The Iron Age steppe nomads almost certainly had musical traditions.

Human societies everywhere have music — it is one of the most universal features of human cultural life, found in every culture that has ever been studied.

The Pazyryk would not have been the exception.

What instruments did they play?

The steppe peoples of the ancient world used instruments that left no trace in the permafrost: drums of wood and skin, flutes of bone or reed, stringed instruments that may have resembled later Central Asian instruments.

The sounds they produced — in ceremony, in celebration, in the context of the elaborate burials like the Ice Maiden’s — are gone.