Pazyryk

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High on the Ulagan plateau of the eastern Altai, where the larch gives out and the valleys hold their snow late, a line of stone mounds runs along the floor of a grassed-over basin. There are five large ones and a scatter of smaller graves, raised by hands that worked in the fourth and third centuries before our era. To the eye they are heaps of rounded stones, slumped and lichened, like the spoil of some abandoned quarry. What sets them apart is invisible from the surface and was unguessed until a spade reached the bottom of the first: under each great cairn the grave-pit had filled with water that froze and never wholly thawed, so that the dead of these barrows were sealed in a lens of ice. The earth, which everywhere else on the steppe takes back the cloth and the leather and the flesh and leaves only the gold and the bone, here gave nothing back. The cold kept it all.

The valley and the digging

Pazyryk is the name of the valley, and by extension of the cemetery and the whole culture it has come to stand for. It lies in what is now the Ulagan district of the Altai Republic, in the Russian Federation, a few degrees of latitude north of where the Altai mountains meet Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and the western edge of China. The five great kurgans cluster on the basin floor at roughly 50°44′ north and 88°04′ east — high, cold ground, well above two thousand meters, where the brief summer never quite drives the frost out of the deeper soil.

The people who built them belonged to the eastern reach of the Scythian world: horse-nomads of Iron-Age Inner Asia, kin in dress and weapon and art to the gold-rich riders of the Pontic steppe far to the west, and still closer kin to the Saka whom the Persians knew on their northeastern frontier. The culture they left, named for this valley, runs through roughly the sixth to the third centuries before our era, with the great Pazyryk barrows themselves falling in the later part of that span. They were a small population, a few thousand at most across the high Altai, but they buried their leading dead with a care and an outlay that the frozen ground has let us see almost whole.

The first of the mounds was opened in 1929 by Mikhail Gryaznov — the barrow now numbered one — and the result was strange enough that the work was not resumed for nearly two decades. After the Second World War, Sergei Rudenko returned to the valley and, across three field seasons from 1947 to 1949, excavated barrows two through five. The digging was unlike any other on the steppe. Each grave had to be reached through a deep cap of stone, then through frozen earth, and finally through the ice itself, which had to be melted with heated water and bailed out by the bucket. What the meltwater uncovered, as it dropped, were not the dry shadows that archaeology usually reads from a tomb but the things themselves, soaked and dark but intact.

Every one of the great barrows had been entered in antiquity by robbers, who took the gold and left the rest where it fell or floated. The ice closed over the wreckage and held it. So the contents of a Pazyryk chamber reach us twice disturbed — once by the thieves, once by the slow churn of freeze and thaw — and yet more complete in their organic substance than any unrobbed grave of dry ground could be. As one survey of the Hermitage holdings puts it, the cold “preserved everything the robbers had left behind.” The robbers had left almost everything that was not metal.

What the ice kept

Begin with the carpet, because nothing else of its kind survives. From barrow five came a knotted-pile carpet of wool, close to two meters square, with a field of small stepped squares framed by borders — an inner band of grazing elk or deer, an outer band of horsemen, some mounted and some leading their animals on foot. It is, by the reckoning of the World History Encyclopedia and of the Guinness World Records that note it as the oldest of its sort, the earliest surviving knotted-pile carpet in the world, woven at a density of some hundreds of thousands of symmetrical knots to the square meter. Whether it was made in the Altai or carried up from Persia or the Caucasus is argued; what is not argued is that without the ice no such object from so early an age would exist for the argument to turn on. The carpet hangs now in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where all the Pazyryk finds are kept.

From the same group of tombs came the felts, and these are the heart of the matter. The Pazyryk dead were laid among hangings and rugs of colored felt, appliqué worked on a ground of thin white wool, sewn with sinew thread. The largest, from barrow five, carries a scene repeated in two long friezes: a goddess enthroned, a flowering branch in her hand, and before her a rider on horseback, armed and dressed, approaching as if to receive something from her. The figures are similar across the repetitions but not identical, so that the panel was built up by hand and not stamped from a single pattern. Scholars usually read the scene as an investiture — a power conferred, a rule confirmed — and some have tied the seated goddess to the great fire-and-hearth queen the Greeks heard named Tabiti, the sovereign before whom the Scythian king’s own life was sworn. The reading is offered cautiously, for the felt itself names no one; it is a picture, and the name we hang on it is borrowed from a Greek list of gods set down a thousand kilometers and an unknown dialect away. That the same enthroned-goddess-and-rider motif recurs among the western Scythians and the Sarmatians lends it weight without settling it.

There was more, and almost all of it perishable. A four-wheeled funeral wagon, some three meters high, had been taken apart and stowed in the largest grave, its turned wheels and pole and frame surviving entire. There were saddles of felt and leather, hung with pendants and worked with the same curling beasts that ran across everything these people made; bridles and cheekpieces and harness ornaments of carved wood and horn, many sheathed in gold-leaf that the robbers had not bothered to strip. There were clothes — a fur-and-felt cap, a shirt, leggings, boots with soles patterned for a people who sat cross-legged and showed the underside of the foot. There were tables on carved legs, cushions, a leather flask, the cut joints of a horse and a sheep left as meat for the road. And there were, in barrow two, the seeds and apparatus of a rite that a Greek traveler had described and that no one had been able to confirm until the ice gave it up.

The chieftain’s skin

The bodies themselves came through. The Pazyryk dead of the great barrows had been embalmed — opened, emptied, the cavities filled, the skin in places preserved well enough to read. The most famous is the man of barrow two, a heavily built figure who died in his late fifties, and across whose shoulders, arms, chest, and one leg run tattoos: a tangle of beasts in the animal style of the steppe, the art these people shared from the Black Sea to the Altai. There are deer with antlers thrown back along the spine, mountain rams, a fish along the shin, and creatures of the imagination that twist into one another, predator locked to prey, in the curving, boneless grammar of the style. The lines were driven into the skin with a sooty pigment, and high-resolution imaging has since let conservators read tattoos that the unaided eye had lost. This is the tattooed body of the Pazyryk barrows — the one to keep in view here. (The often-pictured “Ice Princess” of the Ukok plateau, the tattooed young woman of Ak-Alakha, belongs to the same Pazyryk culture but to a different site and a different, later dig, and the two should not be merged; the questions of repatriation and reburial that have gathered around the Ukok find are her story, not the story of these barrows.)

The animal style on the chieftain’s skin is the same idiom carried on the felts, the saddles, the gold-leafed harness — and it is more than decoration. The beasts are chosen and combined: the herbivore and the cat that hunts it, the eagle’s beak grafted to the deer’s body, the world of the hunt and the herd rendered as a single knotted device. Read for what it meant, the style looks like a way of carrying power and protection and a cosmos of predator-and-prey on the body and the gear, the steppe rider clothed in the animals whose strength he claimed. That reading is an inference — the Pazyryk people wrote nothing — and it is offered as inference, not as something the tattoos say of themselves. What the tattoos do say, beyond doubt, is that the practice the Greek author Herodotus reports of the Scythians, the marking of the skin as a mark of rank, was real and was practiced here.

Around the embalmed lords lay their horses. In the grave-pits, in a chamber walled off from the human burial, the Pazyryk leaders were given mounts — as many as a dozen or more in the richer barrows — killed by a blow to the skull and laid out in their full gear. They wore their saddles and bridles and, on their heads, masks: leather and felt headpieces built up into the antlers of a stag or the horns and ears of a ram, crowned with carved griffins, so that the sacrificed horse was made over into the very animal of the animal style. The frost held them with their trappings in place. To stand before the reconstructed burial of a Pazyryk lord — the man embalmed and tattooed, the disassembled wagon, the felts, the file of masked horses — is to see a steppe funeral very nearly as its makers closed it, which is a thing the dry kurgans of the west, for all their gold, can never quite give.

The rite the ice confirmed

There is one find that ties the mute Altai evidence to the one written account of Scythian life we possess. In his fourth book, the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century before our era of a steppe he never saw, describes a Scythian purification: a small tent of poles hung with felt, a dish of hot stones set inside, and hemp-seed cast on the stones to raise a vapor in which the mourners sat — a smoke, he writes, that no Greek vapor-bath could match, and at which the Scythians howl with pleasure. For a long time this was filed among the traveler’s tales, the kind of thing an interested outsider says of distant people. Then the Pazyryk barrows yielded the apparatus itself: the frame of a small six-pole tent, censers holding charred stones, and a pouch of cannabis seed, laid in the grave for the dead to use. The thing Herodotus described from hearsay was found assembled in the ground.

It is worth being exact about what this proves and what it does not. It does not vindicate every line Herodotus set down about the Scythians, much of which is hearsay, interested, and at points plainly wrong. It confirms one concrete rite — the felted tent, the heated stones, the hemp-smoke — and in confirming it tightens the whole relation between the written and the buried record. The Pazyryk people belong to the eastern wing of the Scythian world Herodotus knew only from its western edge; that a rite he reports on the Black Sea turns up in working order in the Altai is a measure both of how far that world reached and of how much the one literary witness, read with care, can be trusted to have caught. The smoke-tent is named in a Greek book and found in a Siberian grave, and the two accounts meet.

The reception of the frozen world

Pazyryk entered the study of the steppe through the meltwater of Rudenko’s pits, and it changed what could be asked. Before the frozen barrows, the early nomads were known chiefly through their gold — the electrum and the worked metal of the western royal kurgans such as Kul-Oba, Solokha, and Tolstaya Mogila — and through the Greek and Persian and Assyrian authors who watched them from outside. The gold is dazzling but narrow: it tells of wealth and of the animal style and little of the cloth, the wood, the food, the daily and ritual substance of a life. Pazyryk supplied exactly the substance the gold withheld. From its ice came the clothing and the carpets and the wagons and the tattooed skin and the masked horses and the smoke-tent — the perishable nine-tenths of a culture, recovered for once entire. It remains the single richest body of evidence for how the early steppe nomads actually lived and buried their dead.

Its meaning is read on three distances at once, and they are worth keeping apart. The objects and the bodies, the dig and the museum, are the firm ground: the dates and the excavators, the carpet and the felts and the wagon and the tattoos, all checked and cataloged and held in the Hermitage, are matters of record. The reach for religion is softer: the enthroned goddess of the felt as an investiture and as a face of the steppe pantheon, the animal style as a worn cosmos, the masked horses and the embalmed lord as the furnishing of a journey — these are interpretations, careful ones, but inferences laid over objects that name nothing of themselves. And the tradition the Pazyryk people lived inside, the world in which the dead rode out furnished and masked and smoked-clean toward whatever the steppe held beyond the grave, reaches us only through that double screen: the things, read by scholars, and the one Greek book that watched the far western edge of the same world and got at least the smoke-tent right.

What the eastern nomads themselves understood by the goddess on the felt, or by the beasts driven into a chieftain’s skin, or by the dozen masked horses laid down to carry a lord, they did not write, and the felts and the bodies do not finally say. The ice kept the evidence and withheld the words. Among the world’s burial grounds, few have given back so much of what was actually placed in the dark, and fewer still have made a distant, vanished people stand so nearly present — close enough to see the tattoos on the skin, and silent enough that the seeing must do for the rest.

The Pazyryk carpet from barrow five — the oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet known, with its borders of grazing deer and mounted horsemen — recovered from the frozen Altai tombs and now in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. User:Schreiber, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The presentation scene from the great felt hanging of barrow five: a goddess enthroned with a flowering branch, and a mounted rider approaching to receive her gift — usually read as an investiture. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

→ Related: Scythians · The Saka · Kul Oba · Solokha · Tolstaya Mogila · The Sarmatians · The Cimmerians · Tabiti · Papaios · Api Goddess · Argimpasa · Goitosyros · Herodotus · Hestia · Zeus · Apollo