Ancient Siberians invade the British Museum
‘A hemp-smoking kit gives us a sense of intimate, tactile proximity to this long-lost, ancient people’
There’s nothing new in the idea of a threat from the East. From Attila the Hun to the Cold War, we have a vaguely defined but uneasy sense that the nemesis of the “West” – for which read Western Europe – lies out there in the immensities of the Eurasian steppe; it’s a feeling that Vladimir Putin’s supposed territorial ambitions have done nothing to assuage.
The ancient Romans, sitting in their villas with their civic virtues and underfloor central-heating systems, heard stories of the Scythians, a name given by Herodotus, the Greek historian, to nomad warriors inhabiting a vast swathe of Central Asia from modern Romania to northern China. These formidable mounted archers had defeated the mighty Persian empire, run riot through the Middle East for decades and might one day turn their attentions towards Europe, as their successors, the Huns and Mongols, would later do.
In fact, the Scythians were already in decline by Roman times. They would have dropped out of history altogether, but for the 18th-century discovery of burial mounds containing astonishing treasures, including the bodies of Scythian nobles and their horses, perfectly preserved in the Siberian ice. It is from these discoveries that the objects in this extraordinary exhibition – many borrowed from Russian museums – are drawn.
As you enter the Sainsbury Gallery, you could almost swear you hear the wind whistling through the steppeland grasses. It is in fact one of the British Museum’s most immersive soundscapes. Fortunately it isn’t too intrusive, and, a couple of digital panoramas of galloping horseman aside, this isn’t a show that makes or needs much recourse to gimmicks.
After a display telling us how little we know about the Scythians – virtually nothing of their religion, or language (though they are understood to have been of Iranian origin), or even the structures they lived in – we’re shown a full-length portrait of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great, who ordered the expeditions during which the first Scythian discoveries were made.
Suspicions that this will be one of those shows that is more about the difficulties of understanding the subject than the subject itself are soon assuaged by an array of truly astounding gold jewellery. Most of the pieces are large belt buckles or “plaques”, as they’re called, showing animals and mythical beings in ferocious combat – griffin-like creatures sinking their teeth into horses, a vulture “mauling a yak” – the contours of the writhing forms evoked in vigorously incised lines often studded with turquoise. These works are at once the epitome of “barbaric splendour” and extraordinarily sophisticated for a people wandering the tundra; though rather than evoking brutality for its own sake, the imagery was designed, anthropologists believe, to bring the everyday world into balance with the supernatural forces of the underworld, for the protection of the wearer. If golden objects, however vital, feel a touch rarefied, we’re soon looking at the Scythians up close and personal (as close as we have any right to hope, that is, of people who lived two and a half millennia ago), via the shrivelled eye sockets of a Scythian chieftain unearthed at Pazyryk, in the Tuva region of southern Siberia.
Teeth still clearly visible between his leathery, desiccated lips, judging from the axe holes in the back of his head, he was killed in battle. He is surrounded, too, by lengths of gnarled, decorated leather that you might take to be his clothing, but are in fact his skin, tattooed with fearsome beasts designed to provide symbolic protection to his vital organs.
If this is all the show offers in terms of those fabled frozen warriors and their horses, many of the other exhibits are almost more remarkable. How about, for example, a pair of flesh-toned women’s tights in felt, with intricately embroidered tops? If they are a shade worn, you don’t generally get 2,000-year-old textiles, let alone weirdly chic garments such as these. There’s a fantastic squirrel-skin coat and pair of rather Seventies-looking men’s riding boots in magnificent patchwork leather, too. (I can already anticipate a surge in Scythian-inspired fashion.) These objects, together with a hemp-smoking kit – Herodotus said that inhaling the fumes made the Scythians “howl with delight” – give us a sense of intimate, tactile proximity to this long-lost, ancient people.
The preservation of objects in wood is even more extraordinary. The Scythians, like many so-called primitive peoples, put their devotional images not in temples, but on their bodies, in the form of tattoos, jewellery and ritual garments. An intricately carved chief ’s headdress, showing a bird of prey with a deer’s head in its mouth, is in such pristine condition it could have been carved yesterday.
Like everything here, it was intended not for use in everyday life, but in the transition to the after-life. The surprisingly delicate carving of symbolic animals and beasts in different kinds of wood, deftly grafted together with fittings in leather and felt – a favoured nomad material even today – are like nothing you’ll have seen before.
Perhaps most incredible is a horse’s ritual helmet surmounted by a ram’s head and a mythical bird, symbols designed to ensure that the horse, buried alongside its master, would be reborn in the underworld as a kind of animal super-hero.
The best-known piece is an effigy of a reclining elk in solid gold, its stylised antlers captured in a flow of vigorous yet elegant arabesques. If its function remains unknown, it embodies the worldview of a people for whom every aspect of the natural world was charged with spiritual significance.
Exhibitions on the ancient world are one of the crowd-pulling staples of the British Museum’s schedule, and there’s occasionally a reheated quality to their attempts to find an unexplored angle, particularly among perennially popular subjects such as ancient Egypt and Greece.
This exhibition, however, explores territory that feels completely unfamiliar. It takes us inside the totemic mind of the original “threat from the East”, a people remote in time and distance, about whom, without these extraordinary objects, we would know almost nothing.