Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a “unique” human and horse sacrifice ritual at a huge prehistoric burial mound in southern Siberia.
The evidence came to light during excavations at the site of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, Russia, a study published in the journal Antiquity reports. The Iron Age site features a royal burial mound dated to the late 9th century, one of the earliest and largest in the Eurasian steppes.
The excavations revealed the fragmented remains of at least 18 horses and one human on the mound, with the evidence suggesting that they were sacrificed in honor of the elite individual who was buried inside.
The remains were found in association with “Scythian-style” artifacts and horse-riding equipment. These findings indicate that the burial is an early example of the horse-focused funerary rituals of the later Scythians, described in Classical European texts. The Scythians were an Iron Age people of the Eurasian Steppe, known for their horse-focused culture and distinctive “animal-style” art.
Overview of the Tunnug 1 site, one of the earliest and largest burial mounds in the Eurasian steppes, and the remains of a horse (inset). Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of human and horse sacrifice at the site.
Trevor Wallace/Antiquity Publications Ltd
“We discovered a unique burial ritual long thought to be an exaggeration of the Greek historian Herodotus aimed at making the steppe nomads look more barbaric,” Gino Caspari, senior author of the study with the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern, Switzerland, told Newsweek. “The archaeology allowed us to bring together written sources and material remains thousands of kilometers across the Eurasian steppes.”
“People created a tableau [of] dead humans and of the most valuable domestic animals—it is a display of extreme power,” he said. “While we can’t be sure about detailed meaning for the people involved, imagine riding across the steppes and stumbling upon such an arrangement of rotting corpses. Few things will tell you so clearly that the people of these lands are not to be messed with.”
The latest findings at the burial mound suggest that it belonged to a people related to the Scythians. The Scythians are known to have migrated from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern southwest Russia and Ukraine, but their exact origins remain obscure.
The recent finds represent one of the earliest examples of Scythian-style funerary practices, indicating that the Scythians, best known from Eastern Europe, originated far to the east.
“Scythian is often understood as an ethnic term,” Caspari said. “The people at Tunnug were not Scythians in the narrow term of the word. We don’t know what they called themselves. However, their material culture shows a lot of the characteristics that we later find in the northern Black Sea region all the way to the west of the Eurasian steppes. In summary, they were culturally closely related. However, they did not think of themselves as one people or as an empire.”
The sacrificial burial also features some elements that are characteristic of Late Bronze Age examples in Mongolia. This suggests that Scythian funerary rituals partly originated even further east and south, with the Bronze Age horse cultures of Mongolia.
“It is yet another case that highlights the massive changes and the idea transfer happening during the early Iron Age across vast distances on the Eurasian steppes. This is a development that’s a precursor to the Empires of the Huns and the Mongols that massively influenced European and East Asian histories,” Caspari said.
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Reference
Sadykov, T., Blochin, J., Taylor, W., Fomicheva, D., Kasparov, A., Khavrin, S., Malyutina, A., Szidat, S., & Caspari, G. (2024). A spectral cavalcade: Early Iron Age horse sacrifice at a royal tomb in southern Siberia. Antiquity. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.145
