Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the way of death
11.8 The Elizavetinskaya kurgan excavated in 1914. The six-wheeled
hearse and the bodies of the six horses which pulled it were buried in
the entrance passage. Other horses and retainers were buried outside
the main burial chamber.
age to require large numbers of the followers to invest
their otherwise productive effort in monument building.
The greater the monument, the greater the human
energy embedded in it. Although the prime function
of mound-building was to display coercive power, it
had other benefits. The process of construction, which
involved the organization of large numbers of people
working to a common end over a considerable period
of time, was an act of bonding. It was a major event that
would have remained vivid in the minds of those who
had taken part and for generations the great mound
would have served as a time mark in the folk memory of
the people, one redolent of their social cohesion. Other,
more practical advantages would have been to deter the
activities of grave robbers and, perhaps, to give some
assurance that the spirit of the dead king would find it
difficult to return to the world of the living.
The material for building the mounds was not derived
from deep surrounding ditches or nearby quarries but
came largely from turves cut from the surrounding
grassland. The recent, careful, excavation of the barrow
mound at Chertomlÿk allowed the individual turves
from which the structure had been built to be identified
and it was estimated that since the volume of the mound
was about 80,000 cubic m it would have required more
time than a million individual turves to complete. To
build Tolstaya mogila, which was significantly smaller
at 15,000 cubic m, about 100,000 square m of grassland
must have been stripped of turf, soil analysis showing that some of it must have
come from at least 4 km away. Since the black earth—the natural soil of much of the
steppe—was at least a metre thick and could easily have been quarried from nearby,
to build the mounds largely of turf requiring transport over considerable distances
was an unnecessary labour. It must have been done for purely symbolic reasons, with
the mound perceived to be encapsulating the pasture land of the dead king.
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