Pazyryk burials

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pazyryk burials sit in a valley in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, south of the modern city of Novosibirsk, and close to the borders of China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Sealed under large cairns of boulders for more than two thousand years, these tombs hold a world that should not have survived. Felt hangings, silk, wooden furniture, elaborately dressed horses, and tattooed human bodies all endured because water seeped into the wooden chambers in antiquity and froze. The permafrost did the rest, locking the contents in ice until archaeologists reached them in the twentieth century.

  What kind of people built these monuments? How did nomadic herders on the steppe accumulate the wealth on display here? And what can a carpet, a tattoo, or a bag of coriander seeds tell us about a civilization that left no written record? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Who Were the Pazyryk

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  Horse-riding pastoral nomads of the steppe are who the source behind these tombs describes. The bearers of what archaeologist S. I. Rudenko initially labelled Pazyryk culture were connected to the wider Scythian world, a loosely related group of nomadic peoples whose similar kurgans have been found across the steppes from the Black Sea to Siberia.

  Rudenko first dated them to the 5th century BCE, but that dating has since been revised for the five main barrows at Pazyryk, which are now placed in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE. Their art tells a story of deep connection. Certain geometric designs and sun symbols, including the circle and the rosette, recur across the site. Animal motifs dominate even more heavily, with the stag and its relatives figuring as prominently in the Altai-Sayan region as in Scythian art further west.

  The finds also reveal what scholars call zoomorphic junctures: the artistic practice of grafting a part of one animal onto the body of another. At Pazyryk, researchers also found bearded mascarons, or decorative masks, of what has been described as well-defined Greco-Roman origin, suggesting contact with the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Cimmerian Bosporus. The artifacts point to trading links stretching toward Central Asia, China, and the Near East, with some evidence of routes connecting as far as India.

• 3. Wealth from the Horse Trade

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  Some of the Pazyryk nomads may have accumulated great wealth through horse trading with merchants in Persia, India, and China. The range of objects found in the tombs reflects this: Chinese silk, felt hangings, wooden furniture, and horses fitted with elaborate trappings all appear together in the burial chambers of the 4th-3rd centuries BCE.

  The Pazyryk rug, probably the oldest surviving pile carpet in the world, illustrates the scale of these connections. It measures 183 by 200 centimetres and has a knot density of approximately 360,000 knots per square meter, which is higher than most modern carpets. Its middle section carries a ribbon motif, while one border shows a procession of elk or deer and another shows warriors on horseback.

  The question of where the rug was made has never been settled. German art historian Ulrich Schurmann, who specialised in oriental carpets, wrote that he was convinced the Pazyryk rug was a funeral accessory and most likely a masterpiece of Armenian workmanship, noting the Armenian double knot and Armenian cochineal dye used for its red color. Fellow German historian Volkmar Gantzhorn agreed with that view. A separate line of argument holds that it is an imported Persian work, pointing to its decoration and to the horse type depicted, which appears to be the Nisean breed. Others note that the horse design matches the relief of the Armenian delegation carved at the ruins of Persepolis in Iran. The rug now sits in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

• 4. The Tattooed Chief

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  Rudenko's most striking discovery in 1947 was the body of a tattooed chief in burial mound 2. He was a thick-set, powerfully built man, 176 centimetres tall, who died somewhere between the ages of 55 and 60. His tomb was monumental and lavishly equipped. He had been killed with a Scythian-type battle axe and scalped, then carefully embalmed before burial.

  Animal style tattoos covered his body, though not his face. The best preserved designs were on the right arm: a donkey, a mountain ram, two highly stylized deer with long antlers, and an imaginary carnivore. Two monsters resembling griffins decorated the chest. On the front of the right leg, a fish extended from the foot to the knee, and on the inside of the shin ran a series of four running rams that touched each other to form a single continuous design. His back was tattooed with a series of small circles aligned with the vertebral column.

  Subsequent investigation using reflected infrared photography revealed that all five bodies discovered in the Pazyryk kurgans were tattooed. No instruments made specifically for tattooing were found in the tombs, but the Pazyryks possessed extremely fine needles used for miniature embroidery, and those were probably the tools.

  The chief's embalmed head, now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, suggests what has been described as a Mongoloïd type in physiognomy. He was crowned with a gilded copper tiara decorated with six winged, horned, and hoofed lions. Those lion griffin figures were made of wood and originally covered in gold foil, before tomb robbers stripped the foils. A false beard made of hair, sinew thread, and leather was found beside him, though its significance remains uncertain given that all the Pazyryk mummies recovered were clean-shaven. An extraordinary carved wooden crest representing a bird of prey with a deer head in its beak was found at the head of the coffin; it is thought to have been the chieftain's own headgear.

• 5. The Ice Maiden

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  In 1993, archaeologist Natalia Polosmak found the most famous undisturbed Pazyryk burial yet recovered at Ukok, near the Chinese border. Named the Ice Maiden, or the Altai Lady, she had been buried over 2,400 years ago in a casket fashioned from the hollowed-out trunk of a Siberian larch tree. Outside the casket, images of deer and snow leopards had been carved in leather.

  She was young, 167 centimetres tall, with her head shaved but wearing a wig and a tall hat. Her coffin was made large enough to accommodate the high felt headdress she wore, which was decorated with swans and gold-covered carved cats. She was dressed in a long crimson and white striped woolen skirt and white felt stockings. Her blouse was initially thought to be made of Chinese wild silk, but closer examination of the fibers showed the material was not Chinese; it was a wild silk that may have come from somewhere else, perhaps India. A note from Dr. Anicua added that the blouse showed staining, indicating it was not a new garment made for burial but a well-worn item of clothing.

  Animal style tattoos survived on her pale skin: creatures with horns that develop into flowered forms. Shortly after she was buried, freezing rain apparently flooded the grave, and everything inside had remained locked in permafrost ever since. Six horses wearing elaborate harnesses had been sacrificed and laid to the north of the chamber.

  Near her coffin was a vessel made of yak horn and dishes containing gifts of coriander seeds. Those seeds pointed toward trade routes stretching across vast areas of Iran. Similar dishes in other Pazyryk tombs had been thought to hold Cannabis sativa, confirming a practice described by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, but testing revealed coriander seeds instead, probably used to disguise the smell of the body. Two years after Polosmak's discovery, her husband, archaeologist Vyacheslav Molodin, found a frozen tattooed man buried nearby: he carried two long braids that reached his waist and was interred with his weapons, his body decorated with an elk tattoo.

• 6. Discovery and Legacy

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  The first tomb at Pazyryk, barrow 1, was excavated by the archaeologist M. P. Griaznov in 1929; barrows 2-5 followed under Rudenko in 1947-1949. Many of the tombs had been looted in earlier times, but what remained was extraordinary. Among the objects that escaped plunder were cloth saddles, felt and woven rugs, and a four-wheel funeral chariot standing 3 metres high, dated to the 5th century BCE.

  Cranial measurements performed in the 1960s initially suggested the interred were largely of European ancestry with some Northeast Asian admixture. Later genetic analysis produced a more nuanced picture: the Pazyryk population was modeled as deriving roughly 50 percent from the Khövsgöl Late Bronze Age source, about 36 percent from Western Steppe Herders, and around 14 percent from a BMAC-like source. One outlier specimen, catalogued as Pazyryk_Berel_50BCE, was modeled as approximately 18 percent Pazyryk and 82 percent additional Northeast Asian ancestry, suggesting an individual who had migrated from further east.

  As recently as the summer of 2012, new tombs continued to surface at various locations in the region. In January 2007, a timber tomb of a blond chieftain warrior was unearthed in Altai permafrost close to the Mongolian border, containing a well-preserved sable coat and objects that included what appeared to be scissors. The site sits within the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site. Local archaeologist Aleksei Tishkin has noted that the indigenous population of the region strongly disapproves of ongoing archaeological digs, a tension that has since pushed some research activity across the border into Mongolia.