Ancient Near Eastern Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v ...

40
41
43
The Scythians were one of the nomadic
tribes that roamed the steppes north of
Iran, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia in the
first millennium B.C. They are known to us
from the writings of their neighbors, the
earliest records being those of the Assyrians
and Urartians. By the time of the
Assyrian king Esarhaddon (681-668 B.C.)
Scythian nomads had infiltrated into the
rich, settled lands south of the Caspian.
Herodotus, the fifth-century Greek historian,
who wrote about them in Book IV
of his monumental history, tells of sumptuous
royal burials of Scythian chieftains,
which have been confirmed by the
discoveries of burial mounds in southern
Russia. The tombs covered by the
mounds were filled with weapons and
horse equipment as well as intricately
and lavishly crafted pieces of jewelry,
drinking vessels, and combs.
Typical of Scythian art is the so-called
animal style, which chiefly represented
such creatures as stags, panthers, boars,
and birds of prey. The animals are rendered
in a decorative, stylized fashion,
as illustrated by griffin-shaped appliques
(fig. 41), part of a group of ornaments
that has been attributed to a fifthcentury
B.C. treasure found at Maikop in
the Kuban River region north of the Black
Sea. The Scythians were great horsemen
and their passion for adornment
extended to the harnesses worn by their
horses. The boar clasp (fig. 42) of carved
bone covered with gold is probably a decorative
element for the straps of a harness.
The Scythian animal style influenced
the art of other nomadic tribes. This is
reflected in a rare example of fourthcentury
B.C. Thracian workmanship, a
silver beaker (fig. 40) probably made in
the region of present-day Rumania or
Bulgaria. Similar beakers have been found
in a princely tomb at Agighiol, near the
Danube delta in eastern Rumania. The
Museum's cup depicts several animals,
some real and some fantastic. An eightlegged
stag has antlers terminating in
birds' heads, which form part of the
decorative border around the rim.
A bronze belt clasp (fig. 43) has an
intricate openwork design with a horse
and smaller figures of a foal, a dog, and a
bull-all enclosed by a frame with bosses.
Many belt clasps of this same type and
style have been found in ancient Colchis,
now western Georgia in the Soviet Union.
Recently it has been suggested that they
date to the first to third century A.D. These
small, portable, and highly decorative
objects preserved many of the features of
the earlier, nomadic animal style. B.A.P.
35