The Ice Maiden is both a specific person and a representative of a broader cultural world.

Both of these things matter, and holding them together is part of understanding why she continues to fascinate.

As a specific person: she was 25 years old, 167 centimeters tall, tattooed with blue zoomorphic figures, wearing Chinese silk, suffering from chronic illness, buried with six horses and a towering golden-bird headdress in a larch-wood coffin in the permafrost of the Altai Mountains.

These specifics are remarkable and movingly immediate.