I like these beads a lot; I haven't seen the green ones before - they're a very "pure", intense colour for that period.

Thanks, Yankee, for placing them. They were found in the area of the north coast of the Black Sea, but is there evidence of them having been made there? Recently, I've been trying to find out more about the beads from that region, but so far have come across very little in English. One Russian source seems to say that only monochrome glass beads were actually made there, but I'm not sure that makes sense to me. Over the fifteen hundred years from the Hellenistic to the Islamic periods, there seem to be a lot of beads which have been excavated there that in design and colour appear to be found only rarely in Mediterranean or Persian sites. If that's the case, then one explanation that would have to be taken into account would be that they were manufactured somewhere in or around the area of the Crimea.

It was obviously a fascinating and complex meeting ground of cultures, with, on the one hand, the extremely wealthy Hellenistic and Roman ports that lined the coast, and then, inland, the Sarmatian and other Scythian-related nomadic tribes that controlled huge swaths of territory that ranged at times as far as the border of China. Beads would clearly have had quite different functions in these different cultures, but possibly they provided a point of contact between them. This is all just guesswork on my part. I'm sure Yankee knows much more than I do.

Best,

Will