Funeral in the Altai

The fierce Huns and Mongols and Tatars who once swept out of central Asia seemed hardly human to their victims. Few civilized people cared how the devils on horseback might live in their faraway homelands, and little is known of the invaders today.

Last week excited Soviet archeologists were studying a burial mound recently found in the Altai mountains near the boundary of Outer Mongolia. The mound showed a vivid glimpse of how the barbaric nomads buried an honored young woman some 2,000 years ago. Through the short summers of the Altai, the frozen tomb had preserved all its contents as if in a giant deepfreeze.

Twenty-five feet down, in a wooden coffin, the diggers say they found the mummified body of a young girl, almost perfectly preserved. She must have been the daughter, wife or favorite of a man of consequence; her clothes, still in good condition, were rich with fur and ornaments. She had a mirror of polished silver alloy and golden jeweled earrings. Close at hand were primitive musical instruments. (These and the girl's unusually long and slender fingers suggested to one of the romantic, but not very scientific, diggers that she may have been a musician.)

Her relatives prepared for her needs in another world. Buried with her were seven frozen horses (important in nomad symbolism), a gold-trimmed dagger, wood and clay vessels for food & drink. A box of cheese was still fresh (one of the diggers' dogs ate a piece with enthusiasm).

In the tomb was the body of a young man lying beside the girl. He had been killed by a blow that crushed his skull. Perhaps he was a servant, or a warrior sent to protect her on her journey. The Soviet diggers favored a more colorful theory. Around the young man's face was tied a false beard. Perhaps, the fanciful diggers conjectured, an older, more powerful man had sworn to follow the girl over the frontier of death. Thinking better of it when the time came, he killed a youth and disguised his stand-in with a beard to imitate his own.

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