Continuing Mis-Identification of the Altai Culture

[Alanus]

The Issedones... seemed, according to the maps to have lived north or north-east of the Massagetae...
If the Issedones drove the Scythians west around the 7th century BC then I often wonder if the Pazyryk kurgans from around the 3rd or 4th centuries BC are Scythian at all and maybe they could be Issedone. Sergei Rudenko who discovered the Pazyryk kurgans mentioned that the chieftain buried at Pazyryk had been carefully embalmed with brains and viscera as well as muscle tissue removed. He theorised that the muscle tissue may have been consumed in a ritual cannibalistic rite which Herodotus mentioned was a characteristic of Issedone burials although the skull was not removed and gilded like in the description by Herodotus.

Thanks for the insight, Michael. Herodotus grew up in western Asia, was familiar with Indo-Iranian peoples, and wrote his history around 420 BC-- exactly the period when the Altai cultures were active. In his descriptions of various tribes, he follows the Northern Trade Route (west to east). The Route ran along the northern edge of the steppe, below forested lands (below the Urals), continued east to the Altai, and then turned southeast across the Gobi and Ordos to enter China at "the Bend" of the Yellow River.

The Northern route traversed above the Kara Kum, the Ungar Pendi, and the Takla Makan. Therefore, the tribes in the southern sectors-- the Yue-chi, Saka, and Wusun-- are all eliminated as possible "Issedones." Most telling is Herodutus' shortened version:
"This Aristeas visited the Issedones; beyond these live the one-eyed Arimaspoi, beyond whom are the Gryphons that guard gold... I cannot say how the gold is produced, but it is said that the one-eyed men steal it from the Gryphons."

Aeschylus, a contemporaneous writer, notes (rather poetically), "Beware of the sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that do not bark, the Gryphons, and the one-eyed men mounted on horses, who dwell about the flood of Plouton's stream, that flows with gold..."

These two passages pinpoint the location of the Issedones, who live just before the Arimaspoi who steal the Gryphons' gold from their nests. The tribe just west of the Issedones, and just after the "high mountains that nobody crosses" (the Urals), is described as the Argippaeans who "have a language of their own, but their dress is the same as the Scythian." The Argippaeans would be the Sargatskya in archaeological vernacular, living in the forest-steppe zone above the Massagetae and speaking what may have been Indo-Uralic.

The only place, then, that the Issedones could have lived would be at the juncture where the Northern Trade Route turned from west-east to northwest-southeast-- the Altai. The Issedones' southeastern neighbors were the Arimaspoi, the one-eyed men... an interpretation which is in error. The Indo-Iranian word for horse is "asp," so "aspoi" actually meant "horsemen," as mentioned by Aeschylus, and not "one-eyed," the interpretation by Herodotus.

The final geographical clues are the Gryphons, their gold stolen by the Arimaspoi. Today, we recognize the Gryphons as fossil remains of the Protoceratops dinasaurs, the "sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus." Their egg nests are actually those of a different and bird-like dinosaur. Protoceratops skulls and these dinosaur eggs are found aplenty in only one location-- just below the Altai in the wastelands of the Gobi. This pinpoints the exact location of the Arimaspoi (perhaps a proto-Turkic tribe), and definitively places the Issedones to the northwest, in the gold-rich area of the Altai.

I don't see a problem with this account. The aid of Herodotus and Aeschylus gives us a precise location that cannot be any further west, north, south, or east. I respect the work of Mallory and his modern contemporaries, but perhaps Rudenko was the closest. The Indo-Iranian Altai Cultures were the Issedones and nobody else. :-)