Scythian Jewelry Meshes and the Problem of Their Interpretation

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of a specific type of personal adornment worn by members of the Scythian elite in the North Black Sea region in the second half of the 5th century and throughout the 4th century BCE. The discussion juxtaposes the records from 19th-century and early 20th-century excavations with contextual analyses of very recent discoveries from Ukraine, which shed significant new light on the appearance, production, and meaning of Scythian jewelry. The reconstruction of the shape of the jewelry type in question is greatly complicated by two factors: the lack of relevant depictions in the contemporary corpus of Scythian and Greco-Scythian figure scenes and misleading scholarly references to supposed analogies in a Roman-era mosaic, which became the chief reason for the misinterpretations of the ornament’s appearance. Composed of numerous gold or gilded silver tubes; beads; pendants; and, sometimes, “buttons,” this jewelry type is reconstructed in two gender-specific variants in this article: one mesh-like and the other with a cross-chest form. For over a hundred years, scholars have considered only the mesh variant to be the correct reconstruction. As a result, many costume reconstructions of this jewelry form in specialist research and museum displays alike are still proposed without a sufficient evidentiary base.