Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
Kuban region yielded further important discoveries. Excavations began in 1875 on a
group of kurgans known as the Seven Brothers. The great mound of Kostromskaya
was examined in 1897 and work on kurgans in the vicinity of the village of Kelermes
took place from 1903 to 1909. Unlike the burials in the Ukraine, which had mostly
been robbed, many of those examined in the North Caucasus were intact.
The last of the spectacular excavations to be undertaken, before the First World
War and the Russia Revolution brought the luxury of archaeological excavation to
a temporary end, was at the kurgan of Solokha on the banks of the river Dnieper in
Ukraine. Work began in 1912. Although one burial chamber had been robbed, another
was found intact, producing a remarkable collection of grave goods including a nowfamous
gold comb which depicts a battle between a foot soldier and two horsemen,
one whose horse has just been killed (Gallery, no. 5). They wear a mixture of Greek and
Scythian armour, a conflation of styles reflected again by the Greek bronze helmet
and greaves with which the dead king in the burial chamber had been provided.
Putting it All Together
The eight decades of kurgan digging in the Ukraine and North Caucasus had provided
an astonishing array of material reflecting the life of the Scythian elite in the Pontic
region and their burial practices which quite eclipsed the old Siberian Collection. The
Scythians had burst into the popular imagination and scholars around the world were
intrigued. The animal art of the nomads was surprising, even shocking, to those used
to the familiar harmonies of the classical world, but it was the coexistence of these barbarians
with the Greek colonists living on their shores and the cultural interaction of
the two different worlds that really caught the imagination. Many were drawn to write
about it, among them a young Cambridge scholar, Ellis Minns, who after graduating
spent three years in Russia studying the antiquities, art, and history of the country.
Returning to a comfortable academic life in Cambridge he devoted himself to writing
a massive tome, Scythians and Greeks, which was published in 1913. It was this book that
introduced the Scythians to the English-speaking world and it remains a seminal text.
The other great name in the pioneering years of Scythian studies was the Russian
born Mikhail Rostovtzeff. Rostovtzeff left Russia during the 1917 revolution, living
for a short while in Oxford before leaving, in 1920, to make a new life for himself in
America. From 1925 until his retirement in 1944 he taught ancient history at Yale.
Before leaving Russia his interests had included the anthropology and archaeology of
South Russia and the Ukraine and in his brief interlude in Oxford he devoted himself
to preparing material for two books, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, published in
1922, and Skythien und der Bosporus, which appeared three years later. In both ventures
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