Manifestations of the Mithraic cult in the Northern Black Sea Region in its “Pontic” and “Roman” variants (1st century BC – 3rd century AD)

Abstract

The main goal of the study is to characterize various artifacts discovered in the Northern Black Sea region and related to the cult of Mithras from the period of the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, as well as to determine the variants of worship of this deity and establish the characteristic features of the specified belief.
The relevance of the proposed problem is obvious, since there are no works that would present a comprehensive overview of the entire set of sacred objects related to the spread of the Mithras cult in the Northern Black Sea region and offer a reconstruction of the general picture of its features. The presented paper is an attempt to fill this gap in the topic of studying the problem of the spread of this belief in the territory of Ukraine.
In the course of implementation of the problem, various principles of scientific research were used: objectivity, systematicity, historicism, which determined the use of both general scientific (analytical, statistical, historical retrospective and prospective, synthesis and analysis) and special (material analysis, descriptive, semantic, comparative typological, etc.) methods of study. This made it possible to take a versatile and critical approach to solving the above-mentioned issues and ensured the reliability of the obtained results and conclusions.
The findings indicate that in the 1st century BC, after the Pontic king Mithridates VI Eupator became the ruler of the Bosporan Kingdom, the so-called “Pontic” version of Mithraism began to spread in this region. A small number of cult objects, namely fragments of marble reliefs and statues, votive altars dated to the 2nd–3rd centuries AD, indicates minor manifestations of the “Roman” version of Mithras worship among the legionaries present at that time in Tyre, Olbia, Chersonese and the fortress of Charax.