mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Antiquity Review Article A platform for studying the Scythians Timothy Taylor Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK ___________________________________ Treasure At any given time somewhere in the world, an exhibition of Scythian gold is likely to be drawing crowds. Displaying their treasures, museums such as the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Museum of Historical Treasures of the Ukraine in Kiev generate publicity and revenue from catalogue sales. The objects - breathtaking examples of figural gold- and silver-smithing in both the indigenous steppic Animal Style and the grand, ethnographically informative Graeco-Scythian style - are so valuable that they are hard to insure. The existence of highly accomplished electrotype replicas means that one must at times wonder whether what is in the spotlit vitrine is the real thing. The historical worth of these extraordinary Iron Age prestige artefacts has been reflected in recent permanent transfers, including, in 1991, from Moscow to the renewed sovereign capital of the Ukraine in Kiev and, in 1999, from St Petersburg to the Mikhail Nesterov Museum in Ufa, Bashkiria. Reeder's catalogue is typical of the texts which accompany the exhibitions (here one which travelled across North America before finishing up at the Grand Palais in Paris): lovingly photographed high-quality images and broadly informative articles (by Ellen Reeder, Esther Jacobsen and Michael Treister). But, although the standard of the writing is high there is a predictable sameness about it. For the last half - perhaps even full - century, the Scythians have always been presented as a glamorous, martial nomadic elite who just happened to exist. Precisely how they managed to get colonial Greek craftspeople to make fabulous jewellery for them which, uniquely among all the apparent arts of empire, aggrandises the 'barbarian', remains unclear. There is nothing remotely condescending about the scenes on the golden neck-piece or pectoral from the wealthy Scythian burial mound of Tolstaya Mogila. The central tendril and flower frieze betray the south Italic training of the goldsmith; the flanking friezes, with cire- perdue cast figures that Cellini would have been proud of, depict Scythian daily life and Scythian myth in a marvellously detailed and dynamic way. A young lad milks a ewe, a foal suckles its dam, two bearded Scyths work a golden fleece - a pastoral idyll belied by the accompanying scene of voracious winged griffins. It was not the well organised production of cheese and wool that gave the elite its buying power. This was a society that valorised violence and made it pay. It may be that the true nature of the Scythian phenomenon is hidden from us by a surfeit of textual and archaeological riches. The striking congruencies between the Greek written sources (especially Herodotus and Hippocrates) and aspects of the archaeological record might suggest that there exist no great problems to be solved. It would be nice if a simple equation could fill the gaps, yielding a seamless and 'thick' account of the Scythian phenomenon over space and time. Several generations of scholars have assumed such an equation possible. Scythian archaeology was from its inception a handmaiden of history, and nothing much changed in the Soviet period: excavation was considered a 'source study' providing ever more objective data points for constructing a concrete history of material culture. Royal tomb The least recent and most major of the works reviewed here, the monumental two-volume translation of a publication which first appeared in Kiev in 1991 as Chertomlyk: skifskii tsarskii kurgan IV veka do n. e. ('Chertomlyk: a royal Scythian kurgan of the 4th century BC'), represents a new style of investigation which, with sufficient will, may eventually furnish the unique term 'Scythian' with properly unique social content. The 21 metre high kurgan at Chertomlyk was first dug out by grave robbers, who plundered the central burial within a century or two of its construction. But they left the side chambers relatively undisturbed, perhaps because the roof began to collapse. In any case, when the mound was first archaeologically investigated by E.I. Zabelin in 1862 and 1863 it revealed a series of intact attendant interments. Good for their time, Zabelin's field notes never found fully published form. Here they have been edited and incorporated alongside the results of new work. If we believe, as I think we should, Herodotus's detailed account of a royal Scythian burial, then we should expect to find the king's wife, concubine, wine-bearer, cook, groom, steward, message-bearer, and horses all present, strangled so as to be able to accompany their master into the afterlife. Zabelin uncovered a complex of chambers: four radiating from the central chamber and containing a total of five adult skeletons. Chamber 4, containing the artefactually richest intact interment- a female whose dress was suggestive of queenly status - led on to 'Room V' in which two richly arrayed children were found. It was this room that the grave robbers originally entered, so that they must have crept past the children and the 'queen' on their way to the central jackpot. Beyond the far wall of this room Zabelin discovered five separate pits, three containing four horses each, and two each containing single adult male skeletons, positioned as if acting as grooms for them. Further out still, towards the edge of the original mound, the 'North Grave' was excavated. From 1979 to 1986 a joint Ukrainian, Russian and German team, represented respectively by the three principal authors of the volume, worked under the most testing of conditions to retrieve new kinds of data and to put Scythian archaeology onto a modern interdisciplinary footing. Some of the circumstances are reported in these pages: the 4000 km annual round trip of Rolle's German team and the critical help of the Schladen snake farm in providing serum and advice for working on a site which had become home to a large population of poisonous snakes which often fell out of the 9 m high main profile. Others are not, such as the fact that Chertomlyk and its environs were constantly under KGB surveillance due to a massive programme of open-cast manganese extraction. Add to these obstacles the technical problems the researchers faced, using a local workforceo and basic tools in very hot and dry conditions on a site that had been extensively remodelled, and one must judge these volumes a triumph. Volume 1 outlines the history of research and contains plan and elevation drawings of the main structures and analysis and reanalysis of finds and observations from both periods of investigation. The recent re-excavation and analysis demonstrates the existence of complex rituals around the edge of the mound, with a further grave (1/84) and concentrations of horse bones that should perhaps be seen in connection with a final rite of closure (or incorporation), as Herodotus so clearly described. However, mapping of the local topography of the cemetery complex is lacking. The more detailed of the two location maps provided has no scale and cannot be connected to the excavation plans. This unfortunate failing is almost certainly a result of circumstances beyond the authors' control. The paucity of freely-available air-photographs and accurate survey maps in the former Soviet territories is a continuing blight on proper research. Volume II begins with a finds catalogue with high quality black & white and colour photographic plates. This is followed by 18 specialist papers covering soils and phytoliths, palaeogeography (again without adequate mapping), hydrology, palynology and botanical analysis, faunal and osteological material, metal analysis, and technical and aesthetic studies. It is particularly good to see Michael Schultz's detailed palaeopathological analysis of various skeletons and assemblages of human bones. Based on recognition of the rare congenital DISH syndrome in both the North Grave male skeleton and in a contemporary skeleton from Zheltokamenka kurgan, some 40 km distant, Shultz suggests a possible genetic relationship between the two individuals and, more broadly, that the people buried in such kurgans belonged to a fairly limited gene-pool, i.e., an in-bred elite. Context This still begs the question of how the elite worked. To begin to address this we must shift focus beyond the burial record. Murzin & Rolle were key movers also in the production of Issledovaniya sovmestnoi Ukrainsko-Nemetskoi arheologicheskoi ekspeditsii v 2000 g ('Research report of the Ukrainian-German archaeological expedition in AD 2000'), one of a series of interim reports that are not commercially available and which document on-going work on the northern steppe edge, at the vast, 40 km^2 , settlement site of Belsk. In Rolle's view, Belsk, identified by the Kharkov archaeologist Boris Shramko as Gelonus (described by Herodotus but, according to his calculations, covering a mere 30 km^2 ), represents the Scythian capital. Certainly the commanding ramparts and remarkable extent of the site suggest a place of great importance. Strategically situated on the exact boundary of the steppe and forest-steppe, Belsk could have controlled trade from north to south. The presence of craft workshops and large amounts of imported Greek pottery, dating from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, suggest that it did. Iron was worked in quantity, but it may have been a less visible human trade - slaves destined for the Greek Black Sea colonies and beyond, to the Athenian agora - that was the true foundation of wealth in the Iron Age steppe. To demonstrate this in detail will require a new generation of interdisciplinary research, pushing the boundaries of skeletal work far beyond the traditional 'racial' assessments of Soviet period physical anthropology. For now, what we have, especially in the monumental German edition of Chertomlyk, is a platform from which to assess evidence and descry potential evidence relating to the Scythian phenomenon. It is a perspective which reveals just how much remains to be done. 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