Arzhan Culture

Listen first. Wind moves across the steppe and presses the grass flat in long silver waves. Somewhere a skylark climbs and sings, then falls silent. Under your boots the ground is dry and stony, and here and there grey rocks break through the turf in loose, deliberate rings. This open basin in the Piy-Khemsky District of Tuva can look empty at first glance. It is not empty. Many of those low swellings in the land are graves, and some of them are among the oldest royal burials of the Eurasian steppe.

Archaeologists use the name Arzhan culture for the people who built these mounds. The name comes from a nearby village. In the Tuvan language, arzhan means a spring, often a healing mineral spring. The burial mounds themselves are called kurgans. A kurgan is a grave covered by a raised mound of earth or stone. Across this valley there are many of them, large and small, in lines and clusters. Locals and scholars sometimes call this landscape the Valley of the Kings.

Why does this valley matter so much? For a long time, people linked the famous animal-style art of the Scythians with the Black Sea region, far to the west. The Scythians were nomadic horse-riding peoples who spread across the steppe in the first millennium before Christ. Discoveries here in Tuva changed that picture. Some of the burials in this valley are older than the classic Scythian graves of the west. That suggests that key parts of Scythian culture may have taken shape here, deep in the heart of Asia.

The first great discovery came in the early 1970s. A team led by the Soviet archaeologist Mikhail Gryaznov excavated the mound now known as Arzhan One. It was enormous, roughly one hundred and twenty metres across. Under the stones, the team found a remarkable timber structure. Larch logs formed a wheel-like pattern of many separate chambers, spreading out from a central burial. Scholars generally date this mound to around the ninth or eighth century before Christ.

In the centre lay a chieftain and a woman, together with other people who were buried around them. But the most striking part of the find was the horses. Large numbers of horses were placed in the outer chambers, many with bridles and harness. For a nomadic society, horses meant wealth, movement and power. Burying so many with one leader was a statement that everyone in the region would understand. Ancient robbers had disturbed parts of the mound, yet much information survived.

One object from Arzhan One is often described as a key early example of steppe animal art. It is a large bronze plaque shaped as a feline, perhaps a panther or snow leopard, curled into a tight ring. Its body forms a circle, and the paws and tail fold inward. This coiled-animal design later appears across a huge area of the steppe. Seeing it here, so early, is one of the reasons archaeologists treat Arzhan as such an important place.

Then, about thirty years later, came a second surprise. In the early 2000s, a Russian and German team including Konstantin Chugunov and Hermann Parzinger excavated another mound, Arzhan Two. From the surface it looked damaged and unremarkable. But beneath it, set to one side of the centre, lay a grave that robbers had never found. Inside were a man and a woman, dressed for eternity. This burial is generally dated a little later than Arzhan One, around the seventh century before Christ.

The grave held thousands of gold objects, adding up to many kilograms of gold. There were thousands of tiny gold animal figures sewn onto clothing. The man wore a heavy gold neck ring, or torque, decorated with animals. There were gold-handled weapons, a decorated headdress, earrings, beads and small tools. When the light fell on the finds, the couple seemed to be covered in gold from head to toe. It was one of the richest untouched burials ever found on the steppe.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The gold objects are not simple shiny shapes. Look closely at photographs or museum displays, and you see deer, boars, big cats, horses and birds of prey. Their bodies twist and fold, and their muscles are shown with small curved lines. The craftsmen worked at a tiny scale, sometimes on figures only a few millimetres long. This skill tells us that these nomads supported highly trained metalworkers, not just herders and warriors.

The treasures do not stay here in the valley. Most of the gold from Arzhan Two is kept today in the National Museum of the Republic of Tuva, in the capital city of Kyzyl. There, a special gold hall displays the finds behind glass. If you have time on your journey, visiting the museum and the valley together makes the story complete. In the valley, you see the land and the scale. In the museum, you see the hands of the craftsmen.

Now look around you again. The valley sits in a wide basin, ringed by mountains, with larch forest on the higher slopes. In summer the grass is green and full of small flowers. In autumn it turns gold and brown. Herders still move animals through this landscape, and you may hear the bleat of sheep or see horses grazing in the distance. The way of life here has changed a great deal, yet the steppe and the horse are still part of daily life.

It helps to think about the effort these mounds required. Logs had to be cut in the mountain forests and carried down to the valley. Stones had to be gathered and piled by hand. Hundreds of people must have worked together, perhaps over long periods. A kurgan was not only a grave. It was also a public monument, a sign of a family's power, and a gathering place for funeral rituals and feasts. Archaeologists still debate many details of those rituals.

There is also a quiet lesson in Arzhan Two. Its surface looked poor, and many people would have walked past it. The real treasure lay hidden to one side, away from the place where robbers usually dug. So when you look across these low mounds, remember that the plain surface can hide a great deal. Many kurgans in this valley have never been excavated. They are protected, and they should be treated with respect, so please stay on paths and do not move stones.

Before you leave, stand still for one more moment. Feel the wind and the sun on your face, and look at the line of mounds across the grass. Nearly three thousand years ago, people stood in this same basin and watched a leader go into the ground with his horses and his gold. The mountains on the horizon are the same mountains they saw. As you walk back, notice the stones under your feet, and the long, open sky above the valley of the kings.