Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

predatory nomads
an isolated later incident. The material found in the Arzhan 2 mound is typologically
later than that found in Arzhan 1. This is confirmed by dendrological and radiocarbon
dating, which suggests that the burial took place towards the end of the seventh
century.
The two burials, nearly two centuries apart in date, reflect the opulence of the
community commanding the Uyuk Valley. The readiness of the elite to conspicuously
consume in their burial rites their acquired wealth—gold and precious stones,
items of high craftsmanship, and horses— reflects, in large part, the productivity
of their immediate homeland. But it also implies that they had established authority
over a much wider territory enabling them to call on distant resources. Rare raw
materials such as turquoise, amber, and gold could be acquired through systems of
exchange, but the great number of fine stallions decked out in their flamboyant gear
ridden from far afield to Arzhan 1 to be sacrificed in honour of the deceased warlord
speak of more than just trade. Here, surely, we are seeing something of the networks
of social obligation now at work—people sending, or bringing, gifts of great symbolic
value to the graveside to acknowledge their subservience to an overlord and his
lineage.
While there is much that we will never know about the social dynamics of the
nomadic communities of the Altai–Sayan region—the names of the tribes, the events
which structured their lives, and the true extent of their mobility—the archaeological
evidence allows certain broad deductions to be made. The improvement in the
climate at the beginning of the first millennium, increasing the biomass of the valleys
and plateaus, released a new energy in society that resulted in the rise of a warrior
elite, recognizable in the archaeological record by their rich graves, but in real
life most likely expressed in their ability to lead, to raid, and to enter into alliances
with distant elites. This was a time of great mobility, with horsemanship becoming a
dominant way of life. Weapons were now common: the bow and arrow for engagements
at a distance and the vicious battleaxe and the short sword for close hand-tohand
fighting. Pervading it all was an animal art, deeply rooted in earlier Bronze Age
traditions, manifest now in decorative attachments for clothes and horse harness,
moulded extensions to the handles of knives and daggers, petroglyphs carried on
the deer-stone markers, and tattoos on the human body. The flying stag, the perched
argali ram, and the curled feline were everywhere to be seen.
By the end of the ninth century bc warrior lords, like the individual interred at
Arzhan 1, were being buried in grand ceremonies involving large assemblies of people
willing to invest their effort in the construction of the kurgan and thereafter to
indulge in lavish feasting. The burial of a leader was a spectacle designed to display, for
all to see, the might of the clan. The greater the consumption in labour and Âmaterial
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