BOOKS & ARTS
Museums
The icemen cometh
Daisy Dunn
Scythians: warriors of ancient
Siberia
British Museum, until 14 January 2018
You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the
Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and
daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos,
the horse-mad nomads ranged the Russian
steppe from around 900 to 200 BC, turning
squirrels into fur coats and human teeth into
earrings.
At their mightiest, they controlled terri-
tory from the Black Sea to the north border
of China. They left behind no written record,
only enormous burial mounds, chiefly in
the Altai mountains and plains of southern
Siberia. Chambers that weren’t looted in
antiquity were preserved in the permafrost
only to be discovered millennia later. It is
thanks to Peter the Great and the expedi-
tions he launched that so many objects have
now been retrieved from the ice.
There are hats for horses topped with
felt cockerels, lumps of cheese kept in pret-
ty pouches, a stick-on beard dyed chestnut
brown. Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia
is unlikely to leave you pondering how little
humans have changed.
Herodotus said that the Scythians were
cleverer than their Black Sea neighbours.
They did their best work in gold, punch-
ing and pummelling appliqués from flat
sheets and moulding huge belt buckles
into shapes of animals in combat. A vul-
ture tramples a tiger to maul a yak. A tiger
chews the hind leg of a panther-wolf-bird
hybrid. Scythian men wore their buckles
over sheepskin coats and leather trousers.
Some tribes completed the ensemble with
tall pointy hats.
The Scythians were racially diverse. Sev-
eral women buried in mounds at Pazyryk,
near the modern Chinese/Mongolian bor-
der, look European, while the chiefs have
Mongol features. Standing face to face with
one of these heavily tattooed, mummified,
injured warriors is as unsettling as it sounds.
Was it the third blow of the battle-axe to
his skull that killed him, or the thrust of the
sword to his brow? At least he was dead
by the time he was scalped and relieved of
his brain.
Herodotus said that the Scythians scalped
their enemies, too, attaching the remains to
their horses’ bridles. They embalmed their
own dead, stuffing them with straw, pine
needles, herbs and larch cones from the
© THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST PETERSBURG, 2017. PHOTO: V TEREBENINChambers were preserved in the
permafrost only to be discovered
millennia laterWar horse: horse headdress made of felt, leather and wood, late 4th–early 3rd century BC