Using buckets of hot water, the team began the slow process of melting through it, working carefully to preserve whatever lay inside.

What they were uncovering had been sealed in frozen time since the fifth or fourth century before the common era.

Since before Alexander the Great was born.

Since before the Roman Republic had expanded to the Mediterranean.

Since before any written record of the people who lived on this plateau existed.

The ice yielded, slowly.

And then one of the archaeologists saw it: a shoulder emerging from the fur as the ice melted away.

On that shoulder, a tattoo.

Vivid and blue and perfectly preserved.

“A brilliant blue tattoo of a magnificent griffin-like creature,” Polosmak described it afterward.

The ice had been hiding a woman.

She had been waiting there for two and a half millennia.

The World She Came From

Before the discovery can be fully understood, the world the Ice Maiden came from needs to be understood — because it was a world almost entirely invisible to modern audiences, reconstructed from the frozen soil of the Altai and from the fragmentary descriptions of outsiders who observed it from a distance.