Ancient remains found in the Mongolian steppe suggest that the story of the female warrior Mulan may have been inspired by real Xianbei women who rode horseback and probably also used bows and arrows.
According to folklore, a powerful East Asian ruler demanded every family send one man to swell the ranks of聽his army, and a girl named Mulan faced a difficult choice: either let聽her weak father go to war, or聽take his place. Now it seems there may be truth to this age-old Ballad of Mulan.
Christine Lee and Yahaira Gonzalez at California State University examined skeletons from 29 ancient burials across Mongolia. The burials belonged to three groups of nomadic people: the Xiongnu, who began to occupy the region about 2200聽years ago, the Xianbei, who聽took over around 1850 years ago,聽and the Turkic people, who displaced the Xianbei roughly 1470 years ago.
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Three of the skeletons belonged to Xianbei women聽鈥� and two were potentially warriors. Lee and Gonzalez reached this conclusion partly due to the nature of marks left on the bones where muscles once attached. The marks are larger if the muscle was heavily used, and the pattern of marks on both women鈥檚 skeletons suggests they had routinely worked the muscles someone on horseback would use. There were also indications that they practised archery.
Lee was surprised by the discovery. 鈥淭he number of women allowed to participate in聽these activities must have been really small,鈥� she says, adding that Mongolian history suggests that it was rare for women to do either.
Markings on three other skeletons indicate that Xiongnu women may also have engaged in archery and horseback riding to聽a limited degree. Another three skeletons indicate that Turkic women apparently didn鈥檛 practise archery, although they seem to have spent a limited amount of time riding horses.
There may be a simple reason why some Xianbei women may聽have become warriors: the聽political landscape was particularly unstable when they were alive. After the Han dynasty in China ended in AD聽220, there was intermittent violence across the region for centuries.
鈥淧erhaps everybody was needed to defend the country,鈥� says Lee, who was due to present this work at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists that聽was cancelled.
The finding is particularly significant because Mulan is often thought to represent a Xianbei woman. There are hints of this in her story, says Lee. For instance, nomadic men aged 15 to 55 were considered of military age and might be called on to fight in the army聽鈥� but in China there was no tradition of sending one man from each family to serve, she says.
And although in this year鈥檚 cinematic retelling of the story Mulan joins the Imperial Chinese army to fight against nomadic people from the Eurasian steppe, in the聽original tale she may have joined a Xianbei army鈥檚 fight against different invaders, says Lee.
Female warriors may also have existed elsewhere on the Eurasian steppe over the past few millennia. Lee says recent excavations in Siberia and Kazakhstan have uncovered evidence of women buried with聽swords and chariots.
