The following is a brief excerpt from Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Stephen G. Gilbert now available in print.

Tattoo History Source Book: The Frozen Scythian

by Sergei Rudenko, from Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burianls of Iron-Age Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

In 1947 Soviet archaeologists began excavations in central Siberia which led to the discovery of a series of 2,000 year old underground tombs containing cloth, leather, and wood artifacts which had been preserved by freezing. In one tomb they discovered the frozen body of a Scythian warrior whose arms and legs were covered with ornate tattooing. The only other direct evidence of ancient tattooing is found in the form of a few dots and lines on Egyptian and Peruvian mummies. The discovery of the frozen Scythian was of immense interest because it is the only known testimony as to the artistic excellence of ancient tattooing.

The tattooing revealed on the chief's body buried in barrow 2 at Pazyryk was one of the most remarkable discoveries made by the 1948 expedition.

The tattooing had not survived intact, as the body was in a poor state of preservation, particularly the left side of the chest where the skin and muscle fibre had perished. However, here above the heart the forepart of a monster was depicted, more exactly the head (the basic feature in all the tattooing) of a liongriffin or some other imaginary creature. The body of the beast passed under the man's left arm, and over the left shoulder-blade lay its back part with long raised tail, twisting into a spiral and terminating with a bird's, or a snake's head.

Snake's- or bird's head terminals in representations of monsters had been familiar in Hither Asia since at least 2000 B.C. From Mesopotamia this and other artistic details reached the Hittites; it occurs in sculptures and bas-reliefs in ancient Hittite towns by the fourteenth century B.C. In the griffins of Achaemenid Persia, as in Assyria, such a tail was sometimes replaced by that of a scorpion. The same can be seen on the monsters from Lity barrow in Scythia. Nevertheless in the middle of the last millennium B.C. nowhere was it so widespread as among the Scythian and High Altai tribes, not merely as a little bird's head but as the head of a long eared griffin, however schematically reproduced.

Outside the Altai not a few examples can be cited among the Black Sea Scyths of griffins' heads on the tips of antler tines and lions' tails. While insufficient evidence prevents a decision on the date of the first appearance of this motif in the High Altai, it can be confidently stated that both it and the big-eared griffin enjoyed widespread use long before the Persian Achaemenid dynasty had assumed power.