The Maikop kurgan excavated by Nikolay Veselovsky

Nikolay Veselovsky

Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist, specializing on the history and archaeology of Central Asia. Born in Moscow, schooled in Vologda, studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890...

 in 1897 near Maikop

Maikop

Maykop or Maikop may refer to:*Maykop, capital of the Republic of Adygea, Russia*Maykop culture, prehistoric culture of the northern Caucasus, ca. 3500 BCE–2500 BCE...

, Adygeja, Kuban

Kuban

Kuban is a geographic region of Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta and the Caucasus...

, Southern Russia, is the eponym of the Early Bronze Age Maikop culture of the Northern Caucasus. Dating to the 3rd millennium BC

3rd millennium BC

The 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...

, the kurgan

Kurgan

Kurgan is the Turkic term for a tumulus; mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves, originating with its use in Soviet archaeology, now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology....

had a height of about 10 m and a circumference of about 200 m. It revealed two burials, the central one with rich grave goods, including golden and silver bull figurines.

Literature

• Philip P. Betancourt, The Maikop Copper Tools and Their Relationship to Cretan Metallurgy, American Journal of Archaeology (1970).
• Philip L. Kohl, The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia, Cambridge World Archaeology (2007), ISBN 9780511266959, pp. 73ff.
• Brian Murray Fagan, The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (1996), ISBN 0195076184, p. 398.

External links

• artefacts from the Maikop kurgan (metmuseum.org)