Pazyryk Swan: A 2,300-year-old plush swan from Siberia tied to the

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A swan made out of white and brown felt against a green background

A felted swan from Iron Age Siberia was crafted from reindeer wool and represented life in 3 spheres: air, land and water.
(Image credit: Dima Moroz through Shutterstock )

Call: The Pazyryk Swan

What it is: A decorative luxurious figurine of a swan made from reindeer felt and filled with reindeer wool

Where it is from: The Pazyryk Valley in the Altai Mountains of Russian Siberia

When it was made: About 2,400 years ago

Related: Mask of Agamemnon: A gold death mask as soon as believed to be proof of the Trojan War

What it informs us about the past:

This soft figurine is credited to the Pazyryk culture, an Iron Age individuals believed to have actually belonged to the Saka cultural group– wanderers who might themselves have actually been an eastern branch of the Scythian culture

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In addition to other treasuresthe almost 12-inch-tall (30 centimeters) swan was found in a burial mound in the Pazyryk Valley of the Altai Mountains, near Russia’s borders with Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia.

Archaeologists believe the figurine dates to the 5th or 4th century B.C. The swan’s body is made from reindeer wool that has actually been processed into white felt, while the beak, eyes and wing suggestions are made from black felt. Reddish-brown felt was utilized for the “feet,” and the figurine is packed with reindeer wool.

The feet likewise include wood sticks that support the swan in an upright position. Managers at Russia’s Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where it is on display screen, believe these sticks were utilized to install the swan on a wood chariot discovered close by, or possibly on the top of a tent-like structure put up over the burial mound however which decomposed away long back.

According to the museum, the swan represented life in 3 spheres: air, land and water.

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The swan or a comparable water bird likewise might have included in a development misconception: there was “a widespread concept of the creation of the universe by a swan, duck or goose, which was characteristic of many cosmogonical conceptions in ancient times,” according to the museum.

Archaeologists from the Soviet Union started excavating the ancient burial mounds in the Pazyryk Valley in the 1920s and discovered the felted swan in 1949, according to the University of Washington

Since the area is high– and for that reason cold– a lot of the burial mounds are constantly frozen and have actually protected lots of natural products, consisting of human remains.

Tom Metcalfe is a self-employed reporter and routine Live Science factor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom composes generally about science, area, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has actually likewise composed for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & & Space, and numerous others.