A young warrior’s untouched grave, just unveiled at the Hermitage, opens a window onto the steppe world whose name India still keeps in its national calendar
Open the Gazette of India, or listen to an All India Radio news bulletin, and the official date you find will be reckoned not only from the birth of Christ but also from the Shaka Samvat — the Saka era, beginning in 78 CE, adopted in 1957 as independent India’s national civil calendar. The name is worth pausing on. It belongs to the Sakas: Iranian-speaking, horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe who, from the second century BCE, rode south into Gandhara, the Indus and beyond, and left their mark on the subcontinent’s coins and dynasties — and lent their name to its reckoning of time.
This spring, in St. Petersburg, the early, spectacular chapter of that nomadic world has gone on public display — and it is well worth an Indian reader’s attention.
The find
On 26 May 2026 the State Hermitage unveiled a compact exhibition, “Gilded Youth’ from the Valley of the Kings in Tuva,” running in Hall No. 27 of the Main Museum Complex from 27 May to 28 June 2026 before the objects are handed over to the National Museum of the Republic of Tyva. At its heart is one of the most talked-about Russian archaeological discoveries of recent years: an undisturbed elite burial from the Chinge-Tey I kurgan in the Republic of Tyva, in the mountains of southern Siberia on Russia’s frontier with Mongolia.
The grave held a young man of the Scythian-era nomadic aristocracy — the kind of high-status youth who, the museum suggests, would in life have led mounted war-bands on long raids in pursuit of plunder, feats and glory. Hence the exhibition’s name.
The surface of the mound was pocked with the test-pits of ancient grave-robbers, yet they missed the burial shaft by about fifteen centimetres. The intact grave that resulted is, the excavators say, the first find of its kind in Tuva since the celebrated royal kurgan of Arzhan-2.
The dead man’s clothing was sewn with rows of gold beads so dense, Hermitage researcher Natalya Agapitova has said, that the team had the impression he wore trousers of gold — though of course no one dressed that way in life. Taking the costume apart took about three weeks of continuous work and an enormous volume of photographic documentation. From the preserved skull, anthropologists were able to reconstruct the warrior’s face; isotope studies, according to senior Hermitage archaeologist Konstantin Chugunov, who led the dig, are expected to show what the young man ate and where he grew up.
The objects on show — ornaments of the burial costume and an array of gold pieces in the steppe “animal style,” worked into intricate tigers and deer — were probably made by other peoples and are stylistically close to finds from Arzhan-2. The craftsmanship records a life of use, not just display: conservator Olga Dmitrieva has pointed to two gold scabbard fittings from the same mould that show real wear, one of them cracked and then repaired — not with a crude patch but with fine granulation, the work of the owner’s own craftsmen. The burial was found in the 2022 field season; four years of excavation and painstaking restoration followed before the gold could be shown, alongside a film and photographs of the valley’s landscapes and the dig itself.
Why “the Valley of the Kings”
Tuva is Central Asia inside Russia — a land of deep pastoral-nomadic tradition. Its Turan–Uyuk basin is nicknamed the Valley of the Kings, a deliberate echo of Egypt, for the chain of monumental burial mounds strung across it. Two are landmarks of world archaeology: Arzhan-1, dug in the 1970s, among the earliest Scythian-type kurgans known anywhere; and Arzhan-2, where Chugunov’s team uncovered an unlooted royal burial with thousands of gold objects at the turn of the 2000s. Chinge-Tey I belongs to the same horizon — both are assigned to the Aldy-Bel culture of the early Scythian period, the seventh-to-sixth century BCE — and ancient-DNA research has suggested possible kinship between people buried in the two complexes.
These finds have fed a major argument in the field: that the Scythian cultural world — its horse gear, weapons and animal-style art — may have first taken shape not on the Black Sea steppe of Herodotus but here, in the eastern reaches of the Eurasian grassland. A growing body of specialists now treats this Siberian valley as lying close to the cradle of the whole Scythian-type way of life. The Tuva nomads left no writing, and almost nothing is known of their beliefs; the gold is much of what they left to speak for them.
The thread to India
The people buried at Chinge-Tey never came near the subcontinent. The connection is one of family, not footsteps. They belonged to a vast web of Eastern Iranic, horse-riding steppe peoples — the Scytho-Saka world — and one branch of that family, the Sakas, did reach India.
The word Saka is the Iranian equivalent of the Greek Scythians, and the two peoples were close kin, both often traced back to the earlier Andronovo culture of the steppe. From around the mid-second century BCE, pushed by upheavals further east, Saka groups moved south through Central Asia into present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-western India. The first Saka ruler in the subcontinent, Maues (Moga), established power in Gandhara and the Indus region in the first century BCE. Later, a separate Saka power, the Western Satraps — among them Nahapana and Rudradaman I, whose Junagadh rock inscription is a landmark of early Sanskrit prose — ruled Gujarat, Malwa and neighbouring parts of western India for over three centuries, until they were absorbed by Chandragupta II’s Gupta empire around 400 CE.
And then there is the calendar. The Saka era of 78 CE, named for these same steppe people, became the basis of the Shaka Samvat that India adopted in 1957. Historians still debate who actually inaugurated it — candidates run from the Western Satrap Chashtana to the Kushan emperor Kanishka, while a popular tradition instead credits a ruler’s victory over the Sakas — but the name on the nation’s official calendar remains a direct echo of these Iranian-speaking nomads.
A note of caution belongs here, precisely because it is the question Indian readers will ask. It is tempting to fold all of this into the long-debated “Aryan question” — the origins of Indo-Aryan speakers and the Vedic tradition. The two stories should not be merged. The spread of Indo-Aryan languages is dated far earlier, to roughly the mid-second millennium BCE, while the Saka migrations into India belong to the last centuries BCE and after. Both the early Indo-Iranians and the later Scytho-Sakas ultimately draw on the same broad steppe horizon, which is why the kinship is real — but it is one of deep, shared ancestry across Eurasia, not a single migration, and the origins debate remains genuinely contested among linguists, archaeologists and geneticists. The honest claim is a family resemblance, not a settled lineage.
The takeaway
At one level the Hermitage is showing the wardrobe of a single young man who died on the Siberian steppe some twenty-six centuries ago. At another, it is a window onto the civilisation of mounted nomads whose cultural cousins helped shape the early history of northern India — right down to the name of the calendar by which the Republic still dates its official acts. Told through the gold of one untouched grave, it is a story of distant but real common roots, stretching the length of Eurasia.
