Well, many - not one or two, but many VO readers - do not want to part with the military culture of Mycenaean Greece and the legendary Troy. However, in Russia there are almost more mysterious cultures of the Bronze Age than somewhere “out there” in the East or South. For example, we say "Stone Age", "Stone Age culture", but we only know about it that all the tools there were made of stone. Then the "Bronze Age" began and all tools of labor began to be made of bronze? But what about the Eneolithic - the “copper-stone age”, intermediate between the technology of stone and bronze? But the Bronze Age itself is much more complicated than we used to imagine. This is a multitude of cultures that have left behind just a colossal number of all kinds of monuments. And one should not think that they were all only in Ancient Egypt, Sumer or China, and only there ancient bronze swords and daggers were cast. The cultures of ancient metallurgists also existed on the territory of our East European Plain. What about Siberia? It's cold there … But even there, among the preliterate cultures of the Bronze Age, there are wonderful examples of ancient craftsmanship. There are many of these cultures. But even among them, the Seima-Turbino culture stands out among others in terms of the development of metallurgy in northern Eurasia of the Late Bronze Age, and, perhaps, is one of the most mysterious …
The famous Borodino treasure.
This culture was discovered by accident. In 1912, an infantry regiment learned to dig trenches near the Seim station of the Nizhny Novgorod province. They found a lot of green items and began to dig further, and at the same time the unit commander also told where to go and, even though superficially, described the finds, highlighting the presence of four groups of objects among the finds. And in the same year and by the same method, but 3000 km away from this place, the famous Borodino treasure was found in Bessarabia, which consisted of similar things. Then, already in the 50s, the Turbinsky burial ground and the burial ground on Shustovaya Gora were excavated in Siberia, and the fifth monument of this culture was found in the area of the Rostovka village on the Irtysh tributary near Omsk.
In all cases, these were burial grounds, not settlements, and very rich in terms of burial items. That is, the people of this culture did not regret bronze items on their deceased. Many burial grounds were destroyed, but in a strange way - skulls and bones were broken, but their property was not touched!
Borodino treasure in the State Historical Museum in Moscow.
Taking into account the lack of writing in both the Seima-Turbino and neighboring cultures, the construction of the chronology of the existence of this culture is an important question with a rather vague answer. To determine the chronology of the existence of the Seima-Turbino culture, three relative "reference lines" are used: Balkanomiken, East Asian (Yin) and Caucasian. The most widespread are the first two of them. However, a comparative analysis of the artifacts of the Balkan-Mycenaean and East Asian line of references gives significant discrepancies in determining the time of the existence of the Seima-Turbino culture. Western reference gives the result of the order of the 16th century. BC NS. According to East Asian data, the culture of the Seimians and Turbines can be dated to much later dates - not earlier than 1300 BC. NS. and up to the IX-VIII centuries. BC NS. This contradiction is resolved by the hypothesis that the emergence of the Seima-Turbino metallurgical culture in the Altai region became an impetus for the development of metallurgy in the East Asian region. In support of this assumption, the fact is cited that such elements of Yin material culture as the use of race horses, war chariots, yokes, bronze weapons, bushings and other products appeared without prototypes in China.
Consequently, on the basis of the Balkan-Mycenaean reference lines, the time of the existence of the Seima-Turbino culture can be taken as corresponding to the 16th - 15th centuries. BC NS. And if the chronological boundaries of the culture of the Seimians and Turbines caused certain discussions, then the geography of their distribution is determined quite accurately.
Bronze Chain card. Rice. A. Sheps.
The restoration of the territory inhabited by the Seimians and Turbines was carried out according to the available archaeological data. The easternmost finds are found in small burial grounds and single burials in the Sayan-Altai region. The largest center in Western Siberia is confined to the basins of the middle Irtysh and Om and is centered around the Rostovka burial ground. To the west of the Urals, the Seima-Turbino metal objects are concentrated in the Middle and South Kama regions up to the Volga, with individual objects occurring up to the Sura basin. The westernmost large burial grounds are Seima and Reshnoe in the basin of the Lower Oka. Some items were found up to the Baltic Sea in Finland and Estonia, as well as in Moldova (Borodino treasure). An important feature in the distribution of the Seima-Turbino artifacts is their almost complete absence in the Ural Mountains, which looks rather strange, since the Urals at that time was a significant raw material base for metallurgy. Thus, the Seima-Turbino culture was spread over the vast territory of Northern Eurasia, which means the fact of its significant influence on neighboring cultures.
Ceramics of the Seima-Turbino culture from the Vladimir region. That's great rarity. But it is there.
As mentioned above, the bulk of metal products are concentrated in burial grounds of various sizes. The largest of them are Seima, Turbino, Reshnoe, Rostovka and Satyga. Also, a large number of products are in the alleged sanctuary in the Kaninskaya cave. In large burial grounds and a sanctuary, 315 metal products and eight casting molds were found.
"The Warrior and the Horse" is the famous head of the knife. Burial ground Rostovka. Mid-2nd millennium BC NS. Omsk Irtysh region. Western Siberia. Excavations by V. I. Matyushchenko. MAES TSU.
The peculiarities of the Seima-Turbino necropolises include the poor preservation of the remains of those buried. According to the assumption based on the location of the bones of the dead, burials were deliberately desecrated by representatives of other cultures for ritual purposes.
Of considerable interest is the sanctuary of the Kaninskaya Cave in the Troitsko-Pechersky District of the Komi Republic. A feature of this place is the presence of traces of the activity of two cultural horizons: Seima-Turbino and medieval. In addition, single tools of the early Iron Age were found in the cave. 41 damaged metal objects of the Seima-Turbino type were found in the cave.
The second category of burials are small (up to four strictly fixed burials) burial grounds and single graves. They are unevenly scattered over the territory occupied by the Seima-Turbines: their number is greater in the area of large necropolises.
The morphological base is 442 metal products and 30 casting molds. There are also 39 items associated with the Seima-Turbino bronzes, but typologically different from other cultural monuments. First of all, these are the impressive size spearheads up to 44 cm long! In their shape, they resembled the Zulu Assegai, had a stiffening rib, at the hub shaped like a fork. The straight sides of the tip, extending from the point, were carefully sharpened, beaten off on the anvil and sharpened with an abrasive. Some had a hook on the sleeve. A. I. Soloviev in his monograph “Arms and Armor. Siberian weapons: from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages”(Novosibirsk, 2003) suggested that these spears had a short handle, and they could both stab and cut like swords! They also used decorated Celtic axes, daggers and curved knives. The handle was decorated with molded ornaments, and the pommels depicted figures of people and animals. All products are distinguished by a fairly high technological level. Also, many of them have various patterns and ornaments, which can also serve as one of the classification features of the Seima-Turbino inventory.
Seima-turbino type knives.
The tools, weapons and decorations of this culture differ, first of all, not only typologically, but also in their chemical composition. It was the uniqueness of the alloys used by the Seima-Turbines that caused such attention to them. The qualitative and quantitative composition of 71% (331 items and 22 morphologically indeterminate samples) of the Seima-Turbino finds was determined by spectral analysis at the Institute of Archeology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Seven main chemical and metallurgical groups of the Seima-Turbino metal have been identified.
1. Metallurgically "pure" copper (Cu). All impurities are present in insignificant amounts, and their presence can be explained by natural causes or the addition of bronze scrap to copper.
2. Arsenic copper or bronze (Cu + As). The main impurity is arsenic (from several ppm to several percent). Other impurities are due to the same reasons as copper.
3. Arsenic-antimony bronzes (Cu + As + Sb). The arsenic content is similar to the previous group, the amount of antimony is always less than that of arsenic. Compositional deviations are possible due to mixing of scrap from other alloys.
4. Copper-silver alloys or billons (Cu + Ag). The amount of silver is from whole fractions to tens of percent. Arsenic is often present.
5. Silver-copper alloys (Ag + Cu). The main component is silver. The rest are similar to the previous group.
6. Tin bronzes (Cu + Sn). The amount of tin ranges from 1 to 10%. Also, the alloy may contain lead, antimony and other elements of unclear origin.
It can be seen that the main feature of the Seima-Turbino bronzes was the use of arsenic as an alloying component. Arsenic as an alloying component increases the mechanical properties of copper, being a ligature similar in action to tin. There are several hypotheses that substantiate the presence of arsenic in the bronze of the Seimians and Turbines. The most supported by the facts is the hypothesis about the natural origin of this impurity. This is due to the fact that in the Urals, where copper was mined by representatives of the Abashev culture, there are no tin deposits at all. But at the same time, the arsenic content is increased in local copper ores. Another confirmation of this hypothesis is the fact of a decrease in the relative number of tin bronzes in the western direction, as well as the fact that the nearest tin mines were located on the territory of Rudny Altai. However, it is very difficult to explain the presence of such a large amount of arsenic in products by natural reasons. In the process of smelting copper, which contains arsenic, the latter always burns out, and its amount decreases sharply. This means that it was added at the end of the melt on purpose (increasing the fluidity of the melt), then it was stirred and poured into the mold.
True, one can imagine what these people were breathing with! There is, however, a hypothesis that the foundries were located on the tops of hills, where the wind is constantly blowing and kept from the "leeward". But … experience shows that this does not save from poisonous vapors of arsenic. And who knows, maybe due to their specific metallurgy, they just all died (men), and women "moved" to other tribes and disappeared among them.
So, according to the researchers, the chemical characteristics of the Seima-Turbino metal are primarily due to the insufficient raw material base and the creative nature of the people of this culture!
As for other military equipment - and moving across the expanses of Eurasia from Altai to Moldavia, they simply could not help but fight - the Seimians and Turbines had armor made of … horn plates made of deer and elk antlers, sewn onto a leather base. The same were the leggings and bracers. It is interesting that, judging by the tops of the knife handles (a sculptural group from the Rostovka burial ground), the Seima-Turbino warriors moved on skis, holding on to the reins of a horse galloping in front! It can be assumed that to the south, in the steppes, the Andronovo culture dominated, whose warriors rode in chariots, but to the north, in the forests, moving along the river beds in winter, the Seimians and Turbines lived exactly, but for some reason they moved from east to west.
Well, in the end they left Siberia for the territory of Eastern, and maybe Western Europe and somewhere here they disappeared among the mass of ancient tribes!
