The Golden Comb from the Solokha kurgan was discovered in 1913 within the Solokha burial mound—a dynastic tomb of Scythian nobility. It is dated to the late 5th—early 4th century BCE.
The comb is a magnificent sculptural group cast from pure gold. It features figures of three fighting warriors. At the core of the composition is an aristocratic horseman in armor, striking a foot soldier with his spear. Beside the rider lies his fallen horse, and to the right on the ground rests another enemy combatant.
Despite its designation, this object was hardly utilized as an everyday hair tool due to its fragility and weight. More likely, it served as a symbol of authority and status—a ceremonial head ornament for a Scythian king or chieftain.
Today, the Golden Comb from Solokha is housed in the Hermitage Museum (Saint Petersburg) and is rightly considered one of the most renowned and valuable artifacts in the collection of Scythian gold.
The story of the comb’s finding was detailed by Andrey Alekseev, a Soviet and Russian archaeologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, head of the Department of Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia at the State Hermitage Museum, and a specialist in Scythian archaeology, in his book “The Wonderful Scythian Golden Comb.” The book was written for the 175th anniversary of Professor Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky’s birth and the 110th anniversary of his excavation of the Solokha kurgan.
The Solokha kurgan, situated on the left bank of the Lower Dnieper, close to the village of Velyka Znamianka (formerly Taurida Governorate), was excavated in 1912–1913. By the time of this dig, N. I. Veselovsky already had several famous monuments to his credit that became classics in archaeology, such as the Bronze Age Maikop kurgan (Adyghe name Oshchad) (1897), and the Scythian Uly and Kelermes kurgans (1908–1910, 1904, 1908), the Oguz kurgan (1891–1894), and many others.
The mound got its name from the Ukrainian female name Solokha, familiar from N. V. Gogol’s “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,” which, according to Russian dictionaries by V. I. Dal and M. Fasmer, means “witch,” “slob,” “shaggy woman,” “unhurried woman,” “a water spirit,” etc., and apparently derives from the Greek name Salome (Salomith) Σαλώμη (the name of a Judean princess, daughter of Herodias and Herod Boethus, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, who demanded the execution of John the Baptist).
The mound embankment of Solokha was described by N. I. Veselovsky as having an “acute,” by S. A. Polovtsova as “conical,” or, more accurately in reality, a hemispherical shape with a flattened top, reaching a final height of 18–19 meters (and possibly more in antiquity), with a diameter of about 110 meters. Beneath the embankment, two burials were found: the central (primary) and a side (later) one.
The central tomb (Fig. 13) had been robbed in ancient times, but despite this, some items of accompanying burial inventory survived in its two chambers—one intended for human interment and the other serving as a storeroom: a silver vessel—a kylix with the inscription ΛΥΚΟ (from Greek λύκος, meaning “wolf”), gold plaques sewn onto burial clothes, a gold needle, gold overlays for a wooden vessel, Greek clay amphorae, bronze arrowheads, etc.
In addition, a completely undisturbed horse burial remained, containing the interments of two horses with rich harnessing and gold adornments. Based on available evidence, a man and a woman might have been laid to rest in the main grave. The earthwork mound was built over this burial, reaching approximately 15 meters in height according to stratigraphic data.
This kurgan proved to be the first such grand burial construction in the Scythian-era Black Sea steppe. After the construction of the side burial, the kurgan’s height was increased by 3–4 meters. The side grave, dug from the southern base of the original mound toward its center, was entirely unplundered by robbers, which is generally unusual in the study of Scythian kurgans. “Out of one hundred scientifically investigated kurgans, ninety have already been looted, and finding an untouched tomb is a great rarity,” wrote A. A. Bobrinsky, Chairman of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, about this Solokha grave in 1913. The tomb contained the burial of a “king” accompanied by three dependent persons—an “squire,” a “messenger,” and a “stable hand”—and five separately interred horses.
The principal interment was conducted in a special niche of the subterranean tomb. The remains of the “king” were accompanied by an extremely rich collection of funerary objects. His clothing was embroidered and adorned with numerous gold plaques featuring various depictions; around his neck was a gold torc, on his chest a gold segmented netting, and on his arms, five gold bracelets. To the left of the deceased were two swords, one of which had a gold-decorated hilt and scabbard. Also present was a silver gorytos with arrows, decorated with various images, including narrative scenes—a battle between young warriors and old, hideous ones.
A large gold phiale was placed alongside the arrows. To the right of the deceased’s head were the golden comb, a шестопер (mace), a bronze Greek helmet (modified by a Scythian craftsman, as was often done with antique helmets in barbarian settings), and numerous silver vessels of various shapes, some of which were also decorated with imagery, a clay Greek kylix, and bronze greaves. A bit further away were clay Greek amphorae, a drinking horn or rhyton, and cast bronze cauldrons.
According to the data available to us (dating of the Greek kylix, amphorae, items of horse harness, as well as radiocarbon chronology), the primary grave of the Solokha kurgan was constructed at the very end of the 5th century BCE (around 410–400 BCE), and the ancillary addition in the early 4th century BCE (most likely between 400 and 380 BCE). However, we will return to this matter. In 1914, after the excavation concluded, the renowned archaeologist N. E. Makarenko visited Solokha twice, noting that the kurgan ruins presented a sorrowful sight. Now they survive in a horseshoe shape as shapeless, slumped earth mounds in a field that was previously plowed annually, inching ever closer to the remnants of the mound, though fortunately, it has been removed from crop rotation in recent years.
In the vicinity of Solokha, over 120 large and small kurgans dating from the Bronze Age and Scythian period have been recorded to date; only a small fraction of these have been researched and published during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. To the west of Solokha, these mounds form a distinctive kurgan avenue. Evidently, some of these tombs may have been erected by members of the same local ethnic or social group to which those buried in Solokha belonged.
The Golden Comb, found during N. I. Veselovsky’s excavations in the side grave of the Solokha kurgan and currently housed in the State Hermitage Museum, is one of the most recognizable, distinctive, and unusual artifacts of Hellenistic-Scythian visual art. This find, incidentally, was also made under very unusual circumstances, as evidenced by the recollections of Alexey Alexeyevich Bobrinsky, son of the Chairman of the Imperial Archaeological Commission, Alexey Alexandrovich Bobrinsky.
At nearly twenty years of age, he visited Solokha with his father in 1913. Forty years after the excavation, he recalled the discovery of the comb in his notes: “I remained completely alone at the bottom of the empty grave. The silence around was dead. What kept me attached to that spot? To tell the truth, I don’t even know myself. Some invisible force prevented me from leaving, and I stood there as if spellbound. With my small hand trowel, I aimlessly scraped the hard clay of the grave floor, knowing it was already completely empty.
Suddenly, my trowel struck something solid. I dug a bit lower, exerted effort with my hand, something gleamed, and without any difficulty, I pulled out the enormous ceremonial golden comb of a Scythian king with nineteen long pins and a gold adornment depicting two Scythians attacking a Greek horseman defending himself with a short spear using daggers. Another horse, pierced by a dagger, lay near their feet.
Startled by astonishment, I shouted to my father with all my breath: ‘Hurry back quickly, I found the comb!’… In response, I heard my father’s words: ‘Don’t touch it, you’ll break it, don’t dare touch it, I command you!’… while I was yelling back at my father: ‘But how can I break it? It’s heavy, gold!’… ‘Nonsense, shouts my father, there are no golden combs, it must be bone, you will break it, don’t touch it, I’m coming right now, please wait for me’… A minute later, my father knelt beside me, examining my find, which is now known the world over.
This was the famous golden comb that is now in the Hermitage. It so happened that I was the first person to handle it after it had been in the earth for two thousand three hundred years. Did the spirit of the Scythian king, wishing to play a prank on the seasoned scholars, choose me, an ignorant lad, for this discovery? Or did the legendary witch—Solokha—mischievously place such a treasure into my hand?”
It is the Solokha comb that introduces and heads the illustrative sequence of remarkable Scythian jewelry from the 5th–4th centuries BCE, being widely reproduced in various scholarly and popular publications—from school textbooks to albums and catalogs of temporary Hermitage exhibitions.
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