A gold necklace from a Ukrainian burial mound may show women with the bodies of bees

A gold necklace buried with a woman of high status more than 2,300 years ago is getting a new reading that upends decades of assumptions about its imagery. Researchers had long described the necklace’s small winged pendants as a snake-legged goddess, but a fresh study argues they instead depict hybrid women with the bodies of bees, arranged around a central head that may represent an Amazon wearing a Phrygian cap.

A necklace from the Oguz Kurgan

The necklace comes from the North Tomb of the Oguz Kurgan, a major Scythian burial mound near Nyzhni Sirohozy in Kherson Oblast, in southern Ukraine’s Black Sea steppe. The tomb held a high-status woman whom earlier researchers have connected to a so-called “Bosporan princess,” with one hypothesis suggesting she married into Scythian royalty, possibly becoming the wife of a ruler linked to King Ateas. That identification remains a hypothesis rather than an established fact, and researchers continue to debate the burial’s precise date, with estimates ranging from roughly 350 to 310 BCE.

Independent researcher Mikhail Treister, based in Bonn, reassesses the object in the 2026 volume of Drevnosti Bospora, an archaeological annual published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His analysis draws together the necklace’s construction, its imagery, and parallels found across the ancient Greek and Black Sea worlds.

Rethinking the small winged figures

The necklace itself is an elaborate piece of craftsmanship, built from 84 beads each formed by soldering two halves together. Double lotus flowers divide the piece into sections, each set with a five-petaled rosette, and small winged pendants hang from those divisions. Thirty-four of the pendants survive complete, with two more in fragments. Each shows a female figure with a bare upper body and wings that curve upward into a crescent shape, but below the waist the figure narrows into a ridged, conical form that has puzzled specialists for years.

Earlier interpretations read that lower section as a serpent, casting the figures as a snake-legged goddess, a motif with parallels elsewhere in Scythian-era art. Others compared the pendants to sirens, which also combined female upper bodies with wings in Greek imagery. Treister argues that neither reading fits well, noting that the conical lower section does not divide into two curling limbs the way serpent legs typically do, nor does it resemble the leg forms associated with sirens. Instead, he interprets it as an insect abdomen, identifying the figures as a hybrid “bee-woman” image, according to the study reported by Arkeonews.

A head that may belong to an Amazon

The necklace’s central pendant presents a second puzzle. Just 0.9 centimeters high, it consists of two joined gold halves forming a female head with an oval face, straight nose and almond-shaped eyes, topped by an elaborate head covering whose upper section bends forward and folds across the back. Treister identifies this as a Phrygian cap, a detail with real interpretive weight because Greek artists repeatedly used that same headgear when depicting Amazons in vase painting and metalwork, including scenes of Amazonomachy.

Earlier publications had described the pendant simply as a generic female head, but Treister argues the cap makes an Amazon identification considerably more plausible. Even so, the pendant remains unusual within its own tradition: three-dimensional female-head necklace pendants are rare, with most known examples coming from the Bosporus and Olbia, and no close parallel combining this particular head form with a Phrygian cap has previously been documented.

A possible link to Artemis of Ephesus

Treister’s study proposes that a shared religious thread may connect the Amazon-like central figure with the bee-women hanging around it: the cult of Artemis of Ephesus. Amazons carried deep mythological ties to Ephesus and its sanctuary of Artemis, while bees held a prominent place in the city’s own religious symbolism, appearing across its jewelry and coinage.

That cult was not confined to western Asia Minor. Evidence indicates it also reached the Cimmerian Bosporus during the fourth century BCE, the same broader region and period in which Treister places the necklace’s manufacture. A gold earring from the Nymphaion necropolis strengthens the connection: it depicts Artemis seated on a doe and carries a tiny soldered bee on its rosette setting, offering an indirect example of Artemis and bee imagery appearing together in jewelry from the same region. The study stops short of claiming the Oguz necklace is definitively an object of Ephesian Artemis worship, presenting the Artemis connection instead as the most plausible explanation for why an Amazon and bee-women share the same composition.

Imagery centuries older than the grave itself

Perhaps the most surprising element of Treister’s analysis is chronological. He identifies the closest visual ancestors of the bee-women not among fourth-century BCE jewelry contemporary with the Oguz burial, but on ornaments from Rhodes and Melos dating to the second half of the seventh century BCE, roughly three centuries earlier. No closer prototype for the motif is currently known. Those archaic figures have previously been linked to Melissa, a nymph whose name means “bee,” and to female religious imagery connected with the Artemision at Ephesus.

Treister also argues the necklace was likely produced in a Bosporan workshop, pointing to a closely related necklace from the Karagodeuashkh burial mound as its nearest compositional parallel. Later bee-woman jewelry from the Bosporus, Theodosia, Madytos and western Asia Minor offers chronologically closer comparisons but lacks the wings seen on the Oguz pendants, reinforcing how unusual this particular combination of features is.

An old object with a new question

The necklace itself has been known to researchers for decades, buried among the grave goods of a burial mound studied long before this new analysis. What has changed is not the object but the question being asked of it: rather than treating its imagery as decorative flourish, Treister’s study reframes it as evidence for a more complicated network of religious symbolism stretching from archaic Rhodes to the fourth-century Black Sea steppe. Whether that Amazon-and-bee-women reading holds up to further scrutiny will likely depend on whether comparable pendants turn up elsewhere in the region, but for now, the reassessment gives one of Scythian archaeology’s best-known gold objects an entirely new story to tell.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.

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