Asana lay on her back outside her tent, looking up. The grass beneath her was smashed flat and shorn by the grazing teeth and hooves of the herds: horses, sheep, and cattle. Above her, wisps of cloud left scant trails across an otherwise clear sky, driven by the slightest summer breeze. The stars seemed particularly beautiful to her tonight, shining bright and clear on the open stage granted them by the dark of a new moon.
She wondered how many more times she would be able to lie here and look up at the night sky. The pain in her chest was nearly unbearable now. Asana knew more about plant medicines than most of her people—which of the herbs and flowers growing high up in the Altai Mountains were useful and which were harmful—but nothing she’d tried so far had helped. When all treatments failed her, Asana had turned her sights on the five towering peaks that surrounded the plateau where she now lay. These mountains contained powerful spirits, who might choose to aid her and rid her of this pain.
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Driven by hope, Asana had insisted on riding up here from the lowlands along with the herds and the rest of her people. She was still young, entering her twenty-fifth summer, and had made the same journey dozens of times. The king and nobles had suggested that she stay behind, that the ride on horseback through the hills and high passes would be too much for her, suffering as she was. Asana refused. Divining the will of the gods and spirits who watched over and interfered with their world was Asana’s purpose, and the forces in these high places were calling to her.
Then, she fell. A wolf howled and her horse spooked, throwing her from her saddle and down onto the unforgiving ground. Something gave way in her right shoulder. Her hip ached. The spirits of the mountains hadn’t been calling to her to offer aid, she realized; they had summoned her to the place where she was meant to die.
Asana found the notion comforting. She coughed, though whether that was from her new injuries or left over from the potent medicinal fumes she had been inhaling inside her tent earlier was hard to say. Agony stabbed into her torso from every direction. Her vision blurred. Through the haze, the stars twinkled, and she began to drift.
A cool breeze blew down from the five mountains and brought her back. For a moment, Asana forgot it all. Her eyes cleared. The stars above shone clear and bright. She smiled and pondered rising to her feet and going back inside the tent. The fumes would help with the pain. But no, Asana decided. She would stay here a while longer and enjoy the stars.
Break
Hello, my friends. I’m your host, Patrick Wyman. Welcome to another episode of Past Lives.
I’ve got a couple of quick announcements before we dive into today’s episode: First, I will be in New York City on September 29th at 7 PM at the Caveat in the West Village for a live show with the fantastic Claire Aubin, host of the history pod This Guy Sucked, and Manny Fidel, co-host of the pod No Such Thing! We’re doing an “Assholes of American History” draft, and it’s going to be an awesome evening, so come hang out, laugh, and maybe even learn a new thing or two. If you’re in the greater New York area or can get there, you absolutely should. Again, that’s September 29th, 7 PM, at the Caveat in the West Village. Click the link in the episode description to buy your tickets now!
Second, I’m writing historical fiction! Specifically, I’m working on a novel entitled The Wolf and the Eagle. It’s set in the year 376 AD, when the Goths crossed the Danube, and tells the story of two brothers who set off into the barbarian lands beyond the river to rescue a boy and, in the process, experience firsthand the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. I’ll be releasing chapters in both text and audio form on the Past Lives feed for subscribers; if you’re already subscribed, you’ll get them automatically. I’m also going to add a new lower subscriber tier if the fiction is the only bonus content you’d like. Keep a weather eye open for an initial release date, coming soon!
With that out of the way, let’s return to the story at hand.
More than 2,300 years ago, a woman was laid to rest high in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, in a burial chamber cut deep into the permafrost. She was young, around 25, but her life had been difficult: In the years immediately preceding her death, she had suffered from breast cancer, and a serious fall - perhaps from a horse - had made her final months even more painful. After her death, the young woman was interred in magnificent fashion, presumably by people who cared deeply for her. Six horses were sacrificed and buried near her tomb. Hundreds of objects were placed in the chamber with her, and she herself was dressed in her colorful silk and wool finest, including a three-foot-tall headdress, and sealed in a coffin made of larch wood. Not long after the tomb was sealed, water flooded in, which subsequently froze into a solid block of ice, perfectly preserving both the woman and the contents of her burial chamber. When Russian archaeologists discovered the site in 1993, they were astonished to discover that pieces made of wood, textile, and even cannabis and coriander had survived the millennia. It was the woman herself, however, who proved the most stunning and remarkable discovery: Her mummified skin was covered in magnificent tattoos, fantastical beasts circling her arms and hands. The discoverers soon dubbed her the Siberian Ice Maiden. But while she had been discovered and named, questions remained: Who was she in life? What world did she inhabit? The answers take us to a place and time in the ancient world that rarely makes its way into the popular imagination: the vast Eurasian steppe during the Iron Age, when a wide-ranging people known as Scythians dominated the grasslands and left their mark on both their home and the societies they encountered.
At first glance, the location of the Ice Maiden’s burial seems to be well off anything resembling the beaten path. It sits high in the Altai Mountains on the Ukok Plateau, one of the wildest, most rugged places in one of the most remote parts of the planet. A place where snow leopards hunt mountain sheep while eagles soar overhead, and people are few and far between. The final remnants of the Mammoth Steppe, the planet’s predominant grassland biome during the last Ice Age, can be found here. The Ukok Plateau looms more than 7,000 feet above sea level, while the surrounding mountains - including Mongolia’s highest point, Khüiten Peak - tower even higher above the rolling plains. Today, it’s mostly the haunt of adventure-seeking tourists, guards who watch over the borders where Mongolia, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan meet, and herders who graze their flocks on the hillsides, just as people have done for thousands of years.
For much of the past several millennia, however, the Ukok Plateau was not a backwater, but a vital crossroads where the most important routes spanning Eurasia once met. Everything we discussed about Xinjiang several months ago—the hyper-arid desert that lies to the south of the Altai—applies even more forcefully to the Ukok Plateau and the region where the Ice Maiden was buried. A traveler pausing to take in the view could head south into Xinjiang, north all the way to the Arctic along the Yenisei River, west into the open grasslands of Kazakhstan, or east to Mongolia, Manchuria, and northern China. While inhospitable to agriculture, the Ukok Plateau is perfect for pastoralists, offering abundant pasture for their sheep, cattle, and horses, along with access to the trade routes connecting the various parts of Eurasia. Foragers populated it only lightly, but when the first Indo-European-speaking herders made their way east from the lands north of the Black Sea around 3000 BC, they found the Ukok Plateau a paradise for their way of life. These were the Afanasievo people, and they introduced not only their genes and language but the concept of pastoralism itself, which soon spread to the surrounding non-Indo-European-speakers. Indigenous pastoralists, the ancestors of later Turks and Mongols, created a stunning artistic tradition focused around naturalistic depictions of animals. They’re particularly famous for their carved stone monuments, called “deer stones,” that feature extraordinary depictions of people and animals, and deer in particular. More than 1,500 of these stones have been found, mostly in Mongolia and neighboring south Siberia.
Toward the end of the second millennium BC, a new wave of Indo-European-speakers moved east into the Altai.. These were one branch of the Andronovo people, an extraordinarily widespread archaeological culture who almost certainly spoke Proto-Iranian, the ancestor of later languages like Pashto, Persian, and Kurdish. As these Andronovo people traveled into the Altai, they interacted with the indigenous pastoralists who created the deer stones. By around 800 BC, a new people was emerging, building enormous burial mounds for their horse-riding kings in the eastern Altai. We know them as Scythians. They would go on to transform the length and breadth of Eurasia, from Xinjiang to the Danube and everywhere in between. The Ice Maiden was their descendant, and her life, death, and burial only make sense in the context of the world the Scythians made.
The earliest evidence we associate with the Scythian horizon dates to just before 800 BC, from the Uyuk Valley of what is today Russia’s Tuva Republic. This is only about 200 miles east from where the Ice Maiden was buried half a millennium later, and she is quite clearly the cultural if not literal descendant of the earliest manifestations of the Scythians. These manifestations take the form of gigantic burial mounds called kurgans. Recently, researchers have gone back to the Uyuk Valley, where they discovered and excavated what turned out to be the earliest Scythian royal burial ever found, a site called Tunnug 1. Not only was Tunnug 1 precociously early, dating to between 830 and 800 BC, and gigantic, measuring roughly 150 meters in diameter, it was also a remarkably sophisticated construction: The earthen mound covers a central burial chamber of stone, timber, and clay, with subsidiary galleries, a stone-slab wall, and multiple other structures whose function still isn’t clear. As if the quality of the building and its sheer size weren’t enough to distinguish the importance of the man buried inside, at least eighteen horses and one human were also ritually sacrificed and placed upright on the surface above the tomb. The Greek historian, Herodotus, once described a similar practice among the Scythians of his day, who inhabited the grasslands north of the Black Sea. A recent paper published by archaeologist and friend of the show Dr. Gino Caspari calls it a “spectral cavalcade.”
The Black Sea is a long way from the Tuva Republic, but within just decades of the construction of Tunnug 1, the Scythians were on the move, heading west. They had arrived in the steppe north of the Caucasus no later than 700 BC, when they ejected their cultural and linguistic cousins, the Cimmerians, from the power they’d briefly enjoyed in the region. A series of rich burial mounds in the Kuban River Valley, the last bit of grassland before the mountains, dates to precisely this time. By 650 BC, the Scythians were raiding south through the Caucasus into Anatolia. At the same time, they were pushing west along the coast of the Black Sea, encountering the peripatetic Greeks who were beginning to establish colonies in the region; in addition to being the breadbasket of the Greek world in later centuries, those colonies prospered from their continuous trade with the . Wine for slaves was a particularly common transaction: The Scythians had a notable fondness for unwatered wine; if you ever got “as drunk as a Scythian,” you had wildly overindulged. It was Herodotus who gave us the classic portrait of the Scythians as equestrian nomadic warriors who dominated the grasslands, firing arrows as they rode their precious horses around their hapless adversaries. In fact, the Scythians probably invented mounted archery as a practice, and perhaps even the saddle. Those are just two of the innovations they spread across the length and breadth of Eurasia during the Iron Age. Another was what’s called the “animal style” of art, featuring naturalistic depictions of animals, often while fighting. The classically “Celtic” art of the La Tene Culture in Europe drew much inspiration from their Scythian neighbors.
What’s essential to understand about the Scythians is that they were an elite group, both wealthy and powerful. The things we see and label as Scythian in the archaeological record were elite markers: extraordinary animal-style art, particularly in gold; weapons, particularly specific forms of arrowhead, axe, and blade; horses and horse-riding gear; and imported luxury goods. These are the types of items we tend to find in kurgans, those giant burial mounds, wherever and whenever we see them. The kurgans themselves might be located in the Altai, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, or Moldova, but their contents were remarkably similar in style and kind no matter where they were, a sure sign of an interconnected elite that was in constant contact with one another. It’s more than 2,000 miles from the Altai to the Black Sea, and 400 years from Tunnug 1 to Herodotus, yet the historian was clearly describing the same foundational practice of ritual sacrifice.
Below the elite level, people lived in many different ways across Eurasia, speaking a variety of languages and sowing crops in addition to herding animals; but their overlords were Scythians, who spoke the Scythian language, rode their horses, and moved their wagons from place to place. Analysis confirms consistent gene flow across Eurasia from the Altai to Hungary, particularly among the elite. The Scythians’ nomadic existence wasn’t driven by poverty; it was a choice that allowed them the freedom to go where they liked and wield their power to dominate whomever happened to be living there. They wore their hair long, covered themselves in gold and silk and tattoos, carried nasty weapons, and were rarely to be found off their horses. These were the Ice Maiden’s antecedents, and they built the world she inhabited.
Break
The Ice Maiden belongs to a specific subset of that general Scythian world, what we call the Pazyryk Culture, a spectacularly wealthy and widely connected group. Of all the Scythians who wandered the vastness of the Eurasian steppe in the Iron Age, it’s the Pazyryk, we know best: That’s because the Altai was their heartland, the center of their world, and the cold, arid climate has done an extraordinary job of preserving the material remnants of their lives. Everything from tattooed skin to cannabis seeds to the wood they used to build their burial chambers has survived, organic materials that practically never make it through the ravages of time. As a result, the Pazyryk people - not just the Ice Maiden - come to us in the present as shockingly real figures. We don’t have to imagine what they looked like, because the soft tissue of their bodies is still there. We don’t have to wonder about how they dressed their hair or decorated their skin, because we can see it firsthand. The carpets they sat on, the clothes they wore, the haunches of meat they ate at funerals: all of it remains, allowing us unprecedented insights into the lives of people who lived more than 2,000 years ago.
A quick note here: For this following section, I’m relying on the excellent academic tome Pazyryk Culture up in the Altai, by Karen Rubinson and Katheryn Linduff.
The Pazyryk Culture is a regional grouping centered on the Altai Mountains between the late 6th and the middle of the 3rd centuries BC. The Ice Maiden lived toward the very end of that period, with radiocarbon dates giving a range between 280 and 240 BC, with the highest probability placing her in the mid-270s. This makes the Ice Maiden a contemporary of the Successors of Alexander the Great, who were busy at that time fighting over the vast territories the Macedonian king had originally conquered.
The emerging Hellenistic world wasn’t as remote from the Altai as it might appear on a map. In fact, Alexander’s conquests directly impinged on the Pazyryk world, even at its highest altitudes. The massive kurgans built in the Pazyryk Valley, the type-sites that give their name to the entire culture, showcase an incredible range of imported artifacts. The earlier tombs in the valley date to around 300 BC, and when we track the origins of those goods, they bear a strong Persian quality. The easternmost parts of the Achaemenid Empire were quite close to the Altai, a few weeks’ ride to the west. We can safely assume that the Pazyryk people traded livestock - particularly horses - with their sedentary neighbors in exchange for luxuries, like the magnificent pile rug found in Kurgan 5 at Pazyryk. The later Pazyryk tombs, however, contain fewer goods with Persian associations; instead, they seem to have switched their export operations over toward China, accessed through Xinjiang and the Gansu Corridor to the south and east.
This was the world in which the Ice Maiden lived. The Pazyryk always looked out from the Altai, but the direction of their gaze was shifting from west to east. The commodities involved in the trade didn’t change: The high meadows in places like the Ukok Plateau were some of the finest grazing land on the planet, and the Scythians’ entire elite society was based around horses. We saw that with the spectral cavalcade at Tunnug 1, at the very beginning of the Scythian era, and it was a consistent cultural feature throughout the Iron Age. The richest kings were so because of the herds they owned and the armed riders on whom they could call for military service; the two went hand in hand, since stealing livestock was a constituent part of warfare at every scale, be it a small clan’s raid or the largest ravaging invasion. Every neighboring society desired horses, but couldn’t support large herds without damaging the agricultural economy in, say, the Iranian Plateau or the Yellow River corridor.
Who had horses? The Scythians, and they were happy to sell them in return for the conspicuously luxurious objects we see in the Pazyryk tombs. A kurgan was an elite burial, and it was the elite who controlled this massive trade in horseflesh. (There’s a fantastic book tracing this topic over time by David Chaffetz, called Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, and I highly recommend it.). My guess is that when Darius III and the Achaemenids fell to Alexander, the Pazyryk kings of the Altai lost their trading partners in the easternmost provinces of the Persian Empire. It’s not that the newly arrived Macedonians would’ve been averse to trading with them, but the Pazyryk rulers had specific personal relationships with members of the highest Achaemenid elite; after all, the Pazyryk rulers were kings, wealthy ones with vast horse herds, thousands of horse-archers at their disposal, and a well-earned reputation for violence. A man buried in Kurgan 2 at Pazyryk, for example, dating to between 300 and 280 BC, had been killed with an axe-blow to the head and then scalped. If you were the ruling satrap of a frontier province in the Achaemenid Empire, a marriage alliance with a Pazyryk king that ensured access to essential military materiel - horses - and perhaps soldiers would be a smart move.
The horse trade probably didn’t die out when Macedonian governors replaced Persian satraps in Bactria and Sogdiana, what are now present-day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan; more likely these new arrivals just had different partners on the steppe, who were buried in kurgans we haven’t yet excavated. The Pazyryk were just one group of horse-trading warlords of many in that vast sea of grass. What seems quite clear based on the burials, however, is that the Pazyryk took proactive steps to find new trading partners in these years, and found them in China. This was a good time to be selling horses to Chinese buyers, because the Warring States period - the centuries-long era of continuous warfare that led to the rise of the Qin - was nearing its denouement at precisely this time. The man buried in Kurgan 2 at Pazyryk, who was killed and scalped, was buried wearing a caftan, a long shirt made of cotton that was likely grown somewhere in China. The silk in earlier tombs was more likely to come from India, while in later tombs it was more often Chinese silk. Lacquered items were particularly popular, and grew ever more common in Pazyryk tombs as we move toward the end of the period; it’s possible that the southern state of Chu, which was famous for its lacquerwork during this period, was the destination for Pazyryk horses and the source of the lacquered leather of which Pazyryk chieftains seem to have been especially fond. How this trade was conducted we cannot currently say, but several individuals buried in Pazyryk tombs show evidence of tropical and subtropical parasites that they may have acquired during trading expeditions to warmer climes.
These were the currents directing the time and place in which the Ice Maiden was born, lived, and died. She was between 20 and 30 years of age when her life came to its end, and we can say exactly what brought her to an early grave: breast cancer, which plagued her for several years before her death. Her skeleton also shows clear evidence of osteomyelitis, a severe and chronic bacterial infection of the bones, which likely troubled her even before the onset of the cancer that killed her. Several months before her death, she fell from a substantial height onto her right side. Considering her lifestyle, an accident while riding seems a likely scenario, particularly if she was already weakened by a long terminal illness—those of us who have cared for someone nearing the end know how easy it is for a person in that state to suffer an accident, and that’s the most plausible explanation for what we see written in the Ice Maiden’s remains.
The Ice Maiden’s tomb itself is unusual. It is not one of the gigantic kurgans that dominated the landscape of the Altai and still dominate our understanding of the Pazyryk people and their world; hers sits on its own on the Ukok Plateau, not among a group of burial mounds. The term “princess” sometimes used to describe her is inaccurate. She doesn’t belong among the highest members of the Pazyryk elite, because if she had, she would’ve been buried in a kurgan, as other elite women were. Pazyryk culture was patriarchal and male-dominated: Most of the individuals buried in the kurgans are male, and the highest-ranking men always have substantially more lavish and numerous grave goods than women. Despite that basic gender imbalance, women on the steppe, and Pazyryk women in particular, could wield substantial authority over economic and cultural matters. The violence of elite life for men created opportunities for their widows, as we see with older women who were interred later in the tombs of Pazyryk men who were killed in battle.
The Ice Maiden’s burial isn’t like these, however. We do see imported luxury goods, but there the similarities end. It’s by itself; it’s not a kurgan; and she doesn’t share the tomb with an elite man. Hers is special, and probably reflects some kind of elevated status in life, albeit not of the standard variety. When she was buried, she wore a three-foot-tall headdress made of felt and decorated with hair, a tall feather, a bronze deer pin, and fifteen small golden birds. This piece was not commonly found in Scythian tombs, and her coffin was specially made to accommodate not just her body, but the headdress, as well: It was a foundational piece of her identity in death, and had to be included. The most likely explanation is that she was a priestess or shaman with specialized spiritual and religious responsibilities. Her stunning tattoos - covering both arms, her shoulders, and several fingers, depicting stylized animals similar to Pazyryk artwork, curling and almost fluid - may also speak to her role: They’re quite similar, if not identical, to those we see on other elite Pazyryk individuals whose skin has been preserved, and may be a physical manifestation of spiritual knowledge or power. Whatever the precise reason for her status, the Ice Maiden mattered to her Pazyryk people.
The preservation of her body tells us so much about the Ice Maiden’s life and her world that we could otherwise never hope to know. She is a window onto a time and place that few of us ever consider, a seemingly out-of-the-way corner of the Iron Age steppe that was in fact the beating heart of a much larger universe. All of that information allows us to imagine her high up on the Ukok Plateau, riding a treasured horse, feeling the wind and hearing it blow through the long grasses, and seeing the endless sky above her. We can imagine the sensations she felt when the tattoo needle pricked her skin, inking those incredible animal images along her arms and shoulders. We can even visualize the otherwise invisible connections that tethered a collection of tents and burial mounds in the remote Altai to the most distant corners of the world beyond.
What we cannot do at present is understand the bonds of affection that seem to have tied the Ice Maiden to her people, though perhaps someday ancient DNA analysis might reveal that the residents of other kurgans in the Altai belonged to her parents, cousins, siblings, or children. But we can say with certainty that people valued and cared for her. Because of her terminal cancer and other health issues, her final years, and particularly months, must have been extraordinarily difficult. Watching a young woman in the prime of life waste away, suffer a terrible fall, and struggle on to the end cannot have been easy, but the condition of her remains and her tomb tell us that she did not suffer alone, and that she was cared for until the very end.
Next time on Past Lives, we’ll explore the life of a gladiator, but not one who met his end to the applause of tens of thousands in the world’s biggest city. Instead, we travel to distant York, the northwestern limit of the Roman Empire, where a young, robust man was fatally bitten by a lion. How that came to happen, and the fact that it could, tells us everything about what made the Roman world what it was.
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No pictures ? Great article. I’ll have to look elsewhere for visual. Thank you