Sarmatian/Scythian burials

[koechlyruestow]

Michael, come to think of it, the book I was talking about was a bit more than a little excentric about its subject matter, so the story I put up may have been nonsense too. He did show some very compelling analogies though with Central European and Russian folklore, including a mural in a medieval Moravian castle of a knight in a plate armour suit who had hung up his sword-belt and lance in a peculiar-looking tree and reclined with his head in the lap of a lady (with the typical late-medieval pointed hat with cloth hanging down from the top), while a page held the two horses by the reins.

Alanus wrote:

Where in Ospray's The Scythians does it show a tall and pointed Saka hat?

Plate G2. Not pointed, sugar loaf. McBride turns her into a housewife-queen. I've seen in, if I remember right, the book about the mummies from the Tarim Basin, photographs and a description of a lady who also wore a complicated structure on her head made of wood and felt. Just like on the belt buckle, her head was shaved, and the Chinese archeologists could seee she had had her dark blonde hair shaved off almost daily, not as part of some kind of funerary procedure. She was very old, very tall and muscular, during her life must have been very healthy, and she did not seem to have ever been pregnant: a lady of considerable status, perhaps a priestess/shaman or whatever you want to call her.