The Scythians were nomads who lived in wagons and felt tents, and their masons - probably Greeks hired from nearby Pantikapaion - built the dead king a tent of stone. The chamber is almost square, its walls stepping inward and upward into a vault more than five meters high, the ceiling shaped to echo the timber roof of a chieftain's tent. Against the east wall the king lay in state. A gold disk weighing 461 grams hung at his neck; bracelets ringed each wrist; beside him were laid a whip, a knife, a phial, and a quiver, everything inlaid with gold or precious stone. He had been a rider of the open grasslands, and his people had furnished his afterlife with the trappings of rank a Scythian would recognize.

To the left of the king stood a sarcophagus of cypress wood and ivory, and in it lay a woman - his wife, perhaps, or a companion who followed him into death. Her body was arrayed with an electrum diadem and great gold pendants, open-work earrings, a necklace, bracelets, a gold disk over her brocaded dress. A bronze mirror with a gilded handle lay at her side. Between her feet rested the object that made Kul-Oba famous: a small electrum vessel worked with scenes of Scythian men - stringing a bow, tending a wounded leg, binding a comrade's jaw - tiny figures that let us glimpse faces and gestures from a world with no written history of its own. Near the south wall lay a third body, a servant, likely a charioteer, buried with the horse bones and weapons of his trade.

The archaeologists thought they had found everything. They had not. Beneath the burial chamber lay a second, secret cavity - and the diggers never suspected it. Word of the treasure spread through Kerch, and treasure hunters found what the scholars had missed, emptying the hidden room before anyone in authority could act. Some of the stolen valuables were later recovered by the Russian government, but no one will ever know all that vanished in the night. The great pieces that survived - the gold, the electrum cup, the diadems - traveled to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where they remain among the treasures of the Scythian world. The mound itself still rises near Kerch, an empty hill of ash that once held a king.