The specialists working on the construction of the Crimean energy bridge made a unique find. They managed to excavate at a depth of six meters in the vicinity of the village of Ilyich, on Taman, a complex for collecting drinking water, erected by an ancient civilization.
Archaeologists of the Eastern Bosporus Expedition of the Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences consider the find to be the oldest in Russia.
Scientists do not exclude that the excavated reservoir may become proof that the tribes living in the territory of the Kuban mastered the art of building hydraulic structures even before the ancient Greeks. According to preliminary data, the reservoir was built in the 7th-8th centuries BC.
The system is currently filled with groundwater. The complex itself consists of several interconnected stone reservoirs built of hewn stones.
The stones were two meters high. Archaeologists concluded that the complex played the role of a natural filter for water.
According to experts, this was enough to meet the needs of the entire settlement. “If we talk about ancient reservoirs, it is not so easy to determine which ethnic group could build them. The first Greek settlers in Taman and the Sindi tribes could have been masters,”the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper quotes Igor Vasiliev, candidate of historical sciences.
According to scientists, the Sindi lived on the Taman Peninsula and were first mentioned in the 6th century BC. The ethnicity of this tribe is still controversial. Some consider them Indo-Europeans, others as distant ancestors of the Circassians, part of the Meots.