I suggest you look at ancient treasures from the Siberian collection of Peter I. Very valuable things, probably worth a fortune.
In 1715, the Ural miner Nikita Demidov sent Catherine I as a gift (“for the teeth” of the newborn prince) 100 thousand rubles in gold and several gold objects from Siberian mounds. These things were found by mound workers - people who made a living searching for ancient mounds and extracting valuables from them. Many merchants of Siberia and the Urals bought treasures obtained in this way and melted them down, profiting from the sale of gold.
Peter I decided to put an end to this and issued a decree ordering all interesting and unusual finds to be handed over to the authorities. Soon Prince M.P. Gagarin, the governor of Siberia, sent many ancient gold objects to St. Petersburg, which formed the basis of the world's first and only collection of Siberian gold objects. At first this collection was kept in the Petrovskaya Kunstkamera, and in 1859 it was transferred to the Hermitage. From this year, the Imperial Archaeological Commission was established, which was tasked with collecting information about ancient monuments and searching for antiquities related primarily to Russian history and the life of the peoples living in the vast expanses of Russia.
Over time, the collection grew, and its exhibits geographically went far beyond the Siberian mounds alone. Now it contains the world-famous “Scythian gold”.
...A wide strip from the Danube to the Yenisei (and further to Transbaikalia and Mongolia) stretches a huge steppe, cut into pieces by deep rivers. For a long time, related peoples settled in these vast expanses, like the sea, unhampered by any barriers. Homogeneous cultures flourished here and vast empires were created, often not very long-lasting. The routes of devastating conquests and great migrations of peoples lay here.
The steppe, like the sea, was rarely calm: in one place or another, storms arose, which often covered mounds (earth mounds) - these characteristic features of the Eurasian landscape. The mounds stretched across the horizon, wherever you looked. Some of them barely rise above the steppe, others rise like a cone-shaped or hemispherical mountain. Often such mountains reached a height of 20-25 meters and hundreds of meters in circumference.
The mounds with the burials of Scythian leaders are especially large in size and the complexity of the burial arrangement.[1] The vast majority of Scythian mounds were plundered by their contemporaries, but not only... So, for example, the rich Kelermes mounds in 1903 were excavated not by specialists, but by one treasure hunter - a certain technician D.G. Schultz. He excavated four unlooted mounds in the Kuban region, in which he found many expensive things - the clothing and weapons of the buried.
And although the Kelermes burial mounds were plundered, scientists subsequently found here a beautiful silver mirror, decorated with engraving on the back and lined with a thin gold sheet, on which wonderful drawings were imprinted.
The back side of the mirror is divided by radii in the form of a rope into eight sectors, the sharp corners of which are filled with two petals. In the center of the mirror these petals form a large rosette, and the rest of each sector is filled with images of animals and mythological subjects, both of which alternate with each other in the correct order. So, for example, in one of the sectors, Cybele, the winged eastern goddess, mistress of beasts, is represented in full growth in long (to the toe) clothes. She holds two lions by the front paws, cowardly with their tails between their legs. In the adjacent sector there is a fight between a bull and a lion, and under this scene there is a figure of a wild boar.
Some of the most interesting exhibits of the Scythian collection were objects discovered in 1862-1863 in the Chertomlyk mound (north of the city of Nikopol), and among them a magnificent golden gorit - a quiver for arrows and at the same time a case for a bow. This light was made by a Greek master jeweler, and he also decorated it with reliefs depicting scenes from ancient mythology. In two tiers, for example, it depicts scenes telling the life and exploits of Achilles - from the moment when he is taught archery as a child, until the last episode - when his mother, the goddess Thetis, clutching an urn containing the ashes of her dead son, mourns his.
The large size of the gold lining and the beautifully executed chased reliefs would seem to indicate that such a precious thing can only exist in a single copy. But later discoveries[2] allowed scientists to assume that a jewelry workshop in one of the Greek colonies of the Black Sea region produced several gorites from one mold and sent them to their customers (Scythian kings) in different places.
The ancient Hellenes also made the world-famous golden comb from the Solokha burial mound, one of the rare unrobbed Scythian burials. It was a huge mound 18 meters high, which included two burials. The central grave was shaped like a rectangular well with two chambers dug along its long sides.
The comb found in the mound dates back to the turn of the 5th-4th centuries BC - the heyday of ancient Greek art. The creators of the comb took into account the tastes of the customers, as they were well acquainted with the culture of Scythia. The upper part of the ridge is made in the form of a sculptural group depicting a battle between the Scythians. The decisive moment of the battle is captured when a horseman and a footman collided with an enemy who had just lost his horse. The details of the image are worked out so finely that you can see every strand of hair on the head of one of the warriors, pieces of armor on the rider, decorations sewn onto clothes, a wound and the blood flowing out of it on the neck of a fallen horse.
Due to precisely calculated distances between figures, ancient masters achieved compositional unity, harmony and balance of volumetric masses. Two horizontal stripes with figures of five lions sandwiched between them serve as the basis for the main sculptural group and create a transition to the teeth of the comb.
Horses are depicted very characteristically on the crest - small, with long tails and short-cropped manes. The rider sharply reined in his horse, and it stood on its hind legs, and the wounded horse lay on its back with its bent legs raised up.
And in 1853, during excavations near Feodosia, earrings that were unique in their craftsmanship were found. They showed the world examples of that unique type of ancient Greek art, which is commonly called microtechnology. Each earring consists of a richly ornamented disc, the edges of which are covered with several rows of grain. On the inner surface of the discs there are eight graceful palmettes with rosettes at the bases, and their center is decorated with a lush multi-petaled flower.
The main decoration of each earring is a multi-figure composition made in microscopic forms. A popular sporting event in Athens is presented here. Four horses harnessed to a chariot, driven by the winged goddess Nike, are racing at full speed. To her right stands a warrior with a large shield, ready to jump out of the chariot to finish the run to the finish line.
The ancient Greek master made such details on the earrings as the pattern on the shield of the hero-warrior, and even every feather on the wing of the goddess. In the “Feodosia Earrings” the grain is so fine that it cannot be seen without a magnifying glass. Only with high magnification can one see that the tiny grains are connected in groups of four and placed in rows. It was these finishing details that created worldwide fame for the “Feodosian earrings”, especially since the graining technique invented by ancient Greek masters was subsequently lost.
It is not surprising that after the discovery in Feodosia, these earrings immediately attracted the attention of goldsmiths. Many jewelers in St. Petersburg and Paris tried to make a copy of the jewelry, but the task turned out to be impossible due to ignorance of the soldering method and the composition of the solder that ancient craftsmen used. Even the famous Carl Faberge, who tried to repeat the “Feodosia Earrings,” failed. He was unable to complete the moonshot, which was entirely covered with grain. Tiny golden balls, barely noticeable to the naked eye, in the ancient monument were evenly distributed over the entire surface. When creating a copy of C. Faberge, it was not possible to connect even three grains - they merged and did not stick to the earring. But he used the achievements of modern technology, in particular, optics, which the ancient masters did not have. Subsequently, after much effort, jewelers were able to combine only three grains instead of four, and the ancient graining technique remains essentially unknown to this day.
Notes
1. The common name “Scythians” in science refers to the population of the Eurasian steppes, who lived from the Danube to the Yenisei in the 7th-3rd centuries BC. Moreover, it consisted of many related tribes that had their own names.
2. In the Vinnitsa region, and then in the Melitopol area and near Rostov, archaeologists found exactly the same gorites.
Scythian gold from different collections
Pectoral – male chest decoration, 4th century BC.
