Деталь бронзового самовара (authepsa) из Горгиппии

In 2001, in the center of Anapa (ancient Gorgippia) a massive cast leg of a bronze vessel in the shape of a lion’s paw was found in a pit dated by the first centuries AD. A number of analogies, found at different times in Italy and the provincial centers of the Roman Empire, allow us to define it as a detail of a samovar (authepsa) — a rare category of bronze ware of Roman Time. The leg from Gorgippia, judging by its shape and size, could belong to a portable samovar of type A1 according to the classification of T. Tomashevich-Buk. Excluding Italy, most of the finds of such vessels are concentrated in Thrace, Asia Minor, and North Africa; dated specimens date back to the 1st — 5th/6th centuries AD. The closest to the leg from Gorgippia are the stands of two boilers from the destroyed burials of the 3rd century AD, studied in the city of Kayseri in Central Anatolia. The molded parts of another vessel from the Kuban region, interpreted as parts of a samovar, most likely belonged to different vessels, one of which, if it was a samovar, was of a different — stationary — type.