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Archaeologists excavating a warrior’s grave have discovered Scythian treasures in the Ostrogozhsky District of Voronezh region, Russia.The Scythians were an ancient nomadic people living primarily in the region known as Scythia, which today comprises the Eurasian steppes of Kazakhstan, the Russian steppes of the Siberian, Ural, Volga and Southern regions, and eastern Ukraine.Excavations were conducted by the Don Expedition from the Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Science, where the researchers have been excavating the Devitsa V necropolis that consists of 19 burial mounds.A study of mound 7 in the centre of the cemetery revealed a wooden tomb...

Scythian-era people lived across Eurasia from about 700 BCE to 200 BCE, and have long been considered highly mobile warriors who ranged widely across the steppe grasslands. Herodotus describes Scythian populations as living in wagons and engaging in raiding and warfare, and this view has persisted throughout history--supported by archeologists' observations of similar styles of horse harnesses, weapons, burial mounds and animal style motifs throughout what is now Ukraine.Because of this, history has lumped the diverse cultures and periods of people in this region as a single "Scythian" identity, even calling it an "empire." But a study including University of...

...As he and his team began to slice into the mound, located 30 miles east of Stavropol... It took nearly a month of digging to reach the bottom. There, Belinski ran into a layer of thick clay that, at first glance, looked like a natural feature of the landscape, not the result of human activity. He uncovered a stone box, a foot or so deep, containing a few finger and rib bones from a teenager... Nested one inside the other in the box were two gold vessels of unsurpassed workmanship. Beneath these lay three gold armbands, a heavy ring, and...

One of the most iconic living quarters in the history of mankind, the yurt is most closely associated with the nomadic peoples of central Asia. Herodotus, the father of history himself, was the first to describe yurts in the written word. According to him, yurts were the primary domiciles of the Scythians, who rode horses and lived in a nomadic fashion near the Black Sea from 600BC-300AD. The Ger Nomadic Mongolian families called their homes “gers.” Their dwellings were made up of same-sized orange mesh-like walls that curved around the center of the tent. Each yurt had 3-5 walls and...

Siberian scientists make discovery of 2,500 year old Saka settlement in up to 23 metres of water in Kyrgyzstan. The new find at the lake is separate from the discovery in 2007 of the ruins of an ancient metropolis of roughly the same age and Scythian burial mounds under its waters... A piece of a large ceramic pot found in the lake has a stamp on it written in Armenian and Syrian scripts, which, if confirmed, gives credence to the theory that an Armenian monastery was on this site in Medieval times, it is claimed. An intriguing version is that...

Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men. The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians. Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and...

A Sarmatian burial mound excavated this summer in Russia’s Southern Ural steppes has yielded a magnificent but unusual treasure. The artefacts contained within the mound are helping to shed light on a little-known period of the illiterate nomadic culture that flourished on the Eurasian steppe in the 1st millennium BC and interacted with the Persian Achaemenid and Greek civilizations. The archaeological study of this remarkable ancient tomb, or kurgan, was carried out by the expedition of the Institute of Archaeology (Russian Academy of Sciences), led by Professor Leonid T. Yablonsky.

Vast stretches of Central Asia feel eerily uninhabited. Fly at 30,000 feet over... Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan -- and there are long moments when no town or road or field is visible from your window. Wandering bands and tribes roamed this immense area for 5,000 years, herding goat, sheep, cattle, and horses across immense steppes, through narrow valleys, and over high snowy passes. They left occasional tombs that survived the ages, and on rare occasions settled down and built towns or even cities. But for the most part, these peoples left behind few physical traces of their origins, beliefs, or ways...

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C. As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these...

Archaeologists from the Gumilyov Eurasian National University have found a mound, presumably dating back to the Iron age. The tomb of Sarmatian warrior is located near the village of Aidarly in the Akmola region. In the mound, archeologists also found arrowheads, knives, an iron belt badge, ceramic vessels and the bones of sacrificial animals. Sergazy Saken, Archeological Expedition Leader: The body of the middle-class warrior is place with its head towards the south which is peculiar for Sarmatians and dates back to 3rd or 4th centuries BC. The artifacts found in the tomb were placed near the body with two...

Foreign religions grew rapidly in the 1st-century A.D. Roman Empire, including worship of Jesus Christ, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and an eastern sun god, Mithras. Of the religions that expanded rapidly in the 1st-century Roman Empire, worship of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers, who spread his cult during their far-flung travels... Mithras's temples, called Mithraea, are the best archaeological evidence of the god's worship, and most of them featured a characteristic depiction of Mithras slaying a bull, a scene called the tauroctony... In the later Roman Empire, Mithras blended in with another sun god, Sol Invictus, the "unconquered...

“The Catastrophe” - Part 1: What the End of Bronze-Age Civilization Means for Modern TimesFrom the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2009-09-15 09:20 Introduction to Part I: Modern people assume the immunity of their situation to major disturbance or – even more unthinkable – to terminal wreckage. The continuance of a society or culture depends, in part, on that very assumption because without it no one would complete his daily round. A man cannot enthusiastically arise from bed as the sun comes up and set about the day’s errands believing that all undertakings will issue vainly because the...

Herodotus tells us of the Scythians, who ravaged the Middle East and Europe. The Romans later defeated Sarmatians on the plains of Pannonia. Even further back in history we know of the Indo-Aryan Mittani in Syria, while there are hints of a relationship between nomadic societies on the steppe of Eurasia and later settled populations in Eastern Europe, Iran & India. Because of the lack of literacy in most of the world before 500 B.C. we must rely on archaeology to connect the vaguest of these dots... Standard physical anthropological methods did yield results which suggested that populations of European...

According to director of the centre of protection and research of the archeological monuments of the department of culture of the Poltava Regional State Administration Oleksandr Suprunenko, the woman was very influential. The things found next to her prove this, namely a bronze mirror, a dagger and iron scissors as well as a unique silver brooch. Besides, an iron awl was stuck in the woman's head. Sarmatians is a general name of the people that dominated in the Ukrainian steppes after collapse of the Scythian state. According to Herodotus, the Sarmatians originated from Amazonians who married Scythian men.

Frozen Siberian Mummies Reveal a Lost CivilizationGlobal warming may finally do in the bodies of the ancient Scythians. by Andrew Curry That the warrior survived the arrow’s strike for even a short time was remarkable. The triple-barbed arrowhead, probably launched by an opponent on horseback, shattered bone below his right eye and lodged firmly in his flesh. The injury wasn’t the man’s first brush with death. In his youth he had survived a glancing sword blow that fractured the back of his skull. This injury was different. The man was probably begging for death, says Michael Schultz, a paleopathologist at...

Sick Rams Used as Ancient Bioweapons Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Once, a Weapon Nov. 28, 2007 -- Infected rams and donkeys were the earliest bioweapons, according to a new study which dates the use of biological warfare back more than 3,300 years. According to a review published in the Journal of Medical Hypotheses, two ancient populations, the Arzawans and the Hittites, engaged "in mutual use of contaminated animals" during the 1320-1318 B.C. Anatolian war. "The animals were carriers of Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia," author Siro Trevisanato, a molecular biologist based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada told Discovery News....

Results of Dr. Joachim Burger's DNA Comparison between Samartan Amazon Warrior Women and Meiregul, Kazakh child.

Origin of the Celts - Caucasian, not European The Celts are Circaesir from Circaesya, who lived on the Sea of Grass in what is now west Kazakhstan until late in the second millennium B.C. They were by their own definition a linguistic group, but now they are a culture. Contrary to popular belief, they had nothing to do with European inhabitants known to archaeologists as the 'Beaker folk' and 'Battle Axe people'. The 'Urnfield people' farther east were Circaesir, and obviously related to the Celts. Their descendants integrated with Celts in central Europe. Tradition suggests that the Celts left the...

The myth of the Amazons, a tribe of bloodthirsty blond women thundering across arid battlefields to the horror of their male foes, has lingered for centuries. Their exploits seized the imagination of the Greek scribes Homer, Hippocrates, and Herodotus. But proof of their existence had always been lacking. Now, a 2,500-year-old mystery may have been solved, cracked by an American scientist whose 10-year odyssey led her tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of the truth. After unearthing a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball followed a trail of artifacts to a remote village...

GORNO-ALTAISK, September 23. KAZINFORM. - Big ancient Scythian drawings were found for the first time in the mountains of the Russian Republic of Altai. Three drawings or petroglyphs of a size of 1.5 meters were reported by Yevgeny Matochkin from the National Museum of Altai to regional authorities. He said he found them on a cliff that is 30-meter high and 10-meter wide near the village of Inegen at the Katun and Chuya Rivers thanks to local residents, Kazinform quotes Itar-Tass. Matochkin said one drawing is that of a deer and others need to be cleaned to see what they...