Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
Broadening Horizons: The Black Sea
By the middle of the eighteenth century educated people with access to the Siberian
collection were becoming familiar with the distinctive animal art of Siberia so vividly
depicted on metalwork recovered from the kurgans scattered across the steppe. The
Russian military advance to the Black Sea during the reign of Catherine the Great
(1762–1796) brought many more kurgans into the Russian sphere and their potential
for producing spectacular finds was not lost on the Russian elite now commanding
the new territories. One such was General Alexei Petrovich Melgunov (1722–1788),
governor of Novorossiysk, a province of the Ukraine. In 1763 he opened several kurgans
at Litoy in the vicinity of Kirovograd, finding in one of them a rich burial of the
late seventh or early sixth century bc. It was accompanied by a short iron sword (akinakes)
in a gold scabbard decorated with fantastic animals. Such weapons are typical
1.6 At the end of the eighteenth century silver mines were being developed at Zmeinogorsk in the Barnaul
District in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. One of the mining engineers was Petr Frolov, who was also an
avid collector. Among the antiquities he accumulated were bone and wooden carvings dug out of local kurgans.
This bone plaque from the Frolov collection, showing a tiger, dates from the fifth to third centuries bc.
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