The Goths destroy Tanais

In the first decades of the 3rd century Tanais was thriving. Its inscriptions record the restoration of the agora in 220 and repeated repairs of walls and towers; three of them name the architect Aurelius Antoninus, who apparently directed the rebuilding. Deep cellars held stocks of goods — one contained some 400 amphorae — for the town was the Bosporan Kingdom’s outpost in a rich barbarian country and the largest market of its barbarian neighbours, and Iranian names become more frequent in its inscriptions of this century.

Excavations by the Lower Don expedition, led from 1955 by D. B. Shelov, showed that the town was then sacked and burnt: a layer of burning and debris covers the buildings of the Roman period. No clear traces of fighting were found, and Shelov believed that the town was taken without a general assault and its inhabitants carried off as captives before it was set on fire; shield bosses and a spur of Central European Germanic types lay in the burnt rooms. Shelov dated the catastrophe to the 240s and ascribed it to tribes of the union led by the Goths, who had recently reached the Black Sea — among them, he thought, the Heruli, while V. F. Gaidukevich believed that the Borani seized Tanais first and broke through to the Bosporus from there. I. T. Kruglikova placed the destruction more generally in the middle of the century; later scholars, relying on coin finds, date it to 251 or shortly after. Gorgippia (modern Anapa), on the Asian side of the kingdom, perished in a great fire at about the same time — in the 230s or around 240, according to different accounts.

The partial recovery of the Bosporus in the last quarter of the century did not reach Tanais. A new settlement and cemetery appeared on the site no later than the end of the 3rd century; in the 4th century new houses were built directly over the burnt layers, and Tanais remained a modest settlement until it was abandoned in the 5th century.