The size of these mounds usually related to the status of the individual
interred and so to the wealth and number of the oVerings. These peoples
had been able to accumulate great wealth from trade with the Mediterranean
world of corn harvested from the fertile plain located north of the Black
Sea. The Scythians had imported Greek jewellery from the Greek colonies
located in the Crimea along the north coast of the Black Sea from the seventh
centurybce. They had also commissioned Greek artists, some of them settled
locally, to make crafts for them. The objects found, therefore, largelyWtted
within the classical canon. This obviously mainly referred to jewellery, on
which archaeological attention was focused (Norman 1997: 76). Still, in 1928
Gregory Borovka, the keeper of Scythian antiquities in the Hermitage
museum, expressed his concern at the narrow focus of studies. As he put it:
Scythian antiquities have hitherto received but little attention.’Til recent years interest
centred in the products of Greek art, and set beside these exquisite and readily
appreciated jewels, bronzes, painted vases and terracottas the native products often
found in conjunction with them on Scythian soil appear crude and clumsy, strange
and insigniWcant, in a word barbaric; and they were dismissed. As a consequence the
majority of the Scythian antiquities are either not published at all or only (and often
very imperfectly) in Russian works.
(Borovka 1928: 5).The connection of the ancient peoples living in the colonized lands with the
classical Greeks became a source of prestige for Russia. This was not only due
to the Scythians’ classical appeal, but also because eighteenth-century Russian
scholars strove to connect them with the Slavs, the ancient people from whom
the Russians themselves originated (more information about archaeology of
the Slavs can be found in Part IVof this book). In 1725 Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer
(1694–1734), a German scholar who had been invited to give a talk in the
newly founded St Petersburg Academy of Science, maintained that Scythians
and Slavs were not linked. A couple of decades later, however, the association
between Scythians and Slavs was argued by a whole generation of Russian
historians of the early part of the second half of the century. One was the
Russian statesman and historian Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev (1686–1750), and,
moreimportantly,the same opinionwasput forwardby Mikhail V.Lomonosov
(1711–65) in his highly patriotic book of 1760, the Abridged Russian
Annalist. This volume would serve as a textbook of Russian history for the
following decades. TheWrst part focused on Russian antiquity, by which
he meant the Slavs and the Chud, the latter an ancient Finnish tribe. He
established that the Russian ruling class descended from the Scandinavians,
and that the Slavic people came from the Carpathians. But he also connected
both the Slavs with the Scythians when he stated that ‘the Slavs and the Chud,
Russian Empire and French North Africa 251