Photo Friday - Hills of History

About fifteen minutes outside of my small town is a village where there are Scythian burial mounds. If you're like me and slept through the day in history class where we learned about the Scythians then here's a quick recap.

The Scythians were a large group of eurasian nomads who lived in what is now eastern Europe and Asia from about the 9th century BC to the 1st century BC. The Scythians were some of the earliest known people to master mounted warfare. It's even been suggested that they invaded the Zhou Dynasty in China. When they were at their best they controlled the entire steppe region from the Carpathian's in Western Ukraine through Mongolia and up in Siberia. That's quite an empire, at least by my definition.

So you're driving along relatively flat land and then all of a sudden, there's these mini hills, that look pretty out of place. These are the kurgan, or burial mounds. These are made by creating heaping earth and stones over a burial chamber made of wood. The burial chamber was usually a pretty complex structure, with several chambers. Elite individuals were often buried with different goods and offerings, such as horses, shields, chariots, art, headdresses, tools, jewelry, and ceramics.

By now they've all been excavated, but we still climbed up the mound and were able to look down into the hole. You couldn't see anything cool, just lots of greenery. It was such a neat experience to see this ancient history just outside of my town.

#culture #photofriday #learn #ukraine