Siberian forests. The remains were placed in
coffins made from whole trees and interred
in felt-lined chambers. When a chief died,
says Herodotus, his horses were killed and
his cupbearer, cook, groom, squire, messen-
ger, and one of his concubines strangled and
buried with him. The mounds at Pazyryk
contained dozens of horses and enough sad-
dles, bridles and bits to keep them going in
the afterlife.
One of the most beautiful objects in
the exhibition is a small saddlecloth dec-
oration of a winged bull. Discovered in
northern Kazakhstan, it was embroidered
from wool with a delicacy one wouldn’t
expect from a people so enamoured of
triple-blade arrowheads. It was delicacy,
though, that the Scythians used to define
themselves. Pass the cases of terrifying war
implements, and you come to a copy of a
felt tomb hanging featuring men with neat
bobbly haircuts and cheerful moustach-
es riding horses. They look almost cute.
Although the human remains suggest the
Scythians were clean-shaven, the Greeks
and Persians characterised them with
beards. Perhaps they aspired to grow facial
hair (no one really knows what the false
beard was for).
Their women, after all, were trouser-
wearing, horse-riding warriors — Amazons,
according to Herodotus. In his Histo-
ries, the Amazons sleep with the Scythian
men but refuse to cohabit with the exist-
ing Scythian women because they are not
outdoorsy enough. The Amazons therefore
set off with their Scythians to establish a
new people. With their peculiar wooden
hats — topped with tall plaits of hair —
and weaponry, the women of Scythia must
have looked terrifying to the Greeks. It’s
now thought that they really did inspire the
Amazon myths.
It would have been nice to see something
of the Amazons in this otherwise exhilarat-
ing exhibition. One senses a slight tenta-
tiveness on the part of the curators to draw
too much from Herodotus, even though the
evidence from the mounds corroborates so
much of his colourful account. He said the
Scythians would ‘howl in wonder’ as they
inhaled cannabis. A brazier with burned
hemp seeds is on display. He described stag-
es in their burial practices that the archaeol-
ogy confirms. The Scythians were much as
he described them: formidable horsemen,
horsewomen and warriors with a taste for
fine craftsmanship; they worked gold as if it
fell ‘from the sky’.
Daisy Dunn is the author of Catullus’
Bedspread and The Poems of Catullus
(HarperCollins).
Herodotus said that the Scythians
would ‘howl in wonder’ as they
inhaled cannabis" "
! " #/**$'%(',+)+.-,-&&
Illustration
Frills and furbelows
Laura Gascoigne
Over the winter of 1859–60, a handsome
young man could be seen patrolling the
shores of the Gulf of Messina in a rowing
boat, skimming the water’s surface with a
net. The net’s fine mesh was not designed
for fishing, and the young man was not a
Sicilian fisherman. He was the 25-year-old
German biologist Ernst Haeckel from Pots-
dam searching for minute plankton known
as Radiolaria. In February he wrote excit-
edly to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, that he had
caught 12 new species in a single day —
‘among them the most charming little crea-
tures’ — and hoped to make it a full century
before leaving.
Haeckel had a degree in medicine but
no interest in treating patients, whose visits
he curtailed by holding surgeries from 5 to
6 a.m. A man of prodigious energies who
survived on a few hours sleep, he preferred
to devote his waking hours to documenting
in watercolour drawings the intricate struc-
tures of different species of Radiolaria, as
seemingly infinite in their variety as three-
dimensional snowflakes. With no formal
art training, he had an astonishing abilityto record complex combinations of spirals,
lattices, stars, needles and radial spokes
by looking through a microscope with his
left eye while focusing on drawing with
his right.
The exquisitely illustrated Monograph
on Radiolaria he published in 1862, soon
after his marriage, won him the German
Academy of Sciences’ highest honour, but
on the day of the award — his 30th birth-
day — his beloved Anna died of a ruptured
appendix. From that point on, writes Julia
Voss in The Art and Science of Ernst Hae-
ckel, he was ‘consumed by a ferocious uni-
versal loathing’ and ‘gradually gave way to
the darkest nihilism’. The image is hard tosquare with a 1904 photograph of a twinkly-
eyed Haeckel standing next to a chimpan-
zee skeleton with a human skull in his hand,
looking like a more benign and less simian
Darwin. But it helps to explain his devel-
opment of views on race, euthanasia and
war ‘as a continuation of biology by other
means’ that today seem inexcusable.
Things would have been fine if this
Übermensch of a biologist had stuck to
publishing illustrated studies of underwa-
ter creatures, from Radiolaria (1862–1888)What do you do with a genius with
unconscionable views?