by John Man
Arzhan 2, made about a century after Arzhan 1, proved even more remarkable, both for its contents, and for the fact that it had been largely untouched. The builders had got smart, as the German and Russian excavation team discovered when they dug it up in 2000–2004. The two central pits were mock graves, which had fooled would-be looters. The main burial was 20 metres off-centre. The archaeologists and their hundred workers found not only the royal couple, but also sixteen murdered attendants, and a trove of treasure: 9,300 objects, of which 5,700 were gold, weighing 20 kilograms, a record for a Siberian grave. The ‘king’ – that’s a guess – aged fifty to fifty-five, wore a golden torc and a jacket decorated with 2,500 small panther figurines, all gold, trousers sewn with golden beads, and gold-cuffed boots. On a belt was a gold-encrusted double-edged dagger. The woman, twenty years younger, wore a red cloak also covered with 2,500 panther figurines in gold. She had an iron dagger with a gilded hilt, a golden comb, and a wooden ladle with a golden handle. Her headdress was a gold pointed cap, decorated with two gold horses, a panther and a bird of prey. The two were buried together, suggesting the woman – wife or concubine – was killed to keep her man company in the afterlife. Nearby were thousands of beads, 431 of them made of amber, traded all the way across Eurasia from the Baltic.
The Arzhan tombs were for royalty. For rank-and-file warriors, there’s more information 100 kilometres to the south-west. The cemetery, Aymyrlyg, stretches for 10 kilometres along a tributary of the Yenisei. This is a landscape of rolling hills and high pastures, with mountains lining the horizon, and a foreground now under water, drowned by a reservoir created by a vast hydroelectric dam further down the Yenisei. Here, the Scythians and their descendants had made an ancestral cemetery, burying some 800 bodies mainly in the third and second centuries BC. Buried with the bodies were weapons, Animal Style artefacts, tools, pins, combs, mirrors, belts with bronze buckles, and horse-fittings, all the things commonly found in Scythian tombs.
The bones from 600 individuals, collected between 1968 and 1984 from 200 graves and taken to St Petersburg before the reservoir’s waters rose, are an encyclopedia of the pains, diseases and injuries suffered by ordinary Scythians. With the fast-developing sciences of bioarchaeology and palaeopathology, scholars can read stories in the remains. Skulls look more European than Mongoloid. Furrows and pits in the teeth, lesions in eye sockets, and the microstructure of bones give clues to diseases, diet, climate change and plant cover. Causes of death are catalogued in bone: murders, domestic violence, executions, ritual sacrifices, battles, accidents. Battleaxe injuries predominate during the early period and sword wounds are more common later.
Eileen Murphy, of Queen’s University, Belfast, has made an extensive study of these bones in St Petersburg. She analysed over 3,000 of them. A few skulls show signs of scalping, a few others of being cut open, possibly to remove the brain, ‘an aggressive post-combat activity that was part of a warritual’. Beyond this, as Murphy says, ‘The Aymyrlyg excavations enable us to gain real insight into the lives and lifestyles of the “ordinary” members of these semi-nomadic societies.’3
Horse-based cultures are hard on everyone. People fell off horses all the time, mostly without damage; but the healed injuries show that if you fell off you had a 1–2 per cent chance of breaking a bone, though the men were twice as likely as women to break something. Fair enough, you would think, in a horse-riding community. But women had it worse in other ways, as their lower backs reveal. They had more than their fair share of hairline fractures in the lumbar region, a condition known as spondylolysis, sometimes called ‘clayshoveller’s fracture’. Some 5 per cent have the condition in modern populations; Scythian women suffered over twice that. As Murphy points out, this ‘suggests that … the women did not spend all their time sitting around in wagons but that they were also engaged in heavy physical labour’.
This tough life was also a violent one. A few of the injuries – bashed-in skulls, facial fractures – seem to have been the result of assaults within the group. Others were war injuries, notably arrow wounds, sword wounds and holes in the skull from battleaxes. There were twenty of those, sixteen of them with no signs of healing: they were death blows. Most victims of course were men, but two were women. Children too were victims, presumably killed when their camps or wagons were attacked. Several of the women had damaged left armbones, as if they had held up that arm to ward off blows.
Some bones tell dramatic stories. One woman, between thirty-five and forty-five years of age, had a wound in the thigh, and then lost her head to a single blow from an ‘extremely sharp’ sword. The attack came from behind, perhaps from horseback. She didn’t have a chance. Nor apparently did her assailant. ‘The angle of the sword chop … indicates that the blow had probably been struck from left to right, with the aggressor positioned posterior to the victim. The skull had been buried with the cadaver, and evidently the head had not been carried away as a trophy.’ Perhaps, Murphy speculates, the head was left attached by a strand of flesh, and the attacker had no time to finish the job; or perhaps someone stepped in and dealt with the attacker.
Now come 1,500 kilometres south-west of Tuva, to the mountains east of the Kazakh principal city (not the capital – that’s Astana), Almaty. From the northern slopes of the Tian Shan flow rivers that have turned temperate valleys into fine pastures, which now make farmland. Kazakhstan has kurgans by the thousand, about forty of which lie in a pretty valley near a lake called Issyk (Esik in Kazakh, and nothing to do with the huge freshwater lake of Issyk Kul, over the border with Kyrgyzstan to the south).
In the summer of 1969, a farmer ploughing a field near a 6-metre-high kurgan noticed something glinting in the newly turned dark earth behind him. He got down, kicked the soil and found a small piece of patterned gold. Amazingly, he did not pocket his find, but reported it. The Kazakh Institute sent a team to investigate, led by the renowned Soviet archaeologist Kemal Akishev. He was already honoured nationally both for his work and as a fighter in the Second World War. He became the much-revered father of Kazakhstan archaeology, and remained so until his death in 2003, aged seventy-nine.
The kurgan near where the farmer found the plaque was one of those astonishing rareties, an unrobbed tomb. Actually, the central tomb had been robbed, but the robbers had missed a side grave. In it, under piles of dirt, lay a crushed skeleton, quite a small one. Surrounding the bones was treasure.
Overnight a thief made off with some of the gold, but what remained was the most remarkable of all Saka finds. Other than the skeleton, the fifth-century BC burial contained: a jacket decorated with 2,400 arrow-shaped gold plaques edged with more gold plaques in the shape of stylized lions; a belt with thirteen golden deer-heads and three of moose and deer with griffin heads; a golden neck-torc with snow-leopard clasps; a gold-bound whip handle; a silver cup engraved with an unidentified script; a dagger and a metre-long sword, the blades embossed with gold animals and in gold-encrusted scabbards; there were earrings, beads, a gilded bronze mirror, and beaters for churning milk into kumiss (mildly fermented mare’s milk); and to cap it all, literally, a towering 63-centimetre headdress made of a cone of wood covered with felt.
The skull was too damaged to tell the sex of its owner, but the sword and dagger seemed to leave no doubt. Akishev called the find the Golden Man, fitted him with leather trousers and put him on display. He was adopted as the new nation’s symbol when Kazakhstan emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
A Golden Man: that was the assumption. Fair enough, at the time. But there were things that didn’t quite fit, and they began to bother the American archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball, who had worked on the find: the size of the skeleton, the high hat, the earrings and beads, kumiss-beaters. Her conclusion: the Golden Man was not a man after all. ‘This person was actually a young woman … a high-ranking warrior priestess.’4 The truth will probably never be known, because the bones mysteriously vanished around the time it became possible to determine
sex from DNA. Kazakhstan’s strong man, Nursultan Nazarbayev, had declared himself a big fan. It really wouldn’t do to have an ancestral king suddenly turn into a queen. The figure, restored, copied, and constantly reproduced in tourist posters, is likely to remain a flat-chested, trousered youth.
Four hundred kilometres south-west of Tuva and 1,000 metres higher in the Altai Mountains, Mongolia, China, Russia and Kazakhstan very nearly meet. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the local Scythians had no frontiers except their own gorges and pine forests, which locked them into their neighbourhood. They lived in tents and log cabins. Wagons were useless. They used only horses for transport, trapping, hunting and raiding. They lived, fought, died here, and were buried in ancestral cemeteries, where their bodies and possessions remained deep-frozen until discovered by modern archaeologists.
Russians were first on the scene. Sergei Rudenko, arriving in 1924, came up-stream from a long finger lake, Lake Teletskoye, turned left along the Great Ulugan River and found himself in a dry valley called Pazyryk by locals, which is the name given to the people he found and their culture. A long-gone glacier had carved it into a U-shape, which many generations of Scythians had turned into a cemetery. There were fourteen mounds, five of them large, all deep-frozen log chambers. They dated from the fifth to the mid-third centuries BC, with the most recent research placing the five main ones in a sixty-year period, c.300–240 BC. The men wore leather caps with ear-flaps, the women had headdresses up to 90 centimetres high, even higher than the golden person of Issyk. Of the many remaining artefacts – horse-fittings, leather cut-outs, wall hangings, carpets, saddle-blankets – the most surprising is a beautifully made carriage, which when reconstructed has four wheels, each 1.6 metres across, with thirty-four delicate spokes. It was designed for four horses, which had been buried nearby. In these steep-sided valleys, it was entirely useless, and obviously not Scythian. One explanation, suggested by a find of silk in the same grave, is that it had brought a bride from China, and been buried along with her to carry her into the next world.
Another surprise was that some of the people buried here had been tattooed. One man, known as the tattooed chieftain, had animals and bits of animals – legs, tails and bodies of horses, birds, snakes, rams, deer, some sort of winged monster – writhing along both his arms, while a fish lay the length of his shin, flanked by four mountain rams. A lion or griffin with a huge curly tail stood by itself over his heart. These gorgeous designs were probably of soot, pricked into the skin with a needle.
Beside him lay a woman in her forties. As infrared analysis revealed in 2003, she too had been tattooed, with a twisted stag on one shoulder and a contorted mountain sheep on the other. In another mound (No. 5), a woman aged fifty and a man of fifty-five also had tattoos. The woman’s arms and hands were covered with intricate, well-planned designs of two striped tigers and a polka-dotted snow leopard attacking two deer with vast sets of antlers.
All of which provides a context for the most dramatic of Pazyryk finds. Two hundred kilometres to the south and 500 metres higher brings us to the drier and harsher Ukok Plateau, almost on the Chinese border. It is a place of waving grass, meandering streams and scattered lakes. Sharp, snowy mountains enclose the horizon in every direction. There’s not a tree in sight. Summers range from bitter to blistering; winters are brutal. But 2,500 years ago, it was much less grim – a popular place for semi-nomadic Scythians of the Pazyryk culture, because summer pastures were rich and in winter winds kept it clear of snow.
Here in 1990 the Russian archaeologist Natalya Polosmak, from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, started researching the mounds on the plateau. In May 1993, after a late spring, their truck dumped Polosmak and her team by a mound right next to the barbed-wire fence that marked Russia’s edge. Beyond was 8 kilometres of no man’s land, then the Chinese border. Spring sunshine freed the lakes and dotted the grass with snowdrops and edelweiss.
Working with a team of six, it took two weeks to remove the cap of rock and earth, dig through a looted grave and reach the original one, untouched, unrobbed. Inside was a block of ice. Once unfrozen, the contents emerged – harnesses, parts of saddles, a table on which had been placed a meal of fatty mutton, frozen after it had started to rot, which now, after 2,000 years, gave off a foul odour in the spring sunshine. Six horses appeared, with the hole of the executioner’s pick clear in their foreheads. They still had their last meal in their stomachs: their deaths and burial had been in spring. At last, the retreating ice fell away from a curved larchwood casket. After the removal of four 6-inch bronze nails, the lid came up, revealing nothing but more ice. Melting the ice took many days. It was July, and hot. Every day, team members poured on buckets of hot water, and carted away the meltwater. Mosquitoes pestered. The six dead horses stank. Polosmak’s impatience grew.
At last, on Monday 19 July, a jawbone appeared through the ice, then some sable fur. Polosmak peeled back the fur, to see not bone but flesh, a shoulder and the ‘brilliant blue tattoo of a magnificent griffin-like creature’.5 The body, slowly emerging from the ice, was a mummy, in excellent condition, with much of the skin intact, the brain removed, the muscles scraped away, the rest embalmed with a mix of herbs, grasses and wool. The tattoos were of a distorted mythological animal: a deer, its rear twisted in the Scythian Animal Style, with a griffin’s beak and antlers sprouting either griffins’ heads or flowers, a shape repeated on the animal’s back. Further down the arm was a snow leopard with an extended tail and a head (if it was a head) attacking or consuming a sheep’s body with legs at both ends. Next day, a headdress emerged, one-third the length of the coffin. Only then did Polosmak realize this was a woman, aged about twenty-five, the one who would soon be called the Ice Maiden, or the Ukok Princess. The sable fur came away in bits, revealing a long and flowing robe, a striped woollen skirt and a yellow top of silk.
Her looks were important to her. The bag next to her left hip held more than a mirror; it was a cosmetics bag, with a face brush made from horsehair, and a fragment of an ‘eyeliner pencil’ made of vivianite,6 a form of iron phosphate which adds a deep blue-green colour to skin. There was some vivianite powder as well, apparently to be applied to the face.
The final surprise, which only emerged when the Ice Maiden was examined close up in Polosmak’s Novosibirsk laboratory, was that her head had been completely shaved. She was bald. Her hair was not her hair – it was a wig, made with two layers of female hair woven under felt, with a wooden deer covered with gold foil pinned to the front. From the top of the wig rose a spike of felt, 68.5 centimetres long, with a sliver of wood as a core to keep it up. On it were fifteen birds made of leather, each smaller than the last. The device was familiar to archaeologists from Animal Style art in other Scythian graves. It was what they call the Tree of Life, the shamanic symbol of health and status, which was also present on the Golden Man or Woman of Issyk.
There followed a tidal wave of publicity, which inspired much nationalist fervour from the government of the new Altai Republic. They declared Ukok a protected territory, and objected bitterly to the removal of ‘their’ princess. Since 2012, when the museum in the capital Gorno Altaisk was given the proper facilities, the Ice Maiden has been back in her homeland, resting in air-conditioned peace.
1 Gelegdorj Eregzen (ed.), Treasures of the Xiongnu (see Bibliography).
2 Xiajiadian Lower and Upper Periods, Liu Guanmin and Xu Guangji, cited in Adam T. Kessler, Empires Beyond the Great Wall (see Bibliography).
3 Eileen M. Murphy, Iron Age Archaeology and Trauma from Aymyrlyg, South Siberia (see Bibliography).
4 Jeannine Davis-Kimball and C. Scott Littleton, ‘Warrior Women of the Eurasia Steppes’, Archaeology (see Bibliography).
5 Her words, translated in a National Geographic article (October 1994).
6 Named after an eighteenth-century Welsh-Cornish mine owner and mineralogist, John Vivian, of Truro.
2
INTO ORDOS
&n
bsp; BY ABOUT 500 BC, MANY SCYTHIAN TRIBES HAD RISEN AND fallen. Some left long-lasting remains, like those surveyed in the last chapter. Others vanished with hardly a trace, which might have been the fate of two minor tribes living close to what we now call China. They demand our attention, because they were probably the ancestors of the Xiongnu and their homeland was certainly where the Xiongnu were first recorded by the Chinese.
The homeland is a slab of territory defined by the Yellow River as it sweeps north, then east, then south in what is widely known as the Great Bend. It is not a single bend, but – very roughly – three sides of a 1,000-kilometre square defined by mountain ranges. Today, the region is Ordos, an obsolete Mongolian word meaning ‘palace tents’, which explains why this section of the Yellow River has an alternative name, the Ordos Loop. It is about the size of Scotland or South Carolina, with a historical significance out of proportion to its size, because it is ecologically part of the steppes, but geographically part of China. Throughout history, it has switched between the two many times. In 500 BC it was firmly in the hands of several tribes of nomadic herders,1 who had no reason to think things would ever change.
Today, much of Ordos is semi-desert, but the climate was better then. Recent archaeological evidence2 says that some 85 per cent of Ordos was covered by forests and grassland as compared with only about 9 per cent today.3 Those fine pastures were ideal for horse-riders and herders. Though they must surely have engaged in trade with their Chinese neighbours to the east and south, they looked west and north to the peoples of the grasslands. It was with them that they shared a way of life, and from them they received their cultural influences.