Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
mounds to find gold and silver. The first package he sent to the tzar contained ten
items. The second, sent in 1716, was more substantial, comprising 172 objects. It was
accompanied by a note: ‘Your Majesty has instructed me to search for the old objects
buried in the land of ancient treasures. According to this instruction of Yours, I am
sending You as many gold objects as it has been found. Descriptions of these object
and details of their number and weight are enclosed to this letter. Your Majesty’s
humblest slave, Matvei Gagarin.’ A third batch, sent a year later, included sixty gold
objects and two of silver. Gagarin had been a faithful agent diligently collecting for
his master but soon fell from favour and in 1721 was publically hanged ‘for abuse of
authority’. But he was not the only supplier of antiquities. Already, in 1715, a Siberian
mine owner, Alexis Demidov, had presented Peter with twenty gold objects and more
will have arrived from other sources.
Peter’s fascination with Siberian gold artefacts stemmed from his collector’s
instincts for accumulating curiosities, but the flow of antiquities also provided
material to help him forward his ambition to write a history of Russia and its peoples.
The artefacts were research data and had to be preserved from unscrupulous peasants
whose natural inclination was to melt them down and sell the gold, but if they were to
be used to write history it was also necessary to learn something of their context. Thus,
in 1718, a decree was issued to bring an end to the plundering of graves. It threatened
death to anyone found ‘searching for gold stirrups and cups’. Instead, local officials
were ordered to collect ‘from earth and water … old inscriptions, ancient weapons,
dishes, and everything old and unusual’. Information about the context should be
recorded and ‘all objects found be drawn’. It was an enlightened attitude, far in advance
of Western European practices at the time, but very difficult to enforce. Peter realized
this and had already decided to be more proactive in gathering new knowledge.
Expeditions to Siberia: The Pioneers
The idea of sending a scientific expedition to Siberia was clearly in Peter’s mind when,
in 1716, he was spending some time in Danzig (now Gdańsk). There he visited the
natural scientist and collector, Johann Philipp Breyne, whose work had gained international
acclaim, winning him election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. In
addition to examining Breyne’s natural history collection Peter also sought his advice
on setting up a Siberian expedition. Breyne recommended that the tzar should entrust
the venture to a German medical doctor, Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, who had
helped him build his own collection. Messerschmidt was invited to St Petersburg,
and in November 1718 was charged to travel to Siberia to study the geography, natural
history, medicine, medical herbs, diseases, peoples, languages, monuments, and
6