#scythian history

[blueiscoool]

Ancient Scythian Gold Jewelry Stolen From Ukraine Recovered in Spain

An Orthodox Church priest is among the five people accused of trying to sell the pieces, taken after being put on display at a Kyiv museum between 2009 and 2013.

The Spanish authorities have seized Scythian jewelry worth €60m (£52m) they say was stolen from Ukraine.

Police said the 11 ancient gold pieces were smuggled out of Ukraine in 2016 to be resold in Spain.

The bracelets, necklaces and earrings, from the 8th to 4th Centuries BC, had forged documents saying they belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Five arrests were made previously as part of an investigation into the 2021 sale of a gold belt with rams' heads.

The Scythians were a nomadic people who dominated parts of eastern Europe and Asia, including what is now southern Ukraine, from around 800 BC until 400 AD. They were known for their rich cultural heritage and metalworking skills, particularly in the manufacture of elaborate gold jewelry.

Separately, the Ukrainian authorities said last week that they had recovered 14 archaeological items allegedly stolen from areas occupied by Russia. A Russian man was arrested after attempting to smuggle them into the US.

The items include a Neolithic axe dating from approximately 5,000-3,000 BC.

"It's safe to say that Ukraine has received a new shipment of weaponry. The only catch is that this weaponry is incredibly ancient," Ukraine's acting Minister of Culture Rostyslav Karandieiev wryly noted at a news conference.

Artifacts created by the Scythian civilisation are among Ukraine's best-known historical heritage.

Ukrainian archaeologists say Scythian gold held in Ukrainian museums in areas under Russian occupation has been looted since the full-scale invasion last year.

Losses from alleged Russian plundering of Ukraine's historical and artistic heritage are estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of euros.

[nickysfacts]

Scythians were the masters of the horse, the bow, and the hemp!😄

🐴🏹🌿

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

2,300-Year-Old Plush Bird from the Altai Mountains of Siberia, c.400-300 BCE: this figure was crafted with a felt body and reindeer-fur stuffing, all of which remains intact

This plush bird was sealed within the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that runs below the barrows provided an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produced a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in the preservation of the artifacts inside.

This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.

Currently housed at the Hermitage Museum.

[heroineimages]

I really need to study the Scythians more.

Gold comb with battle scene, uncovered from a tomb (Solokha Kurgan) in eastern Ukraine, Scythian, 4th century BC

[worldhistoryfacts]

The first society to ride horses into battle may have been the Scythians, a nomadic people who dominated the areas east and north of the Black Sea between 800 and 200 BCE. We can get a sense of how Scythians might have outfitted their horses from this display, showing ceremonial decorations placed on a horse (the decorations date to the third century):

The most famous representation of Scythian horsemanship is a gold comb in the Hermitage. It economically represents the chaos of battle, with the horse at the center — wide-eyed, with danger underfoot and on both sides.

{Buy me a coffee} {WHF} {Medium} {Looking Through the Past}

Much more on the history of horses at war:

[restless-historian]

Bronze top in a shape it tree of life with tha figure of god Papai, Scythian, 4th cent. BCE, Nikopol, Dnipro region, Ukraine

[sheafrotherdon]

The Parthenon at sunrise is something quite different from the Parthenon in the heat of the day. The long lines of the pillars linger in shadow, as if anticipating their gilding but while as yet still  hidden from light. Technically, Joe thinks, he can’t blame the tourists who aren’t here yet for missing this beauty.  Technically, the Parthenon isn’t open. Technically he shouldn’t be standing, hip-to-hip with Nicky, head tilted back to take in the familiar height of the temple, a cooling travel mug of coffee in his hand.

Technically, he thinks, it’s not that hard to evade notice when you’ve been doing it for close to a thousand years.

“It is amazing, no?” asks Nicky, “to imagine the goddess that they memorialized this way is still among us.”

Joe snorts softly. “I’ll pay you all my pocket change to say that to Andy’s face.”

Nicky hums, amused. “I prefer not to die at the end of her knife.  Again.”

The history books are clear that this is a temple to Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, but Joe has long known that history books are approximations of knowledge, best guesses stitched together from fragments of evidence. Joe has heard, first-hand, exactly how embarrassed Andy was to return from war and find them building the place.

“Hey,” he says, turning his head toward Nicky and bumping their hands together.  “Wanna climb it?”

“Not today,” says Nicky and sips from his own mug.

“I suppose it is only a few months since we did it last.”

“Si. But we could sit on a plinth and watch the sun.”

They scramble up to the base of a pillar and settle themselves. Technically, Joe thinks, there are rules about this, about stepping on history and threatening ruin, but technically, he’s light-footed when he wants to be, and they know the quasi-owner.  The sun is a thin line of orange against the horizon, the sky still more dark than light.

“You are not a god,” Nicky says as if carrying on a conversation they had let lapse.

Joe is used to this. “No.”

“But you are the talisman of wisdom I hold closest to my heart,” Nicky says, picking up Joe’s hand and threading their fingers together.

“Not the talisman of war, I hope,” Joe says with a pleased smile.

“No.  War I can handle myself.”

Joe nods once, decisively, and pulls Nicky’s hand to his lips to kiss his knuckles. “Shall we tell her?”

“That we were here?”

“Hmm.”

“She will hate what they have done with the place.”

Joe laughs. “Perhaps if she revealed the confusion about her identity, put them to rights about who exactly inspired this . . . “

Nicky joins in his laughter. “Yes.  Exactly Andromache’s style.”

Joe sips his coffee. “I miss her.”

Nicky nods. “We will see her soon.”

They relax into comfortable silence together, and technically, Joe thinks, he is perhaps the luckiest man in the world for having been loved longer and with greater dedication than any other man alive.

“Technically,” he says to Nicky. “you’re the best.”

Nicky looks over, quirking an eyebrow. “Best?”

Joe shrugs happily.

Nicky leans over and kisses him, and Joe smiles into the kiss.

[baebeylik]

Scythian Warrior. Sibioara, Romania.

6th to 5th Century BCE.

[paganimagevault]

Dian Kingdom 8th-1st C. BCE. Meant to post this one a long time ago but it took me forever to put together. I'm just going to post 30 images here, I got about 100 total on my blog. Link at bottom.

The Dian Kingdom was an advanced civilization in what is modern-day southwest China. It was occupied by the Han Dynasty and incorporated into China after that. From what I've gathered, the people of the Dian Kingdom were probably closely related to the Baiyue people from southern China and northern Vietnam. Wikipedia says they may have spoke a Tibeto-Burman language. I found it interesting that some of these people look Caucasoid though and were wearing clothing similar to Scythians. The image I compared of the Dian man to the Indo-Scythian has a similar facial structure, hat, and even the same type of pants (sorry, I don't have time to tidy up the comparison photos more).

The Dian art theme of the four tigers attacking an ox is found in the same pre-Han period among the Xiongnu at Aluchaideng, and a similar motif appears at Tillya Tepe a couple centuries later. The theme is the same but the style is very different, still it indicates a connection to these places of the world through trade and exposure.

Some of the scenes with soldiers show a variety of different equipment styles and certain subjects have distinct fashion styles (like the people wearing the items that make their ears look huge). I watched a couple documentaries on genetics of the Dian and they were only able to find genetic info for one person, who was identified as similar to the Baiyue people. I'll link those youtube videos in sources below. I assume these people were primarily related to modern day Vietnamese and southern Chinese (or other people nearby) but may have had close interactions with (and even immigrants from) Scythian cultures despite their distance from them, which is interesting.

From the videos: "According to the final count, the amount of bronze ware excavated from Lijia Mountain is almost half the amount of the Shang Dynasty bronze ware excavated in Yinxu, Henan."

[city-of-ladies]

“Women were included in the ranks of this fully mobilized society. Prokopios, aware, of course, of the legends of the Amazons whose origins he traces to the region of the Sabirs, reports that in the aftermath of "Hunnic" (i.e. Sabir) raids into Byzantine territory, the bodies of women warriors were found among the enemy dead. East Roman or Byzantine sources also knew of women rulers among the nomads. Malalas, among others, mentions the Sabir Queen Boa/Boarez/Boareks who ruled some 100,000 people and could field an army of 20,000. In 576 a Byzantine embassy to the Turks went through the territory of 'Akkayai; "which is the name of the woman who rules the Scythians there, having been appointed at that time by Anagai, chief of the tribe of the Utigurs." The involvement of women in governance (and hence in military affairs) was quite old in the steppe and was remarked on by the Classical Greek accounts of the Iranian Sarmatians. It was also much in evidence in the Cinggisid empire. 

These traditions undoubtedly stemmed from the necessities of nomadic life in which the whole of society was mobilized. Ibn al-Faqih, embellishing on tales that probably went back to the Amazons of Herodotos, says of one of the Turkic towns that their "women fight well together with them," adding that the women were very dissolute and even raped the men. Less fanciful evidence is found in the Jiu Tangshu which, s.a. 835, reports that the Uygur Qagan presented the Tang emperor with "seven women archers skillful on horseback.” Anna Komnena tells of a Byzantine soldier who was unhorsed with an iron grapple and captured by one of the women defenders as he charged the circled wagons of the Pecenegs. Women warriors were known among the already Islamized Turkmen tribes of fifteenth century Anatolia and quite possibly among the Ottoman gazfs (cf. the Bacryan-z Rum "sisters of Rum")”.

Golden Peter B., “War and warfare in the pre-cinggissid steppes of Eurasia” in: Di Cosmo Nicola (ed.), War and warfare in Inner Asian History

[blueiscoool]

A 2,000-Year-Old Scythian-Style Cemetery Discovered in Siberia

Clearing a mound to make room for the newly deceased in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia revealed tombs from a culture unique enough to warrant its own definition, archaeologists say.

While bulldozing land for a new burial ground, workers startled to discover an old one, belonging to a newly identified culture

All they meant to do is expand a local cemetery. But as gravediggers in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, were removing a hill to make room for the newly deceased in 2018, they made an unexpected discovery. That hill turned out to be an ancient burial mound created by a Scythian-type culture over 2,000 years ago.

The question is which Scythian-type culture.

Our story begins in the 19th century, when a new cemetery called Shinnoye was established on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, the second biggest city in Siberia. Little did the founders know that the land nearby had already been “used”.

A century later, excavation of what remained of the ancient burial mound began in autumn 2021 and continued the next summer by a team of archaeologists from the Siberian Federal University, led by Dmitry Vinogradov.

In fact, around 150 ancient burial mounds are now known to have existed around Krasnoyarsk, but most were destroyed in the course of city development during the 20th century. This was the first to be excavated in the region in 65 years.

The chamber of death

It is indeed unfortunate that while expanding the modern cemetery, the ancient mound was bulldozed. Valuable data was destroyed, but based on old photographs and descriptions from an archaeological survey almost a century ago, the mound had been round and about 30 meters in diameter. However, the knowledge about it was lost over the years. Its existence was only rediscovered by the bucket of the bulldozer a century later.

Luckily, the tomb beneath survived the bulldozing and turned out to contain dozens of bodies in a large rectangular pit, that had been walled with timber and carpeted in birch bark.

The upper part of the tomb was damaged by the worksbut parallels with tombs from the era suggest it once had a wooden roof, thus creating what is known as a box tomb, Vinogradov explained.

Preliminary counts suggest the tomb may have contained as many as 50 people buried with grave goods ranging from beads to bronze plaques, miniature symbolic bronze daggers and battle axes, as well as knives, mirrors, and needles; and ceramic vessels that had contained foods: all items the deceased might have “needed” in the afterlife, Vinogradov speculates.

One plaque depicted a stag, a popular motif in Siberian Scythian animal art.

But the question remained, which Scythian-type culture this was.

Signs of Scythians

The Scythians are known mainly as the “barbarians” living in Crimea and north of the Black Sea, according to classical authors, mainly Herodotus from the fifth century B.C.E. However, the Eurasian steppe belt, as far east as northeastern China, was home to numerous horse-riding nomadic and semi-nomadic archaeological cultures that the Russian school of archaeology calls “ Scythian”.

Make no mistake. Scholars today do not ascribe to a theory of some broader unified “Scythian” nation or culture. Rather, the name refers to a triad of Iron Age archaeological features: certain styles of bronze weaponry; horse-riding gear; and art featuring real and mythical animals – mainly stags, wild felines, birds of prey and mythical griffons.

A lot of cultures throughout the sprawling Eurasian steppe belt featured the “Scythian triad” of artifacts, but the ethnic, genetic or anthropological connections between them – if any – remain unclear and highly debated, especially concerning the most far-flung of the “Scythian-type” communities.

For example, Scythian-type archaeological cultures in the Minusinks basin in Siberia are not thought to have any relationships with the classical Scythians in Crimea or the Northern Black Sea, but rather to be related to closer people in Siberia’s Altai mountains.

It can also be said that from the Bronze Age onward and continuing into the Iron Age, there were connections between northeastern China and the Minusinsk basin in Siberia, but researchers still debate who influenced who and how. In any case, these “Scythian” cultures encompassed the full gamut of lifestyles, from nomadic to semi-nomadic to sedentary.

One of the more famous “Scythian-type” cultures is the Pazyrysk living in the Altai mountains, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, best known for the Princess of Ukok and her beautiful tattoos.

Another famous Scythian-type culture is the Tagars, a semi-nomadic people who dominated the Minusinsk Basin during the late Bronze Age and Iron Age. On a number of grounds, the archaeologists suspect that the burial mound inadvertently unearthed by the latter-day gravediggers in Krasnoyarsk is associated with the Tagars.

In the early phase of their culture, the Tagars buried their deceased individually in stone box graves. In later phases, the fashion tended to large-scale wooden box tombs featuring multiple bodies, perhaps accruing over generations. And when the grave was full, the whole lot would be set collectively on fire.

Burning the dead

The large number of skeletons in the newly discovered tomb may attest that it served as a family tomb used for generations, Vinogradov suggests. When the tomb was full, it was sealed off, set on fire and left to burn.

This conclusion is supported by the colour and nature of the soil, which attests to high temperatures – and the fact that the bones had become mixed up inside, making the work for the physical anthropologist quite challenging. Usually, after burning, the tomb would be covered in soil, and that is what created the burial mound known throughout the steppe as kurgans.

However, death in the community did not end with the construction of our kurgan, as indicated by the discovery of ten pit burials around it. In fact, it was not rare for Tagar kurgans to feature later pit burials dug inside them as well. Luckily for posterity, the pits also survived the destructive claw of the bulldozer.

Each pit burial contained one or more individuals. Contrary to the wooden chamber of death, these tombs were not ignited. The dead were laid to rest in different positions – on their backs, chest, or side. Some skeletons survived the vagaries of time while others were less lucky, lacking any surviving bones, let alone articulation (anatomical order).

Nor was there a pattern to the dead in the pits: they contained both different sexes and all ages, including children. Only three contained grave goods, such as pottery and bronze, the same type as found within the wooden tomb.

From ashes, a new culture is born

The kurgan in Krasnoyarsk is similar to others in the Minusinsk basin, south of Krasnoyarsk. These types of kurgans are often associated with the Tagar culture (8th – 1st-century B.C.E).

The Tagar culture is divided into several stages. The style of our particular kurgan is similar to those from the later stages of this culture, from about 2,400 to 2,100 years ago.

The Tagars inhabited the basin from the 8th century B.C.E., the late Bronze Age. Toward the last centuries of the first millennium B.C.E, migration processes in the basin forced them to move northward, including to the territories surrounding the modern city of Krasnoyarsk. If in the early stage of their culture, the Tagans buried their dead individually, collective burials followed by cremation of the full graves marked the later phase of the culture: That was something completely new, Vinogradov explained.

Another hallmark of this final stage is that the dead were no longer buried with real bronze goods but rather miniaturized versions of these items, which presumably were of symbolic significance, the scholars believe.

Based on archaeological finds over the years in the region, some scholars have been suggesting that the late stage of the Tagar culture in the second and first centuries B.C.E., be considered a separate stage, which they call the “Tesinian culture” based on the site where these archaeological traits were first observed, on the banks of the River Tes in the Minusinsk Basin. In fact, the ���Tesinian distinction” was first suggested by the late archaeologist and historian Mikhail Gryaznov (1902 – 1984), a leading scholar of the steppe cultures. .

These Tesinians retained Tagarian traditions, from pottery style to burying the dead in kurgans with miniature items. While the Tagars did use iron, the metal only became common during the Tesinian stage and the metal started to appear in burials as well, a feature associated with the following Tashtyk culture.

Another practice whose roots we see in the Tesinian period was burial with plaster masks. These masks would become a hallmark of the later Tashtyks.

By the time of the Tashtyk culture, which flourished in the area from the 1st to the 4th century C.E., we no longer see miniature bronze items but rather iron and wooden items.

Hence, scholars today believe the final stage of the Tagar culture should be classified as a separate culture, because of the various new traditions they have observed. They believe this Tesinian culture arose from mixing between the Tagars and other populations coming from Central Asia during this time.

At this point however there are more questions than answers, Vynogradov explains.

So, based on the character of the burial mound and the goods, the kurgan is believed to belong to the transitional Tesinian culture and to date to the second or first century B.C.E. And that is the story of the first ancient mound in Krasnoyarsk to be excavated in 65 years, which revealed a people who emerged on the outskirts of the known territories of the Tagars, and may be unique and different from anything we knew before. And perhaps further archaeological investigation will teach us about what might have driven the Tagars north into these territories, and who were the Tesinians they became; and how and when they lived, and how they died.

By Viktoria Grinboim Rich.

[gunhilde]

Depictions of Amazons on Greek pottery.

[memories-of-ancients]

Gold hilt and iron sword fragment, Scythian, 5th-4th century BC

from The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

[liusia-piu]

Overlays for a wooden bridle set: chamfron with serpent-legged Scythian goddess Artimpasa and two cheek-pieces in the form of bird's wings. Graeco-Scythian, 4th century B.C Velyka Tsymbalka barrow, now Zaporizhzhia Region, Ukraine (stolen by russia)

[treasure-of-the-ancients]

Gold handle with turquoise, Scythian, 4th century BC

from Christies

[restless-historian]

Top: beads of necklace, Scythian, 4th cen. BCE, Melitopol mound, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine

Bottom: "tattooed" Trypillian figurines, 4th millennium BCE