In 2003, in the scientific laboratory of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the archaeologists watched intently as infrared rays played over the mummified bodies of women and men of Scythia from the time of Herodotus. Invisible to the naked eye until this moment, swirling images of deer and other animal designs seemed to magically appear on their skin. The faded charcoal pigment of the exceptionally fine, elaborate tattoos became visible under the infrared light, allowing the Russian archaeologists L. L. Barkova and Svetlana Pankova to photograph for the first time a stunning number of previously hidden tattoos. Characteristic of ancient Scythian “animal-style” art, the newly discovered skin pictures include deer, elk, horses, mountain sheep (argali), tigers, leopards, birds, and imaginary creatures with beaks, wings, and fantastic antlers. The drawings had been pricked into the skin with needles and then rubbed with soot. The Scythian tattoo artists are thought to have been the first to use transfer stencils—a cutout leather stencil of one mummy’s ram tattoo was actually found in his grave. Many of the animal figures were carefully placed on the body to give a rippling effect when the person moved or flexed his or her muscles.
The Altai steppes span parts of Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and the Altai Republic. The vast Altai region is dotted with the kurgans of nomadic people closely related to the Saka, Sarmatian, and Scythian groups who used to range over the vast high plains between the Black Sea and Mongolia.26 The bodies of the two women and two men stored in the Hermitage had been buried with golden treasures and sacrificed horses in the fifth to third centuries BC. Their bodies had been preserved entirely intact by permafrost in the Pazyryk (“mound”) Valley, Russia. When graves of the Pazyryk culture were first excavated in 1947-49 by Sergei Rudenko, the extensive animal tattoos of only one male warrior (the famous “tattooed chieftain of Pazyryk” in mound 2) were visible. The infrared camera picked up a new tattoo of a rooster on his finger. Another frozen mummy of the later Tashtyk culture, first century AD, had been excavated in 1969 Khakasia to the north. He too turned out to be heavily tattooed with half-circles, rosettes, a bow and arrow, and large, unidentifiable figures.27
One of the Pazyryk women was in her early forties when she was buried next to the tattooed chieftain in mound 2. More than two millennia after her death, the infrared camera revealed that she was also intricately tattooed. On her shoulder is a fantastic twisting stag. It has a griffin’s beak and black antlers with prongs shaped like griffin heads (a motif seen in Thracian and Scythian artifacts). On her other shoulder is a contorted mountain sheep. A realistic deer-antler design encircles her wrist.
The other woman, about fifty at death, was buried in mound 5 with a man of about fifty-five. to technology, we can now admire their
Finely drawn tattoos. The man’s body is heavily inked with birds, two horses with expressive faces, five deer, three mountain sheep, and a very large, ferocious tiger wrapped around his left shoulder and chest. The woman’s arms and hands are covered in tattoos. On her left forearm, a large bird of prey attacks a struggling deer. On her right forearm, an elegant tattoo depicts a snow leopard and two Caspian tigers attacking a stag and a spotted elk or fallow deer with broad antlers (Caspian tiger habitat once extended from the Caucasus to the Altai). The archaeologists believe that this complex “cartouche” composition shows Chinese influence. Chinese silk and artifacts have been found in several Altai kurgans, demonstrating trade and perhaps marriage alliances with China; grave goods in the Pazyryk tombs came from China, India, and Iran.28
The archaeologists at the Hermitage were delighted to find that these women of the steppes were tattooed. They were following a hunch based on Rudenko’s 1947 excavation of the tattooed chieftain and another remarkable body recovered in 1993 in the Altai region. That year, the Russian archaeologist Natalya Polosmak had unearthed a thrilling discovery, an unlooted, luxurious tomb of a sixth mummy, frozen for twenty-five hundred years.
With the help of some Russian soldiers stationed at the lonely outpost on the high Ukok Plateau (7,500 ft.), Polosmak and her team excavated a large kurgan just ten yards from the barbed-wire fence marking the no-man’s-land on the border with China. After two weeks of digging deep into the mound that snowy spring, they came upon a larch-wood log coffin decorated with large leather cutouts of deer. Prying off the four copper nails securing the lid, they found a block of ice inside. The team carefully drizzled cups of hot water over the coffin. At last, a shoulder covered with marten (sable) fur emerged. Polosmak lifted the fur and saw “a brilliant blue tattoo of a magnificent griffin-like creature” on the woman’s skin. Polosmak identified the “Ice Princess” as “one of the Amazon women mummies” of the Pazyryk culture.29
A tall (5 ft., 6 in.) horsewoman, she was about twenty-five years old when she died in about 500 BC. Her six chestnut horses with dazzling gold bridles had been sacrificed and buried around her. She wore elaborate earrings, a yellow and maroon silk tunic, a towering headdress bedecked with deer and swans, thigh-high boots of embroidered felt and fur, and a wide red wool skirt that could be hiked up for riding by
FiG. 6.8. “Cartouche” tattoo of leopard and two tigers attacking a stag and an elk on female frozen mummy’s arm, revealed by infrared camera, mound 5, Pazyryk, fifth to third centuries BC. Drawing used with permission, courtesy of Svetlana Pankova; from Barkova and Pankova 2005, fig. 14.
A red braided belt. Analysis of her clothing showed that her Chinese-style tunic was of wild silk from India, and that the dyes came from the eastern Mediterranean or Iran. The exotic grave goods show that the Pazyryk culture “had extraordinarily wide connections to China, India, Iran, and the Mediterranean.” For her journey to the afterlife, she was accompanied by a bowl of fermented mare’s milk (koumiss), a wooden platter of meat with a bronze knife, and her everyday possessions, including a small mirror with a deer engraved on the back.30
Horses, deer, and large felines were extremely important animals for the peoples of Scythia. Their unique artistic style often featured deer with contorted bodies and exaggerated branching antlers. (They even fitted their horses with antlers.) The Ice Princess’s shoulder was decorated with a large, twisting deer with a griffin’s beak and stylized extravagant antlers, each point ending in the head of a griffin (very similar to one of the Pazyryk woman’s tattoos). Her arms were decorated with a mountain sheep and a spotted panther or snow leopard. Another deer head with ornate antlers encircles her wrist, like the “antler bracelet” on the Pazyryk woman, above. Two males buried nearby had similar deer tattoos across their shoulders and chests. Antlered deer are also prominent in petroglyphs and carved “deer stones” found from Mongolia to the Black Sea (chapter 14).31
For oral societies such as the Scythians, tattoos may have encoded mythological ideas and traditional stories. The beautifully rendered, stylized animals are decorative, to be sure, but probably held deep meanings for individuals and the tribe. Tattoos could be seen as a living language written on the body, a form of inscribed communication. Each inked animal and scene existed within a repertoire of commonly held stories, while specific details might have referred to personal experiences (such as hunting success, vision quests, dreams) of the tattooed individual. Perhaps heavily tattooed individuals were storytellers or shamans whose body art served as illustrations for cultural narratives. Greek accounts describe Scythians as fully clothed, never nude or even seminude in public (unlike the Greeks). Many vase painters stress this by depicting Amazons clothed in long sleeves and leggings pitted against nude Greek warriors. Because their dramatic tattoos would not ordinarily be observed by enemies or strangers, Russian archaeologist Sergey Yatsenko suggests that Scythian tattoos were private “spiritual weapons” and magical protectors.32
Evidence for even earlier tattooing customs came to light in northwest China. In the Taklamakan Desert and other sites in the Tarim Basin along the Silk Route, numerous male and female mummies were naturally dehydrated in desert sand for about three thousand years. Their culture and origins are mysterious, but their extremely well-preserved
FiG. 6.9. Tattoos of the “Ice Princess,” discovered by Natalya Polosmak, Ukok Plateau, fourth century BC. Images courtesy of Svetlana Pankova, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Bodies are tattooed with geometric shapes that recur in their patterned woolen clothing, still bright and colorful these many centuries later.33
Mummies are rare; they depend on very special conditions maintained within burial chambers over millennia.34 The more typical occupants of nomads’ tombs on the steppes are mere skeletons. Yet even bare bones can reveal evidence of tattooing among Scythians. The most startling example is a snake figure imprinted on the shin bone of a Bronze Age nomad who was buried near the Sea of Azov. The charcoal tattoo pricked into the skin was transferred onto the shin bone during decomposition of the body. A more gruesome example comes from an ancient
Chinese text stating that traces of tattoos could be discerned on the skulls or shin bones of the dead. Indeed, Sergei Rudenko’s examination of the tattooed Pazyryk mummy showed that the tattoo needles had penetrated very deep into the muscle.35
The Altai and Tarim mummies are tangible proof of tattooing among nomadic peoples closely related to the groups identified as Scythians and Amazons by their contemporaries, the ancient Greeks. The common motifs of deer in Thracian women’s tattoos and on Amazons’ sleeves and leggings in so many Greek vase paintings is striking. The vase painters accurately reproduced geometric designs and animals preferred by real Scythians to decorate their skin, textiles, and other possessions. If the Ice Princess and her companions could view the vase paintings of Thracian women and Amazons, they would recognize the deer tattoos and decorations as miniature images of their own. Greek observers of the vases, meanwhile, might wonder whether the exotic marks on an Amazon’s arms and legs were part of her skintight garment or actually inscribed on her naked skin. They could even entertain both options, imagining that the patterned fabric concealed patterned flesh.
World History
