Kul-Oba

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On the low hills northeast of Kerch, where the land falls away toward the strait that joins the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, a mound was being quarried for building stone in the autumn of 1830. The work cut into something the diggers had not looked for: a chamber of dressed limestone, roofed in stepped courses that climbed to a point, and within it a man laid out in the gold of a king. The mound bore a Crimean Tatar name, Kül Oba — the hill of ashes. It would give that name to a whole century of discovery, for nothing of its kind had yet been opened, and the people whose lord lay inside were known until that morning almost only from the page of a Greek who had written of them more than two thousand years before.

The mound on the strait

A kurgan is a grave made visible: a tomb built into the ground or upon it, then buried under a heaped dome of earth and stone so that the burial of a great one stands up from the plain as a landmark. Across the grasslands from the Danube to the Altai the Scythians and the peoples akin to them raised these mounds over their dead, and the largest of them — the houses of the royal dead — could rise to the height of a hill. Kul-Oba is one of the southern members of that family, set not on the open steppe but in the broken country above the strait, within sight of the ground where the Greek city of Panticapaeum had stood since the sixth century before our era. That nearness shaped the tomb. Panticapaeum was a Greek town with Greek masons, and the chamber under the mound was built in their manner: an almost square room, a little over four meters on a side, walled in cut stone and roofed by a corbel vault — courses of stone stepped inward, each oversailing the one below, until they closed some five meters overhead. The earth that covered it was Scythian; the architecture was Greek; the dead man was a Scythian who had drawn the southern city’s craft up into his own burial. That mixture is the keynote of the place.

The opening of Kul-Oba was an accident turned, almost in time, into a discovery. The mound was being mined for stone when the chamber was struck, and the two men who took charge of the work were Paul Du Brux, a French émigré who served as the customs officer at Kerch and kept a private museum of its antiquities, and Ivan Stempkovsky, the governor of the town and a patron of its archaeology. Their dig in 1830 was the first time a Scythian royal mound had been entered and recorded in the modern age; everything that the discipline of Scythian archaeology would later become began here, in a quarry, under two amateurs of the southern Crimean coast. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine sets the find plainly: the vault held “a Hellenized Scythian chieftain, his wife or courtesan, and his servant,” together with “several hundred gold trinkets,” gold diadems, ornamented weapons, collars and bracelets, and the silver and bronze ware of a princely grave (Encyclopedia of Ukraine).

Yet the dig was not clean, and the manner of its failure tells as much about Kul-Oba as the manner of its success. The excavators did not suspect a second cavity beneath the floor of the chamber, and when they had carried off what they had found and left the mound open, the buried wealth that remained drew the treasure-hunters of the district. One of them, by the recorded account, later confessed to Du Brux himself and surrendered his share — among it a length of gold neck-ring ending in a lion’s head, and a deer-shaped plaque that had once adorned a warrior’s shield, returned for a reward paid out of the imperial treasury. The richest objects, recovered or never lost, went north to the imperial collection at Saint Petersburg, where they became the founding nucleus of the Scythian holdings of the Hermitage. The mound that began the recovery of the steppe also gave the first lesson in how easily its gold could slip away.

The king, the queen, and the gold

What lay inside the chamber matched, point for point, a description set down in the fourth book of Herodotus — written in the fifth century before our era, generations before the mound was raised, by a Greek who had gathered what he could of the Scythians from the Black Sea ports. Herodotus tells how, when a Scythian king died, his body was prepared and carried in procession, and how he was laid in a great square pit with his possessions about him; and how others were sent into the grave to attend him — among them, in his account, a concubine and the servants of the household, with horses killed and buried near at hand. The arrangement under the Kul-Oba mound reads as that account in stone. By the east wall a man lay on a sumptuous wooden couch in the dress and arms of a Scythian lord, his neck ringed with a heavy gold torc, his bones sewn over with the small gold ornaments that had been fixed to his clothing. Beside him a woman — taken to be his wife or consort — lay in a sarcophagus of cypress and ivory, her head dressed in an electrum-mounted headdress. Against the south wall lay a third body, a servant or groom, and with the burial were the bones of horses. The retainer and the horses in the royal grave are exactly what Herodotus describes for the funerals of the Scythian kings; the chamber is the description made good.

That the archaeology so closely answers the text is itself a contested thing, and it should be marked as such. The Scythians left no writing of their own; what is known of their world reaches us along three separate roads, each at its own distance. The first is the foreign author — Herodotus above all, but also the later geographers and the Greek imagination of the wild northern people — who wrote from outside, with their own interests and their own appetite for the strange. The second is the archaeology itself, abundant and exact but mute, the gold and the bones that must be read by scholars who can put no name to a face. The third is the slow comparative study of language, the Scythian words and names traced through the Iranian tongue to which the people belonged. Kul-Oba is where the first two roads meet most closely — the foreign text and the dug grave standing side by side — and the meeting is striking enough that it must be handled with care rather than wonder. Herodotus wrote at a distance, from the Greek coast, of a people he did not live among; modern scholarship reads his royal-burial chapters neither as fable nor as transcript, but as a report to be weighed. The Kul-Oba dead are not labeled — no inscription names the man as a king, and whether he ruled, or merely stood among the highest rank of a ruling house, cannot be settled from the grave. What the chamber gives, beyond dispute, is a burial of the very first order, furnished in the manner the Greek source attributes to royalty. The match is real; the title is an inference, and is best held as one.

There is a further caution in the dating. The mound was raised in the fourth century before our era, in the years around and after 400, when the Scythian world of the northern Black Sea coast was bound tightly to the Greek cities of its shore — to Panticapaeum and the Bosporan kingdom whose kings ruled the strait. The gold in the grave was Greek-made for a Scythian master, and the chamber was Greek-built; the man inside had drawn the southern city’s wealth and craft into the oldest of Scythian rites, the heaping of the mound. Kul-Oba is therefore not a pure window onto the steppe but onto a frontier, where the nomad lord and the Greek workshop met. Much of what makes the gold legible to us — the human figures, the narrative scenes — is the Greek hand at work; much of what makes it Scythian is the choice of subject, the deer and the bow and the bearded riders, and the use to which it was put, sewn onto the dead and shut under the earth.

The objects are the heart of the find. Set near the woman’s feet lay a small rounded vessel of electrum — the pale gold-and-silver alloy — worked in relief with a frieze of bearded Scythians. They are shown not in battle but in a camp: one man strings a bow, bending it against his leg; another tends a companion’s mouth, drawing or treating a tooth; a third binds up a wounded leg; others sit in talk. The scene is among the most studied objects of the whole steppe world, and its reading is genuinely open. The Soviet scholar Dmitry Raevskii proposed that the frieze depicts the Scythian myth of origin that Herodotus records — the trial of the three sons of the first ancestor, who were set to string their father’s great bow, the two elder failing and taking the very injuries the vessel shows, a hurt to the jaw and to the calf, while only the youngest drew it and so won the kingship. On that reading the wounds are not field surgery but the marks of a failed test of royal fitness, and the bow-stringing is the founding act of the Scythian line. The reading is elegant and widely cited; it is also one interpretation among several, and none has carried the field. The World History Encyclopedia, presenting the piece, lets the description stand at the level of what is seen — a beaker showing Scythians in camp (World History Encyclopedia) — and that caution is the honest measure of the object.

The electrum vessel from Kul-Oba (second half of the 4th century BCE), with its frieze of bearded Scythians — one stringing a bow, another tending a companion’s mouth, a third binding a wounded leg; read by some as the myth of the bow-trial of the three sons. Joanbanjo, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

With the vessel came the animal-style gold for which the Scythians are known. The signal piece is a plaque in the form of a stag, lying with its legs gathered beneath its body and its head lifted, the great branched antlers laid back along the line of its spine — the recumbent deer that recurs across the steppe from the Black Sea to Siberia, here cast in gold and worked, in the developed manner, with smaller creatures shown within the body of the larger. The stag plaque was a shield ornament — the deer-shaped piece that the treasure-hunter confessed to taking was of this kind — and it is one of the touchstones of what scholars call the animal style: the steppe art that renders beasts in tense, compressed forms, prey and predator folded into one body, the curled antler and the tucked leg made into ornament. The recumbent stag had a weight beyond decoration; the deer recurs too often, and too pointedly, in the highest graves to be only a pattern, and is generally taken to have carried meaning for the people who wore it into death, though what that meaning was must be read from the objects and not from any word the Scythians left. Around the two great pieces lay the rest: gold torcs and bracelets, a gold disk of some weight, granulated earrings, diadems with their stamped plaques, and the thousands of small sewn ornaments that had once covered the clothing of the dead. Together they show the Scythians not as the Greeks pictured them — a wild people of the northern grass — but as they chose to show themselves, in the faces and dress of their own lords.

Gold from Kul-Oba — torcs, plaques and ornaments of the kind heaped in the chamber, the find that opened the steppe world to modern eyes. PHGCOM, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

What the mound began

The afterlife of Kul-Oba runs along three channels, and they are worth keeping apart. The first is the gold itself. Carried to Saint Petersburg in the years after 1830, the Kul-Oba objects became the seed of the imperial Scythian collection, around which the great holdings of the Hermitage grew as mound after mound was opened across the Pontic steppe through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hermitage Museum). The electrum vessel and the stag are not stored curiosities; they are among the defining objects by which the steppe’s art is taught and known, and the museum that holds them was built, in its Scythian wing, on the back of this one mound.

The second channel is the long study of the objects as evidence. The vessel’s camp-scene and the recumbent stag have been the working ground for more than a century of argument about Scythian narrative and the animal style — about whether the frieze tells the origin-myth, about what the deer meant, about how far the Greek workmanship of Panticapaeum stands between us and any purely Scythian image. A modern electrotype of the stag plaque was made to carry the design beyond the original, and copies of it sit in collections far from the Hermitage; the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one such reproduction, cataloged as a Scythian reclining stag after the Kul-Oba original of the fourth century before our era (The Met). The objects have outlived their single chamber to become common property of the study of the steppe.

The third channel is the place of the mound in the recovery of a people. Before 1830 the Scythians were a literary nation — a chapter of Herodotus, a name in the geographers, a byword in the Greek and Roman imagination for the wild edge of the world. Kul-Oba gave them bodies, faces, and gold; it set the first modern eyes on the splendor of the steppe kings and proved that the spare and distant account of the funerals — the lord laid out, the woman beside him, the servant and the horses — answered to something that had truly been done. Every royal mound opened since, Solokha on the Dnieper with its golden comb, Tolstaya Mogila with its pectoral, the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the Altai, stands in the line that this one began. The mound on the strait was quarried for its stone and dug for its gold, and what came out of it was the first chapter of the steppe’s own record — not the page the Greeks had written of the Scythians, but the houses the Scythians had built for their dead.

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