Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  All this means that the time has come for a new Count Bobrinskoy. In his own day of revelation, the count realised that so many of the young warriors at the end of his spade were not men (his predecessors had been so sure of the warriors' maleness that they had not bothered to examine or, often, even to keep their bones) but women. Now it is time to take a much closer look at the bones of queens, priestesses and important women in general, lying among their cosmetics and the remains of expensive dresses and tiaras. Some of them could turn out to be men: Enareis transvestites and gender-crossing mediums who have deceived another generation of far more sophisticated archaeologists.

  Volodya and Yura Guguev are still young men. They were brought up as children at Alexandrovka, a new housing scheme on the north-eastern fringes of the city of Rostov. In those days, the 1960s, some green open space was still left there, and the boys used to play on the mounds of Kobiakov, a few hundred yards from their home, on the road to the old Don ferry at Aksai.

  They both became archaeologists. Volodya was introduced to his career at Tanais, where he used to join the visiting expeditions each summer, but the burial mounds at Kobiakov never let his imagination rest. He went back to them after graduating, mapped the whole site and obtained permission to begin formal excavation.

  It was the last possible moment to do so. Rostov was expanding again; the Kobiakov site was to be levelled for a new riverside expressway, and it was already being destroyed by garbage-tipping and temporary barracks for construction workers. Volodya did what rescue-archaeology he could: he found traces of settlements and kitchen-middens as well as several hundred graves dated between the Bronze Age and the Roman period. In the summer of 1988 he started work on 'Kobiakov 10', a burial site which had been flattened out in recent times but which had once been covered by a small kurgan three metres high.

  Almost all kurgans have been robbed, some repeatedly, some within a year or so of the burial, but Kobiakov 10 had been left alone or overlooked. Volodya Guguev found a square pit - a room cut into the earth — and on its floor lay the skeleton of a young woman on her back.

  She was a Sarmatian, aged between twenty and twenty-five, who had died some time in the second century AD. Her head had been crowned with a diadem of gold-foil stags, birds and trees. She had bracelets, a ring, an axe and horse-harnesses. Around her neck was a huge rigid collar of pierced and chiselled gold, encrusted with turquoises and decorated with a series of unknown magical creatures: dragons fighting with what seem to be monkeys in armour who hold clubs. In the centre of the collar was one of those works of art which, once seen, carry out a small but irreversible coup in the mind: a serene, golden, cross-legged man, his beard and hair carefully combed, a sword laid across his lap, a cup nursed in his two hands.

  All these objects are now to be seen in the treasury of the Rostov Museum. Volodya Guguev studies the antecedents of the jewellery, which he recognises to be Central Asian — the great collar perhaps drawn from some distant central treasury between Tashkent and Afghanistan - and of the Indo-Iranian mythology represented by the golden man and the armoured monkeys. The Kobiakov find has made him well-known and respected in his profession. But when I met him at Tanais several years ago, he was still working as a discjockey in Rostov in order to earn a minimal living. (At that time, to change a £50 traveller's cheque into roubles was to have the annual salary of two professors of Byzantinology in your pocket.)

  She was a princess or a queen — a woman from some great family who had attributes of a priestess, for almost everything left in the darkness with her had magical significance. Yet I have heard Volodya and his brother Yura speak with deep emotion of 'the poor princess'. Archaeologists are not immune to unscientific feelings about the dead, and this was not a usual case.

  As a child, Volodya Guguev had run and played on the grass over her head. As a boy, he had wondered who and what might be hidden under the Kobiakov mounds. In the end, when he had grown into a good-looking young man, a flower in the chivalry of Russian science, he had found his way to this sleeping princess who had given him everything: fame as an excavator, national respect as a scholar, moments of incredulous joy and revelation of the kind which do not come twice in a lifetime.

  She had given him her treasure which, had he been a wicked man, could have been melted down and transformed into enough bullion to buy him a Manhattan penthouse and a life of leisure. She had given him her faith, a puzzle which might, if he chose, preoccupy the rest of his days. In the end, when there was nothing else left at the bottom of the pit, she had given him what was left of her twenty-year-old body.

  Not quite all her bones were there. Some of the very smallest phalanges, the most delicate finger-tip bones, were missing. I saw that this was distressing to Volodya, and we did not pursue it. But his younger brother Yura, one rainy day at Tanais, showed me the colour video of the excavation at Kobiakov 10, and mentioned that he and his brother were divided on this problem of the phalanges. His own view was that they had been gnawed off and removed by mice soon after the burial, something fairly common in chambered graves without coffins. Volodya, however, did not accept this. He preferred to think that the finger-tips had been ritually severed just after death, perhaps in some ceremony to exorcise the living from the touch of the dead. He could not bear the idea of the mice.

  Chapter Five

  We therefore went on towards the east, seeing nothing but heaven and earth, and sometimes the sea on our right hand, called the sea of Tanais, and the sepulchres of the Comanians [Cumans], which appeared to us two leagues off, in which places they were wont to bury their kindred all together . ..

  The Comanians build a great tomb over their dead, and erect the image of the dead party thereupon, with his face towards the east, holding a drinking cup in his hand, before his navel.

  Friar William de Rubruck, 'Journal’,

  THE FIVE BROTHERS are kurgans. They are a group of burial mounds standing on a patch of dry land in the middle of the Don delta. From the summit of the tallest Brother, still some twenty feet high, you can see the golden onion spires of Rostov Cathedral seven miles to the east, and to the south, the cranes and grain elevators of Azov.

  Under this kurgan, although it had been looted by tomb-robbers in antiquity, Soviet excavators found part of the primary burial intact. It was 'royal': the tomb of a male Scythian ruler who had died some time in the fourth century BC It contained a huge gorytus, the combined quiver and bow-case which Scythian men and women carried slung on their hips, made out of silver and gold and embossed by a Greek goldsmith with scenes from the myth of Achilles.

  But when I went to see the Five Brothers, expecting the usual Ossianic setting of emptiness and loneliness, I was astonished to find that this biggest Brother is still in use as a village cemetery. A wavering plank fence surrounds its base. The kurgan itself is covered with weeds, bushes and Russian Orthodox graves: white stones leaning at all angles, many decorated with little photographs under glass, some topped with double Cyrillic crosses of rusty ironwork. The most recent of these graves, still strewn with faded flowers, was only a few months old; the first burial on this site, well before the mound was raised to cover the Scythian and his gorytus, had been dated to the Bronze Age. This mound has been in use as a necropolis for some four thousand years.

  The continuity puzzled me at first. Even in southern England, where villages like to think that they have an unbroken collective memory reaching back at least to the Saxon invasions, I have never seen a Wiltshire long-barrow — for example—still in use as a Church of England graveyard. By contrast, the Pontic Steppe, with its open, oceanic horizons, had been a place of constant movement and change; each new population might have been expected to wash away all traces of its predecessors rather than to accumulate its own debris on theirs.

  But in the end I saw where I had gone wrong. Crossing the steppes behind Olbia, looking at the burial mounds notching the infinite straight skylines, I realised how kurgans concentrate meaning. In a featureless
place, they are the only features. Once they have been raised, it becomes inevitable that any act with human significance will be done on them, under them or around them. To lay a dead body anywhere else on the steppe would be an abandonment, a burial at sea. And the kurgans are not only funerary monuments but also beacons of hope. This is in part because they have always served as landmarks to lost travellers. But it is, above all, because in the kurgans there is gold.

  The presence of treasure was always known. Many kurgans were looted by tunnellers soon after they were built; their sheer size and wealth made robbery inevitable, once the clan-relatives of the dead had moved away or lost control of the region. The Sarmatians, especially, took this into account and often constructed secret recesses for gold and jewellery sealed into the walls of the tomb chamber.

  The scale of the bigger kurgans required professional mining skills from the robbers, some of whom left their own corpses in collapsed tunnels. These mounds could be sixty feet high, and fifty-foot vertical shafts gave access to long horizontal passages leading to the central chamber. Such an underground 'house' and its anterooms often contained human sacrifices: servants and guards or — sometimes — wives killed in a form of suttee. Food was left for the dead inside the chamber, and consumed in gargantuan quantities during funeral feasts around the kurgatv. theTolstoya mound in the Kuban held in its outer ditch cattle and horse bones which corresponded to almost six and a half tons of meat. Herodotus, in his famous account of the details of a Scythian royal funeral ritual, described how the mound was surrounded by a ring of dead, straw-stuffed riders mounted on dead horses and all impaled so that they would not collapse as they decayed. It is very possible that, when he was at Olbia, Herodotus heard a version of the gigantic ceremonies which had taken place some decades earlier at the Ulskii Aul kurgart in the Kuban. When the Russian archaeologist N. I. Veselovsky opened the Ulskii mound in the nineteenth century, he found the remains of 360 horses, tethered around stakes in groups of eighteen and forming a ring under the outer circumference of the mound.

  It is not easy to disentangle the two attitudes of later populations to the kurgans: the impulse to 'desecrate' and plunder them, and the impulse to accept them as sacred places and re-use them for burials. The mounds were plainly a resource of treasure, but extracting it would usually have been too long and difficult an operation either for casual nomad visitors or for gangs acting in a clandestine, 'criminal' context. Many of the tomb robbers may well have been official concessionaires charged by some recent conqueror to gather bullion for him.

  At the same time, it was obvious that the gold and jewellery had been deliberately placed in these mounds by some vanished race. The general taboo against disturbing the dead must have discouraged local initiatives to break into the kurgans, apart from the technical problems of gaining access. It may be that a certain pattern developed: that in new conquered steppe territory there would be a wave of officially sanctioned digging for treasure, but that afterwards the kurgans would be assimilated to the cults of the incomers and would reassert their 'sanctity'. The re-use is striking enough. The Scythians, or at least some Scythian groups, had erected life-sized stone figures on the top of their burial mounds. This was imitated more than a thousand years later by the Kipchaks (Cumans), a Turkic-speaking nomad people who arrived from Central Asia and controlled the Pontic Steppe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding their own burials to Scythian mounds, the Kipchaks carved their own crude and sinister stone colossi, sometimes set upright on the summit of the tumulus but on occasion buried horizontally just under the surface. As late as the nineteenth century, many kurgans were still crowned by these stone 'babas', men or women with flat, scowling features and tall headdresses who hold cups in their lap. Then the new landowners began to remove them as 'idols' or 'curios', and today few south Russian or Ukrainian museums lack a row of Kipchak giants, usually parked in the museum garden.

  The mediaeval Italian colonists on the Black Sea had no inhibitions about the sanctity of the kurgans. The stories of buried treasure obsessed them. Giosafat Barbaro, a Franciscan monk, was a prominent businessman in the Venetian community at Tana when, in 1437, an Egyptian acquaintance told him about the great treasure of indiabu', last King of the Alans (Sarmatians). This treasure was supposed to be hidden inside a tumulus called 'Kontebbe' (possibly a version of the Turkic words for sand-mound), some twenty miles up the Don River from Tana near what is now the site of Rostov.

  Barbaro (whose travel memoirs were wonderfully translated in the sixteenth century by William Thomas) at once organised a treasure venture. He signed up a partnership with a few other Venetian and Jewish merchants, took a hundred and twenty labourers up the frozen river by sledge, and tried to dig into the 'little hyIP of Kontebbe. Defeated by the frost, they retreated to Tana and returned in March after the start of the thaw. Barbaro and his men were now able to drive an enormous railway-cutting of a trench into the mound with pick and mattock, but they were completely disconcerted by what they found.

  Next unto the grasse the earth was blacke. Then next unto that all was coles. .. under this were asshes a spanne deep, and this is also possible, for having reades there by which they might burne, it was no great matter to make asshes. Then were there rynds of miglio [millet] an other spanne deepe, and bicause it may be said that they of the cuntry lyved with breade made of miglio and saved the rynds to bestowe in this place, I wolde faine knowe what proportion of miglio wolde furnishe that quantitie to cover such an hill of so great a breadth with the onlie rynds thereof for a spanne deepe? Under this an other spanne deepe were skales of fishe as of carpes and such other.

  The treasure never showed up. Barbaro and his partners had to be content with 'halfe the handle of a little ewer of silver, made with an adders hedde on the toppe'. Meanwhile the weather had broken. 'Finally in the passion weeke the east winde beganne to blowe so vehemently that it raysed the earth with the stoanes and cloddes that had been digged and threwe them in the workemens faces that the blowwde followed. Wherfore we determined to leave of and to prove no further.'

  It turns out that Barbaro was not digging into a burial mound or treasure cache at all. Without knowing it, he was cutting into a huge kitchen midden raised over centuries by Maeotian river fishermen and their families, and when the Russian archaeologist A. A. Miller excavated the settlement in the 19 x0s, he found the remains of the Venetian pit in exactly the dimensions given by Barbaro in his book. The fish scales and ash were still there, though the millet husks could no longer be found. Barbaro at least deserves admiration for the quality of his recording and measuring. But he is also entitled to some sympathy. The Kontebbe mound is at Kobiakov. Only a few hundred yards away, as Barbaro's team shovelled away in the frost and east wind, a Sarmatian princess was lying in the darkness among enough gold and jewellery to pay for a new basilica in Venice. But she was waiting for Volodya Guguev.

  Barbaro failed. But the narrative of his failure contributes as much to knowledge as any 'Alan gold' he might have unearthed. It demonstrates, once again, that treasure-hunting in kurgans was a serious economic activity in the Pontic Steppe as early as the fifteenth century. It also confirms that breaking into a Scythian kurgan (as opposed to the later activity of looting Greek sites, which was far easier) was a substantial enterprise which required, and could be worth, a big investment of time and labour.

  The kurgans came to be regarded as a natural resource — a form of mine. This was not true at all times nor for everyone, as we have seen. It is striking, for example, that Barbaro implies that only foreigners went on organised treasure expeditions, whereas the Tatar-Mongols appear to have left the kurgans alone. But all inhibitions broke down when Russian power expanded into Siberia and then to the Black Sea and the southern steppe zones. Russian officers and landowners, followed by huge settlements of discharged soldiers, exiles or transported peasants from central and northern Russia, treated the burial mounds as if they were mineral outcrops. In our own time, especially in
the West with its frantic concern for historical conservation and 'national heritage', it has become unimaginable that anyone could treat monuments of the human past as a geological resource available for exploitation, like a gravel-pit or a peat-moss. But these are recent, sophisticated distinctions. Few beyond a tiny, educated minority drew such distinctions in the past, and the truth is that, in spite of the way in which archaeological 'heritage' has been assimilated into nationalist ideology, few outside Europe and North America draw them even today.

  What took place in the steppes of the Russian Empire was one of the catastrophes of Eurasian culture. By the late seventeenth century, large armed bands of Russians were already living as professional tomb-robbers in the new Siberian territories. In 1718, Peter the Great decreed that all archaeological artefacts should be remitted to local governors, accompanied by a sketch of their place of discovery; little notice was taken of this, although enough was recovered from kurgan-robbers to form the nucleus of the imperial collections at St Petersburg. But when Russian settlement began along the Black Sea shores at the end of the eighteenth century, plunder became a regular occupation not just for magnates or bandits but for ordinary immigrant villagers. The Cossacks especially found a new source of wealth here, and they violated not only the kurgans of the grasslands but the more accessible and vulnerable remains of the Greek coastal cities and their hinterland. The magnificent stone-built tombs and catacombs of the Bosporan Kingdom were vandalised and their contents stolen; the surviving walls, towers and monuments of colonies like Tanais and Olbia were pulled down and used as building material. Landowners had title to what was found on their estates, and as Mikhail Miller wrote in his Archaeology in the USSR, 'a large number of landowners, having serf labour at their disposal .. . excavated kurgans all through the nineteenth century out of boredom or curiosity'. Captain Pulentsov, a Cossack, became famous because he dreamed of a buried treasure and then spent the next twenty years frantically digging holes in the Taman Peninsula wherever the lie of the land vaguely recalled his dream (in the end, by pure accident, he found a valuable and unusual coin hoard). In such a climate, it was little short of a miracle that a class of devoted archaeologists emerged in Russia, at first amateurs but later scientifically minded professionals, who were able to rescue so much material and knowledge and to introduce systematic excavation and recording.