Gold of the Nomads

Of all the peoples ancient Greece called "barbarian," none were more formidable than the Scythians--the hairy, implacable nomads who ranged over the steppes of Central Asia and north of the Black Sea, in what is now Russia. Around 3200 B.C., on these grassy oceans, the horse was first tamed for riding, and the Scythians were the result of that profound change in man's mobility.

On their coarse, nimble ponies, they rode like centaurs. They made cloaks from tanned scalps, and the skin of a right arm would furnish a container for their arrows. ("The skin of a man," noted Herodotus, who could seldom resist a piquant detail, "is thick and glossy, and whiter than almost all other hides.") To relax, they got uproariously drunk on thick wine from the Black Sea area, which they quaffed from the leather-bound skulls of their foes, or they would dump marijuana seeds on red-hot stones and breathe the smoke. Fortunately for archaeology, they buried their dead kings and nobles in barrows, surrounded by every sort of tool, artifact and status symbol they might need in the next life.

Preserved by Ice. These included gold. The Scythians were rich. They wrung tribute from every caravan that crossed the steppes, and they carried their gold not as raw bullion but as flamboyant ornament. Other materials went to dust--except for some ornaments of wood or cloth, such as the elegant swan made of felt stuffed with reindeer hair (see color opposite) that was discovered, preserved by ice for almost 2 1/2 millennia, in a tomb in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Yet the gold survived. Almost all the major examples of Scythian gold have remained in the U.S.S.R. up to now, chiefly in the Kiev State Historical Museum and Leningrad's Hermitage. Now, as a result of an exchange agreement worked out between the U.S. and the Soviet Ministry of Culture, written into the communique of the 1974 summit meeting, an extraordinary selection of 197 Scythian artifacts has come to America; it opens on April 19 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and will go to the Los Angeles County Museum in July.

Trained from childhood to fight and hunt, a steppes nomad was accustomed to using his eyes to a degree unimaginable among modern city dwellers. Every twitch of a deer's alarmed head, every gathering of muscle, gust of wind or sprouting of vegetation could be a clue in the work of survival. So it is not surprising that Scythian art--both the objects they made for themselves in the 7th-6th centuries B.C., and the ones they later had made for them by Greek metalsmiths--was supremely visual: accurate observation combined with an amazing clarity of design. The panther hammered from a sheet of gold and worn as a shield ornament in the late 7th or early 6th century B.C. contains, in its bulging, simplified planes, all the rhythmical vitality one might expect from Cubist sculpture: an epigram of predatory sinew translated into metal.

Tendrils and Ferocity. Most early Scythian art consists of animal totems. But when the barbarians started trading with the Black Sea Greeks and employing their skills as craftsmen--like Hell's Angels descending on Savile Row--they demanded, and got, work of almost unbelievable finesse. It is ironic that the best evidence we have of what Phidias' lost chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon looked like should be preserved on a Scythian woman's pendant from the 4th century B.C.

In the finest pieces, such as the 4th century gold comb from the Hermitage, one no longer thinks of jewelry: this battle group, tiny though it is, is one of the most vividly realized and plastically forceful scenes of combat in all ancient sculpture.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is, however, the 12-in.-wide gold pectoral dug from a kurgan or burial mound near the town of Ordzhonikidze in 1971. In the upper course we see domestic life:

sheep, foals, calves, a pair of Scythians making a skin shirt. In the middle, vegetable nature: an exquisite frieze of curling tendrils and blossoms with tiny birds perching on them. And below, the gold smith set forth the central myth of Scythian life: endless combat, unceasing subjugation of the weak by the strong--griffins attacking horses, feral cats killing deer. An entire world is summed up, with a sculptural intensity that Donatello could hardly have surpassed; and one cannot say whether ferocity or beauty prevails, or whether, for the Scythians, there was any difference between the two.

--Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.