Black Sea (15 page)

But there exists another, always latent vendetta between all authoritarian nation-states and independent men and women who investigate the past. Archaeology tunnels into the deep foundations on which the arrogance of civilisations and revolutions rests. When the tunnellers enter foundations which should be rock but are merely sand, the floors of the state apartments high above them begin to tremble. Had Farmakovsky and his pupils burrowed their way into a zone of secret weakness, and was that why so many archaeologists had to die?

All knowledge about the Scythians, as it accumulates, has undermined the proposition that the peoples of the Black Sea steppe were primitive and barbarous, and the conclusion that nomadism was a backward form of existence. That conclusion - so central to old-fashioned Russian nationalism — was raised to the level of geopolitics by Germans like J. G. Kohl, who wrote in 1841 that 'from time immemorial down to the present day, [the steppes] have been the dwelling-place of savage nomads and barbaric hordes in whom no independent seed bearing the idea of the state, the building of towns or cultural development ever took place'. His compatriot Roesler thought that the very landscape was reactionary: 'such desolate surroundings, where the wandering imagination finds no point of rest on the shifting horizons and the memory no place whereby it can orient itself.

Out of this kind of stuff developed the popular assumption - still widespread in Europe — that settled agriculture and the existence of a crop-sowing peasantry represented a huge forward development from an earlier stage of nomadism. Here pseudo-anthropology feeds the basic European nightmare: a terror of peoples who move. This nightmare, inherited from the great migrations during and after the decline of the Roman Empire and renewed by the Hun and Mongol raids into the West, was given an extra dimension of horror by nineteenth-century evolutionist intellectuals. The moving peoples were no longer a merely physical menace emerging from the trackless East. They now also seemed to incarnate a cosmic disorder in which the past rose out of its tomb and swarmed forward on horseback to annihilate the present.

That nightmare survives in the new Europe after the revolutions of 1989. It survives as Western fear of all travelling people, of the millions pressing against Europe's gates as 'asylum-seekers' or 'economic migrants', of a social collapse in Russia which would send half the population streaming hungrily towards Germany.

But nomadic pastoralism was not a 'primitive' condition. It was, on the contrary, a specialisation which developed out of settled agricultural communities. To move large herds of domesticated animals hundreds of miles twice a year, north into summer pastures and south again in winter, requires, above all, horses and high skill at riding them. It requires the wheel, if the population is to migrate with its herds by cart or wagon. This way of life needs many kinds of craftsman or specialist, far more than family subsistence farming. And it cannot be carried on without a central leadership able to take rapid and effective decisions in emergency. That emergency could be economic — a traditional pasture destroyed by drought or flooding — or it could be military. The power to ride a horse created armed elites, who were now able to lead their followers out to plunder farming communities or to migrate and conquer distant regions of grassland.

As Herodotus knew, 'pure' nomadism is a rarity. Recording the various 'tribes' or nations of the Scythian culture, he pointed out that many of them were farmers as well as pastoralists. Some ate what they grew; others cultivated grain for the Greek market. And the Scythians were in no way exceptional; that sort of flexibility has always belonged to the economy of mobile steppe peoples. The vision of mounted hordes living off meat and plundered food-stocks belongs only to times of war or of decisive long-range migration - as opposed to the normal circular journeyings after pasture.

Pastoral nomads, even when they do not settle, can and do raise crops. In the fifteenth century, the friar and merchant Giosafat Barbaro lived for many years in the Venetian colony of Tana, on the Don estuary at the head of the Sea of Azov. He used to watch Tatars from the Golden Horde being sent out each March to plant wheat in patches of fertile soil. When the wheat was ripe, the Horde would pass by and reap it from the open steppe on its seasonal journey northwards to the summer grazing.

And Herodotus, a millennium before, had pointed out that, by his time, there were 'natives' who lived in towns. He described neighbours of the Scythians called Budini, who 'have a city built of wood, named Gelonus'. The Budini were nomads, but the Geloni who lived around the city were - according to Herodotus - farmers descended from Greek colonists. His description of their countryside, with its forests and marshes, makes it sound like the middle Dnieper territory. And in recent years, archaeologists have begun to find town-like sites there: fortified enclosures around large settlements with granaries, potteries, smithies for ironwork and permanent cemeteries outside the walls. One of the most spectacular is at Belsk, on a tributary of the Dnieper, whose ramparts are nearly twenty-one miles in circumference. Belsk, which is claimed to be the biggest inhabited earthwork ever discovered on earth, might plausibly be the 'Gelonus' of Herodotus. A workshop has been found there which manufactured drinking-cups out of human skulls - a custom which Herodotus described in great ethnographic detail.

He has turned out to be right about many things. Especially in our own deconstructive times, new historians contrive to shrivel old historians until their information (and conveying information was the only purpose of all their arduous researching and writing) is practically discounted, if not discarded. All that is held interesting about their work is its discourse, the subconscious patterning of its information to establish certain contrasts and 'oppositions' required by the society in which the historian operated. Herodotus has his discourse too. Hartog has identified it brilliantly enough, in a book which will always be read wherever texts on 'barbarism' and 'civilisation
'
come under study. But when Hartog declines to examine the quality of Herodotus as reporter, to test against archaeological evidence the verifiable
Tightness
or wrongness of the
Histories'
'enquiry', he achieves an almost perverse feat of intellectual asceticism. For the extraordinary quality of Herodotus is that his information grows in importance from year to year as archaeology confirms it.

Since the first
kurgans
were excavated nearly two hundred years ago, it has been known that Herodotus was roughly right in his account of Scythian royal burial customs, with their human sacrifices and their concentric rings of slaughtered horses. He was correct, too, about the existence of wooden 'towns' on the fringes of the forest steppe. But Herodotus, the 'old liar' of Victorian classrooms, reached his peak of posthumous triumph in the 1950s when excavations were carried out in the burial mounds of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains, thousands of miles inland from the Black Sea steppe, on the eastern edge of the Scythian realms.

Pazyryk turned out to be the fulfilment of an archaeologist's fantasy: the past in a deep-freeze. It is high enough and cold enough to have preserved its dead and their possessions in the permafrost.

The skin of one nomad ruler was still illuminated like a manuscript with dense patterns of lamp-black tattooing—stylised gryphons and ibex and catfish, probably an individual pictogram about his lineage, territory and cult. He and the other dead men and women lay among dazzling, many-coloured saddle-cloths, an unsuspected art form whose representations of horses in turn revealed a whole culture of decorative mane-dressing and fantastic crested horse-masks. The bodies had been stuffed with many of the herbs recorded by Herodotus in his account of Scythian burial rituals: 'cut marsh-plants and frankincense and parsley and anise seed'.

In the corner of one tomb lay a fur bag containing cannabis. With it were bronze cauldrons filled with stones, and the frame of a tiny, four-foot-high inhalation tent.

After the burial. . . they set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover them with woollen mats... they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and throw red-hot stones into it . .. [they] take the seed of the hemp and creeping under the mats they throw it on the red-hot stones, and being thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour-bath ...

Those sentences, about the importance of cannabis as a Scythian consolation and delight, had to wait two and a half millennia to be confirmed.

The Black Sea has eaten into the old Greek coastal cities. The colony of Tyras, under the walls of the huge Turkish fortress of Akerman, is now partly under the waters of the Dniester
liman.
As much as a third of Olbia lies under the Bug estuary, visited every summer by an enthusiastic Italian sub-aqua club which collects amphoras from the muddy bottom. Chersonesus, sticking out into the open sea at Sevastopol, has lost its southern suburbs by drowning, and Gorgippia, now the handsome
port de plaisance
of Anapa on the Kuban coast, attracts Russian divers searching for Greek columns in the yacht anchorage. Of all the archaeological sites I visited along that northern shore, only Tanais on the lower Don — at the head of the Sea of Azov — was complete under the ground. Here, the main channel of the river had moved several miles across the delta and left the port and colony inland.

The Greeks, as colonists, stayed on this crumbling edge, the physical periphery of a Scythian-Sarmatian world. That world famously had no 'centre' of its own, unless it was the Scythian royal tombs. But the Greeks, for all the cultural allure of the jewellery and decorated pottery and wine which they had to sell, remained guests rather than dominators. Along the coast, they balanced — often precariously. The Scythians, in turn, were occasionally enemies but for most of the time hosts. Talk about centre and periphery, with its implication of the centre's general superiority to the lands on the margins, sounds unconvincing on the Black Sea.

Because the Greeks were literate, there is only a Greek version of their relationship to the peoples of the Pontic Steppe. 'We came, we founded ...' But there could be a different version. After all, it was the Scythians who set the terms on which the colonies were established, and who — given that the colonies generally had no armed forces of their own beyond a citizen home guard — decided whether they should continue to exist. Usually, they wanted them not only to exist but to flourish. Dio Chrysostom described how the Scythians invited the Greeks to return and reopen Olbia after its destruction in
63
BC by the Getic raiders. This action resembles episodes in mediaeval Europe, when kings invited foreigners to found trading cities on their territory with extra-territorial privileges to make their own laws. But if fourteenth-century England, for instance, had been illiterate, we might now be taught that the Hanseatic Germans who set up the Steelyard in London had taken the initiative of colonising a barbarian shore on their own, and had maintained themselves by their own sheer cultural superiority.

Nobody at Olbia questioned the obvious fact that, ultimately, the Scythians were in charge of the situation. The Greeks made no attempt to conquer and control territory — with the exception of the Bosporan Kingdom, which arose in the eastern Crimea and which was in any case a joint enterprise between Greek colonists and local rulers. In Europe, we are accustomed to the idea of colonists who intend at first to subjugate 'natives' and then, eventually, to make the natives 'like them'. That was the Roman way, but not the Greek. It was normal and acceptable to colonial Greeks that people from other cultures should be attracted to their cities and adopt city customs - as Scyles did, and as many thousands of Scythians, Thracians, Maeotians, Sindi, Sarmatians and Khazars were to do in all the ports of the Black Sea, living within the walls as shopkeepers, labourers, craftsmen and eventually — sometimes — as full citizens. But while Greek colonists could assimilate others, they did not proselytise.

Once we were taught that the classical world was a 'centre' which was ultimately destroyed by its barbarian 'periphery'; then, with a little more subtlety, that the classical world was undone by its own inner failures, moral and even monetary, allowing the nomad hordes to flood over the barriers of the Roman Empire. But there is now a third family of explanations, modish and arresting: that the Graeco-Roman societies destroyed their own environment and then, in savage desperation, moved outwards to destroy the cultures around them -Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian - which until then had lived in harmony with nature.

The Danish archaeologist Klavs Randsborg, for example, calls the whole centre-periphery image 'an academic mental stereotype'. He sees Greek and Roman imperialism as the consequence of economic failure in the city-states of the Aegean and Mediterranean shores. At first, the outer world was content to import Greek and early Roman goods and to construct its own imitations of the Mediterranean city-state in fortified hilltop 'towns' (like Belsk, or like the Celtic
oppida
settlements in the north and west of Europe). Then the peoples on the margin began to make their own high-quality pottery and metalwork, initially reproductions, until they no longer needed to import them. 'The political systems in the old Aegean centre ... then found themselves forced into a policy of dominance or conquest in order to secure continued economic advantage.'