Altai Roads

Or Central Asian roads in general, are not like western roads. The highway from Ulan Bataaar to Olgii is over six hundred miles long, but it is not paved. It is studded with old car parts and camel bones; sometimes, when the land is flat, its ruts seem to stretch a quarter mile wide and more. In the winter even the "Highway" can just vanish.

When I saw the road where the tomb below was found I did a double take-- it certainly looked like ones I had driven on. "Altai Princess" road:

But I think it is just proximity (in a American- Western or Central Asian sense of close, maybe less than one hundred miles away), or the kind of high- desert- with- permafrost environment. Here is my similar road, which also has kurgans, a scant few miles south in Olgii.

On such roads, from Mongolia to the Ukraine, stand the balbals, enigmatic markers, often holding bottles-- for ritual snuff?

But though these cultures trained hawks (and may even have invented falconry and more) I have only see one Balbal, in an Olgii museum, that pictured a bird....