Till death do us part! 3500-year-old tombs with hand-holding couples found

Russian scientists are trying to uncover the secrets of 3,500-year-old Bronze Age graves, where couples are buried together in a seemingly loving embrace – under suspicions of macabre explanation.

These pictures show ancient burials in the village of Staryi Tartas in Siberia where some 600 tombs were examined by experts.

Dozens contain the bones of couples, some with male and female skeletons, facing each other and their hands appear to be held together forever.

The Siberian Times said: ‘Archeologists are struggling for explanation and hope that DNA testing can provide answers for these remarkable burials.’ One writer, Vasiliy Labetskiy, described the scenes in the graves poignantly as skeletons in ‘post-mortal hugs with bony hands clasped together.

One theory is that these Andronovo burials show the start of the nuclear family, but another version that after the man died, his wife was killed and buried with him.

Still, another suggests that some of the couples were deliberately buried as if in a sexual act, possibly with a young woman sacrificed to play this role in the grave. Other graves at the site in the Novosibirsk region in western Siberia show adults buried with children.

Professor Vyacheslav Molodin, director of research of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: ‘We can fantasise a lot about all this.

‘We can allege that husband died and the wife was killed to be interred with him as we see in some Scythian burials, or maybe the grave stood open for some time and they buried the other person or persons later, or maybe it was really simultaneous death.

‘When we speak about a child and an adult, it looks more natural and understandable.

‘When we speak about two adults – it is not so obvious. So we can raise quite a variety of hypotheses, but how it was in fact, we do not know yet.’

Work is underway to establish the ‘kinship’ of these ancient couple burials using DNA research.

‘For example, we found the burial of a man and a child. What is the degree of their kinship? Are they father and son or…? The same question arises when we found a woman and a child. It should seem obvious – she is the mother. But it may not be so. She could be an aunt or not a relative at all. To speak about this scientifically we need the tools of paleogenetics.

‘We have a joint laboratory with the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science,  and we actively work in this direction. We do such analysis but it is quite expensive still and there are few specialists. We are also solving other questions with help of paleogenetics.’

With such couple burials, Professor Lev Klein, of St Petersburg State University, has proposed they are linked to reincarnation beliefs possibly influenced by Deeksha rituals in the ancient Indian sub-continent at the time when the oldest scriptures of Hinduism were composed.

‘The man during his lifetime donated his body as a sacrifice to all the gods,’ he wrote. ‘The ‘Deeksha was considered as a “second birth” and to complete this ritual the sacrificing one made a ritual sexual act of conceiving.’ In other words, in death, a man should perform a sexual act to impregnate a woman.

‘Perhaps in the pre-Vedic period relatives of the deceased often sought to reproduce the “Deeksha” posthumously, and sacrificed a woman or a girl (or a few), and simulated sexual intercourse in the grave,’ he said.

Professor Molodin doesn’t rule out this version, yet makes clear it is only a hypothesis that needs more study.

‘It is again a suggestion. As a suggestion, it could be. This idea of Klein can be extended to Siberia too because a significant part of the researchers think that Andronovo people were Iranians.

‘So this hypothesis can be extended to them. But, I will repeat, it is only a hypothesis.’

2,000-year-old remains of nomadic ‘royal’ unearthed by Russian farmer includes ‘laughing man,’ haul of jewels and weapons

Russian farmer unearths the remains of a 2,000-year-old nomadic ‘royal’ buried alongside a ‘laughing’ man. A farmer found the haul when digging on his land in the south of Russia near the Caspian Sea.

Stunning gold and silver jewellery, weaponry, valuables and artistic household items were found next to the chieftain’s skeleton in a grave close to the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. Local farmer Rustam Mudayev’s spade made an unusual noise and it emerged he had struck an ancient bronze pot near his village of Nikolskoye in the Astrakhan region.

A chieftain was buried with his head raised as if on a pillow (pictured). It is believed the individual was a high-ranking ‘royal’ of a nomadic society more videos He took it to the Astrakhan History museum for analysis and an experts opinion on the find.

‘As soon as the snow melted we organised an expedition to the village,’ said museum’s scientific researcher Georgy Stukalov.’After inspecting the burial site we understood that it to be a royal mound, one of the sites where ancient nomads buried their nobility.’

WERE THE SARMARTIANS? 

The Sarmatians were a group of people who lived for almost a millennium from the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD. Their range stretched, at its largest in the 1st century AD, from the Caspian Sea across Eurasia and towards modern-day Poland.

The territory was known as Sarmatia and included today’s Central Ukraine, South-Eastern Ukraine, Southern Russia, Russian Volga and South-Ural regions, also to a smaller extent north-eastern Balkans and around Moldova. They had conflicts with the Roman Empire as they expanded east at their peak, allying themselves with Germanic tribes.

Towards the end of their reign, they faced competition from Germanic Goths and the Huns. The Sarmatians were eventually decisively assimilated by the burgeoning populations in Eastern Europe.

The burial is believed to belong to a leader of a Sarmatian nomadic tribe that dominated this part of Russia until the 5th century AD, and other VIPs of the ancient world, including a ‘laughing’ young man with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull and excellent teeth that have survived two millennia.

‘We have been digging now for 12 days,’ said Mr Stukalov.’We have found multiple gold jewellery decorated with turquoise and inserts of lapis lazuli and glass.’The most ‘significant’ find is seen as a male skeleton buried inside a wooden coffin. 

This chieftain’s head was raised as if it rested on a pillow and he wore a cape decorated with gold plaques. Archaeologists found his collection of knives, items of gold, a small mirror and different pots, evidently signalling his elite status. They collected a gold and turquoise belt buckle and the chief’s dagger along with a tiny gold horse’s head which was buried between his legs, and other intricate jewellery.

Another grave was of an elderly man – his skeleton broke by an excavator – but buried with him was the head of his horse, its skull still dressed in an intricate harness richly decorated with silver and bronze when a farmer digging a pit on his land unearthed 2,000-year-old treasure inside the ancient burial mound of the tomb of a nomadic ‘royal’, along with a ‘laughing’ man (pictured) with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull. Shaping and elongating the skull in this way was popular on various continents among ancient groupings like the Sarmatians, Alans, Huns and others.

The burial is believed to belong to a leader of a Sarmatian nomadic tribe that dominated this part of Russia until the 5th-century pieces of jewellery were found in the burial pit alongside the dead humans and animals and experts believe they were gifts for the dead.

The chief’s dagger was buried with him and places alongside his body, between his hand and leg (pictured)They collected a gold and turquoise belt buckle and the chief’s dagger along with a tiny gold horse’s head which was buried between his legs and other intricate jewellery.

Nearby was a woman with a bronze mirror who had been buried with a sacrificial offering of a whole lamb, along with various stone items, the meaning of which is unclear. Another grave was of an elderly man – his skeleton broke by an excavator – but buried with him was the head of his horse, its skull still dressed in an intricate harness richly decorated with silver and bronze.

Also in the burial mound was the skeleton of a young man with an artificially deformed egg-shaped skull. Local farmer Rustam Mudayev’s spade made an unusual noise and it emerged he had struck an ancient bronze pot near his village of Nikolskoye in the Astrakhan region.

A horse’s head buried on top of the old man’s body still carries an intricate silver and bronze harness which was also uncovered after the farmer took his find to the Astrakhan History museum for analysis and an experts opinion on the find. ‘As soon as the snow melted we organised an expedition to the village,’ said museum’s scientific researcher Georgy Stukalov.

‘After inspecting the burial site we understood that it to be a royal mound, one of the sites where ancient nomads buried their nobility,’ the archaeologist said we have been digging now for 12 days,’ said Mr Stukalov. ‘We have found multiple gold jewellery decorated with turquoise and inserts of lapis lazuli and glass’

A chieftain was buried with his head raised as if on a pillow and wearing a cape adorned with gold plagues the most ‘significant’ finds is seen as a male skeleton buried inside a wooden coffin. This chieftain’s head was raised as if it rested on a pillow and he wore a cape decorated with gold plagues.

The shape is likely to have been ‘moulded’ either by multiple bandaging or ‘ringing’ of the head in infancy. Such bandages and or rings were worn for the first years of a child’s life to contort the skull into the desired shape. Shaping and elongating the skull in this way was popular on various continents among ancient groupings like the Sarmatians, Alans, Huns and others.

Such deformed heads were seen as a sign of a person’s special status and noble roots, and their privileged place in their societies, it is believed. The burials date to around 2,000 years ago, a period when the Sarmatian nomadic tribes held sway in what is now southern Russia.

‘These finds will help us understand what was happening here at the dawn of civilisation,’ said Astrakhan region governor Sergey Morozov. Excavation is continuing at the site. Nearby was a woman with a bronze mirror who had been buried with a sacrificial offering of a whole lamb, along with various stone items, the meaning of which is unclear.

The gold jewellery and the buckle (pictured) are thought to be signs of the person’s nobility and would only have been afforded to the most wealthy people.