That the warrior survived the arrow’s strike for even a short time was remarkable. The triple-barbed arrowhead, probably launched by an opponent on horseback, shattered bone below his right eye and lodged firmly in his flesh.
The injury wasn’t the man’s first brush with death. In his youth he had survived a glancing sword blow that fractured the back of his skull. This injury was different. The man was probably begging for death, says Michael Schultz, a paleopathologist at the University of Göttingen. Holding the victim’s skull in one hand and a replica of the deadly arrow in the other, Schultz paints a picture of a crude operation that took place on the steppes of Siberia 2,600 years ago.
“The man was crying, ‘Help me,’” Schultz says. Thin cuts on the bone show how his companions cut away his cheek, then used a small saw to remove pieces of bone, but to no avail. Pointing to a crack in the skull, he describes the next agonizing step: An ancient surgeon smashed into the bone with a chisel in a final, futile effort to free the arrowhead. “Hours or a day later, the man died,” Schultz says. “It was torture.” The slain warrior’s remains were found in 2003, buried with those of 40 others in a massive kurgan, or grave mound, in southern Siberia at a site that archaeologists call Arzhan 2.
To find out more about the lives and deaths of these ancient people, Schultz has spent years teasing out the secrets of their bones, using techniques like those employed at crime scenes. In April he announced the results of his research on the wounded warrior. His body, Schultz says, bore some of the earliest evidence of battlefield surgery. (Prior to this announcement, in October 2007, Schultz had reported a finding on a prince buried at the center of the Arzhan 2 mound. Using a scanning electron microscope, Schultz found signs of prostate cancer in the prince’s skeleton. This is the earliest documentation of the disease.)
The Arzhan 2 skeletons, which belong to warrior-nomads the ancient Greeks called Scythians, are part of a spectacular series of finds in remote sites in central Asia. One of the discoveries dates back to the 1940s when mummies were found in the Altai Mountains, which run through Siberia and Mongolia. Later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when some of the sites became more accessible for excavation, the pace of Scythian-related discoveries picked up. The warrior skeleton Schultz is talking about, for example, was found on a plain not far from the 1940s discovery. More recently, other well-preserved mummies—not skeletons—have been found at altitudes of 8,000 feet in the valleys of the Altai Mountains. Still other discoveries have been made on the coast of the Black Sea and the edge of China. Together, the evidence illuminates aspects of the Scythians’ unusual culture, from tattooing warriors to creating intricate metalwork.
Never constituting an empire, the Scythians were a network of culturally similar tribes that ranged from Siberia to Egypt almost 3,000 years ago and faded away around A.D. 100. The Greek historian Herodotus describes the Scythians as murderous nomads. As for how the Scythians—who did not have a written language—perceived themselves, only their artifacts and human remains are left to speak for them.
