Maykop Culture: Bronze Age Chieftains of the Caucasus

The Maykop culture was an early Bronze Age society of the North Caucasus, in what is now southern Russia, which flourished from roughly 3700 to 3000 BC. It is named after the Maykop kurgan, a great burial mound in the town of Maykop excavated in 1897, whose chieftain’s grave held gold and silver treasures of a richness then unknown for such an early date. The culture is important for its early metallurgy and for linking the cities of Mesopotamia with the herding peoples of the steppe.

Setting and dates

The Maykop culture occupied the northern foothills of the Caucasus mountains and the plains of the Kuban and Terek river basins, including the modern Russian republics of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia and parts of Krasnodar and Stavropol regions. The mountains held deposits of copper, arsenic-rich ores, silver and gold.

Radiocarbon dates place the culture between about 3700 and 3000 BC, with some scholars extending its start back towards 3900 BC. Russian archaeology often labels it Early Bronze Age, although much of its metal is arsenical copper rather than true tin bronze. Archaeologists usually divide it into an earlier Maykop phase and a later phase named after the cemetery of Novosvobodnaya.

The Maykop kurgan

In 1897 the Russian archaeologist Nikolai Veselovsky excavated a large kurgan, a burial mound of earth and stones, on the edge of Maykop. The mound, sometimes called the Oshad kurgan, stood over 10 metres high.

Beneath it lay a stone-lined chamber divided into sections. The main burial was that of a man, laid on his side with knees drawn up and covered in red ochre. Two further individuals were buried in separate compartments of the chamber. The grave goods included:

• two gold and two silver figurines of bulls, each pierced to fit onto a long metal rod; the rods probably supported a canopy over the body;
• dozens of small gold appliqués in the shape of lions and bulls, along with gold rings and rosettes, probably sewn onto clothing or a cloth canopy;
• silver and gold vessels, two of them engraved with processions of animals and what appears to be a mountain landscape, among the earliest landscape images known;
• necklaces of carnelian, turquoise and gold beads;
• tools and weapons of arsenical copper, including axes, adzes and daggers.

The finds were taken to St Petersburg and are now held in the State Hermitage Museum. For decades they were thought to be much younger, but radiocarbon dating in recent decades has confirmed their fourth-millennium age.

Novosvobodnaya and other tombs

Later Maykop graves include the impressive tombs near the village of Novosvobodnaya, first explored by Veselovsky in 1898. These were megalithic chambers of large stone slabs, built inside kurgans, with a round porthole-like opening between the burial chamber and an antechamber.

From 1979 the archaeologist Aleksey Rezepkin excavated a group of kurgans at Klady, near Novosvobodnaya, which produced metal tools and weapons, beads and rare fragments of textiles. These later tombs show that the region’s elite continued to bury their dead with great wealth until near the end of the fourth millennium BC.

Metallurgy and craft

The Maykop culture was one of the most advanced metalworking centres of its time. Its smiths used arsenical copper, an alloy harder than pure copper, to make cauldrons, axes, spearheads and daggers. Gold and silver were worked into thin sheets, cast figures and wire. These skills built on earlier advances such as copper smelting in the Balkans and the metalwork of the Varna necropolis.

Maykop potters used slow-turning wheels, and some vessels are made of fine, burnished clay. Known settlements, such as Galyugai, were generally small farming villages, which contrasts with the wealth of the elite burials.

Links to Mesopotamia and the steppe

Many scholars see the Maykop culture as connected to the “Uruk expansion”, when the cities of southern Mesopotamia, led by Uruk, spread trading colonies and influence across northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia in about 3700–3100 BC. Cylinder seals, beads of lapis lazuli and carnelian, and certain styles of pottery and metalwork in Maykop graves point to contacts with the south.

To the north lay the herding peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Maykop metal objects reached steppe communities, and the Maykop culture may have been one route by which wagons, wool sheep and new metal-working techniques spread northwards. Later, the Yamnaya culture built kurgans in a related tradition across the steppe.

Ancient DNA

Genetic studies published from 2019 onwards, especially by Chuan-Chao Wang and colleagues, analysed individuals buried in Maykop graves. They found that most of their ancestry was related to farmers of the Caucasus, Anatolia and Iran, rather than to steppe hunter-gatherers.

This means the Maykop people were genetically distinct from the Yamnaya to their north, even though the two cultures traded and shared some practices. The results challenged older suggestions that the Maykop culture was directly ancestral to the steppe groups.

Society and status

The contrast between modest villages and a few lavish kurgans suggests a society with marked differences in rank. Most people were farmers who grew wheat and barley and kept cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, while a small elite controlled metal, fine goods and long-distance exchange.

Building a mound more than ten metres high required the labour of many people, and the treasures placed in elite graves were taken out of circulation forever. Archaeologists often interpret this as a display of power by chiefs or ruling families, who used burial ceremonies to show their status and to bind followers to them. The canopy over the Maykop chieftain, decorated with bulls and lions, may have imitated symbols of authority known from the Near East.

Research and reinterpretation

When the Maykop treasure was found in 1897, scholars had no reliable way to date it. Because of its sophistication, many assumed it belonged to the second millennium BC and compared it with finds from Troy and Mycenae. Only with radiocarbon dating of Maykop-culture sites, from the late twentieth century onwards, did it become clear that the burials were more than a thousand years older.

Since then, excavations by Russian archaeologists, including Aleksey Rezepkin and Sergey Korenevskiy, together with new scientific analyses of metal and human remains, have turned the culture from an isolated treasure into a well-documented society. Debate continues about how directly it was linked to Mesopotamia, and about its role in the spread of new technologies onto the steppe.

Timeline

• c. 3900–3700 BC: The earliest Maykop-culture settlements and burials appear in the North Caucasus.
• c. 3700–3400 BC: The Maykop kurgan and other rich elite graves are built.
• c. 3400–3000 BC: The later Novosvobodnaya phase, with megalithic tomb chambers.
• c. 3000 BC: The Maykop culture gives way to later Early Bronze Age cultures of the region.
• 1897: Nikolai Veselovsky excavates the Maykop kurgan.
• 1898: Veselovsky explores tombs at Novosvobodnaya.
• 2019: Ancient DNA study by Wang and colleagues shows Maykop ancestry differed from the Yamnaya.

Why it matters

The Maykop culture shows that wealthy, ranked societies with skilled metalworkers existed on the northern edge of the Near Eastern world by the fourth millennium BC. Its treasures reveal long-distance contacts reaching from Mesopotamia to the steppe. It therefore helps explain how technologies and ideas moved between the early cities of the south and the mobile herders of Eurasia.