according to our writers, and the Sarmatians and Scythians, according to
foreign authors, were ancient inhabitants of Russia’ and he claimed that ‘the
common origin of the Slavs with the Sarmatians, the Chud with the Scythians
is indisputable for many clear proofs’ (in Volodina 2001: 67).
Mikhail Lomonosov’s bookWlled a gap that had been felt by students,
including a certain F. Lubyanovsky, who had studied in the institution
Lomonosov had co-founded, the University of Moscow, in 1755. In the
second half of the eighteenth century Lubyanovsky complained at the lack
of teaching on Russian history at the historical and philological department.
As he explained, he had been able to study the past of ‘the Greeks, Romans,
other peoples, their laws, religion, morals, internal institutions, intestine
disagreements, discord, wars..., how and whythese colossi were shaken
and falling down’. An admiration of ‘Virgil, Horace, Tacitus’ was learned,
but the study of Russian history was ‘so little, so superXuous that if we had
been given a task to describe the battle of the Russians with the Tatars on the
KulikovoWeld I would have better agreed to describe Punic wars’ (in Volodina
2001: 64). Lomonosov’s work was translated into the major European lan-
guages within a decade of being published and this facilitated its inXuence on
scholars beyond Russia’s frontiers. 1
During the eighteenth century, archaeologicalWndings came to provide an
image of the ancient peoples historians were arguing about. The earliest
objects were those brought to the Tsars from Siberia. These may have been
included in the two-volume catalogue of the Kunstkammer collections, the
Musei Imperialis Petropolitani, published in the early 1740s. An illustrated
guide-book of the museum was also published in German and Russian. To the
existing collections new items were continuously added. Important in this
respect were the expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences founded in
St Petersburg in 1725. The academy assumed as its role the coordination of the
scientiWc discovery of Siberia. There was aWrst naval expedition to explore the
Russian Far East in 1725–30. There followed the Great Northern Expedition,
also known as the second expedition to Kamchatka (1733–43), which would
have an important impact. Some information about antiquities was published
in the books produced by two of the expeditionaries, the German-born
naturalist Johann Georg Gmelin (1709–55) and his countryman Gerhard
1 The Scottish linguist John Pinkerton, for example, went further than Lomonosov in his
Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Gothsof 1787, arguing that Scythians
and Goths were a single people who had conquered the aboriginals of Europe, the Celts.
According to Pinkerton, the Celts ‘were to the other races what savages of America are to the
European settlers there’ (in Sebastiani 2003). Colin Kidd contextualizes Pinkerton’s ideas in the
discussion by Scottish antiquarians about the origins and identity of the Picts (Kidd 1999: 204)
(see also Sweet 2004: 139).
252 Colonial Archaeology