Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

predatory nomads
have tended to be impressed by the cultural similarities spanning huge areas from
the Altai Mountains to the Great Hungarian Plain. In particular they note similar
styles of elite burials, the use of the bow and arrow in fighting from horseback, and a
highly distinctive animal art—three characteristics which some Russian archaeologists
have referred to as the Scythian triad. Others have preferred simply to stress the
similarities between the culture of the Scythians of the Pontic steppe and that of the
communities of the Altai–Sayan region, referring to the cultural continuum as the
Scythian–Siberian culture. These nomenclatures nicely focus on the central issue:
just how connected did the culture of the steppe become in the period from the mid
ninth to mid seventh century? Do the similarities we perceive represent, as many
would believe, a highly mobile situation with massive displacements of horse-riding
hordes spreading rapidly across the grasslands, jostling each other for position?
These are the issues we shall address in this chapter.
One River, Two Innovative Communities
The valley of the Yenisei River, which rises in the eastern Sayan mountains and flows
across the vastness of Siberia to the Arctic Ocean, can fairly claim to be the birthplace
of the horse-riding hordes that were to dominate the steppe. Threading its
way between the mountain ranges the river provided a corridor of communication
between the different communities occupying its basin and upland plateaus where
rich grasslands flourished and where the enclosing mountain slopes provided summer
pastures for the transhumant population and their animals. Two regions are of
crucial importance to the debate, the Minusinsk Basin which has already been mentioned
(above, pp. 77–9) and, further upriver, the Uyuk hollow in the region of Tuva
close to the northern border of Mongolia. The significance of the Minusinsk Basin is
that intensive archaeological research allows the social and economic development
of the region to be traced throughout the first millennium bc. The Tuva region is less
well known but the thorough excavation of aristocratic burials at Arzhan, the earliest
dating to about 800 bc, offers a vivid insight into the coercive power of the elite at an
early stage in the development of a rigid hierarchical system.
The study of pollen samples recovered from the Minusinsk Valley and the Uyuk
hollow in the Tuva region showed that the cool conditions which had characterized
the Karasuk culture started to change in the ninth century as the temperature
began steadily to rise, while at the same time the climate became increasingly more
4.1 (Opposite) The Yenisei River flows through the Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia. The Uyuk Hollow
in Tuva where the cemetery of Arzhan was located was upriver from the Minusinsk Valley, where
burial mounds of the Tagar culture proliferate.
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