National Museum of the Republic of Adygea in the city of Maikop. If you are interested in the Maikop culture of the Bronze Age, then … you will have something to see there, although all the most valuable items found there are in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
The lands of our sunny south are good for everyone, be it the Krasnodar Territory or, say, the republic of Adygea lying in the center of it. And, of course, everyone knows that this is a granary, and a smithy, and "oil fields", and a sanatorium, united in one place. The advantages of these places were also appreciated by people of ancient civilizations, who fled here for some reason from the Middle East back in the era of the copper stone age. They brought with them their knowledge, customs, but also their ceramics and metalworking technologies. But the most important thing for us is that these people turned out to be also bold experimenters, and were not afraid to add various additives to molten copper. And they were also observant and intelligent enough to see and understand how much this immediately changed the properties of the solidified metal. And - this is exactly how the first bronze appeared, which at that time was an alloy of copper not with tin, which is familiar to us today, but … with poisonous arsenic! It turned out that this alloy is stronger than copper itself, and most importantly, it has a higher fluidity, so it is easier to cast various products from it.
The exposition of the museum is designed in a very modern way.
This is how the ancient culture of the Bronze Age arose here, which received the name of Maikop, and it was named so not in honor of the capital of the republic of Adygea, but … according to the Great Maikop mound, excavated in these places back in 1897 by archaeologist N. I. Veselovsky. Having excavated the mound, Professor Veselovsky found under it the richest burial of three people at once: a priest (or leader) and two of his "accompanying", presumably women.
Dolmen. Well, if he is on display at the State Historical Museum, then how can he not be here ?!
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the burial was downright overflowing with gold and silver objects, since their number is really very large. So, the head of the main buried person was adorned with a golden diadem, and his whole body was covered with 37 large gold plates depicting lions, 31 plates depicting smaller lions, 19 small bulls, 10 double five-petal rosettes, 38 gold rings, and judging by their position, all it was sewn onto his clothes! There were also found a lot of gold beads and beads of various sizes and shapes made of gold, carnelian, and turquoise. Here, near the wall, 17 vessels were lying in a row: two gold, one made of stone, but with an overlaid gold neck and the same lid, and 14 made of silver. Moreover, one of them had golden handles-ears, and the other had a gold rim at the base of the neck. Here they also found two gold and two silver figurines of bulls, which turned out to be one of the most ancient items of this kind on earth!
Here they are - gold plaques from the Maikop mound!
Inside the burial chamber, a lot of all kinds of utensils were found, including the oldest metal bucket on the planet, various weapons and tools, as well as objects of a cult nature. The researchers were especially amazed by the absolutely unique in their technique of execution gold and silver vessels, with images of some mountains, and most likely the Caucasus Mountains (since the figure clearly shows the two-headed Elbrus), and the silhouettes of animals and birds depicted in the characteristic "Maikop animal style". It is hard to imagine that these unique masterpieces were at least six thousand years old and all this time they lay here, in this burial mound under the thickness of earth and stones! It goes without saying that all these truly priceless treasures were immediately sent to St. Petersburg, where they can still be admired today in the "Golden Storeroom" of the State Hermitage.
But this is the same golden bull. It has a hole in the back, so it can be assumed that it was worn on some kind of long rod, or that such gobies served as an ornament for the racks of a canopy made of fabric.
Then, already in 1898, N. I. Veselovsky in the Klady tract, not far from the village of Novosvobodnaya, excavated two more mounds of the Maikop culture, with stone tombs and rich funeral implements containing gold and silver jewelry, cauldrons for cooking, dishes, weapons and tools.
Silver vessel depicting a procession of animals.
And already in the XX century. in the same place, another stone tomb was found, in which the walls were covered with a unique red and black painting depicting figures of people, galloping horses, as well as bows and quivers with arrows. Interestingly, in addition to rich burials, burials were found here with only a very small number of necessary things, or even without them at all. Well, to date, in the territory south of the Taman Peninsula and up to Dagestan, scientists have discovered about 200 monuments belonging to the Maikop culture, including a large group of its settlements in the basin of the Belaya River and along the Fars River south of Maikop, located in the foothills and uplands. parts of Adygea. One of them, near the Svobodny farm, was surrounded by a powerful stone wall four meters wide, to which adobe buildings adjoined from the inside. However, most of the fenced-in area was not built up, and it can be concluded that cattle were driven there in the event of a threat of an enemy attack. Judging by the bones found, the inhabitants of the settlement bred cows, pigs and sheep.
That is, the territory of the distribution of the Maikop culture was very extensive - these are the plains and the foothills of the Ciscaucasia, from the Taman Peninsula to the borders of modern Chechnya, and the entire western coast of the Black Sea.
The most interesting thing in this culture, apparently, is that the Maikopians of the Bronze Age were not only excellent metal craftsmen, but also knew how to profitably trade. In the steppes of the Black Sea region, it was their bronze products that replaced the former copper ones, which were previously supplied there from the Balkan-Carpathian metallurgical province, and imitations of them are found on a vast territory up to Altai. Moreover, they received the turquoise and lapis lazuli they needed from Iran and Afghanistan, that is, they had reliable trading partners there.
Reconstruction of a stone tomb, in which the walls were covered with a unique red and black painting depicting figures of people, galloping horses, as well as bows and quivers with arrows.
It should be emphasized that the discovery of the Maikop culture, as well as many cultures of the Bronze Age, became possible only thanks to the excavation of ancient graves. Well, those, as it turned out, differed from all others in the richness of bronze items and characteristic shape. They were also found in other burials - starting from the right bank of the Don and distant Syria, and from Eastern Anatolia to no less distant Western Iran, which only confirms the opinion of scientists about the ancient Maykopians as good traders.
Beads made of gold, carnelian and turquoise.
As for the ore for their products, they took it nearby, here in the North Caucasus, where they had their own copper ore deposits. Therefore, the tribes living north of the Caucasus Mountains not only in no way depended on its imports from the Middle East, but they also did not need the metal of Transcaucasia. Although, the technological methods of working with metal, and even the very artistic style of Maikop products - all this did not arise here, but in the Middle East at the end of the 4th-first half of the 3rd millennium BC. BC NS. The unique composition of their metal is also indicative - artificially created alloys of copper with arsenic and even with nickel. That is, this arsenic did not accidentally get into them from the ore, but was deliberately introduced during smelting in order to obtain a metal with new properties that were not previously inherent in it. These alloys are characterized by good castability and good forging. Therefore, Maikop craftsmen widely used such technological methods as casting on wax models, forging arsenous bronzes with subsequent annealing, and even inlaid bronze with gold and silver, as well as coating one metal with another. For example, dishes made of pure copper and an alloy of copper with arsenic were covered with tin (that is, they were tinned), items made of a copper-silver alloy were silver like pure silver, but their weapons were covered with arsenic!
There are many objects found in the burials of the Maikop culture, and they are very diverse. These are tools of labor, ranging from axes to adzes, and weapons, which again included axes, but only military ones, with narrower axes, knife-daggers with ribs and valleys on the blade and both with and without shanks. A notable feature of bladed weapons is the rounded end rather than the sharpened blade. The tips of the Maikop copies were petioled, with long necks. The people of Maikop decorated their bronze cauldrons (which were used for cooking meat) and other dishes with crushed ornaments, similar to the stamped relief on ceramics. A very characteristic find are hooks … two-horned, less often one-horned, with the help of which this meat was extracted from the cauldrons. They also found one single ladle with a long handle. But for some reason, bronze jewelry in the burials of the Maikop residents was not found, and this is inexplicable, since there are usually a lot of jewelry made of gold and silver in rich burials. Moreover, the style of these jewelry is purely Middle Eastern, and their counterparts are found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even … in the legendary Troy!
Large bronze cooking pot. Exposition of the State Historical Museum.
The pottery of the Maikop culture is also very interesting. She also retained the look of her Middle Eastern predecessors and, like them, was made without the use of a potter's wheel. The vessels were very diverse in shape, but at the same time they had a carefully smoothed surface of ocher-yellow, red-orange and gray colors. In those cases, if it was coated with an engobe or burnished, then the color of the surface could be both red and black. Archaeologists were very lucky to find a pottery kiln and hearths with solid clay sides. So we know their structure.
It is interesting that, having such a developed metallurgy, the Maikopians, as well as other peoples of the Bronze Age, still widely used stone tools. For example, stone arrowheads were diamond-shaped with retouching along the edges and leaf-shaped flint daggers with serrated edges. Drilled stone axes belonging to this culture are also known. But here we see that they are now imitating bronze axes, and not vice versa. And the diminutiveness of these stone crafts suggests that they were used in blacksmithing and jewelry (for example, for chasing) or for some ritual purposes.
Now, at the place where this mound was located, a stone slab was installed with the following inscription: “Here was the famous in world archeology Maikop mound“Oshad”, excavated in 1897 by Professor N. I. Veselovsky. Treasures from Oshad - part of the culture of the Kuban tribes 2500 BC This monument stands in Maykop at the intersection of Podgornaya and Kurgannaya streets.
The main type of Maikop burials were mounds, from one meter to 6-12 m high, both earthen and stone. The grave itself is usually a rectangular hole dug in the ground, into which the deceased was laid on his side, with his knees pressed to his stomach, and sprinkled with red ocher. Then the grave was covered with earth or thrown with stones, and a mound was poured over it. The fact that there are many items of gold and silver in rich burials suggests that the ancient Maykopians did not spare these metals for the repose of their fellow tribesmen, especially those with a high social status.
