Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
he received the friendship and active encouragement of Ellis Minns. Thus it was
that in the second decade of the twentieth century Scythian studies came of age. In
1923 a special journal, Skythica, was launched in Prague. One of the papers in the first
volume, ‘Central Asia, Russia and the Animal Style’, was contributed by Rostovtzeff.
Meanwhile in Siberia
The Russian fascination with Siberia in the eighteenth century led, as we have seen, to
state organized expeditions. As the potential of the region became better known and
Russian authority was established, educated men gravitated to the area to settle and to
work. One such was Petr Frolov, a trained mining engineer who, in 1793, was sent to the
silver mine at Zmeinogorsk in the Barnaul District, situated in the Altai Mountains of
Siberia. He worked in the mines until 1830 developing new machinery to improve efficiency,
and among his many achievements built the first cast iron railway in Russia,
designed to move ore from the mine to the smelting works two kilometres away. To
while away the long Siberian winters he engaged in a wide range of cultural activities,
collecting antiquities, geological samples, manuscripts, and scientific instruments. In
1823, in partnership with the explorer and ethnographer, F. V. Gabler, he founded the
Barnaul Mining Museum. Among the artefacts he was able to acquire from the local
peasants were bone and wood carvings, mostly in Siberian animal style, which had
been dug out of the kurgans. They dated from the fifth to third centuries bc. What was
remarkable was the unusual state of preservation of these organic materials.
By the mid nineteenth century Barnaul had become a thriving cultural centre,
its energy deriving from the rich deposits of copper and silver in the nearby
mountains. One person attracted there was the German-born Vasily Radlov, who,
as a young man, became a schoolteacher in the city. Radlov developed an interest in
the ethnography and folklore of the region and went on to become an expert in the
Turkic languages. Later in life he played a part in the establishment of the Russian
Museum of Ethnography and eventually, in 1884, became director of the Asiatic
Museum in St Petersburg. During his years in Barnaul he would have become familiar
with the wooden animal carvings from the Altai kurgans on display in the museum
and, no doubt, heard stories about their discovery. In 1865 he decided to explore the
kurgans for himself, choosing two for excavation, one near the village of Katanda
and the other on the Berel River. In both he found that the ground beneath the
mound of stones of which the kurgan was constructed was permanently frozen and
it was this that had preserved all the organic material buried with the deceased in
the wooden burial chamber below. Among the objects he recovered were wooden
carvings, some of them covered with gold sheet, fur clothing, and Chinese silk. It was
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