#sintashta

From here on out, we’ll be covering one century per week. That means the Americas are fairly out of focus this week, because pinning events there down to a specific century is still tricky during this period.

So far, we’ve introduced four state-level societies: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Caral-Supe starting in the 3000s BC, and Harappa in the 2000s BC. Harappa and Caral-Supe, after reaching their height in the 2000s BC, may have begun to decline in the 1900s BC. Additionally, Mesopotamia had returned to being broken up into numerous small city-states following the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2004 BC. Urbanization didn’t decrease in 1900s BC Mesopotamia, though, which suggests that agriculture and the economy were doing well at this level. One new city-state founded in this period was Assur (Assyria). 

A new state-level society joins our list this week: the Minoans in Crete. The 1900s BC saw the start of the peak period of the Minoan civilization, including urbanization, the building of the first “palaces” (which were really central administrative and economic buildings more than royal residences), and the introduction of the pottery wheel. The Minoans were the first state-level society we’ve seen whose wealth came primarily from maritime trade rather than agriculture: they traded widely in the Eastern Mediterranean, with artefacts in Palace of Knossos dated to around 1900 BC including ostrich eggshell and ivory (via Egypt) as well as obsidian from the Cyclades and objects from Western Asia.

Speaking of Egypt, the Middle Kingdom, after starting to re-establish centralized power in Egypt around 2040 BC, completed the process in the 1900s BC under the rule of Amenemhet I. In a piece of political intrigue, he’s speculated to have actually been a vizier who overthrew the previous pharaoh, Mentuhotep IV. Amenhotep I’s son Senusret I further expanded Egypt’s territory, recapturing Lower Nubia (basically, the part of Egypt south of Aswan) from the Sudanese Kerma kingdom. He also established relationships with some towns on the eastern Mediterranean coast of West Asia, an area from which Egypt imported cedar wood.

Last week’s post mentioned the bronze-producing Sintashta culture in the Ural Mountains. By the 1900s BC, the Sintashta were making the world’s first chariots, which in later centuries would move east to China and west to Mesopotamia and revolutionize ancient warfare. Gravesites of the Sintashta culture contain the remains of chariots and chariot horses, predating the earliest definite Western Asian depictions of chariots.

Pretty much due south of the Urals, in the vicinity of what is now eastern Turkmenistan, was an urban society termed the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). Getting a clear picture of this is incredibly difficult – the centuries of its existence are so disputed that some archaeologists have its start at the same time that other ones have its end! So what I’m giving is just one possible version of its history.

The BMAC culture reached its height around the 1900s BC, with irrigation agriculture and large walled towns containing palaces or citadels. One of its main cities was Gonur Depe. There was trade between Sintashta and the BMAC culture, possibly involving Sintashta trading horses to them. There also appears to have been contact between Harappa and an Iranian culture starting around this period, including new types of pottery, burials incorporating precious objects, and the introduction of horses. This contact could have involved trade from Sintashta to BMAC and thence to Harappa.

In addition to Sintashta, another site of bronze production was Britain, which produced its first bronze around this time. Britain was well-positioned for it, as it had both copper (in Wales) and tin (in Cornwall), whereas most places needed to engage in long-distance trade for one or the other (usually for tin, which was rarer). One of the oldest discovered mines, a copper mine at Llandudno in Wales, dates back to this period, and would grow substantially larger in later centuries. 

A disclaimer: this post will be mostly about questions, because I myself do not have the answers.

Ever since the 19th century, British colonisation, and European enlightenment era scientific racism, Indian history, and "caste" and regional politics have been dominated by racial polarisation. The reason behind is that some British scholars discovered that Sanskrit, the native language of India, had quite a few similarities with languages like Latin and Greek. This gave them an opportunity to justify their colonial rule; "the British were just establishing their rightful rule because the Europeans had already previously colonised India and given India its high culture". The Europeans at the time could not believe that there were civilisations far more advanced to anything in Europe. Are these narratives true?

It's true that comparative linguistics or philology has found extensive similarities in lexicon and grammar between some Indian languages and some European languages, which cannot be brushed off as mere coincidences. This has given rise to the popularity of the hypothesis that ancient group of people migrated to India from Europe. Let's see how true this supposition is. 

First of all let's take a look at the map.

The current scholarly consensus is that the Andronovo culture (which is divided into Alakul-Fedorovo subcultures, wherein Alakul practised cremation almost exclusively and Fedorovo buried their dead in a flexed position), and its close predecessor Sintashta culture are the cultures where the Proto-Indo-Iranian was spoken. So, it was the culture that preceded Vedas, according to this scholarly consensus. This culture is estimated to have existed in cirka 2000 BCE – 1150 BCE.

The BMAC, which was situated south to the area where the Andronovo culture existed, refers to the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex. It was a major Middle Bronze Age civilization that flourished in modern-day Eastern Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan, and Western Tajikistan between 2300 and 1700 BCE. It was contemporary with the late phases of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC, c. 3300–1300 BCE). Archaeologists have found IVC seals, beads, and ivory artefacts at BMAC sites, and even some IVC outposts like Shortughai in the banks of Amu Darya in modern-day northern Afghanistan. Both cultures used similar stamp seals, had plumbing and irrigation systems, and metalwork techniques, pointing to a robust cultural exchange. Both the BMAC and IVC were "non-Indo-European". They both spoke an unknown language. Linguists believe that both BMAC and IVC languages may have been an isolated language family on their own, or they may have been faintly related to each other. Scholars are hotly debating whether the IVC language belonged to the Dravidian, Elamite or "Elamo-Dravidian" family. As the IVC script hasn't yet been deciphered, it is impossible to tell. The BMAC language is unknown because they left no written records. Archaeogenetic studies (such as the landmark Narasimhan et al. 2019 study on South and Central Asian populations) show that the core BMAC population was primarily descended from Iranian agriculturalists and Anatolian farmers, characterised by high proportions of Y-DNA haplogroup J and smaller occurrences of haplogroup L (marked by L-M20). The core IVC populations were primarily associated with Y-DNA haplogroups L-M20 and R2a. The reason both civilizations possessed variations of haplogroup L-M20 is that both populations shared a heavy maternal and autosomal foundation rooted in early Iranian/Zagrosian Neolithic herders and early West Asian farmers.Both BMAC and IVC people lacked the haplogroup R1a that characterises Indo-European populations.

What was the religion of the BMAC and IVC peoples? Excavations in the BMAC sites have revealed fire altars, communal ritual hearths, water basins, and evidence of animal sacrifice. Archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi, who discovered the site, found what appears to be "the boiler for the ritual drink soma, which is mentioned in the Rigveda and also in the Avesta as haoma". Sarianidi says he also found dishes with traces of cannabis, poppy and ephedra. According to him, this discovery strengthens the theory that these were the ingredients of soma/haoma. Due to the presence of fire altars, water basins, and soma/haoma making tools, some scholars believe the BMAC harbored proto-Zoroastrian practices that later influenced the Persian religion. Archaeologists have discovered some of the most prolific religious sites and objects from the IVC. Ritual wells, fire altars, lingam and yoni statues, Pashupati seal possibly depicting "proto-Shiva", statues in different (proto?)-yogic positions, and evidences of animal sacrifice have been found in IVC. However, no direct chemical evidence of Soma, cannabis, poppy, or ephedra have been found in the IVC sites, nor have any explicitly confirmed Soma-making tools been discovered there. Some scholars have argued that certain IVC artefacts represent the tools described in Vedic texts, for example, linguist Asko Parpola and other scholars have argued that the "unicorn brazier" - seal is actually a stylized sacred filter apparatus used to drop, strain, and purify a ritual plant drink, closely matching descriptions of the Soma preparation process outlined in the Rigveda, however it is just a theory, and a far-fetched one at that. Please keep these details in mind because we will come back to this later on.

What happened to the BMAC and IVC peoples?Around 1700–1500 BCE, the BMAC experienced a decline, likely due to a combination of climate-induced droughts and shifting river beds. Coincidentally, at this time, the semi-nomadic, Indo-Iranian speaking Andronovo people were moving south. The Indo-European steppe ancestry only begins appearing in the archaeological record at BMAC sites toward the very end of its urban phase, around in 2100–1700 BCE. When the Andronovo people settled alongside the BMAC, they adopted roughly 300 loanwords from the BMAC language into Proto-Indo-Iranian, according to scholars. These borrowed words survived into ancient Sanskrit and Avestan. The reason why scholars think that these specific words were adopted by the Andronovo people is because these terms don't exist in other Indo-European languages, and because these were presumably objects that the Andronovo people "couldn't have encountered before their arrival at BMAC". For example, scholars have theories that the words for brick, canal, house, plough, and seed were borrowed by the Andronovo people because that is, presumably, the first time they encountered permanent brick houses, canals, and farming. Scholars also think that the words for camel, mustard, hemp, and words for priestly functions (rishi), ritual drinks (soma/haoma), and even the names of deities like Indra were absorbed into Indo-European culture from the BMAC (again, please remember this detail). The Andronovo people mixed with the BMAC people, and the Proto-Indo-Iranian language supplanted the BMAC language. This is why the modern day southern Central Asian population has the genetic markers of the BMAC people as well as the Andronovo people. Please keep this detail in mind.

Do the people in the Indian subcontinent possess the BMAC genetic markers in their genome? Major genome studies show that populations in the Indian subcontinent do not possess BMAC genetic ancestry in significant or distinct amounts. According to landmark archaeogenetic papers, such as Narasimhan et al. (2019) published by the David Reich Lab at Harvard University, a direct reciprocal north-to-south genetic spread from the BMAC core population into South Asia is "statistically undetectable". If the Proto-Indo-Iranian steppe people with the haplogroup R1a mixed with the BMAC on their way south, why do modern Indian Subcontinent people have R1a but virtually zero BMAC genetic markers? Scholars say that it is due to a phenomenon known as the "Indus Periphery Bypass". Apparently, the Proto-Indo-Iranian people did not advance like a single solid wall of people moving straight through the BMAC capital cities. Instead, they migrated in multiple, fractured waves. Some Proto-Indo-Iranian groups utilised the "Inner Asian Mountain Corridor", a route hugging the Tian Shan and Pamir mountain ranges. This path allowed them to move from the Kazakh steppe directly down into the Hindu Kush and the Swat Valley. By taking this eastern, mountainous route, these specific migrants completely bypassed the BMAC, thus not mixing with the BMAC people. For the proto-Indo-Iranian groups that did pass through BMAC territory, "archaeology shows they lived in separate, distinct encampments on the fringes of BMAC cities rather than integrating into them. While they exchanged ideas, technologies, and words (which is why Proto-Indo-Iranians adopted BMAC terms for farming and religion), they maintained strict social or cultural barriers against intermarriage. Because the core BMAC population was urban and sedentary, and the Proto-Indo-Iranian people were mobile pastoralists, their lifestyles kept them genetically segregated". Huh?? When did the BMAC and Andronovo people mix then if the central Asian population shows that they're descended from the people of this ancient mix?

The timing of these Andronovo migrations coincided with climate change around in 1900–1700 BCE. The BMAC cities dried up and collapsed, but its people did not migrate south into India; they largely scattered westward into Iran or integrated into other local Central Asian groups, which is why modern Tajiks and Afghans carry BMAC DNA, but "South Asians" do not. At the same time, the IVC was also de-urbanising due to the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra river systems (which has been theorised to be Saraswati of the Rigveda). As the IVC population migrated out of their grand cities, they ran into the incoming Proto-Indo-Iranian people. This strict barrier to intermarriage broke down because they mixed heavily with the IVC population. Doesn't this sound a little contradictory and a bit too convenient? So let me get this straight: Proto-Indo-Iranian people moved southwards in multiple streams, and the stream that bypassed the urban settlements of BMAC and did not mix with the BMAC people, thus not picking up the genetic markers of the BMAC people, they were the ones who settled in the Indian subcontinent, but also some of the core Rigvedic religious terminology for objects and entities like Soma, Rishi, Indra, that apparently came from BMAC and was borrowed by those Proto-Indo-Iranians who had settled in BMAC, those Proto-Indo-Iranian settlers never moved southwards which we know because there is no significant BMAC genetic component in Indian subcontinent population. How come the Indian Hindu Rigveda have those words then?

Below is an image of the sacred rivers in the Zend Avesta. For any Hindu, this looks familiar. The oldest parts of the Rigveda are linguistically more archaic according to scholars. Most mainstream philologists date these hymns to roughly "1500–1200 BCE". Some interdisciplinary models tie geographical features to an even earlier timeline.

The oldest section of the Avesta consists of the Gathas (sacred hymns composed directly by Zarathustra). They are written in Old Avestan, a sister language to Vedic Sanskrit. Linguists date the Gathas to roughly 1200–1000 BCE. The direct cousin relationship between the two texts is proven by systematic sound shifts. In almost every case, the Vedic Sanskrit "S" sound evolved into the Avestan "H" sound, a shift that historical linguists know typically happens later in a language's timeline. The sections of the Zend Avesta that detail geography, such as the rivers and lands of the Vendidad and the Yashts, belong to the more recent layers of Avesta. These were composed much later, estimated between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE. By the time these sections were formulated, the Rigveda had already been complete for centuries. How come the core religious concepts of the Rigveda, like Soma, come from BMAC then if the Indian Hindu Rigveda is more archaic than Persian Iranian Zend Avesta?

There's a massive friction between genetics and linguistics. It is highly contradictory that a migrant group could remain genetically isolated from a major urban civilization, yet intimately absorb its vocabulary, religion, and culture, and then carry it thousands of kilometres to the south to India. Scholars explain this phenomenon with something called "cultural transmission without genetic replacement". The Proto-Indo-Iranian people lived in mobile encampments on the fringes of the BMAC oases from c. 2100 BCE - 1700 BCE until collapse of BMAC. They presumably traded cattle and metals for BMAC agricultural goods, worked as mercenaries or seasonal laborers for BMAC people. They did not need to intermarry or integrate into BMAC cities to learn the local words for camel, brick, or priest. Scholars use modern English as an example; English has plethora of loanwords from Arabic (algebra, alcohol, safari), Nahuatl (chocolate, tomato, avocado), and Hindi (shampoo, bungalow, jungle). Yet, the native English carry virtually 0% Arabic, Native American, or "South Asian" DNA. Fair enough. Core Indian Hindu sacred religious terminology could have been borrowed from BMAC by living in the fringes for 400 years, yet no memory of these people remain in the Vedic hymns.

Another explanation scholars give is that while BMAC genes are not found in massive, dominant quantities across the entire "South Asian" population, "geneticists have detected a tiny, faint pulse of Turanian/BMAC-like ancestry in certain South Asian groups, particularly in the Northwest". That could be the result of later migrations too, as Sakas and Hunas too settled in India, embraced Hinduism and assimilated. The scholars, however, argue that the presence of this "Turanian/BMAC-like ancestry" is due to those Proto-Indo-Iranians mixing with some BMAC people, and the reason why it is so heavily diluted is due to the population size of the IVC. Apparently when the Proto-Indo-Iranian migrants, the ones who had absorbed the BMAC vocabulary, finally entered India, they mixed with millions of IVC people, so whatever tiny fraction of BMAC DNA some of those Proto-Indo-Iranian individuals carried was diluted down to nearly nothing over generations. All while both the BMAC and the IVC language presumably went extinct (except for a few loanwords?) and the Proto-Indo-Iranian language went onto developing into the dominant elite tongue (Vedic Sanskrit), but somehow the core Indian Hindu Vedic sacred religious terminology is from this completely different civilisation which these Proto-Indo-Iranians were never a part of. Okay...

The scholars say that there were two primary waves of migration of the Proto-Indo-Iranians (Andronovo people), the Western Wave pushed directly into the BMAC, mixed heavily with them, and stayed in Central Asia. Their descendants became the ancient Bactrians and Sogdians, and now modern Central Asians, who have high BMAC ancestry. The Eastern Wave moved down through the mountains of modern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan directly into the Swat Valley. They had far less physical contact with the Western BMAC oases, but they spoke the same Proto-Indo-Iranian language as their western cousins. Scholars say that the "BMAC loanwords had already spread through the entire Proto-Indo-Iranian language network before they ever crossed into India". How convenient!

What about genetics?

The haplogroup associated with Indo-European peoples is the R1a.

The R2a (R-M124) is widely considered by population geneticists to be a core paternal lineage of the IVC.

R1a and R2a both belong to the macro-haplogroup R (M207). They split roughly 25,000 ago, somewhere in Central Asia or the West Asian plateau, a man was born with a specific mutation that defined haplogroup R. His immediate descendants split into two primary sons: R1 (the father of R1a and R1b) and R2 (the father of R2a).

The R2a migrated to the Indian subcontinent while R1a remained in Eastern Europe / Central Asia and R1b remained in Caucasia /near east.

A branch of R1b migrated to Central Africa, settled there, married the local people and assimilated. A branch of R1b migrated to Western Europe and this lineage dominates Western Europe.

Eminent Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas identified the Yamnaya culture with the late Proto-Indo-Europeans in her Kurgan hypothesis. The Western scholarly consensus is that the Pontic-Caspian steppe is considered "the strongest candidate" for the "Urheimat" (original homeland) of the Proto-Indo-European language, which suggests that the "Yamnaya culture may be the homeland of the Indo-European languages".

Archaeological genetics reveal that Yamnaya male samples belong to the haplogroup R1b, specifically the R1b-Z2103 (predominant in the east) and R1b-L23 lineages.

R1a, which was prevalent in the Corded Ware culture, is "largely responsible for the spread of Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages in Eastern Europe and Central Asia".

The parent haplogroup of the Indian lineage is R1a-Z93. This lineage evolved from "older European" lineages (R1a-Z282 and R1a-M417). The R1a-Z93 branch became a dominant lineage among the "chariot-riding communities".

The "definitive European" branch of R1a is R1a-Z282. Eastern Slavs, Balto-Slavs and Nordics have different mutations.

Can you see the disparity here? If Yamnaya culture is the original homeland of the "Proto-Indo-Europeans", how come India doesn't have R1b? Let's assume that the Corded Ware people moved to Sintashta in the middle of Russia.

Scholars say that a branch of the Corded Ware culture moved out of Central Europe and pushed deep into the forest zones of Russia, creating the Fatyanovo culture. By 2500 BCE, the descendants of the Fatyanovo culture shifted further south and east into the forest-steppe zone, evolving into the Abashevo culture. The Abashevo people became master metallurgists, exploiting major copper deposits in the Urals. Around 2100 BCE, these Abashevo metalworkers fully emerged onto the northern Eurasian steppe. There, they encountered and absorbed the Poltavka culture, a local group of pastoralists who were "direct genetic descendants of the original Yamnaya culture". They together created the Sintashta culture. The Sintashta people built heavily fortified settlements, advanced bronze weaponry, and crucially invented the spoked-wheel war chariot to control the landscape. By the time the Sintashta culture was established, the Proto-Indo-Iranians possessed the military technology needed for their eventual explosive expansions into Central Asia, Iran, and India.

But why did the Corded Ware people move to Russia? At the time every climate model says that central Europe had much more favourable weather conditions than Russia had. Every time someone proposes that perhaps people moved out of India (the "Out of India" - theory or the OIT) everyone debunks it by saying that why would anyone move out of fertile India with favourable weather conditions to cold Europe? Meanwhile there is an entire scholarly consensus in the West that people move from warm central Europe to cold Russia. They explain it by saying that Russia had more metal after which the people migrated for. Can't this same excuse be used for the OIT? Anyway, since the Sintashta people were a mix of the Poltavka descendants of the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware people, why doesn't the R1b show up in India? Apparently because the Corded Ware people became the elite and their patriarchal system "phased out" the male Y-DNA of the Poltavka people. How convenient.

Because this post will be too long if I have more questions I will end it here. The reason why we must question is because the Western narrative under the garb of "scholarly consensus" gets passed as the truth while any narrative from India gets called "Hindutva nationalist pseudo-science". Isn't it curious though, that art like this below ⬇️ dominates the Western consciousness, and they sell like hot cakes?

This week the focus is on central and southern Asia, the Minoans, and Mesopotamia.

First, Central Asia. It appears that, around the 1700s BC, the Sintashta people living in the Urals spread out in multiple directions, both east and south. Eastwards, a Sintashta-related culture (used in the limited archaeological sense of “similar-looking pottery and other artefacts”) called the Andronovo culture spread across the Asian steppes east of the Ural Mountains, as far as areas around the eastern and northern borders of China. This culture was based on cattle and sheep herding in small permanent settlements (5 to 250 people). At the same time, it appears that the urban-oriented society of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), south of Sintashta in what is now Turkmenistan, underwent a substantial collapse, with urban populations falling and elaborate pottery types being replaced with simpler ones. The appears to be attributable to a migration or invasion of some of the Sintashta people to the area.

This means that for the first time there were people with some degree of a common culture and livelihood (focused on animal herding and reliant on horses) living from the borders of China to the borders of South Asia to the borders of West Asia. It enabled more rapid diffusion of culture and technology throughout Asia. 

The Harappa civilization completed its fall in this century, with people leaving the cities for rural areas in large numbers. Although Harappa had some kind of contact with horse-riding steppe peoples (e.g., enough to be aware of horses), probably for a few centuries before this, there does not appear to have been any invasion or large movement of new people into the area, and there are few indications of violence. The most probable cause is an environmental disaster - while several have been proposed, ranging from floods to droughts, and multiple elements could have contributed, the big one is the shifting of the Ghaggar-Hakra river to an entirely new course, which would have deprived cities and farms along that river of their water source. 

However, there’s an issue with attributing the fall of states to environmental disasters alone, and it’s illustrated by the Minoans during this period. A time of Minoan advances - importantly, they developed their own writing, called Linear A, in the first half of the 1700s BC - was interrupted by a major earthquake (possibly more than one) that destroyed the Minoan palaces and many other buildings in their cities. There are indications that the disaster may have made some Minoans desperate enough to resort to human sacrifice. And yet, despite this, recovery from the earthquakes was relatively rapid, and rebuilding was underway before the end of the century. The Minoans would go on to centuries more of prosperity. So an ancient state suffering a major natural disaster will not necessarily cause it to collapse.

Linear A, like the Harappan script, remains undeciphered, so we do not know the Minoans’ descriptions of these times. The meaning of a few symbols in Linear A has been determined with some confidence (e.g., person, sheep, goat, pig, cow, wheat, olives, figs, oil, wine, cloth), but not enough to read phrases. There are over 300 symbols, around 90 of which are common.

Moving to Mesopotamia, we’ve got one figure who is famous in world history, and another who is famous on tumblr. This is the age of Hammurabi’s Babylon; it is also the period in which Ea-Nasir lived.

Hammurabi’s Babylon was one of two short-lived empires in the 1700s BC that did not outlast their founders. The first was the state of Northern Mesopotamia (1790s-1776 BC); its ruler Shamshi-Adad conquered northern Mesopotamia and northern Syria, including the state of Mari. After his death, Northern Mesopotamia rapidly fell to Eshnunna (to the east, in western Iran) and Yamkhad (to the west, in northwest Syria), and Mari’s power was restored.

Hammurabi became king of Babylon in 1792 BC. During the 1760s BC, he rapidly built his empire by allying with his neighbours to defeat more powerful states, and then successively turning on those neighbours. First he conquered Larsa, the main state in his region (south-central Mesopotamia). Then he conquered Eshnunna by allying with Elam (also to his east) and Mari, and followed it up by allying with Mari and Yamkhad to conquer Elam. At this point you’d expect people to think twice about being his allies, but it was too late. He finished up by conquering Mari, leaving his empire and Yamkhad as the only two major states in the region stretching from western Iran to the Mediterranean. The famous Code of Hammurabi dates from after his conquests, in the 1750s BC. His empire, for all its size and fame, was very brief, and disintegrated not long after his death in 1750 BC – interestingly, losing control of its territory in south and central Mesopotamia, his former power base, while his successors continued to hang on in some parts of the north like Mari.

The first written records of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of the Flood date to Hammurabi’s time: we get them from what were basically students’ school assignments, copying these texts out. It’s as if, in the far future, the record of literature from our era was derived solely from Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. We can also see from school assignments that there were geometry classes, including use of the Pythagorean theorem and determining the height of a stack of grain based on its circumference and slope.

RICOSTRUITO ARCO DELLA POPOLAZIONE INDOIRANICA DEGLI ARI

Un arco dell’Età del Bronzo alto quasi due metri attribuito a una delle popolazioni degli Ari è stato ricostruito con materiali originali dagli archeologi della South Ural State University nell’ambito di una ricerca internazionale, un’arma micidiale che aveva, nella sua precisione, capacità di colpire a distanza e potere di produrre danni mortali contemporaneamente. Una dovuta precisazione prima…