Nomads who left few clues

John Boardman hails a landmark study of artefacts of an elusive race

The combination of gold and ancient Scythians - nomads of the central Asian and the south Russian steppes - is irresistible. Russian nobility and royalty found it so when they started excavating the rich Scythian tombs more than 150 years ago, after many casual finds had made their way into their treasuries. This was not a matter of the occasional cup but dozens of pieces of plate, armour, weapons, decoration from dress, even horse harness. The styles were enticing too, from the fantasy of the animal art, contorting bodies and duplicating detail in a riot of movement that outdid nature, to careful studies in classical Greek realism. Exhibitions of Scythian art and Scythian gold have proved good travellers, especially over the past 50 years; they earned money for Soviet museums, and now they help demonstrate that rapprochement of scholarship and taste between East and West, which is much of what the whole process of excavating and collecting is about.

There has, of course, been a danger of overfamiliarity, and the same pieces have appeared time and again in galleries and sumptuous catalogues, a process that makes bibliographical pursuit of them a nightmare for those dedicated to every possible reference. Most have been from the Hermitage Museum at St Petersburg, where the majority of the early finds were housed.

But not everything went there, and especially in Soviet years many new finds remained in museums closer to their sources in the south. The disintegration of the Soviet empire recreated the Ukraine, and the Ukraine compasses most of the major Scythian and Greek colonial areas of the south,the approaches to the great rivers, Bug and Dnieper, and the Crimea, leaving in "Russia" only the Kuban peninsula east of Crimea, and lands to the north around the Sea of Azov and the Don and Volga. The finds were no less spectacular, but they went to stock the museums of Kiev not the north,and it is these that are the source of the exhibition (in five US cities and in Paris) that was the occasion of the publication under review. So there is much that is totally unfamiliar, much that has been disregarded, and even the expert will find things here better illustrated and explained than ever before. This is something of a landmark in Scythian studies. There are touches of nationalism, not surprisingly, and the material from the same sites in Russian museums tends to get sidelined, while we must (must we?) get used to new transliterations (Kyiv for Kiev, Dniepro for Dnieper, and so on).

The pictures are lavish, and many of the objects are beautiful. The scholarship is detailed, if not always au fait with various western studies of the material, and accessible to any reader. In the manner of such catalogues there are preliminary essays that bid us recall the debt to the hunting as well as herding behaviour of the Scythians in their eastern homeland, as well as other aspects of Scythian life, not least our dependence on what many Greek writers alleged about them. But many of these were good observers and have been vindicated by the finds; moreover, some could themselves observe and comment on the debilitating effects on these noble savages of contact with Greek manners. There is comment too on the construction and furnishing of the great tumuli covering the tombs. If you are on the move and your royal cemetery cannot be on your doorstep, the tombs have to be built to defend themselves from predators, which they have in the main done successfully until collectors and archaeologists had their way with them.

The objects continue to pose the questions they always have. How much is Greek? How much Scythian? How much was derived from Persia, the Near East, Thrace? Since most was made locally, and much no doubt in the Greek colonies, the question of origins and training of artists is paramount and raises in acute form, and probably better here than at most other cultural interfaces, the degree to which an artist can totally disguise the style in which he was trained to serve a market conditioned to something totally different.

The translation is probably easier now than it was in antiquity, but antiquity was not plagued by copyright and art historians, nor even probably by the notion of art forgery. Generally, at first, in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, the Greeks put Greek ornament and style on objects of Scythian shape, but there soon emerges evidence of mixed styles, and it is only the original "animal style" of the steppes that stays mainly unblemished, to have its effect on other pastoralists and hunters to the west, even as far as the Celts. The Greeks also created for Scythia a mythology that they could tie into their own. The Scythians' own stories continue to elude us and eluded their art.

Sir John Boardman is emeritus professor of classical archaeology and art, University of Oxford.