Qualla
Scythian stone sculpture VI- VII century B.C. made from pink granite, revealed either near Lyta Mohyla kurgan or near Mel’gunov kurgan (now- Kucherivka village in Kirovograd region in Ukraine) in year of 1763 by Oleksiy Petrovich Mel’gunov (1722-1788), the governor-general of Novorossiya province of Russian empire in that time. O.P.Mel’gunov was the first who started archeological excavations near Dnieper so all the golden and silver treasures found by him during the years of these archeological studies at current Ukrainian territory are stored now in the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The statue belongs to unique collection of Scythian stone sculpture of Kirovograd regional museum of local history; the collection includes 6 statues of VI – IV century B.C. that characterizes it as the one of the largest in Ukraine considering the age of sculptures
Scythian stone sculpture VI- VII century B.C. made from pink granite, revealed either near Lyta Mohyla kurgan or near Mel’gunov kurgan (now- Kucherivka village in Kirovograd region in Ukraine) in year of 1763 by Oleksiy Petrovich Mel’gunov (1722-1788), the governor-general of Novorossiya province of Russian empire in that time. O.P.Mel’gunov was the first who started archeological excavations near Dnieper so all the golden and silver treasures found by him during the years of these archeological studies at current Ukrainian territory are stored now in the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The statue belongs to unique collection of Scythian stone sculpture of Kirovograd regional museum of local history; the collection includes 6 statues of VI – IV century B.C. that characterizes it as the one of the largest in Ukraine considering the age of sculptures — Photo: Nataliya Shestakova | CC BY-SA 4.0

Melgunov Kurgan

ArchaeologyScythiansAncient historyHistoric sites
4 min read

In September 1763, diggers broke into a mound on the open steppe and found gold under the stone slabs - a short sword with a golden hilt, a golden diadem, plates worked with eagles and lions and strange animals no one had seen in life. The mound was already old beyond reckoning: raised in the seventh century BC by the Scythians, the horse peoples who ruled these grasslands, and known locally as Lyta Grave. It was one of the earliest Scythian tombs ever excavated anywhere, and what came out of it has never stopped resonating. One of those buried eagles now flies on the flag of the Kirovohrad region.

The Mound of Fire

Rising about ten and a half meters above the plain near the village of Kopani, the kurgan is no simple heap of soil. Cut into, it reveals a startling composition: burnt, slag-like earth laced with the remains of melted metal, charred bone, stone, and clay mixed with coal. Fire, it turns out, was central to the funeral rite - the mound itself bears the scars of a great burning that accompanied whoever was laid to rest here. Built in the seventh century BC and altered again in the fourth, it is among the oldest Scythian mounds known. To stand before it is to face a monument whose builders left no writing, only the evidence of flame and the treasure they chose to send into the earth with their dead.

Gold Beneath the Slabs

The riches lay about two meters down, tucked beneath stone slabs and, curiously, untouched by the fire that marked the rest of the mound. There was an acinaces - a short Scythian sword - with a golden hilt and a gold-plated wooden scabbard alive with images of fantastic beasts. There was a golden diadem, and silver fittings from what appears to have been an Assyrian palace stool, a hint of trade or plunder reaching far to the south. And there were the plates: seventeen of gold, each bearing an eagle with a hinge on its back, along with others showing monkeys, birds, and lions' heads, plus forty bronze arrowheads and rings besides. It was the burial of someone powerful, equipped for a world beyond this one with the finest the age could offer.

The Eagle That Endured

The treasure scattered over the centuries. Much of it entered the Hermitage Museum and the historical museum in Kharkiv, though a large part of that collection was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War - a reminder that even gold that survives 2,600 years underground is not safe from the violence of the surface. Excavators returned to the mound again and again, in the 1890s, in 1990, and as recently as 2019, though the records they left are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. Yet the mound's most enduring legacy needs no museum case. The eagle from those buried golden plates was chosen for the coat of arms of Kirovohrad Oblast, and it spreads its wings on the region's flag - a Scythian emblem, older than any nation here, still watching over the land that raised the mound.

From the Air

Melgunov Kurgan sits at 48.725N, 32.379E, near the village of Kopani in Kropyvnytskyi Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, central Ukraine, roughly 25 km north of Kropyvnytskyi. From low altitude it appears as a rounded earthen mound rising from the flat cultivated steppe. The nearest airport is Kropyvnytskyi (UKKG).

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