Getting Power From Enemy's Skull

Alpha Galileo ^ | 10-25-2002 | Tatiana Pitchugina

[blam]

Getting Power From Enemy`s Skull

Tatiana Pitchugina
Informnauka (Informscience) Agency textmaster@informnauka.ru
7-095-2675418
25 October 2002

The archaeologists at Komi Institute of Language, Literature and History worked at the burial-mound Shihovskoy - a cemetery with the square of 3000 square kilometer, aging back to the Iron Age. The archaeologists have excavated seven graves, they date three of them back to the first centuries A.D. These are not very big square pits, where people of that time would bury the remains of the dead body after cremation. In one of the graves there was a cup made of a human skull - it was the crown part of the skull carefully sawed off. The cup is a unique artefact, for the moist soil of the region do not preserve bones. On the other hand, the archaeological artefacts left by the near-Ural ethnic groups have very well been studied, but the scientists have never found such cups before. The legend says that drinking from the cup, made of enemy`s skull, means to capture enemy`s power. Above the cup there was a bronze plate and a clay vessel.

The four other burial mounds date back to the fifth up to the third centuries B.C. While the warlike Scythians rode all over the South of Eurasia, a group of hunters inhabited the northern forests among the numerous rivers and lakes. They also made use of boats, which they produced of wood. The boats were narrow five up to six meters long. When one of the members of the group died, they would cremate the body at the funeral fire and then put the remains in the boat and bury it in the ground. In one of the boats the archaeologists found a bronze axe and a bronze Sarmat looking glass, which was obviously brought from far away. In another grave there were two dozens of belt pieces, decorated with stylized heads of griffins. It is this ethnic group that may be identified with the people, which Herodotus wrote about describing forest hunters. According to Herodotus, they lived "behind the desert, mostly in the eastern direction". Some modern historians place them in the area of the Vychegda-river basin, which flows over the Komi republic.

Igor Vaskul, Ph.D., head of the expedition, says that a single burial-mound contains burials of different age. All of them are in groups. Ethnic groups, which were connected with each other through the common origin, were likely to have been using it for centuries. All the burials have some features in common, such as cremation and the famous "animal style" of decoration, which characterizes all of the ethnic groups of the near-Ural and Kama River region. The modern Komi-people are their descendants and had been exercising cremation until the fourteenth century, while they still use animal images for decorating. Archaeologists have found a confirmation of the legend saying that our ancestors made cups of the skulls of their enemies. In the Komi Republic the archaeologists excavated a grave in the deep forest, dated back to the Iron Age. There they found these unusual utensils.

[blam]

The Xiongnu had this same custom of drinking from the skull of their enemies. The Xiongnu were Chinese in the same region.

[blam]

My mistake. The Xiongnu had the same custom with the skulls but I don't know that they were in this region.

[LostTribe]

Thanks for the BUMP.