Scythians, Trading Gold and Culture

In the 1970s, Scythian gold was the subject of one of the first of what are now commonly called “treasure house” shows at American art museums. An exhibition seen in New York and Los Angeles focused on the exquisitely fabricated decorative metalwork so highly prized by the ancient nomads of the region north of the Black Sea--metalwork in some cases made for them by Greek artisans working in Crimea more than 2,300 years ago. Scythian gold was hitherto largely unknown in the West, but the popular exhibition left a gilded icon in its wake: the glittering image of an elk-like deer, its legs tucked beneath its body in a recumbent pose, its antlers transformed into an elegant, rhythmic interlace of serpentine lines.

Scythian gold is back now, in a concise, informative and well-laid-out exhibition opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Gold of the Nomads: Scythian Treasures from Ancient Ukraine” offers about 170 objects, including bronzes, stone carvings, silver ornaments and pottery, in addition to the jewelry and ritual objects made from gold that the Scythians so mightily craved.

One big difference between the current show, which was organized jointly by Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery and the San Antonio Museum of Art, and its 1970s predecessor is the radically different political climate that surrounds the presentation today. Then, an unprecedented presentation of Scythian gold was played out as one cultural episode in a larger Cold War drama of one-upmanship between East and West. Today, nearly a decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and following numerous discoveries by Ukrainian and other archeologists and art historians, the material is seen in a considerably different light.

In fact, walking through the show, what easily springs to mind now are current questions about economic globalization and its cultural impact. For the story told by Scythian artifacts is a story of ancient international trade and the subsequent transformation of established cultural tradition, albeit on a relatively small scale. Something of the dramatic difference that Scythian art underwent in its increasingly interdependent encounter with the Greeks can be seen in the first gallery.

Two stone burial markers, each about 6 feet tall, are crudely carved into representations of standing men. Frontal, flat and two-dimensional, the sculptures have an unsophisticated, folk-like quality. The 5th century BC artisans who made them relied mostly on incised lines rudely chiseled into the granite and limestone to show blunt facial features, schematic arms held across bodies, prominent phalluses, drinking horns and weapons of war. These are not the works of a civilization with a refined, urbane tradition of sculptural craftsmanship.

In the center of the room, by contrast, a vitrine displays a bell-shaped golden helmet from the 4th century BC, decorated with relief figures of Scythian warriors doing combat in a landscape. Two bearded Scythians have taken on four clean-shaven fighters, and the Scythians clearly have the upper hand. While still somewhat schematic, the relief is far more naturalistic and complicated in its rendering, especially of the warriors’ faces. Hammered from the inside, the design was engraved from the outside. A rosette surrounded by a rope pattern crowns the helmet, while an intricate floral band circles the rim.

Because it’s made of gold, the helmet was likely used in a ritual way--perhaps as part of a burial cache (it was excavated from a tomb in 1988). But if the stone carvings nearby look like the work of untrained artisans, the finely worked helmet is positively Greek. The stark difference in refinement isn’t a simple matter of materials, either--of stone versus metal. Another nearby case holds an even older figural bronze, a hatchet-shaped scepter that looks distinctly like Gumby. The difference between the older sculptures and the newer golden one is more telling.

As nomads, the Scythians were relatively limited in their artistic traditions and capacities. They had migrated from Central Asia around 600 BC. Hunting and gathering (and no doubt plundering) still went on, but in relatively short order they discovered something new. They discovered trade, and especially the meaning of the potentially lucrative term “middleman.”

The wandering Scythians found they could take grain grown by indigenous farmers in the north and sell it, at a big profit, to the Greek cities springing up in the south along the Black Sea coast. Eventually their peripatetic nomadism gave way to regular seasonal encampments. Slowly but surely the Scythians were getting rich, and so they did what the newly rich do: They went shopping. What they bought were luxuries.

The Greeks who were building small cities around the Black Sea bought Scythian grain, but they had artistic talent to sell back to their increasingly prosperous traders. Several dozen works in the show are of Greek manufacture, including bronze vessels, clay amphoras, terra cotta figurines and various pieces of jewelry, and many were excavated from Scythian burial mounds. Others are likely by Scythians emulating Greek styles. The Greek objects are adorned with traditional motifs, both decorative and mythological. Two of the more remarkable are bronze helmets, no doubt used in actual battle, each distinctively shaped like the head of a phallus.

In the exhibition, Scythian style and Greek style begin to mingle, merge and mix with one another. One extraordinary example is an elaborately decorated sword and scabbard plated in gold. The refined and cleverly composed reliefs show scenes of fierce animal combat. The pommel of the sword carries a single crouching stag, typically Scythian, while the blade cover is arrayed with fantastic griffins--half eagle, half lion--of Near Eastern heritage. Elsewhere a half-goat figure of Pan, Greek god of the forests, turns up. And asymmetrical dynamism, which speaks of a worldview based on continuous movement and dramatic flux, begins to be transformed into a more relaxed balance and equilibrium, an expression of eternal harmony.

In more general terms, Scythian decorative motifs tended to be animal and vegetable in origin, as might be expected from warriors who hunted. From Greece came representations of human beings, such as those that turned up at war on the ritual gold helmet, or the elegant seated women who appear on a pair of elaborate earrings, or the portrait-like men’s faces that adorn bridle attachments. And the powerful Scythian figure of a ruling goddess, shown in the center of a magnificent diadem, is eventually joined by a bridle ornament showing the Greek figure of a bearded hero with a lion’s pelt and an enormous club--who else but Hercules.

The exhibition, which is housed at LACMA West, concludes with four pieces of gold jewelry that, however luxurious, with their rock crystal and bits of colored stone, also seem more garish, sometimes even clumsy. The spiral armband, dolphin-shaped pin, floral brooch and intaglio ring are all of more recent vintage, made by the Sarmatians who finally supplanted the Scythian nomads. It is said that the Scythians, whose brutal ways included human sacrifice in the ritual slaughter of attendants (and horses) at elaborate burial feasts, might have grown weak and slothful with all their worldly success as tradesmen.

No one really knows for sure the details of why or how the Sarmatians quashed the Scythians. You get the feeling, though, that this otherwise engaging post-Cold War look at Scythian gold has been given a small but distinctly cautionary coda: Beware getting fat and sassy in a globalizing economy.

* LACMA West, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Sept. 24. Closed Wednesday.