Saddle Horses in the Scythian Burial Rite

Abstract

The first burial mounds with accompanying horse graves were excavated in the 19th century. Nevertheless, some horse graves in the Scythian barrows of the North Black Sea steppe are still insufficiently investigated. A few important questions, for example, whether the horses were killed before being placed in the burial pit or if they suffocated to death after being buried are still under discussion. The horse burial mound sizes and depth have never been taken into consideration and elaborated statistically. The analysis shows that the horse grave pits had special sizes and design features to accommodate the corpses in imitation of those alive. Traditionally horse graves are classified according to their shape. Mozolevsky divided them into three types: square, quadrangular and oval (slot-like). It seems quite appropriate that the shape and size of horse graves were determined by the number of buried animals. In most cases their length roughly corresponds to the size of a horse from its face to tail (2m) while its shape (square or quadrangular) depended on the number of animals buried in a grave. However, not only the width of a grave but its depth also depended on the number of horses per grave. Thus their length may vary from 2.13 to 3.4m; however, only two of them containing 4 animals and one containing 10 animals were over 3m long. Their depth varies from 1.0 to 2.5m but the graves which were over 2m deep had 4 animals (three of them) and 7 animals (one of them). Thus, the conclusion can be drawn that the depth of a grave directly corresponded to its length and width. The Scythian horses had a skillfully made ceremonial harness to emphasize the richness of the burial ceremony of a high status horse master. Therefore, this integrated analysis of burial mounds with their accompanying horse graves and bridle elements has shown that the horse graves in the Scythian tumulus was a sign of prestige and richness of their masters, but in fact accompanying their masters to the other world horses played a secondary role as a part of grave goods.