The First Scythian King

The Origins of the Alans

The Ice Princess
In 1993 a team of Russian archaeologists led by Dr. Natalya Polosmak made a fascinating discovery on the Ukok Plateau, high up at 2,500m altitude in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, close to the borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. As they started excavating the burial mound they found a huge block of ice.

Tomb of the Siberian Ice Princess

This was a tumulus known as a ‘kurgan’ typical of the early Scythian culture. A kurgan is a type of barrow-like tomb with a mound constructed over a grave, sometimes containing just a single human body, sometimes more, accompanied with grave goods such as weapons, horses and distinctive animal art. 

The burial mounds of the Altai are different to the kurgans of the Steppes in containing burial chambers constructed from logs and then covered in a low mound of stone. In this case water had trickled through the stones then froze encasing the contents in a block of ice, preserved an almost perfect state.

On melting the ice the archaeologists found the mummified body of a 25-year-old woman termed the Siberian Ice Princess. This discovery provided a rare first-hand glimpse into the world of the Pazyryk culture, a nomadic people that inhabited the Steppe region of Siberia more than 2,500 years ago. 

Body Art of the Siberian Ice Princess

The Ice Princess, also known as the Altai Lady, and the grave contents had been perfectly preserved by the ice of the cold Altai Mountains. This lady was clearly of high status as she was accompanied by six sacrificed horses arranged in a radial pattern. Individual burials of this type were usually reserved for Royalty, hence her assumed designation as a princess. Her body had several tattoos including a deer-like creature with a griffon’s beak and a Capricorn’s antlers.  Her richly decorated skin had been peeled back and her organs removed, then neatly stitched back together. In addition to the tattoo of the deer-griffin-like creature, the Ice Princess's skin was preserved and embalmed with herbs, grasses, and wool to complete the mummification process. Covering her shoulders was sable fur over a silk blouse and striped woolen skirt confirming her royal lineage as silk was usually reserved for high status people of nomadic tribes. The Ice Princess wore a pointed conical felt hat which had led to the suggestion that she was possibly a shaman. 

Frozen Tombs of the Pazyryk Culture
Five other tombs had been found in the Ukok Plateau; the first, Barrow 1, was excavated in 1929 while Barrows 2–5 were excavated between 1947–1949. The content of these burial mounds were also preserved in a similar manner as the tomb of the Ice Princess, water seeping into the tombs in ancient times had frozen and encased the grave contents in ice, which remained frozen in the permafrost until the time of their excavation.

It is apparent that ordinary people were not interred, or at least not in large burial sites. The large burial mounds, or kurgans, along with their belongings, horses and sometimes attendants, was strictly reserved for the elite across the Eurasian Steppe.

Ukok Plateau, Altai Mountains

Lower in the Altai is the huge Tuekta kurgan also of the Pazyryk Culture. The region of these Pazyryk kurgans is given protection as the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet, literally thousands of these kurgans cover the Eurasian Steppe.

The Eurasian Steppe
The Eurasian Steppe is a belt of grassland extending for 5,000 miles  (8,000 km) from near the Danube delta in modern Romania to Manchuria in north-east China. Since prehistoric times the Steppe has been a super-highway between Europe and Asia, inhabited by nomadic tribal confederations, the most well-known being the Scythians, Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Huns and Mongols.

With relatively low rainfall, typically less than 20 inches, the grassland is devoid of trees and does not support grazing for more than a generation or so requiring pastoralists to regularly move on to fresh pastures. Thus, the nomadic peoples of the Steppe left little in the way of permanent settlements yet their presence can be traced through their burial customs across the Steppe.

The Eurasian Steppe

To the north the Steppe is bounded by the forests of European Russia and Asian Russia or Siberia, to the south land becomes increasingly drier. The Steppe naturally narrows at two points, making, for convenience, divisions of three major regions.

The European, western end of the Eurasian Steppe begins near the mouth of the Danube and stretches to the southern end of the Ural Mountains, this is known at the Pontic–Caspian Western Steppe. In days of old it was bounded to the north by forest steppe, but in more recent times the forest has been cleared for agricultural land. To the south and east it is bounded by the Black Sea and Caspian Sea to the Caucasus Mountains.  Further west, the Great Hungarian Plain of the Pannonian Steppe is separated from the main Steppe by the Carpathian Mountains. 

Between the southern tip of the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea the Steppe narrows forming a natural division between the Pontic-Caspian Steppe with the Kazakh Steppe, where Europe meets Central Asia. The Kazakh Steppe, or Central steppe, forms the bulk of the Eurasian Steppe stretching from the Urals to Dzungaria, in north-western China. To the south it becomes drier, semi-desert and desert divided by the rivers Syr Darya (Jaxartes) and Amu Darya (Oxus) flowing into the Aral Sea. 

However, the Steppe has few natural barriers, the Urals, regarded as Europe’s conventional eastern boundary, regardless of its name as a mountain range is nothing more than a range of low hills and has never been a cultural barrier. Indeed, nomadic horsemen could ride unhindered from the mouth of the Danube in the west to the Altai Mountain range in the east where modern Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together in East-Central Asia. 

The Altai merges with the Sayan Mountains to the north-east, beyond this is the Eastern Steppe, stretching from the Altai Mountains in the west to the Greater Khingan Range in the east. The primary region of the Eurasian Steppe in East Asia is the Mongolian-Manchurian Steppe which covers large areas of Mongolia and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, the two divided by the high plateau of the Gobi Desert. 

The Eastern Steppe

Being of higher altitude than the Western Steppe, the Eastern Steppe is colder and more arid with greater extremes of seasonal temperatures making it one of the most severe climates on Earth. This harsh environment duly played a significant role in human migrations either southward and eastward direction toward Manchuria and northern China or westward, passing between the Altai and Tien Shan mountains through the valley of the Ili River and past Lake Balkhash and the more inviting grasslands of the Western Steppe. Migrating people would converge through the Dzungarian Gate.

The narrowing of the Steppe at Dzungarian is defined by the Tarbagatai Mountains to the west and the Mongolian Altai Mountains on the east, to the north the Tian Shan Mountains and the Tarim Basin to the south. The Dzungarian Gate is the only mountain pass in the 3,000 mile (4,800km) mountain-wall which stretches from Manchuria to Afghanistan, the most accessible pass for nomadic horsemen between the western Eurasian steppe and land to the east. The pass is associated with the modern conception of the Silk Road connecting China with the Roman Empire and Herodotus’s tale of the legendary Hyperboreans.

This natural boundary between the Eastern and Western Steppes, is where we find the ice tombs of the Pazyryk culture on the Ukok Plateau in the Altai Mountains (as noted above) which have been dated to the 5th century BC. But these are not the earliest Steppe kurgans that have been identified to date, for that we must look at the cultures that preceded the Pazyryk.

Kurgans of the Western Steppe
The Greek historian and geographer, Herodotus tells us that the core area of Scythian tribes was around the northern shore of the Black Sea, modern southern Ukraine and southern Russia. The Royal graves of the Scythians in the steppe area north of the Black Sea were the first known and the first to be investigated in modern times. 

Western Steppe, north of the Black Sea

The kurgans of the Western Steppe were typically around 12–15m high, yet at Solokha on the bank of the Dnieper in Central Ukraine the kurgan was almost 18m high. At Chertomlyk, also in Ukraine, the kurgan was 20m high and 50m in diameter. Both are dated to the 4th century BC. The construction of these two large kurgans suggests a huge communal effort, yet the kurgans never contain burials of ordinary people being reserved exclusively for Royalty and the Elite, and on occasion their attendants.

The body in the kurgan at Solokha was wearing a gold neck-ring, gold bracelets, a gold-sheathed dagger, held a sceptre shaft in the right hand, and gold platelets sewn onto the clothing. Other chambers contained cauldrons, bronze and silver tableware, and Greek drinking vessels. Clearly this individual was interred with all of the status of a Scythian king or high chieftain.

The Scythian kurgans north of the Black Sea region typically contained catacombs, or subterranean chambers, underneath the burial mound. This would be entered through a passageway which led to the catacomb 10-18m deep with side chambers containing  further grave goods, tombs of their attendants and interred horses.

Consistently across the Eurasian steppe, the designated Scythian burial mounds from north of the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains, provide evidence that the tribal chieftain received preferential treatment after death, yet burial mound construction and grave goods could follow quite different traditions, in various regions such as southern Siberia. Dr. Hermann Parzinger has determined that “the complex structure of the kurgans should be considered as rituals which became architecture.”

Until relatively recently the kurgans of the Western Steppe were thought to be the oldest Scythian burial mounds, apparently evidence of a culture that spread east as was the knowledge at the time. This was primarily because ancient historians in the west, Greek and Roman, made the first written records of these nomadic peoples and knew little of life beyond the Ural Mountains. Until the 19th century the kurgans of the Central Steppe and particularly the Eastern Steppe were less known, and until recent times very few had been professionally excavated.

But in the last 20 years or so several Russian–German archaeological teams led by Dr. Parzinger have studied the kurgans of the Ural region, the northern Caucasus,  Kazakhstan, and southern Siberia. 

As Dr Barry Cunliffe writes, “It is no exaggeration to say that the frozen tombs of Siberia have revolutionized our understanding of the first millennium BC nomads of the Altai region.”

The archaeological excavations of the Altai kurgans has shown that a vibrant animal art existed in south Siberia that was so similar to the Scythian animal art of the Pontic Steppe, north of the Black Sea, that we are forced to conclude that the two must have been part of the same cultural continuum. Russian archaeologists refer to this as Scythian-Siberian animal art. 

Scythian-Siberian animal art: Deer-shaped gold plaque (7th century BC)

In addition, three common types of object, known as the so-called Scythian Triad have been found repeatedly in kurgans across the entire Eurasian Steppe, from west to east: Horse Bridal - dagger/composite Bow - animal style art.

The First Scythians
Tuva in Southern Siberia is situated on the eastern flank of the Altai massif, about 100km east of Pazyryk where the famous Scythian frozen tombs were discovered.  

Here on a high plateau traversed by the Uyuk River, a tributary of the Yenisei River, and enclosed by the Sayan Mountains to the east and the Kuznetsk Atatau Mountains to the west, which merge into the Altai, we find the Tuva basin, the site of the early kurgan burials at Arzhan and the largest concentrations of Scythian burial mounds so far found. 

The Arzhan cemetery, Uyuk Valley

The Arzhan culture was preceded by the Karasuk culture centred on the Minusinsk Basin in the Altai-Sayan region of the South Siberian Mountains, northwest of Mongolia. The animal art of the Karasuk culture has contributed to the development of the distinctive Scythian-Siberian animal art style.

The origins of the Karasuk culture are complex, however, it seems to have formed out of the Andronovo culture, from 2,000 BC to 900 BC in Western Siberia and the Central Asian Steppe. Most researchers associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo-Iranian languages.

In northern Tuva is one of the largest and most important kurgan cemeteries in Southern Siberia. Here we find all of the features that characterise Scythian culture further west on the Pontic Steppe actually emerged first in Southern Siberia.

As this is the same region where the Karasuk and the earlier Andronovo cultures developed, we can, with some confidence, pinpoint Southern Siberia as the ‘Scythian homeland’. Therefore, the arrival of Scythian culture in this region cannot be viewed as something that migrated from somewhere else, but is endemic. 

The immense valley of the Uyuk River encloses a huge cemetery of a thousand large earthen or stone-built mounds dated to the 1st millennium BC, the Bronze and Iron eras. The largest reach more than a 100m in diameter and up to 6m high and often in a straight line, suggesting a relationship between the deceased. Especially numerous are cemeteries in the valley near Arzhan, which the local people have termed the ‘Valley of the Kings’. The importance of the site has been recognised by its inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Sources:
Warwick Ball, The Eurasian Steppe, Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Barry Cunliffe, The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe, Oxford University Press, 2021.
Richard Foltz, The Ossetes, IB Tauris, 2023.
Ravi K. Mishra1,  The ‘Silk Road’: Historical Perspectives and Modern Constructions, Indian Historical Review, 47-1 (2020), pp.21–39.
Dr. Hermann Parzinger, Kurgans: Ancient Burial Mounds of Scythian Elites in the Eurasian Steppe, Journal of the British Academy 5 (2017), pp.331-335.

* * *