The Pazyryk culture was introduced to the world relatively late: the first tombs were excavated in the early 20th century by the Russian archaeologist Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko.

The world-famous site of Pazyryk is located amid the western part of the Altai Mountains, near the Ukok Plateau, northwest of the Ob River headwaters in Russia, close to the Russian-Chinese-Mongolian-and Kazakh border.

The term Altai might be interpreted as meaning colourful, multicoloured mountains. The ethnic diversity of the landscape has traditionally reflected the uniqueness of each valley. It has been inhabited from the earliest times: it was here that one of the most remarkable Palaeolithic anthropological discoveries of recent times, a handful of bones belonging to a hitherto unidentified member of the Hominina subtribe, was unearthed and has since gained worldwide acclaim. The Altai, however, has yielded other astounding discoveries to the globe: the remains of the Scythian people. The local group of this vast Eurasian cultural sphere is known as the Pazyryk culture, after the site where the first Scythian princely burials, perfectly preserved in the permafrost, were discovered by Russian archaeologists in the 1920s, dating from between the 6th and the 3rd centuries BC. We are not discussing the realm of permanent ice, but rather an inexplicable occurrence in which a block of ice forms at a particular depth within a stone-lined, kurgan-covered tomb. These blocks of ice have preserved the burials of the Pazyryk culture for some 2500 years. The dead were buried, in many cases alongside carts and horses, in spacious wooden chambers ‘made cosy’ by felt carpets decorated with colourful scenes.

In the 1990s, after a lengthy pause, archaeologists in Novosibirsk, who had been exploring the Ukok Plateau for years, managed to unearth new finds. This is where they discovered the tomb of a wealthy woman dubbed the “Ukok princess”. One of her most prominent features is the tattooing, which has been excellently preserved thanks to her being mummified. On both of her arms and a few of her knuckles, blue paint was used to depict panthers, rams, deer, and a variety of other fantastic creatures combining different body parts of real animals. The tattoos were discovered when the bones of the princess, who had been exhumed from the ice 19 years earlier, were going to be taken to Gorno-Altaysk, the capital (and only city) of the Republic of Altai, to be laid to rest in a glass sarcophagus.

Nonetheless, Polosmak argues that tattoos at that time functioned as a kind of identity card, similar to passports. “The Pazyryk people believed that tattoos would aid them in crossing over to the afterlife, where family members would find each other more easily,” the archaeologist explained.

This is where the logo of Pazirik Ltd., which depicts such a “fantastic” creature, originates as well.