Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

After the Revolution
discovering the scythians
In the years following the Revolution of 1917 attention turned from the graves of
the rich to the lives of the ordinary people. Settlements began to be excavated and
attempts were made to define regional groupings based on archaeological evidence:
the elite were no longer thought worthy of study. But following the end of the Second
World War attention turned again to the great kurgans of Ukraine and the Caucasus.
It had long been recognized that in the distant past grave robbers had managed to
plunder most of the central burials but, as excavations in the earlier twentieth century
had shown, the major Scythian tombs often contained burials placed off centre
which had been missed and in some of the plundered burials robbers had overlooked
items hidden beneath floors or tucked away in side chambers. There was also much
to learn about the ritual activities which had taken place around the main burial.
The first of the spectacular post-war discoveries was made when a robbed kurgan
under threat from development was examined near Melitopol in Ukraine. Here, in a
hidden recess, a gorytos (a case for holding a bow and its arrows hung by a warrior’s
side) was discovered. It had been covered with a gold sheet decorated in repoussé
depicting animals in combat and scenes from the life of Achilles. A few years later, in
1969–70, the kurgan at Gaymanova mogila was excavated producing a silver-gilt cup
decorated with figures of Scythian warriors in repoussé (Gallery, no. 3). The next year
the excavation of Tolstaya mogila showed that, although the tomb had been pillaged
in antiquity, a surprising amount of gold had been missed, including ornaments, a
gorytos, a sword in a highly decorated gold scabbard, and a magnificent gold pectoral
(a neck ornament that hangs across the chest) depicting lively scenes in two registers.
The upper shows Scythians engaged in peaceful pastoral activities while the lower is
composed of incidents of violent conflict between wild and domesticated animals
(Gallery, no. 9). The gold from these three tombs is all likely to have been produced
in workshops in Greek colonies fringing the Black Sea to satisfy the Scythian elite. Its
discovery greatly excited art historians and reinvigorated the debate about the Greek/
barbarian interaction.
Meanwhile other kurgan excavations were adding more details about burial
ritual. Between 1981 and 1986 the famous Chertomlÿk mound was re-examined by
a Russian–German expedition. One of the unexpected results was the discovery of
horse and human bones scattered around the base of the mound providing, for the
first time, direct evidence for a practice described in vivid detail by Herodotus which
involved sacrificially killing a group of riders and their horses and securing their
bodies with wooden stakes to give them rigidity so that they could be set up in riding
positions around the grave (below, pp. 306–7). Another result of the excavation was
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