As stated in the preface by M. (p. vi) his book ‘is a study of Greco-Scythian art and its contexts of reception in imperial Russia and the Northern Black Sea region of antiquity’. It is a reworked version of his doctoral dissertation, which he defended at the University of Oxford in 2006. The focus of the book (p. 1) is the corpus of Graeco-Scythian metalwork considered in the light of its twofold – ancient and modern – historical context, with its relative socio-political background and implications. It deals with the perception of Graeco-Scythian objects in what was the Bosporan polity during antiquity, considering the relation between artisans and patrons and the needs of self-representation of the local elites; on the other hand, it ponders the cultural implication driven from the discovery of the corpus of these artefacts in nineteenth-century Russia and thereafter. The study is organised into seven chapters, with an appendix on the grave inventories of Bosporan elite kurgans of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c. (pp. 309–71).

After a brief preface with M.'s overview of the argument and structure of the book, the work begins with an introductory chapter, ‘Discovering Greco-Scythian Art’, further expanded in the ensuing two chapters, ‘Classical Art and Russian Identity’ and ‘Defining the Corpus. Chronology, Technique, Distribution’. These first three sections, far from merely being a dilution of the core argument of the book, introduce the different aspects of M.'s analysis. First, the introductory chapter briefly deals with our contemporary perception of concepts such as naturalism in Greek art (p. 8), and how this concept and its formal elements have been received and elaborated in the convention of what he defines as Graeco-Scythian art. From this first chapter, M. pays much attention to historiography (in particular, and for obvious reasons, throughout the book he focuses on the work of Rostovtzeff and on his academic legacy) not only to present his argument but also to explain his point of view with respect to the reception of Graeco-Scythian art within the modern society in which its discovery occurred, i.e. pre-revolutionary Russia.

The second chapter deepens this historiographical analysis, discussing the reception of the Graeco-Scythian art in imperial Russia: it presents a history of the collection and discusses the birth of museology in the country, in particular narrating the establishment of the New Hermitage and thus explaining the ideological background of Rostovtzeff and colleagues' scholarly endeavours. The following chapter – which M. defines as an ‘excursus on Scythian archaeology’ (p. 133) – introduces the ensuing heart of the book (Chapters 4 to 6) presenting sections such as ‘Scythian history and Scythian culture’ (p. 98), ‘Nomadic elite mobility and art’ (p. 107) and ‘Diversity and unity in Northern Black Sea metalwork’ (p. 119).

Chapter 4, ‘Political Monuments of the Early Spartocid State’, comprises an analysis of the monumental epigraphic evidence and of the relief sculpture unearthed in the area, corroborated by the relative literary sources regarding the Bosporan Kingdom (specifically the polity ruled by the Spartocid dynasty between 438 and 109 b.c.) – with a strong Athenian influence – stressing the concepts of elite cooperation and discussing the establishment of a broad trans-cultural relation network as highlighted by such evidence. It is only with Chapter 5, ‘Looking at Greco-Scythian Art’, that we have an iconographical analysis of the artefacts selected by M. (after the ‘definition of the corpus’ of Chapter 3) in the background of the context analysis discussed up to this point of the work. Subsections of this chapter – focused on themes such as iconography, semiotic, recognition and perception of the toreutic works discussed – are as follows: ‘Greek nudity for non-Greek worlds’ (p. 190), ‘Image and text’ (p. 201), ‘Civilized barbarians’ (p. 207), ‘Virtue and violence’ (p. 222).

The argument on primary social use and display of Graeco-Scythian metalwork is presented in Chapter 6, ‘Greco-Scythian Art in Practice’, where the centrality of tombside feasts is stressed with attention to their archaeological context, i.e. the Bosporan burial mounds. This section offers insights on the social practice of the Graeco-Scythian community and its way of communication, in particular centring the argument on conviviality and on social customs as they are understandable from the corpus of metalwork studied in its historical setting. Subsections of the chapter are ‘Aryan Christianity’ (p. 245), in which M. discusses religious interpretation and its issues – and where he challenges Rostovtzeff's legacy; ‘Bosporan communities beyond the polis’ (p. 253), in which the idea that the Greek polis was the sole model for the urbanism in the region is challenged (with also an argument on the relation between indigenous development and Greek colonisation); ‘Bosporan mounded tombs as ritual sites’ (p. 265), which is the core of the chapter on the burial mounds as signs of socio-political power within the Spartocid state. Brief conclusions are given in the book's seventh and final chapter.

The apparatus includes a wide-ranging bibliography with about 1,000 entries and an index that is subdivided into an index locorum (written sources) and a general one.

By his own admission M.'s book is not an archaeological study stricto sensu. The book's title appears a little misleading and perhaps overambitious, due to the absence of a proper historical argument on the ‘birth of Eurasia’. It is far more a study focused on the reception of different cultural and artistic formal elements (in particular classical Greek) in the Bosporan area specifically during the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., and a study of their social and visual meanings which cross the centuries, shifting in quality. M. also examines at length the re-elaboration and historical reception of the same cultural elements expressed by the Bosporan metalwork in the second context relative to the corpus – the modern one, after its discovery in the nineteenth century – that was the Russian Empire, which saw as its leading scholar the influential Rostovtzeff. Whilst there is little that is strikingly new here, the book deals abundantly with the history of the study of the region, and for this reason it is a good reference book for students and scholars interested in reading a good exercise in art-historical interpretation and analysis. This book is also an endeavour to demonstrate that, with regard to this area, old diffusion concepts – still adopted by some scholars in former Soviet countries – have been superseded and that they need to be revisited in the light of the most recent scholarly work.