We propose how to approach, and report on the first results in our effortfor, describing nuclear matter starting from the solitonic picture of baryonswhich is supposed to represent QCD for large number of colors. For thispurpose, the instanton-skyrmion connection of Atiyah and Manton is exploited todescribe skyrmion matter. We first modify 't Hooft's multi-instanton solutionso as to suitably incorporate proper dynamical variables into the skyrmionmatter and then by taking these variables as variational parameters, we showthat they cover a configuration space sufficient to adequately describe theground state properties of nuclear matter starting from the skyrmion picture.Our results turn out to be comparable to those so far found in differentnumerical calculations, with our solution reaching stability at high densityfor a crystal structure and obtaining a comparable value for the energy perbaryon at the minimum, thus setting the stage for the next step.