The Tuva Valley of the Kings is located near the villages of Arzhan and Tarlyk of the Piy-Khem kozhuun. Surrounded by the mountains of the Turano-Uyuk hollow, a huge number of chains of large mounds of the Scythian leaders are concentrated.
The chains probably reflect the kinship of the people buried in them. Scientists attribute the burials to the Uyuk culture of Tuva.
Due to the large number and impressive size of the ancient burial mounds, this place was named "Valley of the Kings".
The largest of the investigated and the most famous burial mounds of the Valley of the Kings are Arzhan-1 and Arzhan-2.
Kurgan "Arzhan-1" is the largest known royal burial of the Scythian period in northern Asia, dating back to the 9th-7th centuries BC. Its diameter at the beginning of the study was 120 meters with a height of 4 meters. The excavation of the mound was carried out by an expedition led by M. P. Gryaznov in 1971-1974. The burial of the "king and queen" was found in the central blockhouse; in total, 16 people and more than 160 horses were buried in the mound. All these people were buried with due honors in individual decks and special log cabins. Despite the fact that the mound was plundered in antiquity, many graves have preserved unique things that have all the signs of the still emerging Scythian "animal style". Discovered items of gold and silver are indisputable evidence of the noble origin of the buried.
Kurgan "Arzhan-2" is part of the same "chain" of four visually similar embankments as "Arzhan-1" and is located in close proximity to it. The mound measures 80 meters in diameter and up to 2 meters in height. The result of the excavations exceeded all expectations. This, indeed, was the burial of a Scythian leader of the second half of the 7th century BC. The mound was also once plundered, and the central stonework was disturbed. Fortunately, in one of the rooms of the mound there was an undisturbed burial of, presumably, the ruler of the tribe and his wife. And in the room adjacent to her, household items, weapons and gold jewelry were found. The total weight of the gold recovered from the tomb was about 30 kilograms. As in the Arzhan-1 barrow, 17 people and about 160 horses were buried here. Some of them were killed by hammering a wooden stamp into the head. By the way, a woman dressed as a queen was killed in this way.
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The value of the discoveries in the mounds "Arzhan-1" and "Arzhan-2" lies not only in the fact that here for the first time the property of science became an undisturbed burial complex of the highest social stratum of the ancient steppe nomads. It turned out that the mounds of the Tuvan Valley of the Kings are much older than the Black Sea Scythian mounds. This gave scientists reason to believe that it was from here that the era of the Scythians began, and only then it spread westward to the Black Sea region.