The Mummies of Xinjiang and the Amazons

Too busy to yammer at length -- getting ready for Christmas.

From Discover Magazine, 1994: The Mummies of Xinjiang, comes another reference to the Golden Warrior:

...also, in 1970 in Kazakhstan, just over China's western border, the grave of a man from around the same period yielded a two-foot-tall conical hat studded with magnificent gold-leaf decorations. The Subashi woman's formidable headgear, then, might be an ethnic badge or a symbol of prestige and influence.

This week the local PBS HD station aired "Secrets of the Dead: Amazon Warrior Women", about archaeological investigations related to the legend of the Amazons. It focused on the work of Drs. Jeannine Davis-Kimball and Leonid Yablonsky, and showed that there could be something to Herodotus's claims that the Amazons married into tribes on the steppes.

At the conclusion of the story Davis-Kimball and her colleagues analyzed the mtDNA of Meiramgul Khoja, a nine-year-old Kazakh nomad living in western Mongolia. They found a direct link to a 2500-year-old warrior priestess whose body was buried beside the Ilek River near the Russia-Kazakhstan border.

The show left a few questions. For example, how did the German forensics experts determine that their reconstruction of the warrior princess should have dark hair? The decision must have had some rational basis, because it was enough to make Davis-Kimball question her efforts to find a light-haired woman among the Kazakh nomads.

Questions aside it was an interesting episode. Makes me want to go a-Googling in several directions at once -- nomads, steppes, the Circassians, less-relevant topics like Bukar Zhirau...