Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
interest in shipbuilding. In 1697 he travelled incognito to
western Europe with a small delegation, known as the
Grand Embassy, to learn about the West and to establish
new alliances. His interest in maritime technology
led him to spend time in Amsterdam in the shipyards of
the Dutch East India Company, as well as in the London
dockyards. Later he visited Malta to study the Knights of
St John and their fleet, and even considered the possibility
of setting up a Russian naval base on the island.
It was in Amsterdam, in 1697, that Peter’s other
great interest, in collecting scientific curiosities and
antiquities, began to develop. There he met the great
Dutch collector, Jacob de Wilde, whose collection of
scientific instruments, antiquities, coins, and medals
he is said later to have acquired. It was this fascination
with curiosities that drew him, on that spring day,
to visit Ashmole’s museum in Oxford. Like many
educated men of the time Peter became an eclectic
collector of curiosities, amassing works of fine and
applied art, artefacts, items of oriental culture, and
naturalia, especially human malformations, which were
eventually displayed in the Kunstkamera (Cabinet of
Curiosities)—a grand structure built on the banks of
the Neva in St Petersburg, opened in 1727, two years
after Peter’s death. The collection remained there
until December 1859 when it was moved to the Winter
1.1 Peter the Great, Tzar of Russia (r. 1682–1725) dedicated his Palace, but on the orders of Tzar Alexander II it was
life to transforming his country from the medieval backwater in transferred the next year to the Hermitage. One part
which he was born to a forward looking state embracing western
ideals of culture, government, and military prowess. His
of Peter’s collection, to which he was particularly
intellectual curiosity led to him amassing a collection of scientific
curiosities and antiquities. This ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was which came from Siberia. It was handed over to the
attached, was a group of artefacts, mainly of gold,
first displayed in the Kunstkamera in the new capital of St Petersburg.
Later the collection was transferred to the ÂHermitage. Academy of Sciences in 1723, eventually passing to the
Hermitage, where it is still displayed as The Siberian
Collection of Peter the Great.
Siberia was a vast region sparsely populated by nomadic tribes. Russian conquest
had begun in 1581–2 under Ivan IV (The Terrible) and by the middle of the seventeenth
century under official encouragement the flow of Russian settlers had increased,
attracted by the many economic opportunities which the virgin territory had to offer.
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