History Mystery: Pazyryk The frozen tombs of Altai -1

Civilizations are usually founded on urban settlements. But the horsemen of the Altai needed no fixed base. Their alternative, nomadic lifestyle led them to move with the seasons, creating a culture which flourished wherever they pitched their tents. The Altai Mountains of Southern Siberia are a vast massif of jagged peaks and swooping valleys, thickly forested on the lower slopes in the north-west, yet semi-desert in the south-east. There are no fallen monuments or ruined city walls to break the landscape, but the mountains were once home to a nomadic race whose culture was influenced by both China and Achaemenid Persia (Iran). Only their frozen tombs – scattered through the extensive mountain system near the borders of Russia, China, and Mongolia – reveal the extraordinary vitality of their short-lived culture. Burial mounds – huge piles of stones known as kurgans – are the only signs of human presence in this area in ancient times. They dot the steppes of Asia, stretching as for west as the valley of the Danube.

 Those in the Altai have revealed some remarkable finds – at an altitude of 1,600m (5,250 ft), ice has preserved their contents for more than 2,000 years. In the early 20th century, Russian archaeologists began excavations at Pazyryk, high in the massif. Here, a group of five great kurgans had been discovered, surrounded by smaller mounds. After digging a shaft in one of the kurgans to allow access to in central chamber, the scientists entered a frozen world. As the ice melted, it revealed a tomb draped in brightly edged brown felt. All around lay scattered funeral objects – bright tapestries and clothing, luxurious animal furs, wooden furniture, and carved objects of bone and staghorn. North of the chamber, behind a partition of logs, lay the bodies of several horses. The manes were trimmed and bound, the tails plaited. Alongside them lay rich saddlecloths, leather cushions on wooden saddle bows, bits, bridles, and harness straps hung with vividly painted wooden ornaments embellished with gold leaf. It seemed that thieves had penetrated the kurgans shortly after the burial ceremonies. In one of the tombs, the embalmed bodies of a man and a woman had been lifted from the sarcophagus. Their hands and feet had been chopped off to retrieve valuable bracelets and anklets, their fingers amputated to free rings. The heads had been severed from the bodies so that necklaces could be removed easily.

 Aside from the desecration, by breaking into the graves the thieves had rendered an invaluable service to the archaeologists. Autumn rains seeped into the tombs of Pazyryk through the tunnels dug by the grave-robbers. Year after year, the bitter steppeland winters froze the water in successive layers of ice. Screened from the summer sun by the stones above, the ice had never melted. The imprisoned riches had neither perished nor faded, and the bodies of the dead were frozen – preserved almost intact. Fabrics were as richly coloured as when they had been woven and velvety smooth. Carpets were still springy; furs were still silky soft. Textures had endured. The people buried at Pazyryk were relations of the Scythians – a warlike tribe who made sporadic descents on the great civilizations to the east and west of the barren Asian steppes. These ferocious nomads made terrifying incursions into Persia during the 5th century BC. The Greek historian, Herodotus (c.484-425 BC), recorded some of their customs. According to Herodotus, each Scythian warrior had to make at least one kill a year, or face disgrace. The skulls of slaughtered enemies were used as drinking cups, and their skins were tanned to make capes and cushions. Slaves were blinded so that they could not run away. The Scythians’ peculiar savagery may have stemmed from their geographical position. Caught between the advanced civilizations of the Middle East and the warrior horsemen of the remote steppes, they had to be merciless in order to survive. Herodotus also recorded that when a Scythian king died, his subjects embalmed his body and buried it in a square pit covered with stones. Interred with him were horses, personal treasures, and measures of his royal household, strangled before burial. Many of Herodotus’s observations have been confirmed by the excavation of Scythian tombs on the western plains of Asia. But the Pazyryk kurgans reveal aspects of the nomads’ life absent from the Scythian tombs. At Pazyryk, precious metals had been plundered, bit a unique treasure trove of perishable accessories remained. When Herodotus described a distant Scythian tribe known as Argippeans, he may have been referring to the people of the Altai. The tribe occupies an important place in Scythain mythology. They inhabited a remote mountain region, and were known as the keepers of the gold. According to legend, it was they who first stole the precious metal from the guardianship of the griffins – the fabulous winged monsters often represented in Scythian art. In Turkish languages, ‘Altai’ means ‘country of Gold’.

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History Mystery: Sipan City Of Lords Of Gold And Sacrifice -2

Gold was the most highly valued metal. Gold-working had been a local industry in the upper valley for centuries before the development of the Moche culture. An alloy of gold and copper, known as tumbaga, was also popular among many Andean cultures. The Moche finished objects made of this alloy with depletion gilding: they treated the surface of the objects with acid, which removed the surface copper and left a layer of pure gold in its place. To gild plain copper objects, they used a more sophisticated method. They immersed the objects in a solution of gold, water, minerals, and salts, which was then heated. A thin layer of gold formed on top of the copper. Further heating of the copper object bonded the gold to its surface. The Moche were not only skilled in metalwork; they were also fine potters. Huge collections of pots were placed in burials at Span and elsewhere in Moche territory – created to order as part of the funerary preparations.

Many Andean cultures illustrated aspects of daily life on their pottery, and the Moche brought this art form to its highest pinnacle. They decorated their pots with fine line drawings of subjects from everyday scenes, such as weaving and hunting. On others processions of musicians play trumpets, bells, rattles, and panpipes. Some pots reveal the Moche’s sea-going activities; the sea was a major source of food for them. Fishing boats made of tied reed bundles complete with fishing lines, nets, fish, and fishermen, are a common theme. A number of vessels were stamped with designs in relief. Others were created as three-dimensional sculptures, loosely based on the shape of a bottle or bowl.

Many Mooche pots depict ritual scenes of sacrifice, funerary rites, and warfare. Some show battles fought in the desert regions between the river valley settlements. These encounters usually took the form of a series of single combats between warriors, in which the aim was not to maim or kill an opponent, nut to stun him with a blow from a mace-topped war club. The victor would then strip and bind the loser, and publicly parade him as his captive. Ultimately, these captives of ritual warfare were sacrificed. In an important religious ceremony, their throats were cut by a priest, who caught the blood in a goblet.

 A second priest, wearing an owl headdress and attended by a priestess, offered the goblet to the ruler, who drank the blood. The bodies of the sacrificial victims were then dismembered, and strings were tied around their heads and limbs so that they could be hung up as trophies. Until recently, archaeologists studying these scenes suggested that they depicted mythological events involving deities. But the discoveries at Sipan tied them firmly to the real world. Severed hands and feet found near the Sipan mounds are evidence of sacrificial rites. In many ritual scenes on pottery, sacrifices and offerings are shown taking place at sacred mounds. One common scene shows priests offerings Spondylous shells to a supreme warrior priest seated within a pavilion on top of a huaca. The dress and accoutrements of the warrior priest in these scenes match those found with the body in the first tomb at Sipan – including his sceptre, headdress, weapons, and waist bells. The man in the second tomb, with his owl headdress, wore the dress of the bird priest who presented the goblet of blood to his ruler. A female burial excavated more recently, at San Jose de Moro in the adjacent Jequetepeque valley, closely matches the tomb was probably the warrior priest in an earlier guise, before the details the details of the ceremony had fully evolved. The sacred mounds of the Moche symbolized the mountains which played a vital role in South American religion. The Andes, as the source of essential natural resources, were revered by all the cultures who lived in the regions near to them.

Rainfall was rare in the Moche region – and the rivers fed by the mountains were the only source of fresh water. The inhabitants of the valleys constructed sophisticated irrigation networks to take water to their fields. Platforms were set among the fields for the officials who supervised agricultural work. It was agricultural labour and its produce that supported the hierarchy of nobles as well as the craftsmen who made metalwork and pottery. At the apex of society was the supreme ruler, attired in death as the warrior lord. The sea also played a key role in Moche cosmology. Its significance is demonstrated by an artifact found in the burial of the old lord at Sipan – a golden crab with a human face and a pectrol in the shape of an octopus. The Humboldt current running through the south-eastern Pacific provides one of the richest harvests of marine food in the world, but the ocean also harbours fearsome powers of destruction. The devastating storms and upset weather patterns brought periodically by the El Nino phenomenon still spell ruin along the Pacific coast. Natural disasters – El Nino, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, drought, and floods – were always part of South American life. But between AD 562 and 594, a period of sever drought brought enormous changes to the Moche realms. Ravaged by famine and disease, the population plummeted, and massive coastal dunes built up, driving the remaining population inland. The irrigation networks on which agriculture depended were disrupted and new systems had to be created. Warfare, previously confined to ritual combat, developed into something more deadly – real aggression over natural resources. Fortifications sprang up, and communities hoarded produce to tide them over during difficult years. By AD 800, this fight for survival had fractured the territory of the Moche into numerous principalities, and the cultural unity once enjoyed by the river valley kingdoms became buried deep in the past with their glorious ancestors.

History Mystery: Sipan City Of Lords Of Gold And Sacrifice -1

Material looted from ancient Peruvian graves gave tantalizing glimpses of the splendours of Moche craftsmanship. Its full glories were revealed in 1987, when an argument between tomb robbers led to the discovery of a previously untouched burial. THE TREASURE HUNT BEGAN IN SOUTH AMERICA in the 16th century AD, when the Spaniards conquered the Inca and their neighbours. Their aim was to plunder precious artifacts, and they were prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it. In the city of Cerro Blanco, at the mouth of the Moche river in northern Peru, stood the vast Huaca del Sol (Pyramid of the Sun) – a sacred mound with huge potential for a rich haul. The Spaniards hatched a clever plan to reveal its secrets. They diverted the waters of the Moche towards the mound, washing away part of its outer wall.

The sacred site gave up its silver and gold, crafted into works of art by a gifted civilization named after the river. The Moche, whose culture laid the foundations for the later Chimu, who in turn influenced their Inca conquerors, lived in river valley settlements along the coast of northern Peru, between the 1st and the 8th century AD. Their realms comprised a number of related kingdoms, rather than a unified state. At the height of their power, the Moche occupied land covering some 35,750km2 (13,803sq miles). East to west it spanned no more than 80km (50 miles) but stretched 550km (342 miles) from the Huarmey valley in the south to the Piura valley in the north. Between the two lay further treasure at Sipan, near present-day Chiclayo.

 It was here one night in February 1987 that a group of huaqueros, or tomb robbers, began digging into a sacred mound. They stumbled upon a fabulously rich burial. A series of mounds promised further treasures, but before the search could resume, the thieves fell out over the division of their finds, and one of the huaqueros gave his companions up to the police. The police called in Walter Alva, the director of the local archaeologist museum in the town of Lambayeque. Alva and his team investigated the chaotic remains of the looted tomb – with the help of armed guards to prevent further illicit plundering. The archaeologists set about painstakingly collecting clues to the nature of the burial and its rituals, unaware that the huaca, or sacred pyramid, was about to yield an amazing secret. Inside the plundered grave lay the skeleton of a man with a copper helmet and a shield. But beneath him were traces of decayed timbers – supports that formed the roof of another chamber below. This unexpected find led to the discovery of the most magnificent burial ever uncovered in the Americas. Inside the wooden chamber they found cane coffins containing two men, a dog, and two women. In the centre of these lay another coffin made of wood, containing the body of the man for whom the tomb had been created. The man had died in his late 30s or early 40s – a good age for the period when he lived, around AD 250. He was a warrior lord, dressed in an elaborately woven white tunic and sandals of silver. In his right hand he held a gold sceptre, in his left a silver one.

Other gold and silver objects had been placed on or underneath the man’s body, including a huge semicircular headdress, several helmets, and a series of decorated bells, which he had once worn at his waist. Out of the dust came gold and turquoise beaded pectorals, bracelets, and ear ornaments. Other funerary offerings included weapons, Spondylus (spiny oyster) shells, and fans with gold handles, some made of flamingo feathers. Archaeologists also found a series of cloth banners decorated with gilded copper. As if this fabulous discovery were not enough, Alva’s team subsequently uncovered two more richly furnished burials within the same mound. The second intact burial was of a similar date to the first, but was distinguished by a huge gold headdress in the form of an owl spreading its wings. The third had been buried several hundred years earlier, in the grave rather than a chamber, with a range of grave goods even more rich and elaborate than those in the tomb of the warrior lords. One outstanding piece among the older lord’s ornaments was a necklace of rattles. Each rattle consisted of a small gold hemisphere, about 8cm (3 in) in diameter, containing three tiny gold balls. Above the hemisphere, a mesh of gold wires formed a spider’s web, on which crouched a spider of beaten gold, its back decorated with a human face. The sacred mounds of the Moche were constructed of adobe bricks of sun-dried mud. The workers who built them were commoners, who paid their taxes in the form of labour. Labour gangs also constructed roads and canals for the transport of precious materials – turquoise and gold from the north and feathers from the forests to the east. Sea traders traveled far to the north to obtain Spondylus shells. These materials were wrought into the astonishing craftwork found inside the tombs. For the Moche were superb metallurgists. They mined and exported copper ores, as well as the goods created in their workshops. Traces of some of their workshops survive to the west, south, and east of Sipan. Some 15km (9 miles) farther up the valley, in later Moche times, a large town with substantial copper workshops emerged at Pampa Grande.

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