Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
1.7 The expansion of the Russian empire at the time of Catherine the Great brought much of the Pontic
steppe within the Russian domain. Early travellers and settlers were impressed by the massive kurgans
(burial mounds) which littered the countryside. The first to be excavated, at Litoy near Kirovograd, in 1763
was under the auspices of General Melgunov, governor of the region. The engraving shows the Perepyaticha
kurgan (published in 1879).
of the Scythians, but at the time little was known of them and the sword was ascribed
to the Sassanians. The grave also produced the silver legs of a stool which can now
be identified as coming from the Urartian region of Asia Minor. Melgunov’s finds
were displayed in the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg where they caused a minor sensation,
reminding the world of the riches to be had from the great kurgans of the Pontic
steppe and raising the intriguing question of the relationship between the animal
art represented in the Siberian collection and the similar art found in the kurgans in
Russia’s newly won Black Sea territories. By comparison with the kurgans of Siberia
those in the Pontic steppe were massive and could not fail to impress. One of the largest,
Chertomlÿk, near the city of Nikopol in the Ukraine, nearly 20 m high and 50 m in
diameter, is first mentioned in 1781. In this new-found enthusiasm for the Scythians,
Herodotus’ Histories, written in Greek in the fifth century bc, which gives an extended
account of the Scythian lifestyle, was translated into Russian.
The wonders of the Pontic–Caspian region had begun to be more widely
appreciated following a programme of fieldwork commissioned by Catherine II and
carried out by the natural scientist Peter Pallas in 1793–4. His findings were published
at the end of the century in German, and later in English translation as Travels through
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