Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
Âantiquities; to ‘make a description of everything remarkable’; and to ‘collect rarities
and medical plants’. Preparation for this daunting task took some time but he finally set
out in March 1719 for Tobolsk on what was to be a seven-year expedition. In the report,
written on his return after Peter’s death, he explained his brief more fully: ‘I shall look
for herbs, and flowers, roots, birds, and so on … and also for ancient burial objects …
portrayals of people and animals, Kalmyk mirrors. I was ordered to announce in the
towns and regions that everybody must bring me such herbs, roots, and flowers and
ancient burial things … and if any of them are found worthy, the burial objects shall
be paid for generously’. In the event he acquired few items of gold, suggesting to him
that most of the readily accessible graves had already been robbed. As an enquiring
scientist, however, he decided to test this for himself by excavating a number of burial
mounds. Although he found little that he considered to be of value, his were the first
scientifically driven excavations in Russia—the beginning of modern archaeology.
Messerschmidt returned to St Petersburg in March 1727. His patron, Tzar Peter, had
died two years earlier and there was now little enthusiasm for this kind of work, but
the records and collections he brought back were assigned to the Kunstkamera, now
under the control of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which had been established
in 1724/25. No further resources were made available to him and he died in poverty in
1735 at the age of 50.
The Academy’s interests lay elsewhere, with the exploration of the eastern
extremities of Asia and the sea passages to China and Japan. In 1725 it had sponsored
the First Kamchatka Expedition led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, after whom the strait
between Asia and America was named. The second expedition, which set out in 1733
and was to last for ten years, was a vast enterprise involving some 3,000 people, its
task to explore eastern Asia, to map the entire Arctic coast of Siberia, and to chart
America’s north-west coast and islands. The man chosen to oversee the geographical
and historical aspects of the work was a 28-year-old German, Gerhard Friedrich Müller,
who had for five years served as secretary to the Academy. His brief was to ‘describe
Siberia’s civil history, its antiquities, and the manners and customs of the people’.
Müller is best known for his ethnographic observations, but having been closely
involved with Messerschmidt’s archaeological collection when it arrived at the
Kunstkamera he took a particular interest in burial mounds, amassing a collection
of his own, mostly restricted to bronze artefacts since very little gold was now being
recovered. Times had changed. ‘I saw a lot of people in Siberia’, he explained, ‘who used
to do this (grave robbery) for a living but in my time nobody was doing it because all the
graves that could have held treasures had already been dug.’ Nonetheless his collection
was considered to be of scientific value and was bought by the Academy of Sciences in
1748 to be added to the existing Siberian collection housed in the Kunstkamera.
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