The Siberian Ice Maiden and the Scythian World

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.Listen here and be sure to subscribe to Past Lives: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.BreakHello, 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