Crisis of the Bosporan Kingdom

In the first half of the century the Bosporan towns still lived much as before: kings and rich citizens set up statues and dedications, walls and towers were repaired, religious associations flourished. The last dated inscription of this period belongs to 250, and not a single dated inscription is known from the next quarter century. The coins of 250–267 show a steep decline in the craft of minting, and around 253 a second king, Pharsanzes, appears on them beside the reigning Rhescuporis — whether as co-ruler or as rival is disputed. Zosimus, telling of the barbarian raids of the 250s, says that the old royal house had died out and that the worthless men who seized power gave the barbarians ships out of fear, although the kings of this century still bore the names of the Tiberian-Julian dynasty.

Coin hoards buried with latest coins of 251–253 and burnt layers in Panticapaeum dated by coins of 254 point to an attack on the kingdom itself; M. M. Kazansky dates the invasion of the Borani and Goths into the Bosporus to 253–254. With Tanais already in ruins, Goths, Borani and later Heruli used Bosporan ships for their sea raids on the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea. Around 270 many small towns and villages of the European Bosporus ceased to exist, among them Kimmerikon and the settlements near Semenovka, Mysovka and Novo-Otradnoye. After about 275 the kingdom stabilised: honorific monuments to the king and the activity of religious associations reappear, Roman coins return to the hoards, and after a seven-year break the minting of staters resumed — now in pure copper, but still with the head of the Roman emperor. I. T. Kruglikova, whose study of the Bosporan towns supplies these dates, linked the recovery with the restoration of the empire under Aurelian and Diocletian.