Authors: Neal Ascherson
It turns out that Barbaro was not digging into a burial mound or treasure cache at all. Without knowing it, he was cutting into a huge kitchen midden raised over centuries by Maeotian river fishermen and their families, and when the Russian archaeologist A. A. Miller excavated the settlement in the 19 x0s, he found the remains of the Venetian pit in exactly the dimensions given by Barbaro in his book. The fish scales and ash were still there, though the millet husks could no longer be found. Barbaro at least deserves admiration for the quality of his recording and measuring. But he is also entitled to some sympathy. The Kontebbe mound is at Kobiakov. Only a few hundred yards away, as Barbaro's team shovelled away in the frost and east wind, a Sarmatian princess was lying in the darkness among enough gold and jewellery to pay for a new basilica in Venice. But she was waiting for Volodya Guguev.
Barbaro failed. But the narrative of his failure contributes as much to knowledge as any 'Alan gold' he might have unearthed. It demonstrates, once again, that treasure-hunting in
kurgans
was a serious economic activity in the Pontic Steppe as early as the fifteenth century. It also confirms that breaking into a Scythian
kurgan
(as opposed to the later activity of looting Greek sites, which was far easier) was a substantial enterprise which required, and could be worth, a big investment of time and labour.
The
kurgans
came to be regarded as a natural resource — a form of mine. This was not true at all times nor for everyone, as we have seen. It is striking, for example, that Barbaro implies that only foreigners went on organised treasure expeditions, whereas the Tatar-Mongols appear to have left the
kurgans
alone. But all inhibitions broke down when Russian power expanded into Siberia and then to the Black Sea and the southern steppe zones. Russian officers and landowners, followed by huge settlements of discharged soldiers, exiles or transported peasants from central and northern Russia, treated the burial mounds as if they were mineral outcrops. In our own time, especially in the West with its frantic concern for historical conservation and 'national heritage', it has become unimaginable that anyone could treat monuments of the human past as a geological resource available for exploitation, like a gravel-pit or a peat-moss. But these are recent, sophisticated distinctions. Few beyond a tiny, educated minority drew such distinctions in the past, and the truth is that, in spite of the way in which archaeological 'heritage' has been assimilated into nationalist ideology, few outside Europe and North America draw them even today.
What took place in the steppes of the Russian Empire was one of the catastrophes of Eurasian culture. By the late seventeenth century, large armed bands of Russians were already living as professional tomb-robbers in the new Siberian territories. In 171
8,
Peter the Great decreed that all archaeological artefacts should be remitted to local governors, accompanied by a sketch of their place of discovery; little notice was taken of this, although enough was recovered from
kurgan-robbers
to form the nucleus of the imperial collections at St Petersburg. But when Russian settlement began along the Black Sea shores at the end of the eighteenth century, plunder became a regular occupation not just for magnates or bandits but for ordinary immigrant villagers. The Cossacks especially found a new source of wealth here, and they violated not only the
kurgans
of the grasslands but the more accessible and vulnerable remains of the Greek coastal cities and their hinterland. The magnificent stone-built tombs and catacombs of the Bosporan Kingdom were vandalised and their contents stolen; the surviving walls, towers and monuments of colonies like Tanais and Olbia were pulled down and used as building material. Landowners had title to what was found on their estates, and as Mikhail Miller wrote in his
Archaeology in the USSR,
'a large number of landowners, having serf labour at their disposal .. . excavated
kurgans
all through the nineteenth century out of boredom or curiosity'. Captain Pulentsov, a Cossack, became famous because he dreamed of a buried treasure and then spent the next twenty years frantically digging holes in the Taman Peninsula wherever the lie of the land vaguely recalled his dream (in the end, by pure accident, he found a valuable and unusual coin hoard). In such a climate, it was little short of a miracle that a class of devoted archaeologists emerged in Russia, at first amateurs but later scientifically minded professionals, who were able to rescue so much material and knowledge and to introduce systematic excavation and recording.
All the same, the cultural treasures and scientific data which Russian archaeologists saved have to be measured against all that simply vanished. Much was melted down for bullion or sold abroad. Russian archaeologists still remember the charlatan D. G. Shulz, who pretended that he had official authorisation and excavated some of the magnificent burials at Kelermes, in the Kuban. Shulz had the
chutzpah
to pose as the scourge of the tomb-robbers, and he persistently denounced plunderers to the local authorities until, in
1904,
he was himself caught in Rostov selling Scythian gold to a jeweller who melted it into ingots. Further west along the coast, Odessa was the centre not only of this illegal antiquities trade but of forgery — the highly skilled and impeccably scholarly confection of Scythian and Sarmatian articles custom-made for the tastes of individual Western museums. The most famous victim was the Louvre in Paris which bought, at enormous cost, the Tiara of Saitapharnes'. This was manufactured by the Odessa goldsmith Ruchomovsky. He had studied a famous Olbia inscription — incomplete — describing how King Saitapharnes of Scythia was to be propitiated with an 'honour' from the city, and he used all his craft and imagination to supply this honour to the Louvre. The talent represented by Ruchomovsky has not yet died out. Exquisite 'Greek' cameos and brooches can still be bought from young men who hang around the museum in Odessa.
An almost equally frustrating problem for archaeologists is the mass of material that survives without any certain facts about where and how it was found. Looking along the showcases of gold ornaments in the town museum of Novocherkassk, I noticed how few of them had any information about provenance. The interpreter, herself an archaeologist, smiled ironically. They come from lucky people,' she said. As we travelled on across the Don country and into the Kuban, visiting museums wherever we stopped, I heard a great deal more about 'lucky people'.
Schastye
is a Russian word that means both luck and happiness. It is the sort of happiness which is not planned or earned but which falls from heaven or jumps out of the earth: a blessing. It is the feelings of a Russian peasant whose mattock grinds against a jar crammed with Bosporan gold coinage or a bundle of Sarmatian horse-harnesses studded with emeralds and garnets. His poverty is over; his life is transformed as if by the Last Judgement. Those who found wealth in the ground in this way became known as the
schastlivchiki
- the lucky, happy ones. The term appeared among the inhabitants of Kerch, the Crimean port built on the ruins of Panticapaeum where much of the 'Scythian' goldwork was made, and spread throughout New Russia.
In Chekhov's short story '
Schastye,
'
two shepherds lying out on the steppe at night with their flocks fall into conversation with a stranger, a passing estate foreman who has stopped to get a light for his pipe. The talk is of buried treasure. They are all certain that gold is stowed away in the earth all about them, in
kurgans
or in pots dug into the banks of streams, but they are almost equally certain that they will never find it. Why is it denied them, who need it so badly?
The older shepherd complains at one point that the treasure is under a spell, which makes it invisible to all seekers except those who have acquired a special amulet. But then he begins to talk as if the rich and powerful were immune to the spell and needed no amulet. 'It will come to this, that the gentry will dig it up or the government will take it away. The gentry have begun digging the barrows ... They scented something! They are envious of the peasants' luck.'
Dawn comes up, and they all stare into the 'bluish distance' where 'the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs ... rose here and there above the horizon, and the boundless steppe had a sullen and death-like look'. The foreman slowly mounts his horse.
' "Yes," he says, "your elbow is near, but you can't bite it. There is fortune, but there is not the wit to find it. . . Yes, so one dies without knowing what happiness is like." '
One of the three inalienable rights in the American Declaration of Independence is the pursuit of happiness. Can this also mean the right to seek luck? The right to the pursuit of
schastye
- that liberation which happens when the earth suddenly opens and gold blazes around the end of the spade - has always seemed inalienable to the poorest people of many lands and times. A man's fate had little to do with his ability; hard work or natural talent or entrepreneurial flair could not free an English villein, a Russian serf or a Mexican peon from inherited slavery. On the contrary, the whole human world seemed fashioned in order to perpetuate their unfreedom. If there were to be an escape from misery, it must therefore come either from the superhuman or from the inhuman; from God in the sky above, or from whatever force ruled the darkness under the earth.
'Lucky people' were chosen to find treasure by a sort of grace. And yet, as Chekhov's old shepherd was suggesting, the ruling-class could be cruel enough and greedy enough to lock even that last door of hope against the poor, and to pocket the key. This fear survives, its origins scarcely understood, not only in Russia but even among sophisticated urban populations in the West. In Britain, for example, during the 1980s, a war of words and often of fists raged between the metal-detector clubs and bodies like the Council of British Archaeology. Superficially, this appeared to be a contest between responsible scientific authorities defending the material evidence of Britain's past, and rapacious scavengers (some of whom could be justly described as tomb-robbers) interested only in ripping 'valuable finds' out of the context which made them significant. But under that surface lay, on the one hand, archaic popular attitudes to traditional rights and, on the other, a complacent and authoritarian possessiveness with almost equally ancient roots.
The metal-detector lobby, whose club members were largely working-class, pronounced that its supporters were exercising a natural liberty of free-born Englishmen to seek treasure. That liberty was now being dismantled by a middle-class professional
élite
with the insolence to proclaim itself the rightful guardian of Britain's 'heritage'. (Here the treasure-seekers were offering bad history: treasure in England belongs to the landowner unless the Crown exercises its right to 'treasure trove' and appropriates it, rewarding the finder rather than the landowner.) But there was, all the same, something authentic in their sense of the emotional importance of 'luck' to ordinary people in the past. Equally, there was something penetrating in their question to the State's official heritage custodians: WI10 do you think you are? Why should a university degree in archaeology and a government excavation licence allow you to assert ownership over the buried treasures of Britain, and to deny the opportunity of 'luck' to the vast majority of the population?
Cossacks have been especially lucky, and their descendants still fantasise about where their ancestors may have hidden their luck. In that Chekhov short story, there is hungry speculation about the treasure supposedly buried by Don Cossacks on their way home after the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812. And all over southern Russia and Ukraine tales are told about the hidden wealth of the Zaporozhe Cossacks, the Treasure of the Sech.
The powerful Zaporozhe host, which had dominated Ukraine and the debatable lands between Poland and Russia for hundreds of years, was finally suppressed by Catherine II in 1775. A Russian army, pretending to be paying a peaceful visit on its way to harry the Turks, attacked the Cossack stronghold on the Sech island in the Dnieper in the middle of the night. The Cossacks, taken by surprise, surrendered without resistance. Their
ataman
Peter Kalnishevsky and his lieutenants were arrested (the Russian records of confiscation show that Kalnishevsky had in his barns 162 tons of wheat and personally possessed 639 horses, 1,076 long-horned cattle and over 14,000 sheep and goats). The rest of the host were disarmed and allowed to disperse quietly. Some forty thousand of them moved into Crimea, still then under Turkish-Tatar control, and settled near the Cimmerian Bosporus around Kerch.