Those who have traveled along the Black Sea steppes, most of them plowed up and rugged forest plantations, must have paid attention to the earthen mounds periodically encountered on the way. Created many centuries ago, these man-made earthen hills, like the Egyptian pyramids, have long become part of the natural landscape.
Initially, the most incredible versions were expressed about their origin: some believed that high hills in the flat steppe were specially poured before the war in order to look out for a friend from their height; others considered the mounds to be something like border pillars separating the territory of one ancient people from another; still others assigned the role of burial mounds to the mounds, containing in their depths the tombs of ancient kings and countless treasures.
At all times and more than once in the immediate vicinity of the mounds - either on arable land during excavation work, or in a quarry dump - they found outlandish gold plaques, scraps of gold foil, and vessels that darkened with time.
Chest decoration - a badge of the royal horse. So, in the second half of the 19th century, peasants in the vicinity of Nikopol, mining sand in one such hill, nicknamed by the locals "Meadow grave", found gold items with images of strange monsters minted on them. The happy owners of the finds reported this incident to the local government, and officials have already told the archaeologists. As a result of the subsequent excavations, it was possible to find the grave of the Scythian king, whose remains were abundantly decorated with golden objects.
Scythians - this powerful tribal union for more than a millennium occupied the territories of modern Ukraine and Moldova, the Scythian culture is considered one of the most striking in history, and its heritage for Europe is as great and significant as the Celtic or Slavic. True, until recently, not very much was known about the Scythians, the main source of information was the descriptions of their life and customs, made by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. As you know, he loved to travel and even personally visited the Greek colony of Olbia, located at the mouth of the Dnieper-Bug estuary, that is, in the immediate vicinity of the territory inhabited by the Scythians.
It is unknown where the Scythians came from in the Northern Black Sea region. This people settled well on the occupied lands, developed a distinctive culture, established trade relations with neighbors and even allowed themselves to go to war against more aggressive neighbors. In general, everything is as usual, except for the fact that it was the Scythians who were the first to mine gold in the steppes of Ukraine.
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Moreover, the Scythians created a whole cult from this noble metal. Gold was used in everyday life, clothes and shoes were abundantly decorated with precious plaques, they covered military ammunition, horse harness, and, without regretting at all, buried a huge amount of gold jewelry together with the dead. The adherence of the Scythians to gold was their strange, amazing feature. The same Herodotus wrote that silver and copper were used by this people in limited quantities, and they gave preference exclusively to gold. Indeed, archaeological finds show that neither before nor after the Scythians this metal was so widespread in the steppe region of present-day Ukraine. No other culture of antiquity, even “gold-rich Mycenae”, could compete with Scythia in this respect. Gold among this steppe people was considered a symbol of wealth, personified fire,the sun, royal power and, most importantly, eternal life. To cover as much of the body as possible, the Scythian craftsmen developed a special technology - manual extraction of gold foil and the minting of plaques with original images from it.
In addition to gold household utensils and ornaments, the Scythians left behind many mounds. True, after two and a half millennia, their appearance has changed markedly. Once the mounds were not just earth hills, but rather remarkable architectural structures. The mounds of some burial mounds were faced with stones or wooden log cabins, carried wide colored clay belts, and were surrounded by deep ditches. And all this was intended to hide rather complex underground mausoleums, catacombs, crypts from human eyes.
According to Herodotus, the main cult center of Scythia was located between the Dnieper and Southern Bug rivers. It is the rulers of the steppe Scythia who own the largest of the kurgans, the true steppe pyramids, covering, like domes, the tombs of the powerful kings of the Black Sea region. Tombs filled with gold are no less generous than the burial chambers of the Egyptian pharaohs. And since the Scythians valued the burial places of their ancestors above all else, they, of course, tried to protect the graves, for which they used mounds sometimes more than 20 meters high.
However, gold, for that and gold, to excite human minds from time immemorial. The secrets of the origin of Scythian wealth haunted the Greeks, Romans and Persians. Where did the Scythians get gold in such quantities - no one knew. At the same time, it was well known that there were no significant placer deposits or gold-bearing veins in Scythia.
The impression was that the ancient craftsmen, like the alchemists of the Middle Ages, simply possessed the secret of extracting precious metal from improvised means. But how they did it remained a secret, which could not be discovered by force or cunning. So, due to the ignorance of the gold-bearing source, the enemies, greedy for the wealth of others, could only trade by robbery. And if the Greeks and Romans ultimately decided not to get involved with the cunning and militant steppe people, then the Persian king Darius I, having heard about the Scythian riches, in 512 BC. e. invaded the territory of the Northern Black Sea region, ordered the destruction of the Scythian tombs and extract from there all the treasures found.
In fairness, it should be noted that he nevertheless warned of his intention and offered to give him the treasure voluntarily. “We have fatherly graves. Find them and try to destroy them, and then you will find out whether we will fight for these graves or not,”- this is how the Scythians answered Darius. The warlike steppe dwellers, instead of taking on a battle with a huge army superior in strength and number, reasonably limited themselves to guerrilla tactics, exhausting the sluggish army of invaders with sudden attacks. So they defended their lands.
When the Scythians disappeared as suddenly as they appeared, the graves of their ancestors were left without protection, and treasure hunters eager for easy money rushed into the mounds. However, getting to the legendary treasures was not so easy. It took a lot of effort to excavate a multi-meter earthen embankment, and it was naturally impossible to hide such a large-scale excavation. Excavation work of "black archaeologists" invariably attracted the attention of both ordinary residents and competitors, and especially the authorities. So, illegal treasure seekers had to show haste, which, as you know, does not lead to any good in any business. In addition, their inhabitants themselves rebelled against the destruction of graves. As it soon became clear, not only the pharaohs knew how to defend their burials with curses.
In 1862, archaeologists began excavating a kurgan located 20 km from Nikopol and popularly called Chertomlyk. Already a preliminary analysis of the artifacts extracted from the earth has shown: this is the burial of some powerful Scythian ruler. However, the found tomb was plundered. It was possible to find only scattered bones of the deceased, the remains of a wooden bed on which the ashes rested, several gold things - a ring with the image of a bull, plaques with figures of animals and plants, and bronze arrowheads. However, archaeologists did not despair.
As practice has shown, often such burials behind a fake burial chamber were equipped with special hiding places in which real treasures were placed. Apparently, the Scythians well understood how much gold-filled mounds were attractive to robbers. Such a cache was found in the Chertomlyk mound. And it contained many precious things: a gold plate from a sword scabbard, a gold lining of a quiver with scenes from Greek mythology depicted on it, a golden twisted necklace, gold bracelets and rings, a belt trimmed with gold plaques. It was also discovered that a predatory move was leading into this secret chamber. And in the place where it connected with the treasury, archaeologists found the tomb robber crushed by the collapse, surrounded by many gold things he had stolen.
However, the retribution of the afterlife almost never stopped the "black archaeologists." The abundance of gold buried in the mounds made one forget about fear. And its reserves, apparently, were huge. For example, the famous Solokha burial mound, located in the Zaporozhye region, was ravaged for several centuries, and it seemed that gold did not decrease. This was partly due to the enormous size of the mound - it reaches 100 meters in diameter and 18 meters in height.
Solokha's serious research began in 1912 and is associated with the name of Nikolai Veselovsky, a professor at St. Petersburg University. The initial inspection of the mound showed that he did not escape the sad fate of plunder, but Veselovsky knew from experience that amateurs who hunt exclusively for gold rarely managed to rob the grave clean. And in the mound there could be several burials. Inner instinct did not disappoint the Russian professor: after two seasons of archaeological work, the researchers received a well-deserved reward for their faith and hard work. The discovered caches stored a mass of gold items of rare historical value. The most outstanding find of this mound, famous all over the world, was a skillfully made gold comb weighing 294 grams.
Further more. Exactly 40 years ago, in the summer of 1971, at the excavations of Tolstaya Mogila near the town of Ordzhonikidze in the Dnepropetrovsk region, archaeologists recovered truly amazing jewelry from the excavation. Under the eight-meter embankment, the richest burials of the Scythian queen and a boy lying in an alabaster sarcophagus were discovered, not disturbed by either ancient or modern robbers. In full accordance with the description of Herodotus, the clothes of the dead dazzled with a golden sheen. The queen lay in a dress embroidered with gold plates with ornaments and images of animals, and her neck was hugged by a massive hryvnia hoop made of the same noble metal, with skillfully made figures of lions. The tall hat also bore finely worked gold plates. Unfortunately, the main chamber - the burial place of the tsar himself - was not preserved until the excavation. Apparently, everyonewhat was valuable in it, the unscrupulous destroyers managed to endure.
At the entrance to the royal tomb, archaeologists found a hiding place, not noticed by the robbers, in which a golden pectoral was found - a breast adornment of a Scythian king of the 4th century BC. e., weighing more than a kilogram (to be precise, 1 kg 150 g). In diameter, this jewelry reached 30.6 centimeters and was made of 958 gold. In total, researchers have extracted about 4.5 kilograms of unique gold items from the Tolstaya Mogila.
As some experts in the Scythian culture believe, all the gold still found in ancient burials is only a visible part of the iceberg. After all, Scythia was famous for a whole dynasty of kings, and the graves of most of them have not yet been discovered. And many grandiose, not yet explored kurgans are waiting in the wings.
If we take on faith the information provided by Herodotus, then the burial places of the first Scythian rulers were kept in the strictest confidence, and the treasures hidden in the most ancient burial mounds far exceeded the richest treasury of Priam, the king of Troy. Burial mounds, excavated by archaeologists in the past and the century before last, belong to the era when the powerful Scythian empire was already disintegrating and, therefore, the gold-bearing sources were becoming scarce. So, it is quite possible that some inconspicuous hill, standing on the outskirts of a little-known Ukrainian village, will still bring many surprises of world significance to archaeologists.
