Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
Altai. In 1927 a frozen tomb at Shibe dating to the first century bc was examined by
one of the team, Mikhail Griaznov (1902–1984). Here the body of the deceased was very
well preserved together with horse gear, gold appliqués, and emblems cut from bark.
Two years later, at Pazyryk in the eastern Altai, Griaznov opened a kurgan in a barrow
cemetery that the expedition had discovered earlier in 1924. The preservation in the
Pazyryk kurgan was exceptional. The timbers of the burial chamber and several layers of
logs that had been piled above and around the chamber to deter robbers were perfectly
preserved as were the ten mares buried with the dead man. Although the main grave
had been robbed, what remained firmly established the importance of the cemetery,
but it also made clear that there were many technical difficulties to be overcome when
dealing with delicate organic materials preserved in permafrost conditions.
After the excavation of kurgan 1 at Pazyryk in 1929 work on the frozen tombs came
to a halt. Both Rudenko and Griaznov were removed from their posts during Stalin’s
Great Terror, which began with a purge of the intelligentsia. Rudenko was arrested for
wasting time on pointless investigations while Griaznov was charged with working
with nationalists in Ukraine. Both were eventually reinstated and Rudenko returned
in 1947 to Pazyryk, where over the next three years he excavated seven kurgans with
spectacular results. The well-preserved mummified and tattooed bodies that were
recovered together with the elaborately dressed horses, wooden carvings, and brightly
coloured carpets, appliqué felts, and silks caught the imagination. Rudenko published
a popular, but thorough, account of his work in 1953—a work widely disseminated in
1.15 The cemetery of Pazyryk was discovered during an expedition in the 1920s. The first kurgan, excavated
in 1929, covered a timber burial chamber set in a grave pit. The timber construction and the contents
of the chamber were preserved by the permafrost conditions.
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