Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
better.’ Witsen was a prominent citizen in Amsterdam, serving as mayor of the city
on thirteen occasions between 1682 and 1706. In 1697 it was he who organized a fourmonth
attachment for the young Tzar Peter in the shipyards of the Dutch East India
Company, and introduced him to other scientists and collectors in the city. Peter
will have been well aware of Witsen’s collection of Siberian antiquities and tried to
acquire it after his death in 1717, but apparently without success.
By this time Peter was himself an avid collector of Siberian gold artefacts. His
main supplier was Prince Matvei Petrovich Gagarin who, as governor of Siberia,
lived at Tobolsk, the capital of the province. On one occasion we hear of Gagarin
ordering that poor peasants sheltering in a monastery should be sent out to dig into
1.4 Gold belt buckle sent to Peter the Great by M. P. Gagarin, governor of Siberia, from Tobolsk in 1716,
dating from the fourth or third century bc, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. This is one
of a pair of plaques which made up the belt buckle. The scene is set beneath the Tree of Life and centres on a
goddess, wearing a tall pointed hat, comforting a dead hero. The gorytos (quiver) hanging on the tree symbolizes
the marriage between the goddess and the hero, completing the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth
(p. 279).
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