Pontic region which has been found in Chersonesus. However, on the whole, this find fits well into a series of Syrian blown vessels found in the Bosporan Kingdom. The volume of imported vessels omade in this technique in Panticapaeum increased in the second half of the 1st century AD. At the same time, we cannot exclude a possibility that this beaker got into the Bosporan Kingdom with a newly arrived population which left behind this cemetery