Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  The headdress was a masterpiece in its own right. Towering headdresses marked high status in Saka-Scythian cultures; they were known by neighbours as ‘people of the peaked cap’, or ‘long hood’; but there was more to this than status. It had a flap covering the ears and neck, adorned with gold plaques in the form of ibex, snow leopards, horses and birds. Attached to it were four gold-foil ‘arrows’ or miniature spears almost as high as the headdress itself, set in gold-foil feathers over a pair of horses with ibex horns. Akishev reconstructed it by comparing it to a Persian portrait of a Saka, one of the many peoples of the Achaemenid empire, in the great reception hall in Persepolis, designed by Darius the Great in the sixth century BC.

  The skull was too damaged for the physical anthropologist, Orazak Ismagulov, 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 became so famous that 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 Davis-Kimball, who worked close up with Akishev’s find. For one thing, those words a few pages back: ‘quite a small one’. Akishev called his Golden Man a youthful chieftain. Remarkably youthful he would have been, hardly out of boyhood. The skeleton was of a person only 160 centimetres (5 foot 3 inches) tall, which is 7.5 centimetres (3 inches) shorter than the average Scythian woman. The headdress’s ‘arrows’ (with two barbs, as opposed to the normal three) might not have been arrows or miniature spears, but some sort of flower, perhaps a fertility symbol; earrings and beads were female items, never seen in male burials; mirrors were associated with priestesses; a couple of items were shamanic symbols familiar from other sites – a ring impressed with a head emanating rays or feathers; birds on trees (a shape often called the Tree of Life) decorating the base of the headdress – but there was nothing to say they had to belong to a male shaman, especially given the figure’s apparent youth; and there were kumiss-beaters, which were attributes of female shamans, symbols perhaps of the transformative powers of women.

  Even while the grave was being excavated, the headdress reminded the Kazakh archaeologists of the tall hats worn by brides at local weddings. Such hats, passed down the generations as dowries, were decorated with small pieces of gold and silver.17 Another major find – the ‘Ukok Princess’, whose story is told in the next chapter – had a high hat and short jacket and twisted-animal tattoos. The sword was no proof that the owner was male – plenty of females were buried with swords. Many of the artefacts were so similar to those found in other women’s tombs that Davis-Kimball felt impelled to go public, and did so with an article in Archaeology magazine in autumn 1997.

  Her conclusion: the Golden Man was not a man after all. ‘This person was actually a young woman . . . a high-ranking warrior priestess.’ In the reconstruction, it would be enough to replace the leather trousers with a skirt, as other Saka women wore. If Herodotus’s Scythian source had seen the result, he would have had no doubts: here was an Amazon queen.

  After publication, Davis-Kimball was apprehensive. Would Russian colleagues see her as an interloper? A feminist challenger to the ‘male-oriented Soviet archaeological system’? But there was no backlash. For those in the know, there was nothing very controversial in her view. Rumours had been circulating about the Golden Man’s sex. Even the physical anthropologist Orazak Ismagulov, who had examined the skull, told her by phone, ‘The bones were very small and could have belonged to a female.’

  No backlash, just a wall of official silence. By 1997, it was possible to determine sex from ancient DNA. A small sample of bone was all that was needed. She requested one. But by then the Golden Man was on display as a national symbol, and Kazakhstan’s strongman, Nursultan Nazarbayev, had declared himself a big fan. It really wouldn’t do to have an ancestral king suddenly turn into a queen. So guess what? When Davis-Kimball called a few days later, Ismagulov’s daughter said the laboratory had been moved and ‘I can’t find any of the Issyk skeletal material’. Since then there has been no trace of the bones and no record of what happened to them. The figure, restored, copied and constantly reproduced in tourist posters, is a flat-chested, trousered youth, and likely to remain so.

  The main problem with doing archaeology in Tuva is that it’s just too pleasant. In broad valleys, 1,000 metres above sea level, the flesh on buried bodies, plant remains, materials and leather all rot away in an eye-blink, geologically speaking, leaving only things made of metals and other minerals. But travel 400 kilometres south-west, climb another 1,000 metres into the Altai Mountains and that problem goes away, because here, in the right conditions, tombs are deep-frozen, with far-reaching consequences for graves, bodies and archaeologists.

  Geopolitically, this is an intriguing region. Mongolia, China, Russia and Kazakhstan very nearly meet, except for 40 kilometres of hideously inaccessible peaks dividing Russia from China. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the local Scythians had no frontiers except their own valleys. Protected by gorges and dense pine forests, they had no need to move as often as their Tuvan neighbours. They lived in tents and log cabins. Wagons were useless. They used only horses for transport, trapping, hunting and raiding. They lived, fought, died and were buried in ancestral cemeteries, where their bodies and possessions remained deep-frozen until discovered by modern archaeologists.

  Where Russian colonists came in the late nineteenth century, scientists followed. First off the mark was a German-born Russian, who called himself both Wilhelm Radloff and Vasily Radlov, depending on which language he was working in. He opened the first of the frozen graves, melting the icebound soil by lighting fires on top of it. His most notable successor, Sergei Rudenko, arriving in 1924, came upstream from a long finger-lake, Lake Teletskoye, turned left along the Great Ulagan River and found himself in a dry valley called Pazyryk by locals. 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, with five big ones, all deep-frozen log chambers, which presented a mystery. The surrounding soil was not permanently frozen, not permafrost. So how come the tombs had been flooded and frozen?

  Rudenko, using boiling water to turn the ice to slush, found the answer when he excavated the tombs in 1947–9.18 The stone cairns themselves made the right conditions by creating an underground microclimate. In summer, water filtered in; the stones above prevented evaporation. In winter, the water froze; the stones, colder than the surrounding earth, acted as a refrigeration unit making the ice permanent. Gradually, ice spread downwards, an effect that weakened towards the warmer edges of the circular mound. Eventually, the frozen soil formed a lens shape 4 or 5 metres deep, holding the grave and its body in an icy grip. Once through the shell of ice, the tombs could be excavated at leisure.

  It took days of labour to break through the ice. Had the robbers moved in before the ice formed? Apparently not. Some bodies had been moved, some had decayed, some had been mutilated to get their gold, some hadn’t. Another mystery, another solution by Rudenko:

  It is obvious that the plundering took place quite openly, proceeding at leisure, executed by small groups of perhaps two or three individuals. Clear traces of robbing, like great open pits and piles of upcast, cannot be concealed, so this could not have taken place if relatives of the deceased were close by. The plundering could only have been undertaken by new-comers when the tribe responsible for making the Pazyryk barrows had for one reason or another left the area.

  The robbers had time enough on their hands. The Pazyryk mounds date from the fifth to early third centuries BC with the most recent research placing the five main ones in a sixty-year period c.300–240 BC.

  Here was evidence that Herodotus had been right – some of the bodies had shaved heads, and one showed clear evidence of having been scalped: �
�The skin above the forehead had been cut through from ear to ear through a forelock of hair and then torn off backwards, baring the skull as far as the neck’. Herodotus said this was only done to enemies, but he also said that at least one group, the Massagetae, killed and ate their old people, so perhaps scalping was also done to their own. The men wore leather caps with earflaps, the women had headdresses up to 90 centimetres high, even higher than the golden person of Issyk.

  The bodies had been embalmed, again recalling Herodotus’s words about the belly being slit open and filled with herbs. Rudenko describes numerous slits on the stomach, limbs and buttocks to remove entrails and muscles, all being sewn up with sinew (for the men) and black horsehair (for the women). ‘In order to preserve the natural shape at the neck and breast of the woman, horse-hair padding had been inserted.’ Heads had been opened by cutting out a plate of bone with a mallet and chisel, brains removed, the cavity filled with soil, pine needles and larch cones, and ‘the plate of bone put back in its former place and the skin secured with a cord of twisted black horsehair.’

  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, all with animal masks, as if in the afterlife they could transform themselves into deer, ibex or griffins. In these steep-sided valleys, the carriage was entirely useless, and obviously not Scythian. One explanation, supported 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. Later, after unification by the First Emperor in 221 BC China had a policy of sending off princesses as wives for ‘barbarian’ chiefs as a way of ensuring peace and spreading the benefits of Chinese civilization, but if true this would be the first evidence of the practice.

  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. They had been done, Rudenko recorded, when the man was young and fit. When he died, he was old and had put on weight: ‘We are dealing with a stout man, with strongly developed subcutaneous fat tissue.’

  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 them, intricate, well-planned designs of two 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, one that takes the discussion of Amazons in a wholly new direction. It turns out that warrior women, even warrior princesses, are only half the story. The subject we should be following is not one of weapons, but of tattoos.

  10 We’re getting into worlds of rumour again. Supposedly the Argippaei were all bald, lived under cherry trees, and were peaceful people ‘protected by a special sort of sanctity’.

  11 Valeri Guliaev. See Bibliography.

  12 The Pole of Inaccessibility – the point furthest from any coastline – is actually 700 kilometres to the south-west, in China.

  13 The finds have been meticulously recorded in a superb 500-page book kindly sent to me by Hermann Parzinger, from Germany. See Cugunov, Parzinger and Nagler in Bibliography for details.

  14 Details from ‘Masters of Gold’, National Geographic, June 2003.

  15 Murphy lists the names in a meticulous 242-page monograph. Her findings are summarized in my other references.

  16 Warrior Women, page 101. See Bibliography.

  17 Traditional tall hats are still worn. In Mongolia, they are known as bocht, and are made like the Issyk one, with felt over a wooden frame. Kublai Khan’s wife Chabui was portrayed in one in the thirteenth century. They haven’t changed much in 700 years.

  18 His classic book, Frozen Tombs of Siberia, appeared in Russian in 1953 and in English in 1970.

  5

  THE ICE MAIDEN

  SO COME 200 KILOMETRES TO THE SOUTH, TO THE HIGHER drier and harsher Ukok Plateau, almost on the Chinese border. Now we’ve climbed another 500 metres, on to low waves of grass, meandering streams and scattered lakes. Sharp, snowy mountains enclose the horizon in every direction. There’s not a tree in sight. It’s a beautiful place, but cloud and wind and occasional blistering heat often make it miserable. In winter the conditions are brutal. This is about as far from civilization as you can get today. But 2,500 years ago, it was a popular place for semi-nomadic Scythians of the Pazyryk culture. The pasture was wonderful in summer, and good in winter as well, because the small amounts of snow were blown clear by the bitter winds.

  Here in 1990 the Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak, from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, started researching the mounds on the plateau. Administratively and politically, these were interesting times. The Soviet Union was on its way down, local nationalism on the way up, in the form of what would, three years later, become the Altai Republic, an autonomous but highly sensitive member of the new Russia (as is its neighbour, Tuva). Altai’s autonomy and sensitivity are significant in what follows.

  The first season was brilliantly successful. From a frozen kurgan came two bodies, a man of forty and a girl of sixteen, both warriors, with battleaxes, knives and bows. The girl was tall, strong, well-built, perhaps the man’s weapon-carrier, perhaps already an Amazon in her own right. Two more seasons produced nothing so impressive. Then, 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 were 8 kilometres of no-man’s-land, then the Chinese border. It still froze overnight, but spring sunshine freed the lakes and dotted the grass with snowdrops and edelweiss. Asters, cyclamen, daisies and wild garlic would follow as summer came.

  Working with a team of six, it took two weeks to remove the cap of rock and earth. A dip in the top showed it had been looted – but the looters had been content with a man’s grave near the surface, a later burial. The original grave lay deeper, its larchwood lid frozen, untouched, unrobbed. Inside was a block of ice. The team hauled buckets of water from a nearby lake, heated them and poured the steaming water on the ice, slowly melting it, as Rudenko had done in Pazyryk almost fifty years before. Gradually bits and pieces appeared on the meltwater – 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 emerged, 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 larch-wood casket, but opening it would be a special occasion, to be done in the presence of the institute’s director, as well as reporters and cameramen from National Geographic and a Belgian TV company.

  The next day came the opening. After four 15-centimetre bronze nails had been levered out, the lid came up, revealing nothing but more solid, opaque ice. That was good. Whatever was inside was untouched. Melting the ice took many days. It was July, and hot. Every morning, team members poured on buckets of hot water, filled the same buckets with meltwater and carted it away. Mosquitoes pestered. The six dead horses stank. Polosmak’s impatience grew. What was in there – a skeleton, a corpse, a mummy?

  Monday, 19 July: a jawbone appeared through the ice, then s
ome 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’. 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 next day revealed a headdress, one third the length of the coffin. Only then did Polosmak realize this was a woman, the one who would soon be called the Ice Maiden, or the Ukok Princess. Polosmak referred to her simply as Devochka, the Girl.19

  The sable fur came away in bits, revealing a robe:

  It was long and flowing, with a woollen skirt of horizontal white and maroon stripes and a yellow top of silk, perhaps from China . . . In the crook of the Lady’s knee was a red cloth case containing a small hand mirror of polished metal with a deer carved into its wooden back. Beads wound round her wrist and more tattoos decorated her wrist and thumb. She was tall, about 5 foot 6 inches. She had doubtless been a good rider, and the horses in the grave were her own. As we worked, the fabric gradually revived around her limbs, softening the outline of her legs, the swell of her hips. And somehow in that moment, the remains became a person. She lay sideways, like a sleeping child, with her long, strong, aristocratic hands crossed in front of her.