The opening of the Kul-Oba burial-mound near Kerch in 1830 and the discovery in the tomb within it of masterpieces of ancient art left by former inhabitants of the northern Black Sea region fired the imagination not only of specialist scholars, but also of the Russian court, which saw the opportunity to provide the Hermitage with ancient rarities through excavations. The monumental three-volume work entitled The Antiquities of
Cimmerian Bosporus Kept in the Imperial Hermitage Museum, published in St Petersburg in 1854, with a text in Russian and French and an album of superb engravings draws the balance, as it were, of the first stage in the formation of the museum's collection of antiquities from southern Russia. This luxurious publication consists of a catalogue of the collection and a historical introduction that reviews archaeological researches in the south of the country. Of enormous value are the colour plates produced by the artists Picard and Solntsev reproducing items from the collection described in the text.