Kurgan

A kurgan is a type of tumulus (Burial mound) constructed over a grave, often characterized by containing a single human body along with grave vessels, weapons, and horses. Originally in use on the Pontic–Caspian steppe, kurgans spread into much of Central Asia and Eastern, Southeast, Western, and Northern Europe during the third millennium BC.
The earliest kurgans date to the fourth millennium BC in the Caucasus, and some researchers associate these with the Indo-Europeans. Kurgans were built in the Eneolithic, Bronze, Iron, Antiquity, and Middle Ages, with ancient traditions still active in Southern Siberia and Central Asia.
According to the Etymological dictionary of the Ukrainian language the word "kurhan" is borrowed directly from the Kipchak, part of the Turkic languages, and means: fortress, embankment, high grave. The word has two possible etymologies, either from the Old Turkic root qori- "to close, to block, to guard, to protect", or qur- "to build, to erect, furnish, or stur". According to Vasily Radlov it may be a cognate to qorγan, meaning "fortification, fortress, or a castle".
The Russian noun, already attested in Old East Slavic, comes from an unidentified Turkic language. Kurgans are mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Popularised by its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.
Some sceptre graves could have been covered with a tumulus, placing the first kurgans as early as the fifth millennium BC in eastern Europe. However, this hypothesis is not accepted unanimously. Kurgans were used in Ukrainian and Russian steppes, their use spreading with migration into southern, central, and northern Europe in the third millennium BC. Later, Kurgan barrows became characteristic of Bronze Age peoples, and have been found from Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria (Thracians, Getae, etc.), and Romania (Getae, Dacians), the Caucasus, Russia, to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the Altay Mountains.
The Kurgan hypothesis is that Proto-Indo-Europeans were the bearers of the Kurgan culture of the Black Sea and the Caucasus and west of the Urals. Introduced by Marija Gimbutas in 1956, it combines kurgan archaeology with linguistics to locate the origins of the peoples who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language. She tentatively named the culture "Kurgan" after its distinctive burial mounds and traced its diffusion into Europe. The hypothesis has had a significant effect upon Indo-European studies.
Scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a "Kurgan culture" as reflecting an early Proto-Indo-European ethnicity that existed in the steppes and in southeastern Europe from the fifth millennium to the third millennium BC. In Kurgan cultures, most burials were in kurgans, either clan or individual. Most prominent leaders were buried in individual kurgans, now called "royal kurgans". These individual kurgans have attracted the most attention and publicity because they were more elaborate than clan kurgans and contained grave goods.
The monuments of these cultures coincide with the Scytho-Siberian world (Saka) monuments. Scytho-Siberian monuments have common features and sometimes, common genetic roots. Also associated with these spectacular burial mounds are the Pazyryk, an ancient people who lived in the Altai Mountains that lay in Siberian Russia on the Ukok Plateau, near the borders with China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. The archaeological site on the Ukok Plateau associated with the Pazyryk culture is included in the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Scytho-Siberian classification includes monuments from the eighth to the third century BC. This period is called the Early or Ancient Nomads epoch. "Hunnic" monuments date from the third century BC to the sixth century AD, and Turkic ones from the sixth century AD to the thirteenth century AD, leading up to the Mongolian epoch.
Burial mounds are complex structures with internal chambers. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, elite individuals were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horses and chariots. The structures of the earlier Neolithic period from the fourth to the third millenniums BC, and Bronze Age until the first millennium BC, display continuity of the archaic forming methods. They were inspired by common ritual-mythological concepts.
In all periods, the development of the kurgan structure tradition in the various ethnocultural zones is revealed by common components or typical features in the construction of the monuments. They include:
Depending on the combination of these elements, each historical and cultural nomadic zone has certain architectural distinctions.
In the Bronze Age, kurgans were built with stone reinforcements. Some of them are believed to be Scythian burials with built-up soil and embankments reinforced with stone (Olhovsky, 1991).
Pre-Scytho-Sibirian kurgans were surface kurgans. Wooden or stone tombs were constructed on the surface or underground and then covered with a kurgan. The kurgan tombs of Bronze culture across Europe and Asia were similar in construction to the methods of house construction in the culture. Kurgan Ak-su - Aüly (twelfth–eleventh centuries BC) with a tomb covered by a pyramidal timber roof under a kurgan has space surrounded by double walls serving as a bypass corridor. This design has analogies with Begazy, Sanguyr, Begasar, and Dandybay kurgans. These building traditions survived into the early Middle Ages, to the eighth–tenth centuries AD.
The Bronze Pre-Scytho-Sibirian culture developed in close similarity with the cultures of Yenisei, Altai, Kazakhstan, southern, and southeast Amur regions.
Some kurgans had facing or tiling. One tomb in Ukraine has 29 large limestone slabs set on end in a circle underground. They were decorated with carved geometrical ornamentation of rhombuses, triangles, crosses, and on one slab, figures of people. Another example has an earthen kurgan under a wooden cone of thick logs topped by an ornamented cornice up to 2 m in height.
The Scytho-Siberian kurgans in the Early Iron Age have grandiose mounds throughout the Eurasian continent.
In the eastern Manych steppes and Kuban–Azov steppes during the Yamna culture, a near-equal ratio of female-to-male graves was found among kurgans.
In the lower and middle Volga river region during the Yamna and Poltavka cultures, females were buried in about 20% of graves and two thousand years later, women dressed as warriors were buried in the same region. David Anthony notes, "About 20% of Scythian – Sarmatian 'warrior graves' on the lower Don and lower Volga contained females dressed for battle... a phenomenon that probably inspired the Greek tales about the Amazons."
In Ukraine, the ratio was intermediate between the other two regions, therefore approximately 35% were women.
The most obvious archeological remains associated with the Scythians are the great burial mounds, some more than 20 m high, which dot the Ukrainian and Russian steppe belts and extend in great chains for many kilometers along ridges and watersheds. From them much has been learnt about Scythian life and art.
Some excavated kurgans include:
Kurgan building has a long history in Poland. The Polish word for kurgan is kopiec or kurhan. Some excavated kurgans in Poland: