Archaeologists have discovered evidence of sacrificial funerary practices at the Early Iron Age burial mound of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, Siberia.
This finding suggests that the horse-riding Scythian culture, primarily associated with Eastern Europe, may have originated much further east.
The Scythians were a nomadic people from the Eurasian Steppe, renowned for their equestrian lifestyle and unique ‘animal-style’ art, which depicts stylised animals in distinctive poses.
Their migratory way of life caused their geographical distribution to shift over time. While they are known to have moved from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in present-day southwest Russia and Ukraine, their precise origins have remained unclear.
“The horseback-riding Scythians have sparked the imaginations of people since the days of Herodotus”, says senior author of the research, Dr Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern. “But the origins of their culture have long remained hidden in remote corners of the Eurasian steppes.”
To trace the Scythians’ origins, a team of researchers examined one of the earliest known royal burial mounds containing Scythian artefacts — the late ninth-century BC kurgan of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, southern Siberia. Their findings are published in the journal Antiquity.
Among the fragmented remains, they identified at least one human and 18 horses, indicating that these animals were sacrificed in honor of an elite individual buried within.
These bones were discovered alongside Scythian-style animal artefacts and horse-riding equipment, marking this as an early instance of the horse-centric funerary traditions that were documented thousands of kilometres to the west in Classical sources.
“After years of tough fieldwork in Siberia, it is just wonderful to hold some of the oldest Scythian animal-style items in our hands”, states Dr Caspari. “Unearthing some of the earliest evidence of a unique cultural phenomenon is a privilege and a childhood dream come true.”
The presence of Scythian-style burials in Tuva implies that the Scythians’ origins lie much farther east, underlining the mobility of early horse cultures across the steppe. Moreover, similarities between this burial and Late Bronze Age examples from Mongolia suggest that some of the Scythian funerary traditions may have even deeper roots in the Bronze Age horse cultures of Mongolia.
“The evidence from Tunnug 1 solidifies the crucial role Tuva plays in Eurasian prehistory,” Dr Caspari concludes. “Our findings highlight the importance of Inner Asia in the development of transcontinental cultural connections.”
“The findings also suggest that these funerary practices played a role in the broader process of cultural and political transformation across Eurasia, contributing to the emergence of later pastoralist empires.”
Header Image Credit : Trevor Wallace
Sources : Antiquity | https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.145
