In the period from the middle to the late Bronze Age, in the steppes southeast of the Urals in Russia lived communities that took possession of metal production. They buried their warriors on horseback. They had the earliest examples of war chariots that had wheels with spokes.
Name of archaeological culture
Scientists do not know what they called themselves, because after them there were no written texts left, but their archaeological culture is widely known as Sintashta. This name was given in honor of the river near one of their main settlements, which was a complex fortified city.
It is also described as an ancient metallurgical industrial center. Another of the well-known settlements of this kind, very similar to this culture, is Arkaim. And Sintashta is arguably one of the most developed ancient cultures ever discovered by archaeologists. The Proto-Indo-Iranian culture, which is the linguistic ancestor of many modern peoples of Asia, including the Indo-Aryans and Persians, is also considered a generally accepted highly developed culture.
Features
Sintashta culture, also known as Sintashta-Petrovskaya, or Sintashta-Arkaim, is an archaeological monument of the Bronze Age of the northern Eurasian steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dating from the period 2100-1800. BC e. The ancient culture is named after the Sintashta settlement in the Chelyabinsk region in Russia.
She is considered the "progenitor" of metal processing technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient military art. The earliest known chariots were found in the burials of Sintashta mounds. A distinctive feature is the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy, which is unusual for the steppe culture.
Research
Due to the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta places under the burials of later settlements, culture has only recently begun to be distinguished from Andronovo. Currently, it is recognized as a separate entity that is part of the Andronovo Skyline.
The main hypothesis, based on archaeological data and reports about Sintashta, is that it mainly comes from the more western and warlike culture of Abashevo, which occupied most of the forest-steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas. In turn, Abashevo is usually described as the eastern branch of the Late Neolithic culture of string ceramics, which is usually considered the first Indo-European archaeological culture in Northern Europe.
Genetic connections
Moreover, many ancient and modern inhabitants of South and Central Asia, especially those who are identified with or speak Indo-Iranian languages, are apparently associated with the main cluster of Sintashta, forming an almost perfect wedge between it and the likely representatives of the diaspora of the Indus Valley, which are not found any signs of steppe origin.
This corresponds to mixed models based on formal statistics. The latter shows significant similarities associated with the Indo-Iranian group and the high frequencies of the Y-haplogroup R1a-Z93 both in this culture and in many Indo-Iranian language populations.
Some of the samples of Sintashta culture monuments were separated from the main cluster: they have signs of origin associated with the Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures of Eastern Europe and / or Western Siberia.
This is especially true for individuals belonging to the Y-haplogroup Q. However, this does not contradict archaeological evidence that suggests that the Sintasht community may have been multicultural and multilingual. Indeed, on the basis of historical linguistics, it is generally recognized that in Northern Eurasia there were fairly intense contacts between speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Ural and Yenisei languages.
Thus, it seems that there is not much room for discussion, because ancient DNA seemed to support the most widely accepted hypotheses about the origin and history of Sintashta and her people, and they are identified mainly as proto-Indo-Iranian speakers.
However, a sample of the cultural burial of the Middle Rig II in the North Pontic steppe, in the territory that is now Eastern Ukraine, somewhat complicated the situation. This individual, known as Ukraine Eneolithic I6561, is not only very strongly associated with the most typical examples of Sintashta archeology, but also belongs to the Y-haplogroup R1a-Z93. On the other hand, not one of the CWCs that have remained sequenced to date is related to this particular sub-burial of R1a (although, obviously, they belong to a number of near and distant related sub-burials of R1a).
Previously, there were no versions that Sintashta culture could come from Sredny Rig II instead of Abashevo. And no wonder, because Middle Rick II was not yet discovered when data on it appeared in archaeological reports.
Nevertheless, the facts that indicate that R1a-Z93 from the Sredny Rig to the Sintashta period can originate from the steppes of Eastern Ukraine and its environs can lead to the fact that ancient DNA could well cause a serious rethinking of how this amazing culture originated .
Search for ancestors
According to a genetic study conducted in 2015, individuals of the Sintashta culture and its descendants, representatives of the Andronovo culture, originated, at least in part, from the population of the cord ceramics culture. This conclusion is based on the genetic similarity of Sintashta individuals with representatives from this culture, since both showed a relatively high proportion of ancestors descended from early Central European farmers. Both of them differ markedly in this origin from the population of the Yamnaya Culture and most individuals of the Poltava culture that preceded Sintashta in the same geographical region.
Origin and distribution
According to recent studies of historical monuments of Sintashta culture, it arose as a result of the interaction of two previous cultures - Poltava and Abashevskaya.
The direct predecessor in the Ural-Tobolsk steppe was the Poltava culture - a branch of the cattle-breeding pit horizon, which moved east between 2800 and 2600. Several Sintashta cities were built over older Poltava settlements or near their cemeteries, and their motifs are common on Sintashta ceramics.
Development
The Sintashta material culture also demonstrates the influence of the late Abashevskaya culture, originating from the Fatyanovo-Balanovo culture. This is confirmed by finds consisting of dishes from settlements in the forest-steppe zone north of the Sintashta region, which were also mainly cattle-breeding.
Scientists have found a close autosomal genetic connection between the peoples of the culture of cord ceramics and Sintashta. It suggests similar DNAs of both and may mean that this happened directly from the migration of the former to the east.
The first settlements of Sintashta appeared around 2100 BC. e. during a period of climate change, when the already arid Kazakh steppe region became even colder and drier. The everglades around the Ural and Tobol rivers, which were formerly considered winter shelters, became increasingly important for survival. Under this pressure, both the Poltava and Abashevsky shepherds constantly settled in the strongholds of the river valley, avoiding less protected places on the top of the hill.
Intergroup confrontations and wars
Abashevo’s culture was already marked by an endemic tribal war intensified by environmental stress and competition for resources in the Sintashta period, which led to the construction of fortifications on an unprecedented scale and innovation in military technology, such as the invention of the military chariot.
The increased competition between tribal groups may also explain the extravagant sacrifices observed in Sintashta's graves, as competitors sought to outperform each other in conspicuous consumption actions similar to the North American tradition of potcha. Types of Sintashta artifacts, such as spearheads, three-headed arrowheads, chisels, and large axes of the shaft hole, were borrowed in the east.
Many of Sintashta’s graves are equipped with weapons, although the complex bow later tied to the chariot does not appear. Horn and bone objects were also found on the sites, which are interpreted as parts (pens, stops for arrows, tips, loops for strings) for bows. There is no indication that the curving portions of these bows contained anything other than wood.
There are also arrowheads made of stone or bone, rather than metal. These arrows are short, 50–70 cm long, and the bows themselves may also have been correspondingly small.
Metal production
The Sintashta economy revolved around copper metallurgy. Copper ores from nearby mines (such as the Thieves' Pit) were delivered to settlements for processing into copper and arsenic bronze. This production had an industrial scale: in all the excavated buildings on the sites of this culture in Sintasht, Arkaim and Ustye there were remains of smelting furnaces and slag.
Most of this metal was intended for export to the cities of the Bactrian-Margian Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia. The metal trade between Sintashta and the BMAK for the first time connected the steppe region with the ancient urban civilizations of the Middle East: the empires and city-states of Iran and Mesopotamia provided an almost bottomless market for metals. These trade routes later became the means by which horses, chariots, and eventually Indo-speaking people traveled from the steppes to the Middle East.
Ethnic and linguistic identity
It is believed that the people of Sintashta culture spoke the Praindo-Iranian language, the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian language family. This identification is based mainly on the similarities between the sections of the Rigveda, an Indian religious text that includes ancient Indo-Iranian hymns recorded in Vedic Sanskrit, with funeral rituals of the culture of Sintashta discovered by archaeologists.
However, there is linguistic confirmation of the common vocabulary list between the Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian languages. Although its origin as the Creole of various tribes in the Ural region may lead to the inaccuracy of attributing Sintashta culture to exclusively Indo-Iranian ethnicity. Its interpretation as a mixture of two cultures with two different languages ​​is a reasonable hypothesis based on the available evidence.
Settlement
The main monuments of Sintashta archeology belong to the fortified complex - the ancient settlement, the Great Barrow and the dirt burial ground. In addition to them, the complex also consists of a small soil burial ground, in the center of which there is a ritual structure; small mound, whose diameter is 16 m, height - 0, 4 m; complex of soil and burial mounds.
The age (about four thousand years) is established thanks to the found burials and various finds.