Tolstaya Mogila

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A herdsman crossing the open ground north of the Dnieper bend would once have seen the mound from a long way off: a broad swell of earth standing alone above the flat grassland, higher than a house, the kind of rise the steppe people raised over a king. The local Ukrainian name for it was plain — Tovsta Mohyla, the thick or fat grave-mound — and that is the name it kept when the spade reached it, rendered into Russian as Tolstaya Mogila. It sits in the lower-Dnieper steppe near the town of Pokrov, in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, among the dense field of Scythian kurgans that crowd the river’s lower course. For more than two thousand years it held its dead in the dark. Then, in the summer of 1971, it was opened, and out of one unrobbed corner of it came the single most celebrated object the steppe world has left behind.

The mound and its opening

The kurgan — the steppe burial-mound, a raised tumulus of earth heaped over a shaft and its chambers — is the characteristic monument of the Scythian dead, and the lower Dnieper carries some of the largest. Tolstaya Mogila belongs to the fourth century before our era, the period when the royal Scythians of the Pontic steppe were at the height of their wealth, trading grain and slaves and gold-work with the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast and burying their lords with a magnificence that has no parallel north of the ancient Mediterranean world.

The man who opened it was Borys Mozolevsky (1936–1993), a Ukrainian archaeologist and poet attached to the Institute of Archaeology in Kyiv. His was an unlikely path to the work: he had studied at the university in Kyiv by correspondence while earning his living as a stoker, and he came to the Scythian mounds as an outsider who had to prove himself. By his own later account the stakes at Tolstaya Mogila were personal as well as scholarly — “only a discovery of world significance could save me,” he wrote of the season — and the mound gave him exactly that. Excavation began in 1971. As at so many of the great kurgans, the central grave told a disheartening story first: it had been entered and emptied in antiquity by tomb-robbers, who left only the bones of a Scythian nobleman amid the wreck of his plundered burial.

A robbed central grave was, by the 1970s, the expected fate of a Pontic kurgan. Generations of plunderers, ancient and modern, had worked the river field, and the great mounds of the lower Dnieper were notorious for yielding up bones and broken fittings where their treasure had been. The discipline that Mozolevsky and his colleagues brought to the work was the patience to keep digging past that first disappointment, on the principle that a royal mound was a complex of graves and not a single shaft, and that the robbers had rarely found everything.

So it proved. The plunderers had gone for the obvious target, the central shaft, and had missed what lay to the side. The side-chamber, cut later and off the central axis, was intact — sealed exactly as it had been left. Within it lay five skeletons; the principal two belonged to a Scythian noblewoman, a queen or a great lady of the royal house, and a small child. She was buried in her full finery, her dress and headdress sewn over with gold; the infant lay near her, likewise dressed in gold. Around and beyond the burials the grave held the long inventory of a royal interment — over six hundred objects of gold among them, by the count of the Ukrainian excavators: vessels of metal and clay, weapons, the bronze fittings of a funeral cart, six openwork bronze pole-tops worked with stylized deer and griffins that had stood above the cortège. East of the central tomb the diggers found two pits with the bodies of six horses, their bridles and trappings mounted in gold and silver and bronze, and the bones of three grooms killed to tend them in the ground.

That second fact — the slain attendants and the sacrificed horses — is the point at which the archaeology of the mound meets the one ancient author who describes a Scythian royal funeral from the inside of the custom. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century before our era, set down at length (in the fourth book of his Histories) what happened when a Scythian king died: the embalmed body carried in procession among the subject peoples, the burial in a great square pit, and the strangling of attendants — a cupbearer, a cook, a groom, a steward, a messenger — and of horses, to go down into the earth with the king. He is an external witness, a Greek reporting on a people he regarded as wholly other, and his account must be read at that distance and with that caution. But the retainer-pits and horse-pits of Tolstaya Mogila are not Herodotus; they are the thing itself, dug up, and they answer to what he wrote with a closeness that has made the mound one of the cornerstones of any sober reading of the rite.

The pectoral and the world it holds

What the side-chamber held above everything else, and what has made the name of the mound, Mozolevsky lifted from the ground on 21 June 1971: the golden pectoral, a great crescent breast-ornament to be worn across the shoulders and chest of a lord. It is among the supreme surviving works of the steppe.

The gold pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla (Tolstaya Mogila), 4th century BCE, now in Kyiv. Sergio Nesgovorov (Sergio367), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The measurements are exact and worth keeping in mind, because the object’s power is partly a power of compression. It is solid gold of about twenty-four carats; it measures roughly 30.6 centimeters across — close to a span of an outstretched hand — and weighs just over eleven hundred and fifty grams, more than a kilogram of metal on a single ornament. The workmanship is Greek: it was almost certainly made by Greek goldsmiths, very likely in the Bosporan city of Panticapaeum on the Crimean strait, who cast and soldered together dozens of individual figures and elements into the finished crescent. The hands are Greek; the world depicted is Scythian, ordered by a Scythian patron’s sense of what mattered. That double authorship — a Greek craft serving a steppe imagination — is itself one of the truths of the object, and it makes the pectoral a hinge between two worlds rather than a pure product of either. The standing scholarly study of the piece, the 2023 analysis by the art historian who set out the gold insignia of ancient Scythia, reads it as exactly such a meeting.

The crescent is worked in three tiers, three concentric bands following the curve, and it is the relation between them that has made the pectoral so much more than a luxury.

The upper register is the world in order. At its center two men kneel, working with their hands at a great fleece or sheepskin garment spread between them; near them stand their quivers, the gorytoi, hung up while they work. To either side the band fills with the domestic life of a herding people and with its increase: mares with their foals, one newborn lying down and one suckling; a cow with her calf; a ewe being milked by a youth, who holds the vessel; a young man with an amphora; goats with their kids; birds among them. This is the pastoral steppe at peace — the herds and their young, the work of the hands, the abundance on which the whole life of the nomads turned.

The middle register is a band of pure ornament: spiraling floral tendrils, acanthus scrollwork and palmettes worked over a single gold backing plate, with small bird-figures set among the foliage. It is the most overtly Greek of the three in idiom — the acanthus is the workshop’s own — and it serves as a flowering threshold, a green belt dividing what lies above from what lies below.

The lower register is the world unbound. Here the animal style of the steppe — the predatory, transforming imagery of beasts in combat that runs through all Scythian gold — takes over. At the center griffins, the winged lion-eagles of the imagination, fall upon horses and bring them down; to the sides a lion and a leopard tear at a deer on one hand and a wild boar on the other; dogs course after hares; and at the band’s tapering ends two grasshoppers face one another, the small steppe creatures set where the great violence runs out. This is the wild — predation, the hunt, the monstrous — set beneath the ordered herds above. The combat of beasts is the oldest and most insistent theme of steppe gold, running from the Altai in the east to the Dnieper in the west, and the goldsmith who worked the lower band of the pectoral was drawing on a repertoire centuries deep: the predator locked on the prey, the griffin transforming the lion and the eagle into a single dread thing. What is striking is that the workshop set this ancient steppe matter into the lowest tier and reserved the upper tier for the quiet of the herds — an ordering that, whatever the patron intended, reads almost inevitably as a hierarchy of worlds.

That arrangement is what has carried the reading of the pectoral as something more than a catalog of steppe life. It is widely interpreted — and this is interpretation, a scholar’s construction laid over a mute object, not anything the Scythians left written — as a tiered image of the cosmos: the domestic and ordered world of human life and the tended herds set above, the chaos and danger of the wild set below, with the band of flowering nature between them as the living seam where the two meet. Read this way the pectoral becomes a small map of the whole Scythian world, its vertical order a cosmology drawn in gold, the kind of three-tiered universe that comparative scholarship has read out of other Indo-Iranian and steppe material. The reading is attractive and much repeated; it is also unprovable, and the honest position is that the object permits it without compelling it. What is certain is the structure — domestic life above, beasts of prey below, foliage between — and the structure is enough to make the pectoral feel, to anyone who looks, like a single span of metal into which a people’s whole sense of its world has been gathered.

Beside the pectoral the grave held the rest of a great burial: the akinakes — the short Scythian sword that was also, in the steppe cult Herodotus reports, the very body of the war-god, worshiped as an iron blade set up on a brushwood altar — here sheathed in a scabbard mounted in gold; the noblewoman’s gold-sewn dress and headdress; vessels of metal and clay; the bronze pole-tops with their deer and griffins that had ridden above the cortège; and the gold-mounted harness of the slaughtered horses. The pectoral is the masterpiece, but it sat among a king’s whole household of the dead, and the value of the mound to scholarship lies as much in that intact assemblage — the whole furniture of a fourth-century royal burial, recovered in order and in place — as in the single great ornament. Few of the famous kurgans gave up their gold from a chamber that had never been disturbed; Tolstaya Mogila did, and that is why its evidence carries the weight it does.

The afterlife of the mound

The reception of Tolstaya Mogila runs along two lines: the fame of the single object, and the standing of the dig.

The pectoral itself has become, by common agreement, the most celebrated thing the Scythians left — the image reproduced wherever the steppe peoples are written about, the face the civilization now wears for the wider world. It has had the peculiar afterlife of an object that has slipped its origins: it appears on stamps and on the covers of books, it has lent its tiered crescent to the design of medals and emblems, and for many who have never read a line of Herodotus it simply is, by itself, what “Scythian” means. That fame is a measure of the object’s reach and also a small distortion, since it pulls a single masterpiece loose from the field of graves and the long labor of excavation that produced it. It is held in Kyiv, among the gold of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine, the treasury division of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, where it is the centerpiece of the Scythian collection. The mound that produced it stands within a dense cluster of royal kurgans on the lower Dnieper — the same field of the dead that includes Solokha with its gold comb and the great robbed mound of Chertomlyk nearby — and away on the Crimean side of the steppe the earlier royal burial of Kul-Oba, opened in 1830, where the modern recovery of the Scythian world began. Against that company Tolstaya Mogila stands as the richest of the modern, scientifically excavated kurgans, and the one whose intact side-chamber gave the clearest single window into a fourth-century royal burial.

For Mozolevsky the mound was the discovery of a lifetime, and his name has stayed attached to it; streets in Ukrainian cities bear it, and a village was renamed for him. The wider afterlife of the find belongs to the long, slow assembling of a steppe world from three kinds of evidence that rarely meet: the outside witness of the Greek authors, Herodotus above all, interested and distant; the abundant but silent archaeology of the gold and the graves; and the comparative reading of Iranian language and myth through which scholars have tried to name the powers the gold does not name. The pectoral sits at the seam of all three. The Greeks who made it left their acanthus and their griffins on it; the Scythian who wore it ordered his herds and his beasts of prey into its tiers; and the modern reader, standing before the crescent in Kyiv, supplies the cosmology — the ordered life above, the wild below — that the metal so strongly suggests and never quite confirms. A kilogram of gold, a span across, in which a herding people’s whole sky and earth seem to have been pressed into three bright bands: that is what Mozolevsky raised from the side of the mound on a June morning, and it has not stopped repaying the looking since.

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