“But No Living Man Am I”: Unique 10th Century Burial Contains a Warrior Woman

A research team led by Dr. Balázs Tihanyi has found something never before seen in Hungary’s Carpathian Basin. The grave, dating to the 10th century, is of a woman and her weapons.

Such burials of warrior women are extremely rare across the archaeological records, and this is a first for Hungary. The discovery, published in PLOS ONE, comes with all sorts of questions as to who this woman was.

The burial, from a cemetery first explored in the 1980s, contains both jewelry and archery equipment, alongside the heavily degraded bones which are generally agreed to be female. Some 262 graves were known from the cemetery, which dates from the Hungarian Conquest period which saw the Magyars, ancestors of modern Hungarians, establish themselves in Europe for the first time.

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The cemetery contained both male and female graves, the rest of which seem to have been buried with grave goods along gender lines. The men were buried with equipment for horses and a variety of weapons, the women with home goods and jewelry.

But this single grave, designated No. 63, seemingly contains both. The grave good consist of a silver hair ring along with three bell buttons and a string of beads, alongside an “armor piercing” arrowhead, the remains of a quiver and the remains of a bow. The orientation of the bow suggests it was placed in or near the woman’s hand as she was laid to rest.

It is very unusual to include weaponry in a grave unless the individual buried there is a warrior. This seems to be backed up by the remains themselves, which suggest that the woman buried there had a hard life in the saddle. Other skeletal evidence such as the shape and thickness of certain bones suggests the woman was indeed an archer, and trauma to the bones, apparently from falling off her horse, suggests she was a warrior too.

The team focused on confirming that this body was indeed that of a woman, and while the evidence falls short of being conclusive key points like the presence of osteoporosis in the skeleton is highly suggestive that the remains are female. Of course, if it did turn out to be a male this would simply replace one mystery with another, namely why a male had female grave goods.

Sadly much of the cemetery has since been destroyed by agriculture in the area. However the detailed records gathered at the time have allowed the team to examine the burial in detail, and if their conclusions are correct, if indeed this is a warrior woman, then it is the first ever found in Hungary.

Original study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313963.

Header Image: The woman was buried holding a bow, and with evidence of a violent life: she appears to have been a warrior. Source: PLOS ONE / Dr. Balázs Tihanyi et al.