About the results of the Don expedition, about the Scythians, about gold, which traditionally attracts the attention of people hungry for sensations, about the science of Scythology. How is this era represented, this people - the Scythians? What treasures is our land rich in?
The Scythian era is the time from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC, - says the head of the Don expedition of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Historical Sciences Valery Ivanovich Gulyaev. - The Scythians lived on the territory of Eastern Europe in the Northern Black Sea region, which includes forest-steppe zones. The Scythians are a European people who spoke one of the dialects of the ancient Iranian language. This people is numerous, warlike, nomadic. Their ancestral home was in Central Asia. Now science is more or less sure of this, although one of the problems of Scythian history has always been the origin of this people and their ancestral home. Now we know that these are Tuva, Altai, eastern Kazakhstan, northern Mongolia. At the beginning of the 7th century BC, these nomadic tribes began their movement to the West; they were the first "wave" of nomadic peoples who, with a periodicity of 200-400 years, rolled from the depths of Asia to Europe, to the Northern Black Sea region.
Having passed a large territory of the Caspian Sea, the Scythians seized the Northern Black Sea region, the Northern Caucasus and from there fell upon the states of Western Asia - Assyria, Babylon, Media. These powerful states were forced to reckon with them - either to enter into an alliance with them, or to pay off.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians ruled in Western Asia for 28 years. Perhaps more, though. They glorified themselves by the fact that in addition to the tribute they imposed on all the territories under their control, they were also engaged in robberies. But over time, the ruler of Media, having accumulated strength and invited the Scythian leaders to a feast, interrupted them when they got drunk to unconsciousness. The Scythians left through the Caucasus Mountains.
The monuments of the Scythians are mainly mounds, starting with the royal ones at 20 meters in height, ending with the mounds of the ordinary population. Later, from the 5th century BC, fortifications appeared. These monuments have always attracted the attention of Russian science. After the successful Russian-Turkish wars at the end of the 18th century, Russia received vast territories of the Northern Black Sea region and the Azov Sea and Crimea. An imperial archaeological expedition was organized, which in 1859 began to excavate Scythian burial mounds, where there were many works of ancient art and works of Scythian masters.
