Dromos Burials in the Lower Don Kurgans

In the 1970s three graves referred to the type of under-kurgan crypt structures were excavated in the kurgans of the Lower Don Right Bank north of the Severskiy Donets. The burials were roofed with timber and had a dromos as an entrance corridor. The author of the excavations S. V. Smirnov was familiar with this type of multiple graves as he had examined the materials from the South Urals region. This knowledge and discovery of a female grave containing weapons in one of the kurgans made it possible to conclude that these kurgans belonged to the Sauromatians. The Sauromatians-Sirmatians moved from the South Urals to the Don right bank; this migration triggered the start-up of the Sarmatian conquest of the Scythians. The author believes it necessary to get away from direct ethnic interpretations and seek to understand the components of the burial rite. The author interprets it as the establishment of the cult of the dead and formation of the ideology based on continuous communication between the world of the dead and the world of the living. For the living to be able to communicate with the dead, it was necessary to maintain access to the bodies of the buried and provide a possibility for making secondary burials. This idea began to shape in the Iranian world in the second quarter of I mill. BC. The spread of ideas does not necessarily reflect migrations. Rather, geographical factors and similarity of landscapes and rituals attest to the fact that the Lower Don group of dromos graves reflects a link with the Middle Don group of the sites dating from the Scythian period. The distance between them is hardly 300 km. There is direct link between these two groups of sites.