'Burying The Mummy Will Stop The Earthquakes' ("Altai Princess")
Princess tattoo
Posted on 08/17/2006 5:04:52 PM PDT by blam
By Julius Strauss
(Filed: 17/04/2004)
Revolt is in the air over a mummified princess. Julius Strauss reports from Gorno-Altaisk
High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air.
Local officials, urged on by the increasingly militant electorate, are collecting signatures, writing petitions and demanding audiences with regional political leaders.
Their demands are simple and have nothing to do with the inept rule, poverty, corruption and ecological disasters dogging the region.
They want a 2,500-year-old mummy, found by Russian archaeologists 11 years ago and being studied in the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, to be reinterred without delay.
Egged on by powerful shamans who local people believe act as go-betweens with the heavenly spirits, they say only the mummy's reburial will put an end to a rash of earthquakes and other problems assailing the region.
The mummy in question is an archaeological jewel. When her ornately tattooed body was found entombed in ice in an ancient burial chamber, the find was acclaimed as one of the most important in Russia's recent history.
The Ice Maiden, as she was dubbed, had survived almost intact in the permafrost of the southern Siberian mountains, surrounded by a burial sacrifice of six horses in gilt harnesses.
Now the battle lines over her future are being drawn up. The fight pits modern Russian science against the ancient beliefs of the Altai people who lived in the region for centuries before Russian colonisers arrived 300 years ago.
It is also at the heart of strained relations between Moscow, often seen as high-handed and out of touch, and the many indigenous peoples of Russia, growing in self-confidence and demanding ever-greater autonomy even as President Vladimir Putin seeks to rein them in.
The campaign to rebury the Ice Maiden began soon after a strong earthquake hit the region last September, destroying many buildings.
Aulkhan Djatkambayev, the head of the Kosh-Agach administration in the Southern Altai region, is a leading proponent of the cause.
"People say the failure to rebury the mummy has brought a string of misfortunes and I respect their opinions," he said. "It is not only a question of earthquakes, but there is a rising incidence of suicide and sickness.
"I respect science but we are nomads not scientists and every people has the right to its own level of understanding. Only by reburying the mummy can we lay the spirits to rest and calm people's fears."
The Russian scientists studying the mummy in Novosibirsk, some 400 miles north, scorn such talk.
Vyacheslav Molodin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whose wife discovered the Ice Maiden, said that during the 1990s when funding was scarce, scientists at the research centre even gave some of their pay for expensive conservation materials.
He said: "Burying the mummy would make us a laughing stock of the world scientific community. As for the earthquakes, the Altai has always been a high-risk zone and earthquakes are nothing unusual there."
The discovery of the Ice Maiden was of great scientific importance. By studying her, archaeologists have been able to piece together much about a little-known people called the Pazyryks, fierce nomadic fighters and skilled horsemen who lived in the first millennium before Christ.
Previously historians had been forced to rely almost exclusively on the writings of Herodotus, who was fascinated by these warrior-nomads who grazed their herds at the ancient historical gateway known locally as the Pastures of Heaven. Today it is the point where Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet.
Herodotus wrote of virgin warriors, some of whom cut off a breast to make them better archers. He wrote: "No maiden may marry until she has killed a man of the enemy. Some die old women, unmarried, because they cannot fulfil the law."
The Ice Maiden, who died when she was about 25, was certainly an important member of society, though probably not a warrior or a princess, as local people claim, but a story-teller, a highly revered position in nomadic culture.
She was buried in a long coffin made of larch and a table was set out with horse-meat and mutton to accompany her into the afterlife. She worea tall wooden headdress and coriander seeds were sprinkled around her.
There were many such burial sites but most were ruined by grave-robbers during the Dark Ages. The Ice Maiden survived only because looters did not search further after finding another body buried on top of her coffin. She was preserved because her body had been stuffed with peat and bark and ice seeped into the grave.
Even the most sceptical admitted that during the work to excavate her there were suspicions of strange forces at work. Jeanne Smoot, an American archaeologist at the dig, told of a sense of foreboding that plagued the team, and frequent nightmares.
When they took the mummy to Novosibirsk, their helicopter's engine failed and it crash-landed. On arrival, the body was almost ruined when it was placed in a freezer that had been used to store cheese and began to develop fungi. The Ice Maiden was saved only when she was rushed to Moscow for treatment by the embalmers who worked on Lenin's body.
In Gorno-Altaisk, the shabby, Soviet-built capital of the stunningly beautiful Altai region, talk of ill fortune shadowing the Ice Maiden comes as no surprise.
At the local market, traders said that until she was laid to rest bad luck would continue.
Tatyana Kazantseva, 48, said: "Our princess must be reburied immediately, everybody here agrees. Having her in a laboratory might be good for the scientists but it has brought only bad for us."
The director of the ethnographic museum, Rima Yerkinova, said: "Personally I am torn. As the director of the museum, I feel she must be returned to us to be put on display for our people to see. But something inside me says she should be reburied. It is the belief of our people."
A Siberian man and his horse who were discovered after the Ice Princess (below), have stirred up some anger. After Russian archaeologists found him, they took him to their lab in Moscow for preservation and research. This angered the Altai Republic officials. They accused the Russians of “spiriting away a piece of their national heritage.” Officials have banned any further Russian digging. Since his horse is buried with him, he has been nicknamed the Horseman. This is the description given in “Archaeology Online”:
“The Horseman, 25 to 30 years old, had been impaled by an enemy’s weapon or animal’s horn. His face and hands have not survived well, but the rest of his skin and muscles and his braided hair are in good condition, as is a tattoo of a deer on his right shoulder. He was wearing a thick wool cap, high leather boots, and a marmot and sheepskin coat. The horseman was buried with his bow, arrows, ax and knife. The horse wore a harness richly decorated with griffins and animals carved in wood and covered in gold foil.”
The Ice Princess
Russian archaeologists found an ancient Pazyryk tomb. Time stood still inside because water had seeped in and froze everything perfectly into one big tomb-cicle.
In 1993 the Ice Princess, also known as "Ledi" for lady, was found near the border of Mongolia in Russia. She is said to be around 2,500 years old! She was buried in a 20 foot underground loghouse. The Pazyrak's believed that when you die you have an afterlife so they buried food water and anything else you would need with you.
Apparently wealthy, her headdress was so high, her coffin was 8 feet long. Also found with Ledi, were 6 horses and a 40 year man. The six horses buried with her are believed to be warriors with some relationship to each other and the horses were meant to carry them into battle in their next life.
blam,
I tried to link to a site that had some neat photos of Ice Princess and her tattooed shoulder and thumb, but I'm too tired to get right apparently.
"YEKATERINBURG, Russia In a medieval Siberian graveyard a few miles south of the Arctic Circle, Russian scientists have unearthed mummies roughly 1,000 years old, clad in copper masks, hoops and plates - burial rites that archaeologists say they have never seen before."
'Burying The Mummy Will Stop The Earthquakes' ("Altai Princess")
Princess tattoo
A reconstructed picture of Oetzi's face. First I've ever seen.
Wowzo! Too bad about the no picture, I'm sure there'll be one in no time. This is as big a deal as Oetzi, IMHO.
I expect so too.
Han Dynasty came close to contacting Rome. They had a 100,000 man military expedition that got to the Caspian Sea and decided to head north. If they had headed south, they would have entered the eastern outposts of the Roman Empire. The Persians were buying silk from China and selling it to the Romans. The same happened to Alexandra the Great. When he headed an expedition going east from a region known today as Afghanistan. He hit a major mountain range that bordered today's Sanjing region of China. Alexander thought that was the end of the world so he stopped and went back to where he started and turned south into India. If he had gone over the range he would run into the western outpost trading cities of the Chinese civilization (China was not united yet, but had six major kingdoms)
I loved that. :') "Know, oh prince..."
There's a Han court record that survives which records a visit by a Roman ambassador of some sort (possibly a commercial contact), and it accurately records the name of the Roman emporor (Marcus Aurelius I think). Also, the Chinese sent an ambassador by sea, and it just missed -- Trajan had died, and after just about a year or two, Hadrian abandoned the newly conquered Mesopotamia. :'(
In front of the camera the archaeologists opened the sepulchre where the mummy of the Scythian soldier was stored. The mummy, conserved in permafrost, carried still a fur coat. Animal rights activists promptly splattered it with red paint and protested.
That's very interesting. The Sarmatians, who were related to the Scythians (but came off the steppe later) were beaten by the Romans, then moved off as auxiliary cavalry into various parts of the Empire, including Britain.
Did he skin his dad for the coat or is this too young for evolution?
Hey, is that a Richie Valens flashback? ;')
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&lr=&q=Bombata+conan&btnG=Search
Fur coat? Don't tell PITA.
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