How refreshing it is to stumble across a beautiful women’s boot that is actually constructed to last in the age of fast fashion, when intentional obsolescence, cheap materials, and faulty construction have become the standard…
…like, for the past 2300 years.
It helps to have landed in a Scythian burial mound in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, where the above boot was unearthed with a slew of other nomadic afterlife necessities including jewelry, food, weapons, and clothes.
Permafrost and the scrupulous attention the Scythians devoted to their deceased preserved these items (and their mummified owners).
In anticipation of the 2017 exhibition Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia, curators of the British Museum wrote:
Nomads don’t leave many traces, but when the Scythians buried their dead, they made sure to outfit them with all they felt they’d need for the afterlife’s endless travels. They excavated a deep pit and constructed a wooden building at the bottom. The roofs were covered with layers of larch, birch bark, and moss, and the interiors resembled log cabins lined and carpeted with black felt. The body was put in a log trunk coffin within the burial chamber, together with some of their cherished possessions and other artifacts. They put killed horses facing east outside the burial chamber but still inside the grave shaft.
The red cloth-wrapped leather bootie, currently in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, is a show-stopper, with tin, pyrite crystals, gold foil, and glass beads attached with sinew. The seams are embellished with fanciful shapes—ducklings, perhaps? The amazing condition of its sole, though, is the real show-stopper.
On Reddit, there’s a lot of speculation about how perfect this bottom layer is:
Perhaps the footwear belonged to a high-ranking woman who didn’t do much walking…
Alternatively, the Scythians may have spent so much time on horseback that their shoe leather was saved…
Perhaps it’s a high-end burial gown intended just for post-mortem wear…
According to the keepers of the British Museum, Scythians sat on the ground around a communal fire, exposing their soles to their neighbors’ gaze.
Make a pair of Scythian boots, like ancient Persian empire reenactor Dan D’Silva did, and describe the process in a three-part series on his blog. It’s up to you how you bedazzle the soles.