The icemen cometh

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 territory 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 expeditions 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 pretty 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, punching and pummelling appliqués from flat sheets and moulding huge belt buckles into shapes of animals in combat. A vulture 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. Several women buried in mounds at Pazyryk, near the modern Chinese/Mongolian border, 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.