Science clashes with tradition over the corpse of an ancient princess. James Meek reports from Novosibirsk
The princess lies in a glass casket on the West Siberian plain alongside her kinsman. She is naked save for a scrap of gauze draped across the top of her legs. Tattooed beasts – part griffin, part deer, part goat – dance along her arm, from shoulder to hand.
No prince could kiss this sleeping beauty into life. She lived around the time of Alexander the Great, died before reaching 30, and lay frozen in a cocoon of ice for 2 500 years.
Russian archaeologists who discovered the mummified princess in 1993 and, two years later, a lower-ranking male from the same ancient Siberian culture, believe there may be scores more in the icy burial mounds of the Ukok plateau, in the remote region of Gorny Altai.
But they are not allowed to look for them. Altai officials have banned further excavations, accusing archaeologists of plundering and disrespect for their ancestors.
Vyacheslav Molodin, the archaeologist who found the male mummy, warned that global warming meant the Altai authorities risked depriving the world of an extraordinary scientific inheritance if they did not lift the ban.
“The issue of global warming is now exceptionally urgent,” said Molodin, deputy head of the archaeology institute just outside the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, where the two mummies are being kept.
“You can be sure about the effect this is going to have on the frozen burial chambers. They’ll melt. Even a rise in temperature of half or one degree could have serious consequences. We risk losing everything if we don’t get back to work.”
Molodin’s wife, Natalya Polosmak, who found the princess after three years work on the Ukok plateau, said the burial mounds of the vanished Pazyryk people had acted like fridges, preventing bodies from decaying. Water dripped into the wooden burial chamber through gaps between the small stones making up the mound, freezing around the sarcophagus.
The plateau, 2 400m above sea level and only accessible by helicopter, lies where the Russian, Mongolian, Chinese and Kazakh borders meet, at the centre of the “southern steppe road” which saw the great migrations of nomadic peoples in the pre- Christian and Dark Ages. A recent survey showed thousands of burial mounds, hundreds of them from the Pazyryk period (600 to 300BC).
Although the Novosibirsk archaeologists had licences to dig at Ukok, and say the local authorities knew what they were doing, Gorny Altai claims the mummies were flown out illegally and wants them back. The Novosibirsk archaeologists say they will give back only one – and not until they are ready. Even then, they say, the mummies will remain their “intellectual property”.
“If we gave everything back straight away these mummies would become fetishes rather than the objects of scientific study,” said Polosmak. “That’s why we dug them up. … if we hadn’t excavated them, they wouldn’t be known about, and the Pazyryk culture and Altai would not have achieved the degree of worldwide fame they have.”
The discovery of the Ukok mummies created a stir in world archaeology, arousing huge interest in Korea and Japan, where a popular theory holds that their civilisations emerged from southern Siberia. An exhibition featuring the princess toured east Asia. In South Korea, she was met like a diva, with vast crowds, admirers on their knees and bouquets of red roses.
“The Novosibirsk archaeologists took the mummies from here incognito, then had them restored in Moscow, then took one of them to South Korea. We didn’t get anything out of this,” complained Rimma Erkinova, head of Gorny Altai’s museum. “We want to get everything back: both mummies and everything that was found along with them.”
The female mummy was called the princess because of the richness of her burial trove. Six horses were entombed with her, some of the tassels and cloths they carried still in almost perfect condition after more than 2 000 years. She wore an elaborate head-dress and ornaments of wooden snow leopards and griffins, covered in gold leaf, now on show at the Novosibirsk institute.
Erkinova said the archaeology issue was so sensitive that this year a Belgian team with official permission to work in Gorny Altai was prevented from doing so by local people.
“Our ancestors are buried in these mounds. There are sacred items there,” she said. “The Altai people never disturb the repose of their ancestors.”
Ethnically, the region is partly Russian and partly made up of the Altai people, traditional adherents of Buddhism or shamanism.
Erkinova scorned talk of global warming. “That’s hilarious,” she said. “How many years would have to go by before these burial chambers melted? And this is from the same Novosibirsk archaeologists who barbarously defrosted the mummies by pouring hot water on them.”
Polosmak said there had been no other way to free the princess from the ice. Her husband pointed out that they had already given the Gorny Altai museum a large collection of Pazyryk artefacts.
“It would be fair for one mummy to be there and for us to keep one,” said Molodin. “We agreed to give back the princess once the conditions for looking after it were right. That means proper accommodation with an air conditioner and a special sarcophagus.
“Another condition was that this was our intellectual property and that we would have the right to use it for exhibitions and to study. We’re not doing this out of curiosity but in the interests of science. The soul is somewhere else and we’re studying the remains.”
Scientists believe they can learn much from the Pazyryk mummies: about their genetic origin, the diets and customs of the time, the still misunderstood interaction of the steppe nomads (intriguingly, the Pazyryks were an ethnically mixed group of Europoids and Mongoloids) and the mysterious process by which the flesh, hair and tattoos of the mummies were preserved.
“I think the ban is wrong,” said Molodin. “You might as well put a ban on knowledge. It’s frustrating because we’ve accumulated this priceless, unique store of knowledge, and yet the questions which remain are no fewer than before.”