Searching for the Amazons Read online

  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.13 The builders had got smart, as the excavation team discovered when they dug it up in 2000–4. The two central pits were mock-graves, which had fooled would-be looters. The main burial was 20 metres off-centre. Digging almost 4 metres down into the mound, Pavel Leus, a Russian heading a small team of local labourers, found a layer of larch logs.14 Lifting one, he glimpsed in the shadows two skeletons and a glint of yellow. ‘Guys,’ he called up to his bosses, ‘we’ve got a problem. We need the police.’

  Yes, indeed, as the expedition leader, Konstantin Čugunov of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, confirmed when he joined Leus in the pit, followed by his partners, Hermann Parzinger and Anatoli Nagler of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. Over the next three weeks, well guarded, the archaeologists and their 100 workers found not only the royal couple, but also sixteen murdered attendants, and twenty-three other skeletons buried later, probably Turkic – twenty-nine graves in all, women in the western half, men to the east – and the real treasure: 9,300 objects, of which 5,700 were gold, weighing 20 kilograms, a record for a Siberian grave. The king, aged between fifty and fifty-five, wore a golden tore and a jacket decorated with 2,500 small panther figurines, all gold, trousers sewn with golden beads, and gold-cuffed boots. On a belt hung 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 equal status. Was she killed to keep her man company in the afterlife? Or vice versa? Or was he her father, she a daughter? Nearby were thousands of beads, 431 of them made of amber, carried as trade goods all the way across Eurasia from the Baltic.

  The Arzhan tombs are for royalty. For those whom we might term Amazons, the rank-and-file women 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 spanning the time when the Scythians started to give way to, or assimilate with, or develop into, the so-called Hunno-Sarmatians, a mix of Sarmatians and Xiongnu (known locally as Huns, or Hunnu, though whether they were the forefathers of Attila’s Huns is an open question).

  Eight hundred burials in 200 years – four burials a year, on average – doesn’t seem much. Perhaps the burials, typically in tombs made of logs or stone slabs, came in irregular bursts, after particularly significant battles, when bodies had to be dealt with en masse. Some tombs have as many as fifteen bodies. Buried with the bodies were weapons, Animal-style artefacts, tools, pins, combs, mirrors, belts with bronze buckles, and horse fittings, the things commonly found in Scythian tombs. Generally, bows did not survive, but the imprint of one shows they were about 1.5 metres long.

  The bones, from 600 individuals collected in 1968–84 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. Skull shapes reveal that they looked more European than Mongoloid. Furrows and pits in the teeth speak of diets. Lesions in the eye-sockets point to vitamin deficiencies (still a problem, by the way, for some steppe nomads). The chemical and sub-atomic structure of bones hints at changes in climate and plant cover. Disease and malnutrition in childhood cause the enamel to grow more thinly in developing teeth (hypoplasia). Mechanical stresses build muscles and their attachments unevenly (long-bowmen in medieval England, training from childhood, had massively distorted backs and shoulders). Causes of death are catalogued in bone: murders, domestic violence, executions, ritual sacrifices, battles, accidents. There are, for instance, signs of long-term changes in weaponry: battleaxe injuries predominate during the Scythian period and sword wounds are more common during later Hunno-Sarmatian times.

  Eileen Murphy, of Queen’s University, Belfast, has made an extensive study of these bones in the Kunstkammer, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography started by Peter the Great in St Petersburg. She has never been to Tuva, but knows more about the perils of everyday life for herders and mounted archers in ancient Scythia than anyone else on Earth, thanks to the Russian archaeologists who collected and recorded the bones in the first place.15 She analysed over 3,000 of them, and published the results in ‘one of the first detailed palaeopathological analyses . . . on a substantial corpus of Iron Age human skeletons from Eurasia.’ They provide direct evidence that Herodotus got a lot right: 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 war-ritual.’ Beyond this, as Murphy says, ‘The Aymyrlyg excavations enable us to gain real insight into the lives and lifestyle of the “ordinary” members of these semi-nomadic societies’, many of whom displayed a range of diseases and malformations. One man, for instance, had congenital dislocation of the hip, another a ‘malformed proximal femur’, which would have made them walk with fearful limps. There were facial deformities, eye defects, distortions of the skull, a whole catalogue of medical catastrophes. One woman had neurofibromatosis, an extremely unpleasant condition in which tumours grow in the nervous system.

  People with serious congenital defects find life difficult in any society, let alone one as harsh and reliant on herding, horses and hunting. As Herodotus says, this was not a society that took much care of its old people. You would think that they would not tolerate deformity of any kind, rather as the Spartans allowed weak children to perish. Apparently not. Perhaps because injuries and wounds were so common, there seems to have been a tolerance of deformity – perhaps even a support system – that ensured that cripples of all sorts had useful roles until they died, to be buried along with their sturdier fellows.

  Murphy wonders if these dire cases could be the origin of some of the so-called myths about the more distant regions of Central Asia:

  To a visitor from the Greek world, these Scythian individuals with abnormalities would probably have seemed abhorrent and incredible, particularly if such people were eliminated at birth or ostracised by Greek society. It can be argued, therefore, that the fabulous accounts of unusual individuals and peoples in Scythia . . . may have had their origins in real people with abnormal physical appearances who lived freely among the populations.

  Herodotus himself mentions ‘the tale (which I do not believe) that the mountains are inhabited by a goat-footed race, beyond which still further north are men who sleep for six months of the year – which to my mind is utterly incredible.’ Could a hibernating bear be mistaken for a man? Could a club foot look like a hoof? Could a congenital malformation explain the ‘one-eyed Arimaspians’? Or could the Cyclops, the monster that captured Odysseus, be someone with Goldenhar syndrome or cebocephaly, which (if the sufferer survives) may result in the absence of an eye, or even a single central eye? One or two individuals with such defects could have been enough to inspire exaggerated tales of monsters.

  Horse-based cultures are tough for everyone. Of course, 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, with men twice as likely as women to break something. One 35–45-year-old woman, who had fractures in her right shoulder and forearm, also had the fourth finger on her right hand so badly broken it had solidified into a claw-shape (ankylosis), all her
injuries probably being caused by a very nasty fall.

  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, as well as a type of fracture called ‘clay-shoveller’s fracture’ because of its association with heavy physical labour in the modern world. Today, young male athletes (median age: twenty) suffer from it if they do too much of anything that is one-sided: tennis, throwing the javelin, high jump, rowing. Some 5 per cent have the condition in modern populations; Scythian women suffered over twice that. Three-quarters of the affected skeletons were female. As Murphy points out, this ‘suggests that, contrary to the assertions of the historical accounts relating to the activities of female Scythians, the women did not spend all their time sitting around in wagons but that they were also engaged in heavy physical labour.’

  (For some reason, the work got easier as time passed: later female skeletons show fewer signs of spondylolysis. Imagine a grandmother muttering the Scythian equivalent of: ‘Kids today, don’t know how lucky they are. When I was their age, I was lifting wagon wheels all day and cauldrons of kumiss all night. Then it was horseback archery and sword practice. How I had time to get pregnant I’ll never know.’)

  Apparently, this tough life occasionally involved in-fighting: revenge killings, domestic violence, rows between argumentative teenagers ending in fatal assaults. Some skulls were bashed in with clubs. The numbers are not great, a dozen over the course of 200 years, a quarter of them women, the rest divided equally among men and ‘sub-adults’. Most fractures were ‘on the left side of the frontals or parietals . . . the site at which an injury would commonly be afflicted in hand-to-hand combat when faced by a right handed opponent.’ Fractures of the facial area and jaws were more common later, suggesting that in ‘the Hunno-Sarmatian period individuals only employed their fists in aggressive activities’ instead of clubs. Perhaps, perhaps not, because other fractures usually produced by fights – head fractures, fractures of the forearm, ‘boxer’s fractures’ of the fingers – ‘all attest to the occurrence of interpersonal and intergroup conflict in both the Scythian and Hunno-Sarmatian period populations’. In most cases, as you would expect, those affected were men, but one Scythian woman displayed multiple fractures – including a forearm break, a broken right finger-bone and a fractured rib – suggesting that she gave as good as she got.

  Then there were the war injuries, notably non-fatal arrow wounds, sword wounds and holes in the skull from battle-axes. 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. ‘There is, however, no justification for assuming that females and older sub-adults would not have deliberately participated in the practice of warfare.’ Several of the women had damaged left arm-bones, as if they had held up that arm to ward off blows.

  Five people living in later Hunno-Sarmatian times were beheaded. One, a woman of 35–45, 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. Another woman had a sword wound in the shoulder, and was then finished off with a blow just above her left ear. Perhaps she was carrying the one-year-old child killed with a sword-blow to the head. Swords had apparently been refined over the previous centuries.

  The evidence is overwhelming that ordinary Scythian women fought, and were victims of fighting. ‘There is no reason,’ Murphy concludes, ‘why the Aymyrlyg females might not have obtained their cases of weapon trauma during pitched battles, where they would have joined the men and young adults in defence of the clan and its possessions.’ Like a police report from the forensics department, the cold language of science conjures the heat of battle, galloping hooves, flashing swords, screams, quick deaths.

  The message of the bones is clear: Scythian women and their successors were Amazons as the Greeks imagined them, but individually, not as part of some spurious female-only nation, but as ordinary members of Scythian society.

  Now come 1,500 kilometres south-west of Tuva, to the mountains east of the principal Kazakh city (not capital – that’s Askana), Almaty. From the northern slopes of the Tien 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). Despite its name it has nothing to do with the huge freshwater lake of Issyk-Kul, just 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. Among his post-war projects, he opened up Otrar, the long-buried city that was Genghis Khan’s entry-point when he invaded the Islamic world in 1219. Akishev later became the much-revered father of Kazakh archaeology, and remained so until his death in 2003, aged seventy-nine. What happened when he arrived in Issyk took him from the national on to the international stage.

  The kurgan near where the farmer found the plaque was one of those astonishing rarities, an unrobbed tomb. Actually it had been robbed, and spruce logs that made the 4 × 6-metre grave had fallen in, but the robbers had missed a side-grave. In it, under piles of dirt, lay a very crushed skeleton, quite a small one, which is what makes this story significant for our subject. Surrounding the bones was treasure – 4,000 small gold plaques and ornaments, almost as new.

  The American archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball relates what followed. First, let me introduce her. She took her time getting to inner Asia, only starting work there at the age of sixty-five. Three marriages, six children, work as a nurse, hospital administrator, English-language teacher in Bolivia and cattle rancher finally led to a BA in art history. She was cataloguing near-eastern art for the Los Angeles County Museum as part of her Masters when she became intrigued by the museum’s 200 bronze plaques and animal statuettes: a deer with a net of antlers, a tiger attacking a horse. The world of the Eurasian nomads seized her: its size, its place in history as the stage for horse cultures succeeding each other for 2,000 years. An excavation in Israel gave her experience of archaeology, and a new purpose. She would focus on the role of women in nomadic societies.

  That meant working in Russia, which was hard to arrange in the last days of the Cold War. A Kazakh art exhibition gave her contacts. A visit to Kazakhstan – a train journey marred by unnerving confrontations with KGB agents – inspired her to set up a research organization, now the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads. Very little was known outside Russia about the region and the subjects. Then, in 1991, came an invitation to excavate kurgans on what would shortly become Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, and with luck modify the current Western view of nomads as ‘merciless warlords with jet black hair and dark-slanted eyes, who marauded on tiny ponies . . . besieging cities and wiping out the men before carrying off the women.’

  Chapter 6 looks at Davis-Kimball’s first experience of the Russian kurgans. This is what happened at the newly discovered Issyk grave, as told to her by Akishev’s
team leader, Beken Nurapiesov, when he took her to the site thirty years later:

  ‘The skeleton had been cleaned and all the gold plaques were in full view in the pit. Dusk was falling. What were we to do? We didn’t have time to finish recording and remove the thousands of objects before dark, and we couldn’t leave the skeleton and all that gold alone overnight, so we hired two local men as guards’. Beken paused, and pushed his thick white hair back from his forehead. ‘Do you know what happened next, after the crew left? Well,’ he said with a mirthless laugh, ‘those guards weren’t about to spend the night in the cold by an open grave without a little liquid courage. They went into town to buy a bottle or two of vodka, and while they were gone someone came and scooped up the gold pieces that were on the boots and even took the bones of both feet and one lower leg.’ He shook his head ruefully at the memory. ‘Of course the thieves would have melted down the gold. The plaques are gone, for ever.’16

  There’s something fishy about this story. Why would a thief take bones, but not more of the gold? How did the guards discover the theft, returning the worse for wear and in darkness? What did they do about it? Isn’t it rather more likely that the guards themselves took advantage, and then came up with an explanation that shifted the blame on to an anonymous thief?

  Whatever the truth, the loss was only a fraction of the whole. 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 (and even more that went missing on the boots); a belt with thirteen golden deer-heads, and three of moose and deer with griffin heads; a golden tore around the neck, with snow-leopard clasps; a gold-bound whip handle; a silver cup engraved with an unidentified script in an unidentified language (more on this later); 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; and to cap it all, literally, a towering 63-centimetre headdress made of a cone of wood covered with felt.