Searching for the Amazons Read online

  The flurry of media interest worked miracles. Suddenly the Ice Maiden became the cause of, and focus for, nationalist fervour. Ukok was declared a protected territory by the Altai government. In 1998 it was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Having been flown to Novosibirsk for further investigation and preservation, the Ice Maiden became known worldwide. She was taken to Japan and Korea, returning to Novosibirsk. Altaians took note, and objected. Theirs was a new republic. They had a history, which needed respect. The Ice Maiden was the perfect symbol. As Rimma Erkinova, director of the Altaian Museum in the capital, Gorno Altaisk, put it: ‘In the perception of the local population, the Ukok Princess embodies the image of the earliest ancestress and ancient protector of Altaian people.’ She should never have been dug up. In Altai, where shamans still have influence, the dead should not be disturbed, otherwise they could try to capture the souls of the living people. ‘The crudeness of her handling,’ Erkinova went on, as if Polosmak had been some sort of torturer, ‘and especially her forced separation from her birth land is even today perceived with sharp pain’.

  What rubbish, came the reply from Reason and Science, in the form of Russian academics in Novosibirsk. There was no genetic relationship between the Ice Maiden and modern Altaians. Her people, the Scythians, of whatever clan, had moved westwards 2,000 years ago. They were no more ancestors of today’s Altaians than the Manhattan Indians were ancestors of today’s New Yorkers.

  Altaians would have none of it. Of course she was Altaian. She was born on Altai’s holy soil. Genetics and history had nothing to do with it.

  In September 2003, Altai was shaken by a series of earthquakes. Locals sprang to the obvious conclusion: Altai, their homeland, was angry. There were pleas, petitions, letters from ordinary people blaming the earthquakes on the removal of the Ice Maiden ten years previously, and demanding her return. In February 2004 Auelkhan Dzhatkambaev, head of the most affected region, and eager for votes, wrote an open letter to Altai’s government. Without the Ice Maiden,

  our land cannot find peace. The quakes have been getting stronger again. My fellow people think that the reason for this is the archaeological excavations carried out on the Ukok Plateau, in a place sacred to Turkic people, and above all the removal of the bodies of the princess and the prince [that would be the later burial, on top of the Ice Maiden] . . . Further retaining of the princess and the prince and, even more so, earning money through displaying their naked bodies is contrary to human values. This is not a superstition, neither is this whim – this is wisdom, which has arisen from the depth of the centuries.

  Novosibirsk put forward the scientific case many times to no great effect, and finally, in August 2012, when the Gorno Altaisk museum had been given the proper facilities, they sent the Ice Maiden back to her homeland, where she now rests in air-conditioned peace.

  She is likely to remain alone. Ukok has been declared out of bounds to archaeologists, despite the near-certainty of more treasures like the Ice Maiden lying in the permafrost, and despite the protests of scientists that this would deprive the world of vital knowledge.

  Still, much work was done, and much more about the Girl has come to light.

  She was a woman of mystery. Aged about twenty-five, she was buried alone, when most other women were buried with men. Why? Obviously because she was special. Why? Was she a priestess, goddess come to earth, a symbol of her people? How, or why, did she die? There’s no clue. One thing is certain: she was no warrior. There were no weapons buried with her. Her role is all wrapped up in her flowing robe and her tattoos, and one other surprise which we’ll get to later.

  First, her tattoos. The ‘griffin-like creature’ Polosmak had seen when she first peeled back the Girl’s clothing on the left shoulder was 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 her arm is a snow leopard with an extended tail and a head, if it is a head, attacking or consuming a sheep’s body with legs at both ends.

  The tattoos are as weird, puzzling and beautiful as several other ethnographic enigmas: the vast lines that mark the Nazca Desert, the graceful chalk trenches of the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Is this somehow a conflict between two worlds: predator and prey, linked by nature? Or just a way of stating identity and ancestry? Whatever it means, it is tattooing as an art form, which must have been refined over centuries. The images speak, in a language we cannot understand.

  Polosmak speculates: ‘Tattoos were used as a means of personal identification – like a passport now, if you like. The Pazyryks also believed the tattoos would be helpful in another life, making it easy for the people of the same family and culture to find each other after death.’ The tattoos were used, she guesses, ‘to define one’s position both in society, and in the world. The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position’ – which perhaps explains why Rudenko’s aging chief was so well tattooed. ‘Our young woman – the princess – has only her two arms tattooed. So they signified both age and status.’

  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 horse hair, and a fragment of an ‘eyeliner pencil’ made of vivianite, 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 clothing turned out to be more elaborate than it seemed. Her skirt was made of three horizontal strips, each one separately hand-coloured. The top one was crimson, the middle very slightly pinkish-yellowish, and the third of a very rich red-wine colour. The skirt had a woollen braided belt, which could change the length of the skirt by holding it either around the waist, or higher, under the breasts. There was a long, almost knee length, light shirt worn over the skirt, with a round neck, decorated with red lace and braid. The shirt is of silk, similar in style to those found in oasis burials in what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang, though the silk itself comes from further afield, possibly Assam.

  ‘The Pazyryk costume was made from textile which is quite unexpected for mountain people,’ says Polosmak. This type of fabric was inconvenient, wore out quickly and needed to be darned often. These people put up with the inconvenience for the sake of fashion and status, because it was imported. From where? The dyes suggest answers. The crimson came from a little scaly insect that looks like a miniature armadillo, the Kermes vermilio, which lives only on the sap of a type of oak that grows around the Mediterranean. Another red colourant was rose madder, made with alizarin, which comes from the root of Rubia tinctorum, a little yellow-flowered shrub native to Europe. Recalling the silk and bronze mirrors from China, Polosmak points out that her Girl, the Ukok Princess, was an early bridge between the great, distant cultures of the ancient world.

  The final surprise, which emerged only 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/Girl of Issyk.

  With every bit of new research, the Ice Maiden looks more and more like a priestess, pure and simple, with none of the Amazonian warrior about her, other than her power. We can’t guess her true status, but she is the closest yet to an Amazonian queen in her own right. From all the work that went into her burial, her death must have been a tragedy for her community, a tear in the fabric of
their lives, the loss of the person who embodied life itself.

  By the time of the Ice Maiden’s burial at one end of their world, Scythians were already pressing further westwards at the other. In 612 BC they assaulted the Assyrian empire and raided Persia. Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, feared the worst: ‘Behold a people shall come from the north . . . they shall hold the bow and the lance; they are cruel, and will not show mercy: their voice shall roar like the sea, and they shall ride upon horses’ (Jeremiah 50, 41–2). They were on the move because they were themselves under pressure from their easterly neighbours, the harder-fighting Sarmatians, an even likelier source of the original Amazons.

  Discoveries keep coming. Thirteen years after the emergence of the Ice Maiden, 100 kilometres to the south-east, an eight-person team of Spanish, French and Mongolian archaeologists excavated another set of Pazyryk tombs. The two sites were part of the same world 2,500 years ago. Riders routinely roamed between them. Today they are in different worlds, Russian and Mongolian. There are no roads, and the only tracks lead in different directions, one north into Altai and Siberia, the other east, over a 112-kilometre tangle of hills, pastures, rivers and lakes to Bayan-Ölgii, the local capital, itself several hours by plane from Ulaanbaatar. The site – the first of a Scythian burial in Mongolia – is by a small river, the Little Turgen, which gives the place its name, the Little Turgen River, Baga Turgen Gol in Mongolian: BTG to archaeologists.

  It is important for archaeology because BTG is part of a much larger burial area, as the Spanish archaeologist Xavier Jordana and the team discovered in the summer of 2007. It was a tough assignment, driving in for half a day in a truck and one of the high-riding, go-anywhere Ukrainian UAZ 4 X 4s that are the workhorses of the Mongolian countryside. They pitched their tents and a yurt (ger in Mongolian) beside a cemetery: fourteen burial mounds, rock circles, roughly carved little statues and slabs of stone standing like broken teeth. The bitter-cold Turgen would be spring, loo and bath. Round them, scattered firs gave way to hills of scrubby grass or grey scree, still patched with snow. These were circumstances in which you would hope not to get ill. But they were not alone: local Kazakhs, with weather-burnished faces and round caps, rode by to share kumiss and boiled mutton, and watch.

  From BTG and three other burial sites Jordana and the rest retrieved the remains of nineteen skeletons – sixteen adults and three children. An analysis of their DNA revealed a surprise. This tangle of mountains, the Altai, had for centuries acted as a natural border between the two sets of people, Scythians in the west and Turco-Mongolians in the east. Then, roughly around the fifth century BC that changed. These people no longer shared the same ancestry: they were a mixture of east and west, with the easterners steadily supplanting the westerners by the second century BC.

  But we should focus on the BTG site itself. After two months, rocks had been stripped, revealing four tombs and thirteen skeletons: two children and eleven adults, of which two were women – Amazons in all but name, given that they were good with horses and bows – seven were men and the other two indeterminate. One horse per adult, a few small bits of gold, arrowheads, battleaxes, daggers.

  Something extremely nasty happened here. The team’s paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science records the clinical details:

  a male, 35–45, pointed object entered skull tangentially, multiple short cut-marks consistent with scalping; male, 40–50, bone defect in the skull the shape of [the transverse section of the Scythian arrowhead]; female, 25–30, two V-shaped cut marks in the right rib-cage compatible with shape of Scythian dagger; child aged 8–9, 15mm oblique sharp-force puncture on left lateral anterior side of the first sacral vertebra; pelvic injuries on two other individuals suggestive of fatal hypervolemic shock, compatible with Scythian dagger. In all, much acute trauma: 12 injuries to 6 individuals most likely caused suddenly and with extreme violence . . . Randomly distributed injury pattern [which suggests] conflicts related to the defence of communal property or ambush or surprise attacks.

  Perhaps these people died years apart, but the injuries, the ‘sub-adults’, a young woman – there’s enough here to suggest a single incident. Perhaps a family or small clan brought their sheep and horses here, to good summer pastures. They are well able to look after themselves, even the woman and her nine-year-old boy. They don’t expect trouble. They have relatives not far away. But they have enemies, envious perhaps of their animals; or perhaps the woman’s teenage daughter had rejected the advances of some suitor. Horses emerge from the valley below. There’s no time to mount. The whole group is caught in the open. An arrow takes out one, swords and war-axes strike heads, the boy is stabbed in the back, the teenage girl grabbed and tossed up behind her rejected suitor. In minutes, the attackers are off with the herds, leaving a scattering of bodies and weapons.

  Days later, the rest of the clan find the dead. They gather the remains, dig a shallow grave, add a few precious possessions to the bodies, pile earth over them and seal the tombs with a dome of loose rocks where, 2,500 years later, Xavier and his team dig them up and reveal their story.

  19 Some of the details in this account come from the National Geographic article published soon after the discovery. It is credited to Polosmak herself. But she speaks little English, and it is clearly by National Geographic staff. English for a popular readership, especially in American magazines, is often sentimentalized. In the article, Polosmak’s down-to-earth Devochka, the Girl, turns into something reverential, ‘the Lady’.

  6

  SARMATIANS: THE ROOTS OF THE LEGEND

  TO FIND THE AMAZONS DESCRIBED BY HERODOTUS WE must look beyond the Scythians. His Scythian informant said they had mated with Scythians to form a new tribe, the Sauromatians. He had a name for them in Scythian: Oeoropata, which he said was Scythian for ‘man-killers’. Perhaps: there is no way to check, since no Scythian language was recorded.

  Anyway, the Scythians had reason to fear the Sauromatians, because they were a new threat from the east. There is a little confusion about their name. Later, in the first century AD writers referred to Sarmatians. Once, Russian archaeologists argued about whether they were different from Sauromatians or not. Now, the consensus is that they were one and the same. Some classical writers suggested that ‘Sauromatian’ derived from sauros, meaning lizard, as in ‘dinosaur’ ( ‘thunder lizard’ ), because they wore scaly armour made of horn and hooves, but most scholars dismiss this as folk etymology. Today, archaeologists use both terms: Sauromatians for earlier times (sixth-fifth century BC) Sarmatians for later ones (up to the second century AD). It’s easier to ignore the academic technicalities and just call them Sarmatians from now on.

  Originally, around 700 BC they were an insignificant group living east of the Caspian, in the sparse grasslands running across to the Amu Darya.20 Now in Kazakhstan, it is a place of weird land-forms and semi-desert. Back then the conditions were kinder, but not kind enough to keep the Sarmatians in place. Two hundred years later, they were on the grasslands between the Don and the Volga, neighbours of the Scythians. The Amazons, being mythical, could not have mated with the Scythians, but the Sarmatians could have done so. They were not yet seen as dangerous – the opposite, as Herodotus describes in one of his usual colourful passages.

  In the days when Darius was leading the expansion of the Persian empire into Scythia in the late sixth century BC the Scythian king, Idanthyrsus, asked the Sarmatians and others to help fight the Persians. ‘We beg you not to remain neutral in this struggle,’ the envoys said. ‘This invasion is aimed at you just as much as at us, and, once we have gone under, the Persians will never be content to leave you unmolested.’ The others refused, telling the Scythians it was their fault for being aggressive in the first place. But the Sarmatians, together with two other tribes, came on side.

  Under the command of a Scythian called Scopasis, the Scythians and Sarmatians played cat and mouse with Darius, sending the herds of cattle and wagonloads of women and children away in adv
ance, then retreating along the same route one day’s march ahead of the advancing Persians, scorching the earth as they went, drawing the Persian army ever deeper into barren territory. The allies crossed the Don – the Scythians’ eastern border – the Persians followed, on through Sarmatian territory, turning north-east across the vast Eurasian steppes, into the forested territory of the Budini, finally coming to the Volga. Darius, apparently anticipating contact at last, started to build eight large forts. At this point the Scythians and Sarmatians galloped off into the void, circling back towards their own lands, hotly pursued by the Persians.

  All this had taken many weeks. It was too much for Darius. He sent a message to Idanthyrsus: ‘Why on earth, strange man, do you keep on running away? . . . You should rather send earth and water to your master, as the sign of your submission, and come to a conference.’

  ‘Persian,’ replied the Scythian king:

  I have never yet run from any man . . . There is for me nothing unusual in what I have been doing: it is precisely the sort of life I always lead, even in times of peace. If you want to know why I will not fight, I will tell you: in our country there are no towns or cultivated land; fear of losing which, or seeing it ravaged, might indeed provoke us to hasty battle . . . And your claim to be my master is easily answered – be damned to you!

  Now the Scythians and Sarmatians turned to guerrilla tactics, harrying the Persian flanks, luring them into traps with small herds of cattle. The final straw came as the two armies seemed about to engage, when a hare ran between them. Scythian horsemen were after it in a trice, obviously unimpressed by the Persian army. Darius was astonished and dismayed. ‘These fellows have a hearty contempt for us,’ he said. ‘It is time to think of the best way of getting out of this country.’ Which he did, escaping with his army intact, but no victory.