Customer Reviews

The Golden Deer of Eurasia

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The Golden Deer of Eurasia is the catalog of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, focusing on recent excavations of a 4th-3rd c. BC Sarmatian grave mound from the eastern Black Sea. The exhibition also included a variety of earlier and later material from points east and west to provide both historical and geographical context. Some of this material (from the Hermitage collection) is very familiar and quite spectacular; some is from smaller provincial museums and has never before been published in English or with color photos. The brief essays by Russian (and a few American) archaeologists are especially valuable because most of the Russian material is available only in Russian and because they illustrate the widely diverging views of the dates, social and cultural context and meaning of the Sarmatian and Scythian material. Translations are excellent, photos generally attractive (though a few are lost in the gutter or show pieces upside down or from poorly chosen vantage points), captions range from excellent to perfunctory (and in a few cases, obviously incorrect). Overall a very worthwhile book providing access to fascinating and poorly documented material.

Ably edited and with informative commentary by Joan Aruz, Ann Farkas, Andrei Alekseev, and Elena Korolkova, The Golden Deer Of Eurasia: Scythian And Sarmatian Treasures From The Russian Steppes is a showcase volume of spectacular artifacts crated from about the fifth to the fourth century B.C.E. by the nomadic people who lived on the steeps of the southern Ural Mountain region and uncovered by recent archaeology expeditions in Filippovka, Russia. The objects include wooden, deer-like creatures overlaid with sheets of gold and silver, as well as gold attachments for wooden vessels, leather, and fabric. Very highly recommended for art history, anthropology, and archaeology reference collections, The Golden Deer Of Eurasia is the catalogue for an exhibition presented by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is a 320-page compendium of 335 illustrations (280 in color) and seven maps.