Solokha

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Eighteen kilometers downriver from the modern town of Kamianka-Dniprovska, on the left bank of the lower Dnieper and across the water from Nikopol, a mound stands up from the flat grassland to the height of a six-story building. It is some nineteen meters tall and a hundred across at the base, a dome of heaped earth that the centuries have rounded and grassed over until it reads as a low hill among hills. The country people called it Solokha, a woman’s name, and the name has stayed with it. Beneath it lay a Scythian king, and beside him, in a grave the robbers of antiquity never reached, lay the small golden object on which the whole drama of a steppe battle is held in the span of a hand.

The mound by the river

A kurgan is the steppe’s way of giving a death an address. The nomad households of the Pontic grassland moved with their herds and built nothing to last, but the dead were fixed in place: a great one was laid in a pit cut deep into the earth, his goods set around him, and over the closed grave the people raised a heaped dome of soil and turf, so that the burial stood up from the level plain as a marker visible for a day’s ride. Across the grasslands from the Danube to the Altai the Scythians and the peoples akin to them built these mounds, and the largest of them — the houses of the royal dead — rose like small hills above the country they had ruled. Solokha is one of the great ones, raised at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era over the grave of a king of the steppe.

It sits in the open country east of the Dnieper, in what is now Kamianka-Dniprovska Raion in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, near the village of Velyka Znamianka. The precise spot is hard to fix from the published record alone: the coordinate carried in the reference works is given to the round arcminute — a figure of the order of 47°20′ north and 34°20′ east — and that coarseness is a caution worth keeping. What is certain is the setting: the left bank of the lower river, in the belt of royal mounds that follows the Dnieper down toward its mouth, the same stretch of steppe that holds Tolstaya Mogila and the great mound of Chertomlyk. This was the heartland of the Scythian kings whom the Greek colonies of the coast knew and traded with, and the density of royal barrows here is the steppe equivalent of a dynastic cemetery.

The mound was opened in two seasons, in 1912 and 1913, by Nikolai Veselovsky, working for the imperial archaeological commission. Veselovsky was the most experienced kurgan-digger of his generation, a man who had cut into scores of the southern mounds, and Solokha was among his largest undertakings. The barrow he attacked was no small heap: it stood, by the published figures, nineteen meters high and roughly a hundred across at the base (Solokha, in the Internet record), a mass of earth that men had carried up basket by basket over a single grave. Two burials came to light beneath the single dome. The first, the central and principal grave, had been entered and stripped in antiquity — the fate of nearly every rich Scythian mound, whose builders heaped a landmark over their gold and so advertised it to every later age. What the robbers left in the central chamber was enough to show its standing: the remains of a high burial, two horses in their trappings, the wreckage of a plundered royal grave. The second burial lay to the side. This lateral grave the diggers found intact, sealed and untouched since the day it was closed, and it is from this side-grave that the treasure of Solokha came.

The mound’s afterlife began at the moment of the dig. A find of this order, made on the eve of a long convulsion in the region’s history, was lifted whole and carried north into the imperial collections, and the gold of Solokha entered the museum record almost before the mound was closed again. The contrast between the patience of the burial — the years of labor that raised the dome — and the speed of its undoing is the standing irony of kurgan archaeology, and Solokha is one of its clearest cases.

What the side-grave held

The untouched lateral grave held a man laid out as a Scythian lord, and the account of his burial reads, point for point, as the steppe’s own confirmation of a rite that Herodotus had described in the fifth century before our era — generations before this mound was raised, by a Greek who gathered what he could of the Scythians at the Black Sea ports. In the fourth book of his Histories he tells how, when a Scythian king died, his body was carried in procession and laid in a great pit with his possessions about him, and how others were sent down to attend him into the ground — a cup-bearer and servants of the household, with horses killed and laid near at hand. Under the Solokha mound the arrangement answers that description: the dead man lay covered in gold, and with him were laid his weapon-bearer, a servant, and five horses. That the spade should keep meeting the funeral Herodotus reported from hearsay is one of the steady surprises of steppe archaeology; the rite is read here at his distance and on his word, as he set it down, not as anything the mound itself can be made to say.

The man was buried in his war-gear and his wealth. He wore bronze greaves on his shins and a bronze helmet; at his side lay a short sword — the akinakes, the Scythian blade that was both a weapon and, in the sword-cult Herodotus describes, the iron in which the war-god of the steppe was honored — sheathed in a scabbard sheltered under sheets of worked gold. A quiver covered in silver held some eighty bronze arrowheads, the small three-edged points the steppe made by the thousand. There was a silver cup among the vessels, and the gold that had been sewn over his clothing and worn on his body, the ornament of a great burial. The objects went, soon after they were lifted, into the imperial collections in St Petersburg, where they remain among the steppe treasures of the Hermitage.

The golden comb from the Solokha kurgan, c. 430–390 BCE, now in the Hermitage. Photograph by Levan Ramishvili, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Among it all was the comb. It is a small thing, a little over twelve and a half centimeters tall and just over ten across — a working comb, with a row of sturdy teeth along its base, the kind a person would draw through the hair. But above the teeth the gold rises into a sculptured group worked in such relief on both faces that it reads almost in the round: three warriors in the act of a fight. On the left a Scythian rides, a second man on foot behind him as his squire; their opponent, on the right, has been thrown from his horse — the animal lies fallen on its back — and fights now from the ground, his shield up, his sword raised against the horseman bearing down on him. Below the figures a row of crouching lions runs as a base, and the whole composition, balanced and pedimented, has reminded more than one observer of the sculptured gable of a Greek temple (a close description of the comb). The drama of an entire steppe engagement — the charge, the unhorsing, the last stand on foot — is compressed into the breadth of a palm, and held there without a wasted line.

The detail bears looking into, for it is the detail that carries the conviction. The fallen horse is not a symbol of defeat but an observed animal, legs in the air, the line of its belly and the strain of its neck caught as a maker catches them who has watched a horse go down. The unhorsed warrior braces on one knee with his shield brought across his body, his sword already lifted, in the posture of a man who knows he has one stroke left to make. The mounted Scythian leans into his thrust; his squire steadies behind him. None of the three faces the viewer; the scene is wholly turned inward upon itself, an action complete and self-contained, indifferent to being watched. That self-sufficiency — the figures absorbed in their own fight, the gold giving back nothing to the eye that looks for an audience — is what lifts the comb above ornament and into the small company of objects that are, in the full sense, sculpture.

The Greek hand and the Scythian scene

The comb is read now as the meeting of two worlds in a single object. The hand is Greek. The modeling of the bodies, the anatomy of the fallen horse, the temple-gable balance of the group, the very conception of a narrative scene built like a relief — all of this belongs to the workshops of the Greek cities of the northern Black Sea, the poleis of the coast where artisans worked in precious metal for whoever could pay. The workmanship has been placed in the last quarter of the fifth century before our era; some have gone so far as to set the mounted figure beside a particular Athenian grave-relief, the stele of Dexileos of about 394, to argue the closeness of the two traditions. The scene, on the other hand, is Scythian to the bone: these are steppe warriors in steppe dress, fighting a steppe fight, kitted in the gear the mounds themselves give up. The comb is what a Greek goldsmith made when a Scythian patron set the subject — the Greek eye and the Scythian world, fused so completely that the seam between them is the whole interest of the object.

Whether the men on the crest enact a particular story is less certain, and honesty requires the distinction be kept. The great Black Sea golds carry scenes that scholars have long wanted to read as Scythian myth or legend — the trial of the king’s sons, the origin of the royal line, an episode of war remembered in the tribe — and for some of them, the Kul-Oba vessel above all, such readings have been proposed and argued. For the Solokha comb the scene is plainly a combat of three; beyond that, what it commemorates, whether a named encounter or the generic glory of the mounted warrior, the gold does not tell, and no reading has settled the matter. The object is at once entirely legible and finally silent: one can see exactly what is happening and not know what it means.

The robbed central grave keeps its own question. The reference works report the principal burial as that of a woman — a female ruler laid with two horses in rich attire — while the intact side-grave held the man with the comb. If that reading holds, Solokha set a queen or a great lady in its principal chamber and a king or prince at its side, and the relation between the two is past recovering: which was raised for whom, and in what order, the plundered mound will not say. The identity of either is lost. The Scythians named no one on their graves, and the king of Solokha, like nearly every steppe lord, comes to us faceless and without a name — known only by the gold he was sent into the ground with, and by the small fierce battle his goldsmith set above his comb.

The afterlife of the comb

Solokha’s afterlife runs first through the comb itself, which became almost at once one of the most reproduced objects of all Scythian art. It is among the showpieces of the Hermitage’s gold collection, set with the steppe treasures gathered from the southern mounds, and through photograph and cast and catalog it has carried the image of the steppe battle into every general account of the Scythians and of ancient gold. When a modern reader pictures a Scythian warrior, the picture owes a great deal to this hand-sized relief — to its riders and its fallen horse and its last man fighting from the ground.

It runs, second, through the standing of Solokha as a type-site. The mound is one of the canonical fourth-century royal kurgans of the lower Dnieper, and the pattern it shows — the single great dome over more than one grave; the principal chamber robbed in antiquity and a lateral grave that escaped; the king laid in his gold with his arms, his attendants, and his horses — recurs across the belt of royal mounds and became part of how the type is understood. That the richest gold should come not from the central grave but from a side-burial the robbers overlooked is itself a lesson the excavators carried forward: in a plundered mound the margins are where the untouched treasure hides, and Solokha taught it as plainly as any dig of its age. Veselovsky’s two seasons here, in 1912 and 1913, belong to the heroic age of kurgan excavation in the south, the decades in which the steppe began to give back its dead in quantity.

And it runs, third, through the line of the great mounds that have returned the steppe kings their faces. Solokha stands in that company: after Kul-Oba, the first of the royal mounds opened, in 1830 above the Crimean strait, with its electrum vessel and its gold stag; before Tolstaya Mogila on the same lower-Dnieper steppe, dug in 1971, with the great gold pectoral on which the steppe world is set out in tiers; alongside the frozen tombs of Pazyryk in the distant Altai, where the cold kept the felt and the carpets and the buried horses that the southern mounds could not preserve. These are the houses of the steppe dead, and Solokha is one of the richest of them. The Scythians wrote nothing of themselves; their gods come to us as a bare list of names in Herodotus, the hearth-queen Tabiti and the sky-father Papaios and the earth-and-water mother Api among them, read across a great distance and a foreign tongue. What the kings could not say in words their goldsmiths said in gold, and on the crest of the Solokha comb three warriors fight a battle that has lasted, in silence, for twenty-four centuries.

→ Related: Kul Oba · Tolstaya Mogila · Pazyryk · Scythians · The Sarmatians · The Saka · The Cimmerians · Tabiti · Papaios · Api Goddess · Argimpasa · Goitosyros · Herodotus