Authors: Neal Ascherson
She was a Sarmatian, aged between twenty and twenty-five, who had died some time in the second century AD. Her head had been crowned with a diadem of gold-foil stags, birds and trees. She had bracelets, a ring, an axe and horse-harnesses. Around her neck was a huge rigid collar of pierced and chiselled gold, encrusted with turquoises and decorated with a series of unknown magical creatures: dragons fighting with what seem to be monkeys in armour who hold clubs. In the centre of the collar was one of those works of art which, once seen, carry out a small but irreversible coup in the mind: a serene, golden, cross-legged man, his beard and hair carefully combed, a sword laid across his lap, a cup nursed in his two hands.
All these objects are now to be seen in the treasury of the Rostov Museum. Volodya Guguev studies the antecedents of the jewellery, which he recognises to be Central Asian — the great collar perhaps drawn from some distant central treasury between Tashkent and Afghanistan - and of the Indo-Iranian mythology represented by the golden man and the armoured monkeys. The Kobiakov find has made him well-known and respected in his profession. But when I met him at Tanais several years ago, he was still working as a discjockey in Rostov in order to earn a minimal living. (At that time, to change a £50 traveller's cheque into roubles was to have the annual salary of two professors of Byzantinology in your pocket.)
She was a princess or a queen — a woman from some great family who had attributes of a priestess, for almost everything left in the darkness with her had magical significance. Yet I have heard Volodya and his brother Yura speak with deep emotion of 'the poor princess'. Archaeologists are not immune to unscientific feelings about the dead, and this was not a usual case.
As a child, Volodya Guguev had run and played on the grass over her head. As a boy, he had wondered who and what might be hidden under the Kobiakov mounds. In the end, when he had grown into a good-looking young man, a flower in the chivalry of Russian science, he had found his way to this sleeping princess who had given him everything: fame as an excavator, national respect as a scholar, moments of incredulous joy and revelation of the kind which do not come twice in a lifetime.
She had given him her treasure which, had he been a wicked man, could have been melted down and transformed into enough bullion to buy him a Manhattan penthouse and a life of leisure. She had given him her faith, a puzzle which might, if he chose, preoccupy the rest of his days. In the end, when there was nothing else left at the bottom of the pit, she had given him what was left of her twenty-year-old body.
Not quite all her bones were there. Some of the very smallest phalanges, the most delicate finger-tip bones, were missing. I saw that this was distressing to Volodya, and we did not pursue it. But his younger brother Yura, one rainy day at Tanais, showed me the colour video of the excavation at Kobiakov 10, and mentioned that he and his brother were divided on this problem of the phalanges. His own view was that they had been gnawed off and removed by mice soon after the burial, something fairly common in chambered graves without coffins. Volodya, however, did not accept this. He preferred to think that the finger-tips had been ritually severed just after death, perhaps in some ceremony to exorcise the living from the touch of the dead. He could not bear the idea of the mice.
Chapter Five
We therefore went on towards the east, seeing nothing but heaven and earth, and sometimes the sea on our right hand, called the sea of Tanais, and the sepulchres of the Comanians [Cumans], which appeared to us two leagues off, in which places they were wont to bury their kindred all together . ..
The Comanians build a great tomb over their dead, and erect the image of the dead party thereupon, with his face towards the east, holding a drinking cup in his hand, before his navel.
Friar William de Rubruck, 'Journal’,
THE FIVE BROTHERS
are
kurgans.
They are a group of burial mounds standing on a patch of dry land in the middle of the Don delta. From the summit of the tallest Brother, still some twenty feet high, you can see the golden onion spires of Rostov Cathedral seven miles to the east, and to the south, the cranes and grain elevators of Azov.
Under this
kurgan,
although it had been looted by tomb-robbers in antiquity, Soviet excavators found part of the primary burial intact. It was 'royal': the tomb of a male Scythian ruler who had died some time in the fourth century BC It contained a huge
gorytus,
the combined quiver and bow-case which Scythian men and women carried slung on their hips, made out of silver and gold and embossed by a Greek goldsmith with scenes from the myth of Achilles.
But when I went to see the Five Brothers, expecting the usual Ossianic setting of emptiness and loneliness, I was astonished to find that this biggest Brother is still in use as a village cemetery. A wavering plank fence surrounds its base. The
kurgan
itself is covered with weeds, bushes and Russian Orthodox graves: white stones leaning at all angles, many decorated with little photographs under glass, some topped with double Cyrillic crosses of rusty ironwork. The most recent of these graves, still strewn with faded flowers, was only a few months old; the first burial on this site, well before the mound was raised to cover the Scythian and his
gorytus,
had been dated to the Bronze Age. This mound has been in use as a necropolis for some four thousand years.
The continuity puzzled me at first. Even in southern England, where villages like to think that they have an unbroken collective memory reaching back at least to the Saxon invasions, I have never seen a Wiltshire long-barrow — for example—still in use as a Church of England graveyard. By contrast, the Pontic Steppe, with its open, oceanic horizons, had been a place of constant movement and change; each new population might have been expected to wash away all traces of its predecessors rather than to accumulate its own debris on theirs.
But in the end I saw where I had gone wrong. Crossing the steppes behind Olbia, looking at the burial mounds notching the infinite straight skylines, I realised how
kurgans
concentrate meaning. In a featureless place, they are the only features. Once they have been raised, it becomes inevitable that any act with human significance will be done on them, under them or around them. To lay a dead body anywhere else on the steppe would be an abandonment, a burial at sea. And the
kurgans
are not only funerary monuments but also beacons of hope. This is in part because they have always served as landmarks to lost travellers. But it is, above all, because in the
kurgans
there is gold.
The presence of treasure was always known. Many
kurgans
were looted by tunnellers soon after they were built; their sheer size and wealth made robbery inevitable, once the clan-relatives of the dead had moved away or lost control of the region. The Sarmatians, especially, took this into account and often constructed secret recesses for gold and jewellery sealed into the walls of the tomb chamber.
The scale of the bigger
kurgans
required professional mining skills from the robbers, some of whom left their own corpses in collapsed tunnels. These mounds could be sixty feet high, and fifty-foot vertical shafts gave access to long horizontal passages leading to the central chamber. Such an underground 'house' and its anterooms often contained human sacrifices: servants and guards or — sometimes — wives killed in a form of suttee. Food was left for the dead inside the chamber, and consumed in gargantuan quantities during funeral feasts around the
kurgatv.
theTolstoya mound in the Kuban held in its outer ditch cattle and horse bones which corresponded to almost six and a half tons of meat. Herodotus, in his famous account of the details of a Scythian royal funeral ritual, described how the mound was surrounded by a ring of dead, straw-stuffed riders mounted on dead horses and all impaled so that they would not collapse as they decayed. It is very possible that, when he was at Olbia, Herodotus heard a version of the gigantic ceremonies which had taken place some decades earlier at the Ulskii Aul
kurgart
in the Kuban. When the Russian archaeologist N. I. Veselovsky opened the Ulskii mound in the nineteenth century, he found the remains of 360 horses, tethered around stakes in groups of eighteen and forming a ring under the outer circumference of the mound.
It is not easy to disentangle the two attitudes of later populations to the
kurgans:
the impulse to 'desecrate' and plunder them, and the impulse to accept them as sacred places and re-use them for burials. The mounds were plainly a resource of treasure, but extracting it would usually have been too long and difficult an operation either for casual nomad visitors or for gangs acting in a clandestine, 'criminal' context. Many of the tomb robbers may well have been official concessionaires charged by some recent conqueror to gather bullion for him.
At the same time, it was obvious that the gold and jewellery had been deliberately placed in these mounds by some vanished race. The general taboo against disturbing the dead must have discouraged local initiatives to break into the
kurgans,
apart from the technical problems of gaining access. It may be that a certain pattern developed: that in new conquered steppe territory there would be a wave of officially sanctioned digging for treasure, but that afterwards the
kurgans
would be assimilated to the cults of the incomers and would reassert their 'sanctity'. The re-use is striking enough. The Scythians, or at least some Scythian groups, had erected life-sized stone figures on the top of their burial mounds. This was imitated more than a thousand years later by the Kipchaks (Cumans), a Turkic-speaking nomad people who arrived from Central Asia and controlled the Pontic Steppe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding their own burials to Scythian mounds, the Kipchaks carved their own crude and sinister stone colossi, sometimes set upright on the summit of the tumulus but on occasion buried horizontally just under the surface. As late as the nineteenth century, many
kurgans
were still crowned by these stone 'babas', men or women with flat, scowling features and tall headdresses who hold cups in their lap. Then the new landowners began to remove them as 'idols' or 'curios', and today few south Russian or Ukrainian museums lack a row of Kipchak giants, usually parked in the museum garden.
The mediaeval Italian colonists on the Black Sea had no inhibitions about the sanctity of the
kurgans.
The stories of buried treasure obsessed them. Giosafat Barbaro, a Franciscan monk, was a prominent businessman in the Venetian community at Tana when, in 1437, an Egyptian acquaintance told him about the great treasure of indiabu', last King of the Alans (Sarmatians). This treasure was supposed to be hidden inside a tumulus called 'Kontebbe' (possibly a version of the Turkic words for sand-mound), some twenty miles up the Don River from Tana near what is now the site of Rostov.
Barbaro (whose travel memoirs were wonderfully translated in the sixteenth century by William Thomas) at once organised a treasure venture. He signed up a partnership with a few other Venetian and Jewish merchants, took a hundred and twenty labourers up the frozen river by sledge, and tried to dig into the 'little hyIP of Kontebbe. Defeated by the frost, they retreated to Tana and returned in March after the start of the thaw. Barbaro and his men were now able to drive an enormous railway-cutting of a trench into the mound with pick and mattock, but they were completely disconcerted by what they found.
Next unto the grasse the earth was blacke. Then next unto that all was coles. .. under this were asshes a spanne deep, and this is also possible, for having reades there by which they might burne, it was no great matter to make asshes. Then were there rynds of
miglio
[millet] an other spanne deepe, and bicause it may be said that they of the cuntry lyved with breade made of miglio and saved the rynds to bestowe in this place, I wolde faine knowe what proportion of miglio wolde furnishe that quantitie to cover such an hill of so great a breadth with the onlie rynds thereof for a spanne deepe? Under this an other spanne deepe were skales of fishe as of carpes and such other.
The treasure never showed up. Barbaro and his partners had to be content with 'halfe the handle of a little ewer of silver, made with an adders hedde on the toppe'. Meanwhile the weather had broken. 'Finally in the passion weeke the east winde beganne to blowe so vehemently that it raysed the earth with the stoanes and cloddes that had been digged and threwe them in the workemens faces that the blowwde followed. Wherfore we determined to leave of and to prove no further.'