The Big Salbyk Kurgan is located in the Salbyk Valley ("Valley of the Kings"), Khakassia at the foot of the Kuznetsk Alatau mountain range. There are more than 100 kurgans of the Tagar culture of the Scythian time in the valley, of which 15 are large (more than 50 meters in diameter).
This is how the mound looked like before the excavation.
This is how he looks now
Before the excavations, the stone fence of the mound was practically invisible under the sagging floors of the embankment. Only angular slabs protruded to the surface. By the beginning of excavations, the height of the mound reached 11.5 meters.
Promotional video:
It is believed that the mound originally looked like a pyramid.
The Big Salbyk mound, the largest mound in the Middle Yenisei basin, was excavated in 1954-56. expedition of the Institute of the History of Material Culture and the Khakass Scientific Research Institute of Language, Literature and History, under the leadership of S. V. Kiseleva.
During the excavations, it turned out that the entire mass of earth that forms the floors of the mound outside the square of stone walls is of a later origin. This is the result of erosion and weathering of the main embankment, originally built only inside the fence in the form of a tetrahedral pyramid up to 25 meters high.
Between the center of the mound and the western wall of the fence, a structure of earth and logs in the form of a truncated pyramid up to 2.5 meters high, with a square base - 18 x 18 meters, and an upper platform 8 x 8 meters, was opened. This inner pyramid was snow-white due to the thick layer of birch bark that covered its slopes. Archaeologists have counted 15 such layers. The upper logs of the pyramid were wrapped in birch bark.
Under the pyramid, a square pit measuring 5 x 5 meters and a depth of 1.8 meters was found. Its walls were lined with vertical beams. At the bottom of the pit there was a frame of four crowns of larch logs 4 x 4 m and up to 2 meters high. The bottom of the blockhouse and the slots of the blockhouse were filled with waterproof red clay. On top of the clay, the bottom of the pit was covered with six layers of birch bark. Six layers of logs laid crosswise - represented the roof of the crypt.
Seven men and women were found in the crypt. An old warrior was buried in the center. He had injuries to his legs and broken ribs. The rest were buried later through the dromos, which was used more than once. The entrance to the dromos began near the middle stele of the western wall and came close to the slope of the log pyramid, into which there was a narrow manhole leading to the crypt. Near the southern wall of the dromos, a pair burial of two men was discovered, lying on a birch bark and covered with birch bark. Both men were oriented with their heads to the east. According to the ritual of the Tagar culture, the southern skeleton lay on the back with arms extended along the body. On his belt was a bronze knife. The northern skeleton lay face down on its stomach; next to it, only the skull of a predator (fox?) And the remnants of fur were found.
Here is a small article about those who lived here at that time: Ancient Cultures of Siberia of the Caucasian anthropological type.
No Iranians and straight Aryans. Everything is clear.
The basis of this grandiose burial structure was made up of huge stone slabs, or rather, fragments of rocks, dug in sideways in a square with a side of 70 meters. Many-ton boulders towered two meters above the soil level, and numerous monoliths were dug vertically in the corners and sides of such a stone fence. Their height sometimes reached 6 meters, their weight ranged from 30 to 50 tons. Archaeologists have established that the mound was built at the end of the 4th century BC. They also found quarries, in which 2400 years ago people were mining stone for this construction - on the banks of the Yenisei … 70 kilometers from the mound!
Above the carefully marked site, first of all, multi-ton steles were installed vertically in special pits. What devices were used for this remained unknown, since the builders dismantled them after the end of the work.
Another archaeological or chronological inconsistency. If this log is 2400 years old, how is it so wonderfully preserved that it is sawed as if it had been freshly felled? It didn't rot. There was no oxygen available? Then why not petrified? It seems that this log is only a few hundred years old.
Nearby is the Small Salbyk Kurgan. It has been little researched.
Coordinates: 53 ° 54'10 "N 90 ° 45'46" E
We finish with the official part of the acquaintance with the mound and move on to its riddles.
The Salbyk Kurgan impresses modern people with its size. The height of individual stones is 6 meters, plus at least a meter must be underground (so as not to fall) up to three meters wide, and about a meter thick. Let's remember the eighth grade, physics lesson. The body mass is equal to the product of volume and density, from the tabular data the density of sandstone is 2250-2670 kg / m3 and that we get: 2500 * 7 * 3 * 1 = 52,500 kg
I wonder how much time and horses it takes to drag one fifty-ton stone, and in the enclosure it is not alone … Nowadays, move such a stone under the power of a Belaz-type car.
But the most mysterious thing on this mound is the footprints on the stones:
Information from cfrog:
Once, when visiting this historical monument, in the company of a scientist (I will not give his name without his consent), he showed this trace, and when asked how this can be done he shrugged his shoulders.
Traces are marked with red lines. They are not just straight, computer processing showed that the lines are perfectly straight..
A detailed examination of the mound revealed three more stones with traces of either a tool or traces from the formwork when pouring the slabs.
As you can see, the limestone layers do not join, but run into some kind of flat, flat barrier and begin anew, when it was apparently removed and the adjacent section was filled in. Or they pressed something even on the not yet hardened flagstone. If these were cracks, the stone would have collapsed long ago. It's like a seam of plastic parts welded together.
But there is one peculiarity - on all stones, the crack does not go deep into the stone.
There are such lines on many slabs of the mound, and all of them are parallel to one of the slab faces:
Two parallel lines, at a distance of almost a meter, are crossed by a line.
Lines in the photo editor.
This is such a mystery of the stones of the mound, to which archaeologists did not pay attention.
In the next article I will show my observations, photographs of limestone stones, taken on Lake Belyo in the same Khakassia.