The first written descriptions of people like them come from Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E. — a document produced by someone who had never visited the Altai and was synthesizing information from traders and travelers who had.

Herodotus’s accounts of Scythian practices — including their burial customs, their use of hemp, their treatment of enemies — are vivid and sometimes corroborated by archaeology, and sometimes clearly exaggerated or garbled.

What archaeology has revealed about the Pazyryk comes primarily from their kurgans, which began to be systematically excavated by Soviet archaeologists in the twentieth century.

The first major Pazyryk kurgans were investigated by M.

P.