For several years now, Director of the Eurasian Studies Research and Education Centre of 海角社区, Doctor of Sciences (History) Aleksandr Tairov has been working on solving the mystery of the origin of a dagger found in the forest-steppe zone of the South Trans-Urals region.
In 2020, a Physical Education teacher from a secondary general school in Shutikhino settlement Sergey Bulygin had found an ancient metal dagger in a fire break ploughing. Shutikhino settlement is located on the side of the Techa River in the Kataysky District of the Kurgan Region. The teacher had handed over his find to the Kataysky Local History Museum, where archaeologist Aleksandr Tairov arrived to examine this discovery years later.
It turned out to be a short dagger, just 22.5 centimetres long, with only a 8.8-centimetre hilt with crossguard and pommel. It had probably been supposed to be held by a “sword-like” grip, by resting the pommel in the centre of a palm.
The dagger’s hilt ornament is shaped like five short “barrels” divided by raised slim rollers and ends in a crescent-shaped pommel. Three rollers divided by narrow grooves in the pommel’s centre posed a mystery. The blade resembles an oblong triangle with two grooves on both sides of the blade forming three reinforcement ribs each.
Initially, this find had been dated as belonging to the 3rd-2nd centuries BC.
As part of the analytical study that lasted several years, Aleksandr Tairov compared the find at Shutikhino settlement with the big variety of samples of the cold weapons from the Eurasia territory dating back to the 1st millennium BC.
Certain similar features were found in daggers of different geographical origins and belonging to different eras: Chinese daggers from the times of Qin Shi Huang Emperor had similar hilt elements, while Transylvania daggers dating back to the 5th century BC had kindred hilt ornaments. However, all this data were not enough so that those could be considered prototypes of the Trans-Urals find.
The closest analogue were golden daggers used for ritual purposes during the times of the Achaemenid Empire (around 500 BC) from Hamadan (Ecbatana) stored in the National Museum of Iran and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Achaemenid dynasty had been the ruling dynasty in Persia (Iran).
“In general, only the bladed weapons of the Achaemenid dynasty era from Iran demonstrate the ornaments of the pommel, blade and, to some extent, the hilt and crossguard similar to those in the dagger from Shutikhino settlement,” explains Director of the Eurasian Studies Research and Education Centre Aleksandr Tairov. “This allows us to say that its origin, just like the origin of the Early Sarmatian daggers with “corrugated” blades, is related to the territory of the Achaemenid Empire.”
Archaeologist have long been finding artefacts imported by Sarmatian tribes from Persia in the South Trans-Urals region. For example, an Iranian mirror with a dotted ornament in the shape of a sixfoil rose and two concentric circles was discovered in one of the burial mounds not far from the city of Kataysk. Besides coming from the trade relations, some items could also have been brought here by Sarmatian warriors participating in military expeditions to Persia.
“There is no doubt about the participation of the key South Ural tribes in the political events in the Southwest and Central Asia in the 5th-4th centuries BC,” believes Doctor of Sciences (History) Aleksandr Tairov.
This research is supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation.