The Scythian gold

Real Scythian royal gold, still being found in the steppe kurgans

The Scythians were semi-nomadic horsemen, an Iranian people who ruled the steppe north of the Black Sea, and across the grasslands of what is now southern Ukraine they buried their nobles under great earthen mounds, the kurgans. From the 7th to the 3rd centuries BC their art was made to travel: gold plaques sewn onto clothes and horse trappings, ornaments for tents and wagons, and vigorous stylised animals fighting or alone, a style whose influence reached as far as China and the Celts. Gold set them apart from other steppe peoples. As they traded with the Greek colonies on the coast, Greek craftsmen began making pieces for Scythian customers, and so much of ancient Greek goldsmithing has vanished from Greece itself that finds from Scythian graves are now the largest body of it that survives. Many of the finest pieces are in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

The greatest single find came from Tovsta Mohyla, the "fat barrow," a 4th-century BC royal kurgan near the city of Pokrov in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The archaeologist Borys Mozolevskyi excavated it in 1971. Robbers had looted the central vault long before, but on 21 June 1971 Mozolevskyi found what they had missed: a crescent-shaped pectoral of solid gold, 30.6 cm across and weighing about 1,150 grams. "It is easier to believe in mysticism," he wrote, "than in the fact that robbers could really overlook such a treasure." A side vault, from a later burial, was untouched. It held five skeletons, chief among them a noblewoman and a child, covered in gold ornaments, and the mound gave up more than 600 gold objects in all, with a gold-sheathed sword and a gold headdress.

The pectoral is made in three tiers from dozens of separately cast figures soldered together. The top tier, the focus of the piece, shows scenes of Scythian daily life; the middle, so delicate that its elements were soldered to a solid gold backing plate, is read as the Scythians' bond with nature; the bottom is thought to show their cosmos and mythology, with animal motifs throughout. It was probably made by Greek goldsmiths, perhaps at Panticapaeum in Crimea, for a Scythian chieftain, though some scholars credit Scythian artisans. It is now in the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv.