Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS 21
the body covered with the curtain of the canopy. The dead man was
evidently no ordinary person, but the chief or king of a tribe.
The Maikop grave is no exception. Although the explorers of the
Caucasus paid little attention to graves with contracted and painted
skeletons, and directed most of their efforts to discovering richer
Scythian tombs, they were nevertheless so fortunate as to find four
graves contemporary with the Maikop grave and rivalling it in the
splendour of their furniture. As to graves with similar though poorer
furniture, they can be counted by dozens if not by hundreds. It is
quite certain that in the copper age the Northern Caucasus, especially
the valley of the Kuban, was thickly populated, and that the inhabitants
were wealthy enough to build monumental tombs and to surround
the dead not merely with rough clay vessels but with precious
objects of copper, gold, and silver. I shall give a short account of the
four finds mentioned above.
In 1898, while digging for clay in the Cossack village (stanitsa) of
Staromyshastovskaya, workmen found a silver vessel of the same ovoid
shape as the Maikop vases ;
it contained a number of precious objects
resembling those at Maikop : a golden diadem with rosettes, a silver
figure of an ox with a hole in its back for suspension or for the insertion
of a rod, hundreds of gold and carnelian beads which originally formed
one or more necklaces and bracelets, a lion's head in gold, belonging
to one of the necklaces, and several earrings each composed of gold
rings of various sizes interlinked.
Even more extraordinary are the two graves discovered in kurgans
near the village of Tsarskaya. The wooden framework of the Maikop
grave is replaced by stone structures which recall, with singular
insistence, the well-known dolmens of the same period in Northern
Caucasus. These structures were composed of big slabs forming
stone-boxes or tomb chambers each divided into two by a cross-slab.
Both chambers had stone roofs, one roof being gabled, the other flat.
One corpse was buried in each stone-box ; the corpse occupied one
compartment, the other was filled with tomb furniture. In both
graves the bodies were contracted and covered with a thick coat of
red paint : the same paint was used on the walls of the second stonebox
and on certain objects in the grave. The furniture of both graves
was extremely rich and copious : it is of the same character as at
Maikop, but the objects are clumsier and less distinguished. There is
no doubt, however, that Maikop and Tsarskaya Stanitsa are contemporary.
The Tsarskaya kurgans show the same combination of
stone and copper implements, without any bronze, the same wealth of
gold and silver, the same shapes of earring, and the same abundance