Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

10
OF GODS, BELIEFS,
AND ART
The intricately tattooed torso and limbs of the slaughtered warrior buried in
kurgan 2 at Pazyryk immediately draw us into the wonder and energy of the
designs. The images are far from our experience and difficult for us to begin
to understand, yet they embody values and beliefs familiar to the man and his contemporaries,
packed with messages intelligible to his contemporaries. Similarly the
gold stag from Kostromskaya, with its antlers flowing across its body and legs neatly
tucked beneath would have been redolent with meaning to the warrior on whose
shield or gorytos it was emblazoned.
It is difficult for us now to arrive at an understanding of the religious beliefs and
practices of a non-literate people like the Scythians because, except in their imagery,
they have nowhere left a record of what they believed. Some attitudes to the ‘other
world’ are implicit in their burial practices revealed through excavations—these will
be considered later in Chapter 11—but to try to understand the Scythian world view
and to see how it impacted on human behaviour we are forced to rely largely on what
the few classical sources have chosen to communicate. At best they offer entertaining
anecdotes, usually unexplained, invariably incomplete, and filtered through the
values of the observer. That said, the insights provided by Herodotus and a few lesser
sources are invaluable, and when seen in the context of the belief systems of the wider
Indo-Iranian world, it is possible to begin to comprehend something of the Scythian
world view. However, given the ethereal nature of the evidence, and the ingenuity
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