Zur Identifizierung von bewaffneten Frauen in den Gräbern des 2. bis 1. Jahrtausends v. Chr. in Aserbaidschan auf Basis der archäologischen Funde

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the research of female warriors of the Southern Caucasus. I have discovered multiple representations of female warriors in the petroglyphs of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Gobustan National Park (60 km south of Baku), and also equivalent representations in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. Subsequently I found the presence of female warriors reflected in the grave goods of the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age tombs of the Southern Caucasus. For my thesis at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (Baku), I have compared these discoveries with the Scythian-Sarmatian tombs. Thereby, it became clear that these tombs date to a significantly later period (8th to 4th c. B.C.). This gave me the reason to compare the publications from 185 years of German archaeological researches in the Southern Caucasus with Russian and Caucasian publications. One of the main components of my research was to locate the excavated finds of the nineteenth century, and to recover their corresponding, original archaeological documentation so that they could be compared with the more recent researches. During my research I found out that many of the finds from the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in the Caucasus Collection which had been originally treasured in Berlin were brought to the Soviet Union after the World War II. Today they are spread over some museums in Russia (mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg), and the Caucasus. A joint effort should be taken to research them together through international co-operations in order to re-evaluate the results of the previous researches.