Scythia

Scythia (750–300 BCE) was the era of domination by Iranian-speaking nomadic tribes across the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region, described as early as Herodotus in his "Histories." The Scythians forged a military-tribal polity centred on the Pontic steppe, and their elite grew famous for fabled wealth. The core of Scythian culture was the "animal-style" art — dynamic images of deer, panthers, birds of prey and scenes of beasts in combat, worked in gold, bronze and bone with the stylised energy proper to the steppe nomad. Its most emblematic monuments come from immense kurgans on Ukrainian soil: Tovsta Mohyla in the Dnipro region, which yielded the celebrated gold pectoral of the fourth century BCE, along with Chortomlyk, Kul-Oba and Solokha. The Tovsta Mohyla pectoral — a three-tiered composition uniting scenes of nomadic life, the vegetal world and heraldic griffins — is considered a summit of ancient toreutics. The Scythians possessed advanced horse-breeding, cavalry tactics and close commercial and artistic ties with the Greek coastal colonies, whence came many pieces made to the order of the barbarian nobility. Their religion inclined toward cults of fire, weaponry and female fertility deities. In the late fourth and third centuries BCE, Greater Scythia was displaced by the Sarmatians, and the polity's centre shifted to the Crimea (Scythian Neapolis). Scythian gold remains one of the foremost artistic treasures of ancient Ukraine.