Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
Late Bronze Age Andronovo cultural continuum found extensively across the steppe
of central Asia. From about the fourteenth century bc a local culture, known as the
Karasuk culture, began to crystallize out which, by the end of the tenth century,
had evolved into the Tagar culture, dominated by a horse-riding elite using a highly
distinctive set of horse gear, weapons, and other artefacts. What is important here is
that the archaeological evidence suggests that the changes were largely indigenous,
evolving over a period of time, and were not caused by significant influxes of new
people. In other words, in the Minusinsk Basin we can trace the emergence of
nomadic elites for whom horse-riding was both a way of life and a mark of status.
More to the point they were beginning to adopt representations of animals, drawing
on a tradition that can be traced back to the second millennium in the Altai–Sayan
region. It was this love of animal forms that was to pervade the art of the steppe
throughout the later first millennium.
Further upriver the Yenisei is joined by a tributary, the Uyuk, which flows
through a remote steppe basin with a floor of lush grassland pasture giving way to
alpine meadows on the flanks of the surrounding mountains. It was, and still is, an
idyllic environment for nomadic pastoralists. Toward the centre of the basin, near
the village of Arzhan, is a massive kurgan, 110 m in diameter and up to 4 m high,
surrounded by a vertical stone wall. It had once been covered with a thick layer of
large stone blocks which had helped to maintain permafrost conditions in the
ground beneath but the layer had been stripped off to provide construction material
in the decades following the Second World War, making the delicate archaeological
remains beneath increasingly vulnerable to decay. The potential importance of the
site was recognized by the archaeological community and in 1971 Mikhail Griaznov
(who had dug the first Pazyryk barrow 44 years earlier) began an excavation which
was to last until 1974. We will consider the kurgan in some detail below (pp. 95–100).
Suffice it to say that it was a royal burial, with the king and his consort laid together
in the central chamber and their favourite retainers and horses buried immediately
around them. This royal tomb was set within a vast timber construction built of larch
logs, arranged in a radial fashion, each segment being divided into chambers. Within
the chambers were groups of horses with their grooms. Since the trapping associated
with the horses suggest that many of them had been brought in from considerable
distances, they must represent the power of the king to command the allegiance of
entourages from far away. The burial had much in common with elite burials on the
Pontic steppe but what was astonishing was its early date. A number of radiocarbon
assessments leave little doubt that burial took place in the late ninth century bc,
thus pre-dating by more than a century the earliest of the royal graves on the Pontic
steppe. The excavation of Arzhan 1, then, showed that all the elements of the Scythian
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