Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

of gods, beliefs, and art
10.20 Detail from the gold pectoral from Tolstaya mogila. Two winged griffins attack a horse. This is part
of a zone of figures representing scenes of predation (see Gallery, no. 9).
ence the animals change: the snow leopard-like feline morphs into a lion, while the
raptor bird becomes a winged griffin. Even the stag, a great, majestic beast, becomes
a docile deer or sometimes a horse or a ram. Yet for all the changes the central
theme remains, the fight to the death between predator and prey. The sophisticated
Scythian aristocracy living around the Black Sea coasts from the fifth century were
immersed in images of it. The ferocity of the conflict is brilliantly displayed on a
series of gold plaques from the Seven Brothers kurgan in the Kuban showing deer
and rams impassively, almost stoically, waiting while lions and other winged beasts
begin to devour them. In one even more spirited scene, comprising the lower register
of the gold pectoral from Tolstaya mogila dating to the second half of the fourth
century (Gallery, no. 9), lions and cheetahs attack stags and pigs, while in the centre
two huge winged griffins have descended on a horse and are beginning to tear it to
pieces. The violence and sheer horror of the carnage contrasts dramatically with the
upper register, a bucolic scene celebrating the symbiosis between humans and their
domesticated animals. It is difficult to resist the suggestion that the designer was setting
out to counterpoint the harmony of the world of humans with the conflict of
the supernatural world, though perhaps there was a more subtle message implied—
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