Two years ago, a new, undisturbed find of a wealthy Saka woman from the 4th to 5th centuries BC in western Kazakhstan made the news. Finding an unlooted kurgan is always great news. So many of them were
looted in both distant and recent history (in modern cases, many looters
melt the gold down, which means all cultural information is lost). A week ago, images of many of the artifacts in her grave, along with reconstructions of some things (like her clothes and her comb) were published here. Take a look through them! It's pretty awesome.
The claim that her symbols represent a belief in Zoroastrianism confused me. Maybe something was lost in translation, but worshiping a sky/sun god is kind of an ancestral Indo-European thing (discussed in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language), so it should by no means be indicative of Zoroastrianism over other religions in that category.
Side note 1: The tall hat would have been made of felt over a wooden frame. I don't know more details than that; it's something that was briefly noted in Warrior Women by Davis-Kimball.
Side note 2: The "Golden Man" is also a woman. But because the archeologists in charge of reporting her operated in a highly patriarchal paradigm, they failed to report it, even though some of them suspected it. It ruffled their feathers that she was buried with a warrior's accoutrements. Davis-Kimball also recounts how she independently figured it out and the reception of her findings in her book.
One thing I should note before anyone rushes off to recreate her outfit: just because someone is buried in something, doesn't mean they would have worn it in life. It could be funerary clothing. Someone noted on this facebook page that a hat like that is impractical, so why would someone living on the steppes wear it? Couldn't it get blown away by the wind? All I have to offer to counter that is that there are depictions of steppe women wearing tall hats while alive in their goldwork. See this post for one example. However, it's still possible that they were specifically for ceremonial purposes, rather than for everyday use.
The claim that her symbols represent a belief in Zoroastrianism confused me. Maybe something was lost in translation, but worshiping a sky/sun god is kind of an ancestral Indo-European thing (discussed in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language), so it should by no means be indicative of Zoroastrianism over other religions in that category.
Side note 1: The tall hat would have been made of felt over a wooden frame. I don't know more details than that; it's something that was briefly noted in Warrior Women by Davis-Kimball.
Side note 2: The "Golden Man" is also a woman. But because the archeologists in charge of reporting her operated in a highly patriarchal paradigm, they failed to report it, even though some of them suspected it. It ruffled their feathers that she was buried with a warrior's accoutrements. Davis-Kimball also recounts how she independently figured it out and the reception of her findings in her book.
One thing I should note before anyone rushes off to recreate her outfit: just because someone is buried in something, doesn't mean they would have worn it in life. It could be funerary clothing. Someone noted on this facebook page that a hat like that is impractical, so why would someone living on the steppes wear it? Couldn't it get blown away by the wind? All I have to offer to counter that is that there are depictions of steppe women wearing tall hats while alive in their goldwork. See this post for one example. However, it's still possible that they were specifically for ceremonial purposes, rather than for everyday use.
- Anthony, D.W., 2007, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, pp. 553.
Davis-Kimball, J., and Behan, M., 2002, Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines, Warner Books, pp. 268.
