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The Pazyryk ((ロシア語:Пазырык)) burials are a number of Scythian Iron Age tombs found in the Pazyryk Valley of the Ukok plateau in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, south of the modern city of Novosibirsk, Russia; the site is close to the borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Ice Mummies: Siberian Ice Maiden ) 〕 Numerous comparable burials have been found in neighboring western Mongolia. The tombs are Scythian-type kurgans, barrow-like tomb mounds containing wooden chambers covered over by large cairns of boulders and stones, dated to the 4th - 3rd centuries BCE.〔''A Special Issue on the Dating of Pazyryk.'' ''Source: Notes in the History of Art'' 10, no. 4, p. 4.〕 The spectacular burials at Pazyryk are responsible for the introduction of the term ''kurgan'', a Russian word of Turkic origin, into general usage to describe these tombs. The region of the Pazyryk kurgans is considered the type site of the wider Pazyryk culture. The site is included in the Golden Mountains of Altai UNESCO World Heritage Site.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Golden Mountains of Altai ) 〕 The bearers of the Pazyryk culture were horse-riding pastoral nomads of the steppe, and some may have accumulated great wealth through horse trading with merchants in Persia, India and China. This wealth is evident in the wide array of finds from the Pazyryk tombs, which include many rare examples of organic objects such as felt hangings, Chinese silk, the earliest known pile carpet, horses decked out in elaborate trappings, and wooden furniture and other household goods. These finds were preserved when water seeped into the tombs in antiquity and froze, encasing the burial goods in ice, which remained frozen in the permafrost until the time of their excavation. "At Pazyryk too are found bearded mascarons (masks) of well-defined Greco-Roman origin, which were doubtless inspired by the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Cimmerian Bosporus." == Discoveries == The first tomb at Pazyryk, barrow 1, was excavated by the archaeologist M. P. Gryaznov in 1929; barrows 2-5 were excavated by Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko in 1947-1949. While many of the tombs had already been looted in earlier times, the excavators unearthed buried horses, and with them immaculately preserved cloth saddles, felt and woven rugs including the world's oldest pile carpet, a (3-metre-high four-wheel funeral chariot ) from the 5th century BC and other splendid objects that had escaped the ravages of time. These finds are now exhibited at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Craniological studies of samples from the Pazyryk burials determined that skulls were generally of Europoid type, with some showing Mongoloid features.〔 "Although in general the skulls in the series are of europeoid type, there are some among them with markedly mongoloid features."〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pazyryk burials」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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