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Siberia's tattooed princess revealed
The Siberian Ice maiden, 5th century The Siberian Ice maiden is the name given to a mummy who was found in 1993 in the Republic of Altai, Russia. The woman is thought to have been a Siberian, more particularly, she was a member of the Pazyryk people.
She was 20 - 30 years of when she died. She was found in a chamber in a burial mound. She is thought to have died from breast cancer and injuries sustained from a fall. She was buried was 2 food trays, which were tested. The residue found on these trays indicated that a beverage, different meats, and yogurt were left out ceremonially.
She was also buried with 3 horses. Cannabis and opium were also found in a pot, which is thought to have been used as painkillers. The woman could have also been a high priestess. The grave itself had been robbed a long time ago, but this allowed water to flood the chamber and freeze, allowing for fantastic preservation. The body was also placed inside a coffin. The fantastic preservation of the body also revealed that the woman had tattoos on her body. The one above is theories to have been a horse or deer. She also had 2 other tattoos on her body as well.
The Siberian Ice Maiden, also known as the Princess of Ukok (Russian: Принце́сса Уко́ка), the Altai Princess (Russian: Алтайская принцесса), Devochka and Ochy-bala (Russian: Очы-бала, the heroine of the Altaic epic), is a mummy of a woman from the 5th century BC, found in 1993 in a kurgan of the Pazyryk culture in Republic of Altai, Russia. It was among the most significant Russian archaeological findings of the late 20th century. In 2012 she was moved to a special mausoleum at the Republican National Museum in Gorno-Altaisk.
The mummified remains of the Ice Maiden, a Scytho-Siberian woman who lived on the Eurasian Steppes in the 5th century BC, were found undisturbed in a subterranean burial chamber. Natalia Polosmak and her team discovered the Ice Maiden during the summer of 1993, when she was a senior research fellow at the Russian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk. It was Polosmak's fourth season working on the Ukok Plateau where the institute was continuing its research into the early habitation of southern Siberia. Nearly two decades later, there are few English language sources available for the important discovery: Polosmak's National Geographic article from October 1994, and a BBC documentary (1997) featuring Polosmak and members of her team are the most informative and accessible.
The Ice Maiden was a representative of the Pazyryk culture that thrived between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC in the Siberian steppe.
The Ice Maiden's tomb was found on the Ukok Plateau near the border of China, in what is now the Autonomous Republic of Altai. The plateau, part of the Eurasian Steppes, is characterized by a harsh, arid climate. The area is known by the local people as the "second layer of heaven," one step above ordinary people and events. Present day Altai herdsmen still bring their sheep and horses to the plateau during winter because the fierce wind blows the snow off the grass and provides grazing land for the animals despite the freezing temperatures.
Polosmak and her team were guided by a border guard, Lt. Mikhail Chepanov, to a group of kurgans located in a strip of territory disputed between Russia and China. A kurgan is a burial mound filled in with smaller sediment and covered with a pile of rocks; typically, the mound covered a tomb chamber, which contained a burial inside a log coffin, with accompanying grave goods. Such burial chambers were built from notched wood logs to form a small cabin, which may have resembled the semi-nomads’ winter shelters. The Ice Maiden's tomb chamber was constructed in this way, and the wood and other organic materials present have allowed her burial to be dated. A core sample from the logs of her chamber was analyzed by a dendrochronologist, and samples of organic matter from the horses’ stomachs were examined as well, indicating that the Ice Maiden was buried in the spring, at some point during the 5th century BC.
Before Polosmak and her crew reached the Ice Maiden's chamber, they hit upon a second later burial in the same kurgan positioned on top of the Maiden's wooden tomb chamber. The contents included a stone and wood coffin containing a skeleton, along with three horses. Polosmak believes that this secondary burial was that of an outside group, perhaps of subordinate peoples, who considered it honorable to bury their dead in Pazyryk kurgans.
A shaft dug into the kurgan indicated that this later grave had been robbed, another means by which water and snow entered and seeped into the Ice Maiden's hollow burial chamber. The water collected, froze, and formed an ice block within the chamber which never fully thawed because of the steppe climate, permafrost, and the rocks piled on top of the mound which deflected the sun's rays. The contents of the burial remained frozen for 2400 years, until the time of Polosmak's excavation.
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