Artifacts from the Ancient Silk Road (Daily Life through Artifacts) 9781440858284, 9781440858291, 1440858284

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ARTIFACTS

FROM THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD

Recent Titles in Daily Life through Artifacts Artifacts from Ancient Rome James B. Tschen-Emmons Artifacts from Medieval Europe James B. Tschen-Emmons Artifacts from Ancient Egypt Barbara Mendoza Artifacts from Modern America Helen Sheumaker Artifacts from American Fashion Heather Vaughan Lee Artifacts from Nineteenth-Century America Elizabeth B. Greene

ARTIFACTS FROM THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD

William E. Mierse

Daily Life through Artifacts

Copyright © 2023 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mierse, William E., author. Title: Artifacts from the ancient Silk Road / William E. Mierse. Description: Santa Barbara : ABC-CLIO, LLC, [2023] | Series: Daily life through artifacts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022037753 (print) | LCCN 2022037754 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440858284 (hardback) | ISBN 9781440858291 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Silk Road—Civilization. | Silk Road—Antiquities. | Asia, Central—Civilization. | Asia, Central—Antiquities. | Eurasia—Civilization. | Eurasia—Antiquities. Classification: LCC DS328.2 .M54 2023 (print) | LCC DS328.2 (ebook) | DDC 939/.6—dc23/eng/20220816 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037753 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037754 ISBN: 978-1-4408-5828-4 (print) 978-1-4408-5829-1 (ebook) 27 26 25 24 23   1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. Greenwood An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 147 Castilian Drive Santa Barbara, California 93117 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Preface vii How to Use This Book  ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road?  xv ALPHABETICAL ENTRIES Amazons 2 Animal Style  2 Banqueting 4 City Planning  6 Coinage 8 Domestication of the Horse  11 Funerary Practices  12 Indus Valley Civilization  14 Linguistic and Genetic Studies 15 Monasticism 16 Nomad Kingdoms and Empires  19 Persepolis Apadana Reliefs  24 Persistence of Classicism  25 Shamanism, Ancient Central Asian 28 Silk 29 Texts and Archaeology  31 Texts and Translations  33 Travelers, Early  35 Wool Working and Carpet Making 37 Zoroastrianism 39 v

ARTIFACTS   1 Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos with Portrait of Heliodoros  43   2 Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya 47   3 Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene 55   4 Adult Man’s Caftan 61   5 Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique Showing Aspects of Scythian Life  73   6 Gold Belt End  81   7 Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery in Front of Her Yurt 87   8 Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments 93   9 Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment  97 10 Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes from a Window 103 11 Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana 109 12 Bronze Throne Leg with Griffin 115 13 Early-20th-Century Yurt 121 14 Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot  129

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Contents 15 Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket 137 16 Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer 145 17 Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exterior  151 18 Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration  155 19 Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE)  161 20 Bronze Coin with Square Hole  169 21 Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread 175 22 Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed in Roundels 183 23 Still Life with Peaches and Glass of Water 189 24 Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure  195 25 Faceted Glass Bowl  203 26 Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China 209 27 Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk 215 28 Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch  221 29 Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider 227 30 Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession of Horse-Drawn Chariots 235 31  Ashoka Pillar 243 32 Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I  251 33 Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting  257 34 Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) 265 35 Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard 273

36 Silver Plaque in Form of a Recumbent Horse  281 37 Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk 287 38 Phoenix-Headed Ewer with ThreeColor Sancai Glaze and with an Applique of a Steppe Warrior in the Pose of the Parthian Shot  293 39 Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius from Dura Europos 301 40 Terracotta Head of Dionysus 309 41 Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper Standing before God Shiva/Oesho 317 42 Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele 325 43 Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos  331 44 Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahrām IV) with Fire Altar Reverse Type  337 45 Reindeer Stag Horse Headdress from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk  343 46 Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Including Crosses 349 47 Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding  353 48  Infant Mummy 361 49 Bronze Reliquary Box 365 50 Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand  369 Index 375 About the Author  405

PREFACE

I was introduced to the riches of the study of ancient Central Asia and of the myriad roles that trade played in the evolution of the cultural diversity of the region over twenty years ago. A colleague of mine in the Department of History, Alfred Andrea, asked me if I would be interested in team-teaching a course. I agreed to the proposition because what he suggested was a course for first-year students on a subject about which neither of us knew too much so that we would be discovering the material along with our students. We chose the Silk Road, and because of our many discussions over good wine and cheese and our experience in jointly teaching the class, I  have been hooked ever since. I had begun my career several years earlier as an art historian trained in the Classical world. I  had confined my scholarship to matters Greek and Roman and had only moved a little way out of that research groove to explore architectural developments in the ancient Near East. The exploration of Central Asia opened my eyes to an entirely new set of research options and to a completely different range of issues and problems. Unlike the fields of Classical and ancient Near Eastern studies, the scholarship on ancient Central Asia and the Silk Road did not possess the same degree of accepted interpretations. Nor had the range of possible avenues of exploration been so hierarchically structured. There was much greater latitude for how to approach the material. Over the years, I have developed and taught several versions of courses on the Silk Road and ancient Central Asia. I have begun to find my voice in the scholarship and have published a few articles on specific aspects that interest me. I have abandoned neither my Mediterranean scholarly background nor bias, but I have worked to broaden my understanding and to offer a different perspective in my studies. One of the things that I have noted is the lack of a good introductory book that focuses on objects, which is my area of expertise and interest. There are good introductions to both ancient Central Asia and significance of trade represented by the Silk Road. Valerie Hansen’s two books, The Silk Road: A New History 2012 vii

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Preface and The Silk Road: A New History with Documents 2016, offer an excellent entry into the narrative history of the region using the rich trove of primary documents found over the hundred years of excavations. A thoughtful new take on the significance of Central Asia in the development of Eurasian civilization is provided by Barry Cunliffe’s The Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia, published in 2015. The explorer and historical geographer, Christopher Baumer, has produced fascinating and detailed investigations of Central Asia over its historical periods beginning with the prehistoric era in a beautifully illustrated series of volumes titled The History of Central Asia, volume I: The Age of the Steppe Warriors, 2012; volume II: The Age of the Silk Roads, 2014; and volume III: The Age of Islam and the Mongols, 2016. While each of these recent works illustrates objects throughout the texts, they are not the device for telling the story. Several international loan exhibitions somewhat balance the situation, since by nature, museum exhibitions must place the objects in primary position. Some, like The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol, organized by F. R. Allchin, J. Boardman, Joe Cribb, J.C. Harle, and N. Kreitman, at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1992, When Silk was Gold, Central Asian and Chinese Textiles by James Watt and Anne Wardwell at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998, Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon’s Afghanistan, Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2008, the 2010 Secrets of the Silk Road, an Exhibition of Discoveries from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, organized by the Victor Mair for the Bowers Museum and S. Stark and K. S. Rubinson’s 2012 Nomads and Networks, the Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World considered discrete units from the region, whereas others, such as Annette Juliano and Judith Lerner’s 2002 show at the Asia Society Museum, Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, have been a bit broader in their scope of coverage. In this work, I have sought to make objects the focus and through them to tell the story of Central Asia before the Arab conquest and the arrival of Islam. With this in mind, I have written essays for each object that aim to investigate several avenues of exploration that the object opens up. As an art historian, I believe in the power of human-made works to convey information. The information can be that which the maker intended, but, at the same time, the object tells its own story about its context or its changing contexts. I have tried to elicit several different narratives from each item selected so that it provides a richer and fuller understanding of some aspect of ancient Central Asia. Throughout the text, I have woven the thread of trade, which I think does bind together all of the history of Central Asia and joins it to those peripheral but important regions, China, India, the Iranian Plateau, the Mediterranean, and the steppes.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I have written this book as an introduction to the cultural developments of Central Asia, from the 3rd millennium BCE to the 1st millennium CE up to the Arab conquest. My interest has been in the rich and varied cultural mixing that happened in the two great ranges of Central Asia: the steppe lands of the north and the sedentary regions of the south. Though I explore each of these zones in its own terms, I also aim to show how the regular interaction between the zones, though this could be hostile at times, proved, more often, to be mutually beneficial. The theme that works its way through the book is the role played by trade. What I have tried to examine are the myriad ways that trade has stimulated cultural interaction. The book is intended for any reader interested in the issues of ancient Central Asia. However, I have aimed this at the reader with limited or no knowledge about the region. I  am thinking specifically of advanced high school students or college undergraduates who may be taking a course in world history. The structure of the book follows the others in this series. I have written fifty artifact entries in which I examine some aspects of life in ancient Central Asia. With these objects I have worked to flesh out some of the aspects of the religious, economic, cultural, and daily lives of the many peoples who called Central Asia home during a roughly six-thousand-year period of time. While some of the objects were considered to have been created as artworks, most were not, and even some that qualify today as art pieces were not considered so when they were made. The artifact entries are grouped by topic: numbers 1–8 are about Clothing and Identification; 9–14 Houses and Household Furnishings; 15–18 Music, Sports, and Entertainment; 19–28 Economy and Trade; 29–30 Transportation; 31–34 Rulership; 35–39 Arms, Armaments, and Combat; 40–47 Religion; 48–50 Funerary Practices. However, these objects also tell other stories, and I have regularly added references to them into the discussions of other issues. Many of the artifact entries are really two items providing for a richer investigation. These items present numerous paths of investigation, and I have explored as many as possible. ix

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How to Use This Book I have selected most of the objects from museum collections in the United States that are available online, allowing the objects to be explored more fully by an interested reader since the object is accompanied by descriptive and contextual information on the museum online catalogue site. These are major museums making it easier for an individual to visit to view the objects in person, which is always valuable since objects in reality can be quite different from what is seen in a photograph. The introductory chapter serves as a framework on which to hang the objects themselves. In it, I lay out the physical geography of the area that comprises this study. I have not limited myself to the narrow definition of Central Asia simply because the reality of how this region developed and interacted was much broader, and I  have looked at the larger picture for the purposes of this study. The introduction considers the major historical issues that informed the cultural developments. The archaeology that has been undertaken throughout Central Asia over the last and a half century and the ancient literary sources, most of which were written by authors who neither came from Central Asia nor had ever set foot in it, drive the historical narrative. Augmenting the introduction and the artifact entries are several alphabetical entries. In these, I explore subthemes that recur throughout the introduction and the artifact entries but that deserve longer and more thoughtful consideration. It is my hope that this book will excite the interest of readers and will encourage them to explore more about ancient Central Asia on their own. To aid the next level of research, I have provided bibliographies for each artifact entry and for the introduction. I have tried to use recent scholarship, since the study of ancient Central Asia is constantly evolving and changing. I  have also limited the bibliography to only works in English. Since this is an introductory text, and I expect that most readers will be English language speakers with limited or no command of other scholarly languages, I wanted to provide easily accessible but appropriate works to allow anyone to take the study deeper. However, it is important to realize that the study of ancient Central Asia is not one that can be seriously undertaken in English alone. Much of the important scholarly work is in other languages: Russian, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The ancient sources that supply much of the historical narrative are in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Chinese. Though we have no surviving literary texts in the form of ancient historical narratives written by the peoples of Central Asia themselves, we do have many ancient texts from the region in a variety of ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Prakrit, Gandhāri, Bactrian, Khotanese, and Middle Persian. This is a good moment to begin an exploration of Central Asia: ancient, medieval, or contemporary. The region, with the exception of Afghanistan, is once again open after many decades of being closed to outsiders. The

How to Use This Book modern nations that comprise the region are engaged in the study of their own histories, and many international exhibitions have brought important collections of artifacts to the United States. The United States is itself deeply involved with Central Asia, and the Chinese government is ramping up its economic and political involvement as well. These are important reasons why we should all know this area much better than we do. Moreover, Central Asia rewards the investment made. It is a fascinating region of the Eurasian continent, an area that has played an important role in the development of Eurasian cultures. As I hope that this book will show, it never was an outlier. Central Asia was always an important player in the cultural formations that happened to its east and west. Not only did forms and ideas pass through the region but it also contributed to the ways in which the cultures that we know better took shape.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a real pleasure to write this book. I  could only do this with the aid of the University of Vermont, which has allowed me to pursue this study over the past two decades and funded the initial research travel. My academic home for the past thirty years, the Department of Art and Art ­History, has allowed me to formulate many of my ideas by teaching courses on aspects of ancient Central Asia, and several cohorts of undergraduate students have helped me to find my way through this material. I have greatly benefited from the stimulating courses that Jennifer Hoag has offered on the varieties and properties of natural fibers and from our discussions about specific aspects. I could never have undertaken the writing of the book without having had the chance to spend time in many parts of Central Asia, and this has been made possible through the generosity of Richard and Pamela Ader. In this time of growing skepticism about the value of humanities to society, an attitude reflected in the policy of many academic institutions to disable departments and programs in the humanities, the Aders have seen fit to fund scholarship in the humanities by underwriting one of the University of Vermont’s Green and Gold Professorships. I have been the lucky recipient of this professorship, which has allowed me to travel unencumbered through most of the regions about which I write in this book. This has been a truly rare opportunity, one that has permitted me to explore, as I have seen fit, the world of ancient Central Asia, without needing to constantly scrape together the funding to permit the on-site travel. This book owes much to the faith that the Aders have shown, and I hope that it repays that faith and encourages other donors to realize that the humanities offer meaningful and important ways in which to investigate and explore the world for contemporary society. I want to thank my wife, Helen, who, even though not in the best of health, has tirelessly accompanied me on my travels through the region. Together we have traversed the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts, wandered the market at Kashgar, visited Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, walked through the xiii

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Acknowledgments palaces and halls of Persepolis, explored the Sogdian remains at Paikent, investigated a caravansary in Armenia, and watched Mongolian nomads manage their herds of horses and sheep. We have visited countless museums and made special trips to see visiting exhibitions both here and abroad. She has been my constant companion on this project and on all those that I have done before, and I could not continue my work without her steady support, encouragement, and loving comradeship. For many of these trips, we have had the good fellowship of a friend of some forty years, Candace Fitzgerald, who has provided an alternative view to my sometimes overly academic focus and has enlivened many local dinners with witty and enjoyable conversations and observations. Finally, I want to thank ABC-CLIO for deciding to include this volume in their series, Daily Life through Artifacts, even though it was not part of their original plans. Kevin Downing took a risk when he decided to go forward with this project after the financial strain placed on ABC-CLIO by the COVID-19 pandemic, and I have very much appreciated his steadfast support and good advice. Ellen Rasmussen has done an excellent job of locating the many images needed for the book that I have written, and the anonymous copyeditor has done yeoman’s service taking the poorly prepared manuscript and making it suitable for publication. I  can only hope that with its publication, they will see the wisdom of the decision. All these people have helped me to produce a better book, but all mistakes and errors remain mine.

INTRODUCTION: WHAT WAS THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD? NAME AND SOURCE AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? The idea of the Silk Road has become popular in our contemporary world. It conjures up notions of heavily laden camel caravans crossing through inhospitable deserts and mountains to bring treasures from one distant land to another and has come to represent the essence of international business, a romantic view of how mercantile exchanges occurred in the past to play against the realities of today. It is not without reason that China has called its new international trade program, the Belt and Road Initiative, the “New Silk Road.” It has become of interest to us again in the late 20th and early 21st centuries because it seems to reinforce the value that we have given to global capitalism and international mercantile exchanges. The whole notion of the Silk Road rests on the positive effects of openness: openness of borders for exchanges, openness of cultural institutions to outside ideas, and openness of societies to foreigners. The periods of greatest prosperity for the cultures that formed in the regions through which the Silk Roads passed were those when trade was most extensive, and peoples were willing to engage one another. The Silk Road celebrates multiculturalism and the richness that are to be gained through the peaceful mixing of peoples. The term “Silk Road” (or die Seidenstraße in the original German), used to describe the caravan routes that allowed for the commercial activities that joined together China and the Mediterranean worlds in the millennia before the formation of the early

modern world in the 16th century CE, was coined by the German geographer Baron (Freiherr) Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905). He was a great traveler, and from 1868 to 1872, he made several scientific expeditions to various parts of China and began the serious study of China’s western region (Xinjiang) by European scholars. In his wake were to come other foreign expeditions led by European, Japanese, and American scholar-adventurers who initiated the archaeological study of the Silk Road that continues to this day. Comparative philological, historical, and literary studies of ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese texts had been pursued since the 18th century in Europe and had already made clear that connections between China, India, and the Mediterranean world had existed in antiquity and the early medieval periods. The active interest on the part of Western scholars in the cultural development of ancient Central Asia and the Silk Road waned after the Russian Revolution closed easy access to the Soviet Central Asian Republics and the political turmoil in China from the 1920s until the Chinese revolution of 1948, and the subsequent closure of China to most Western scholarship made it impossible to conduct work in Xinjiang. However, Soviet and Chinese investigators continued to conduct archaeological work in the region and publish the results in their respective professional journals. This scholarship was difficult to obtain in the West and so went largely ignored. The fall of the Soviet Union followed by the independence of the Central Asian republics and the opening of China to Western scholars in the 1970s

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and 1980s allowed for a new generation of Western researchers to explore the archaeological remains of Central Asia. This has resulted in numerous joint expeditions, the promulgation of the earlier scholarly literature published by Soviet and Chinese scholars in the decades between 1930 and 1980, and the appearance of new scholarship about the region. Numerous museum exhibitions in the United States, Europe, South Korea, and Japan over the past two decades have brought wide public attention to the ancient Silk Road and Central Asia. There are two important reasons for making ancient Central Asian cultural developments better known to larger public. The first is a matter of correcting a misinterpretation of how civilizations took form on the Eurasian continent. Scholarship has largely ignored the roles that Central Asia played both as the incubator for cultural forms within its own sphere and as the disperser of cultural influences coming into the region from the East, West, South, or North. The second reason is more basic. In our present world, it is essential that we all have a better understanding of the cultural history of the various regions with which we engage. Central Asia is in the spotlight for the war in Afghanistan, for the increased Chinese interest in reviving in a modern form the old network of Silk Road routes for new commercial ventures, and for the rising popularity of cultural and adventure travel in the region. There needs to be a disclaimer here. There never was a “Silk Road.” It was the invention of a German geographer and has become the stuff of modern advertisers and promoters. What did exist for much of the human history of Central Asia was a vast and changing network of commercial exchanges that sometimes began in Central Asia and, at other times, passed through it. Because of the physical geography and the resulting ecological zones, people living in most parts of Central Asia have always needed to supplement their own local resources with basic items from other different regions. Trade has been a fundamental feature of human activity from very early in the story of Central Asia, and the movement of silk into these trade connections actually occurred quite late. However, it is convenient to use Silk Road as a shorthand way of referencing these

trade networks, and I will continue to employ it or its more proper form Silk Roads.

TOPOGRAPHY AND ECOLOGY OF CENTRAL ASIA The ancient Silk Road was, in reality, many roads, and they existed because of the varied landscape of the region. If one looks at a Google map of the center of the Eurasian continent, it becomes immediately apparent that two massive topographical features dominate and create three distinct ecoregions and several ecotones. The first, the steppe lands, bounds the north. Beginning at about the 48th parallel is the belt of grasslands, known as the steppes, spreading from Mongolia in the east to Hungary in the west, only interrupted by two major mountain ranges, the Altai in the east and the Urals in the west. The territory includes the Gansu corridor of modern China that connects it to the ancient Chinese heartland. It passes across the top of the Caspian and the northern regions of the Caucasus and the Black Sea. At their northern edge, the steppes integrate with the great taiga, the coniferous forest of the northern latitudes of Eurasia and North America, that juts finger-like into steppes along the courses of the Volga, Samara, Ural, Irtysh, and Yenisey Rivers. The steppe zone stretches for about 3200 miles (5600 km) and contains some of the most productive soil in the world, the black earth or chernozem. However, the grasslands are not homogeneous. The northern steppes are richer in plant varieties than the south, over eighty species in a single square meter. The eastern steppe grasses are tougher than those in the western region because of the more severe climatic conditions, longer and harsher winters that produce cold, dry springs that yield to scorching summers. Across the steppes roamed the Central Asian herds of ungulates; the Central Asian saiga antelope, a close relative of the Tibetan Plateau’s chiru antelope; the Bactrian two-humped camel; gazelles, and wild horses (Przewalski’s horse), some of which moved between the northern steppe in the summer and the southern steppe in the winter. The steppes provide two different opposing environments that respond to the seasonal cycle. During the winter months, snow closes the mountain highlands making them difficult

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? to access while the lowlands provide for movement and grass, so long as the animal can break through ice or dig away the snow cover. In reverse, when in the summer months the intense heat burns the lowland steppes, the highland meadows provide grass. The second major feature is the great mountain mass that forms a roughly inclined T that defines the center. The top bar created by the Hindu Kush and the Tian Shan Mountains crosses the stem, formed by the Kunlun, Pamir, Karakoram, and Himalaya ranges and the Tibetan Plateau. Surrounding this mountainous complex are three great desert units. The Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts, separated by the Amu Darya River, extend to the northwest and together form the fourth-largest desert region on the globe. The Täklimakan Desert, the second largest; the Tarim Basin; the Turfan Depression; and the Gobi Desert lie to the northeast. The Gobi joins with the eastern end of the Dzungarian Basin that separates the Tian Shan from the Altai ranges and serves to connect the steppe land to the northwest with the deserts below. The Great Indian Desert, or Thar, defines the area to the southwest of the T. Extending from the southern boundary of the Karakum Desert and hemmed in on the east by the Pamirs and south by the Hindu Kush lies the area known as Bactria and to its northwest Margiana. This is a fertile plain watered by the Amu Darya and the Zeravshan Rivers and their tributaries. This landscape sits atop the bed of an ancient sea that 500 million years ago stretched from Western Europe to China. The landmass that forms India was a separate island. The sedimentary formations laid down by the action of rivers flowing into the sea form most of the bedrock. Salt pans and depressions, some poisonous, are found throughout the deserts. Underneath sections of the Karakum Desert are remains of coral reefs. Some 60 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent slammed into the ancient continent of Asia and started the mountain building process that continues to this day, and it brings to the surface the raw materials needed for metallurgy. The crumpling resulting from this collision produced the mountain ranges that, in turn, affect the movement of winds and moisture. The mountain ranges to the south, the Himalayas, Karakoram, and

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Hindu Kush, block the moisture-laden air coming up from the Indian Ocean and cause most of the rains to fall on the southern flanks of these mountains. The winds that moved over the tops of the ranges are largely devoid of moisture, resulting in the increased aridity of the lands from the Tibetan Plateau north and west, creating the great desert expanses. The deserts are not all the same. The Täklimakan, one of the two driest places on the earth, connects with the Turfan Depression, the world’s second-lowest spot. The Täklimakan is a sand desert in which little can survive because of the extreme heat, except for the tamarisk bushes that send down deep taproots to find where water is available. The strong winds blow the huge dunes around changing the landscape dramatically. Those settlements that pushed out from the edges of the desert more into its heart were always at risk of being buried by the shifting sands. The Kyzylkum and Karakum are also sand deserts, but along the foothills of the Kopet Dag Mountains in the south and the Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains in the east are friable bands of clay desert dissected with networks of ridges and gullies, and between the Syr Darya and Lake Balkhash is the Betpakdala, a large clay desert. The stony desert known as the Ustyurt Plateau sits between the Caspian and Aral Seas. Because of the seabed that underlies the region, throughout the Karakum, Kyzylkum, and Täklimakan, salt deserts emerge. The Caspian Sea itself is a salty inland body of water, and seasonal lakes, resting atop the impermeable clay pans, appear in the deserts but are often too salty to sustain life. However, there are pockets of life in the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts where vegetation can thrive and large animals live. In the south, the kulan, the Asiatic wild ass, and the dromedary, the one humped camel, eke out an existence, while in the north, on the border with the steppes, the twohumped Bactrian camel makes a home. There is evidence that Bactrian camels and wild horses roamed parts of the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts in the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene. The Gobi takes several forms: a gravel desert in places and an ironrich sandy desert in others. In the Badain Jaran stand the world’s tallest sand dunes that tend to stand firm because of the salt-tolerant plants that have grown

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on them and anchored them against the force of the winds. Enough vegetation grows in parts of the Gobi to allow for herds of wild Bactrian camels to survive. The Thar forms the northwest coast of the Indian subcontinent. To its north is the vast alluvial plain formed by the delta of the Indus River that brings water into the region. The southern coastal region is extremely saline, but the kulan and the blackbuck antelope can live here feeding on salt-resistant vegetation. These herd animals permit one of the larger felines to exist, the last remnants of the Asiatic lion. Elsewhere in the Thar, the landscape becomes a sand desert, but the area, unlike the other deserts in Central Asia, receives water annually in the form of the monsoon rains. This sporadic watering allows for a greater variety of life in the Thar proper, since many plants and animals have adaptive strategies for living in environments that shift from wet to dry in a regular cycle. There are enough prey animals to support large carnivores like the lynx, the caracal, the Asiatic wildcat, and tigers. The alluvial plain of the Indus delta leads up toward the mountains to the northeast. The high mountain peaks do hold the water as snow and glaciers. Snowfall and glacier ice fields sit in the mountain ranges of the southern half of this region. In the north, the Tian Shan and Altai Mountains provide the water for the rivers. The two great southern rivers, the Ganges and the Indus, run to the sea. The Indus cuts through the Thar. To the north are the great rivers that the Greeks and Romans knew as the Oxus (the Amu Darya) and the Jaxartes (the Syr Darya). The Amu Darya drains from the flanks of the Hindu Kush. Today it empties at the Aral Sea, but in antiquity, it fed the Caspian Sea by way of a dried up river bed, the West Uzboy. It also supplies an underground network of channels that can be tapped by wells in the deserts. Keeping the Amu in its bed are the tugai, riparian forests of poplars, willows, and tamarisks that together with other shrubs hold solid the riverbanks even when the Amu floods, which it does twice a year. The tugai provide habitats for animals and fowl, including pheasants. The river forests are an important feature, for other desert rivers in the Karakum and Kyzylkum and in the Täklimakan moved their beds over time. Many

of the rivers do not end in water holding features like the Caspian and Aral Seas. Instead, they form deltas in the desert itself, and when flooded by the annual melt, the rivers can change dramatically their courses. The waters that run down the slopes of the Kunlun Mountains on the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau push directly into the southern rim of the Täklimakan Desert where they soon disappear in the sands. In the past, these temporary rivers and deltas provided adequate water to sustain the forest along the bank, which supplied wood that is found as the building material and coffins for some of the ancient settlements in the Täklimakan. The Tarim River that parallels the northern edge of the Täklimakan and is fed by waters from the southern slopes of the Tian Shan Mountains is partly underground. It must be accessed from above, like the Amu Darya in places in the Karakum. Those who lived in the oases along the north rim devised a network of access points to the underground river from which they could obtain water, the karez system. Rivers that run into the deserts and empty into the same place or that flow beneath the surface and occasionally break the top form oases. These oases dot the landscape and together with the riparian forests provide habitats for hearty plants and animals that can survive prolonged periods of drought. Here can be found the pistachio tree as well as the wild ass or kulan. The mountains also provide a number of different habitats as they ascend. The heat of the desert lowlands from which many ranges emerge on one side means that temperatures can reach alarming highs in the summer months and little can survive unless water can be found in an oasis or underground stream. However, at about 2000 to 5000 feet up, meadows of grass appear that can survive well into the summer, and at about 6000 feet, the grass cover remains throughout the summer months. Where the coolness lasts through the summer and there is enough water from rain and snow melt, woods appear. Here can be found fruit trees like apricot, plum, apple, and cherry along with almond and walnut trees. Higher up still, to the area just below the snow line, is the subalpine region of another group of hearty plants capable of withstanding sudden blasts of cold. The forested mountain environments are the home to

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? golden eagles, vultures, red deer, yaks, gazelles, argali sheep, mountain goats, and the spotted leopard and, higher up, the snow leopard. The mixture of lowland steppe pastures and highland meadows means that the two regions react differently during the seasonal cycle.

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY, ENVIRONMENT, AND ANCIENT LIFESTYLES In contemporary studies, Central Asia is defined as the region that expands south of the steppe lands and extends from the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang Province in western China and northwest to the Dzungarian Basin and Gobi Desert. The modern countries of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, China (Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia), and Mongolia comprise the region. However, this is too narrow a definition. Neither the physical nor the social geography actually operates in such a restricted way. It is obvious that the ecological realities of Central Asia are tied to those of the steppes and of the great southern expansion from the Amu Darya to the Indus Rivers, what is called the Oxus-Indus stretch. Climatic events that occur in these regions impact what occurs in Central Asia proper. Moreover, no physical barriers protect Central Asia from the movements of peoples. The demographic shifts that punctuate the story of Central Asia are almost always the result of forces coming from these areas that bound it. The famed Silk Road was really not a simple West-East line of trade. It was a changing network of exchange that linked Central Asia south to the Indian region and to the Iranian Plateau, north to the steppes, west to the Black Sea and east to China, Korea, and Japan. Though not technically defined as part of ancient Central Asia, these peripheral lands played important parts in the cultural developments of the region and helped to fuel the commercial activities of the Silk Road. From the taiga belt, furs flowed south and formed a major item of trade. China, to the east, was an integral participant in all aspects of the life in Central Asia after the 2nd century BCE, as was Persia to the southwest at a much earlier date. The eastern Mediterranean, an area

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defined by its Greek cultural identity for our purposes, was a great outside cultural force that actively worked to inform the developments in Central Asia and along the Silk Road from the 3rd century BCE. On the other hand, India, far south, began to interact with Central Asia two thousand years earlier. As can be determined from the discussions of geology and topography, there are three distinctly different environments that will inform this study of ancient Central Asia: the steppes, the mountains, and the deserts. Nomads, who learned to move their herds of horses, Bactrian camels, sheep, goats, and cattle in cyclical fashion, to the highland pastures for the summer months and to the lowland steppes during the winter period, could best exploit the steppes even into parts of the Gobi. The abundance of water in certain places made agricultural activity possible, and some people permanently inhabited settled communities on the steppe lands often where it was also possible to access the ores for metallurgy. A  nomadic culture of shepherds, existed in the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts well into the 20th century CE because water could be accessed by digging wells, though such was not possible in the Täklimakan Desert. However, the Täklimakan and the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts could support settled communities in areas where there were dependable supplies of water. Where the rivers from their mountain sources pushed out into the desert such as northern foothills of the Kopet Dag and of the Kunlun Mountains or along the main channels and tributaries of the Amu Darya people did settle. The northern rim of the Täklimakan Desert and in the Tarim Basin, where the Tarim River flows underground fed from the Tian Shan Mountains, at places where the river was accessible from above ground or where it came to the surface, people established permanent communities. This oasisbased survival strategy sometimes connected with a mountain vertical exploitative system. The mountains provided a number of different settlement options. Some farmers engage in terraced agriculture. By developing the wild fruit and nut tree economies in certain settings, farmers could make use of some of the highland areas. Herders practiced small-scale transhumance in which they moved

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herds of domesticated goats and sheep seasonally up and down the mountainside. These herders were often associated with agricultural settlements, integrating farming and herding. The three major large indigenous herd animals, wild horse, the Bactrian camel, and the yak, were domesticated for human use. The Bactrian camel can serve as a source of meat, leather, and wool, but more important, it was perfectly adapted to serve as a beast of burden and a draft animal for the steppe, desert, and foothill regions of Central Asia. Its large widespread feet can move easily on the various surfaces including snow. It can go for long periods without water, can drink brackish water, and is able to gain nutrition from vegetation that is unpalatable to most other animals. The Bactrian camel was the major long-distance transport animal for the Silk Road caravans, most adaptable to the changing landscapes through which long-distance merchants had to move. The yak was the alternative beast of burden for high altitudes. Like the camel, it too provided meat and wool, but it could also operate carrying heavy loads in the vertiginous topography of the higher mountain elevations. It allowed caravans to negotiate the high passes through many of the mountain ranges. Horses were, perhaps, the least adapted to the environmental variation since they needed a more regular supply of water, could not sustain themselves on bad vegetation, and were unable to walk comfortably on all types of landscape, but they could function extremely well on the great stretches of grassland. They assisted nomadic herders to keep control over the large herds and to move them a distance from the more settled areas to fully exploit the grass options. They also provided speed. It was the full use of the horse that made nomadic herdsmen into nomadic warriors and permitted the nomadic bands to form political entities, nomadic empires, beginning in the Early Iron Age. The human exploitation of these different environmental ecoregions, ecotones and the microenvironments within them helps to explain the history of the cultural developments of the region. In almost all cases, these distinct regional exploitive strategies, even when fully developed, did not provide all that people needed or wanted. This desire

to access resources from different environmental settings led quite early to localized trade and conquest or extortion among the peoples from within Central Asia proper. In time, this trade expanded to include groups from outside, sometimes in peaceful exchanges and other times as the result of military engagements. The Bactria-Margiana plain serves as a natural meeting point for human traffic as it moved north from Indus Valley, from the west across the plain below the Caspian Sea, south from the Karakum or Kyzylkum Deserts, and from east out of the Tian Shan and Pamir ranges. Though the deserts do throw up obstacles to easy crossing, the Amu Darya provides a thoroughfare through the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts north to the steppes. Moreover, it is possible to access via wells the river as it runs underground in the Karakum. Likewise, if movement is along the northern rim of the Täklimakan, the water of the Tarim River can be reached via the karez or qanat system, and along the southern route, the oases are close enough to allow for oasis hopping. The various mountain ranges, though high, can be crossed. The late-19th- and early-20thcentury scholar-adventurers often chose to do their investigations in winter even when they had to cross the high mountain passes. The deserts were cooler in the winter, and the mountain rivers were frozen making crossing them much easier. This may have also been the practice of the ancient merchants, either in large caravans or in small bands. The Bactrian camel can move easily between the steppe and the desert and up into the mountains. It can navigate grass, sand, and snow. When the height becomes too great, the yak, a high-altitude worker who can handle the steep mountain trails and passes, can replace the camel.

SOURCES FOR THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT CENTRAL ASIA AND THE SILK ROAD Our modern understanding of the cultural developments in Central Asia and along the ancient Silk Road comes from three sources: (1) ancient writings, (2) archaeological excavations, and (3) numismatics (the study of coinage). Of these three, the study of

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? ancient writings and numismatics have the longest histories, dating back to the 18th century.

Writings Ancient writings and texts fall into two distinct categories. One group consists of formally composed texts; works intended to be read by others and to have some lasting importance (see Travelers, Early; Texts and Archaeology; Texts and Translations). These include formal histories, geographies, and literary works (poems, plays). The other group contains items directed to a limited audience and usually written in response to a specific need: correspondence, reports, lists (tribute, tax, sacrifice, payment, etc.), bills, and receipts and also religious scriptures and commentaries, most commonly translations of works that came from outside. For the study of ancient Central Asia, the two categories of textual sources fall into a neat geographic distribution. The formal writings are found almost exclusively in the peripheral regions, and so we look to the contemporary ancient writers in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Middle Persian, and later Arabic to provide the formally constructed histories, geographies, and commentaries that attempt to explain the Central Asian region. There is an obvious problem here; our fullest understanding of what life was like and how it had developed in chronological terms in ancient Central Asia is based on the writings of individuals who were looking at it from the outside, as are we. On the other hand, the other group of writings found in Central Asia itself, among the ruins of the cities, towns, monasteries, and graveyards that formed the linkages of the Silk Road, supply contemporary accounts of daily life on the ground. They are not the filtered accounts of writers looking from outside but the record of the day-to-day transactions. They lack the historical consciousness of the works by the other authors but instead provide some sense of the voices of the people who actually lived and worked in the ancient Silk Road centers. There are also fully developed religious texts that we use to reconstruct the religious life along the Silk Road in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Syriac, Armenian, and Chinese.

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The initial study of the formal accounts began in earnest in the 18th and early 19th centuries as Western academicians unearthed more surviving texts by ancient Greek and Latin authors, which contained information about ancient Central Asia. The region acquired greater scholarly interest and relevance as European commercial and political concerns focused on the exploitation of India. The aggressive expansion of European presence in India and China also brought ancient Chinese and Indian along with later Arab and Persian sources to the attention of European scholars. It was by using all of these ancient written accounts that the first European scholars of ancient Central Asia and the Silk Road put together a kind of shadowy history. However, these first attempts at a history would soon be challenged by archaeological discoveries.

Archaeology Formal archaeological investigations for which written, photographic, and drawn records were kept; a systematic approach to a site and the excavating process was maintained; and a publication was issued did not begin until the late 19th century with the works of the scholar-adventurers. These early excavations and publications along with the formation of object collections from the sites in European museums provided a much fuller picture of life along the Silk Road in ancient Central Asia. The many new written documents found came from the region proper and recorded the voices of the peoples themselves. Excavations continued during the decades that much of Central Asia was closed to Western archaeologists. Chinese archaeologists explored the sites along the northern and southern rims of the Täklimakan Desert, while Soviet archaeologists teased out the story of the human occupation of the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts and the steppe lands to the north. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran where Western archaeologists continued to excavate often alongside their local colleagues, the ancient developments of these regions began to become much clearer. Over the past three decades, Western archaeologists have been working with local archaeologists throughout the region of Central Asia. The

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methodologies employed reflect the newest practices for excavating and analyzing finds. The mummified remains have yielded more and more information through genetic and DNA testing (see Linguistic and Genetic Studies). Textual sources are important because they allow ancient voices to be heard. They are always problematic because of which voices actually speak. Objects found in systematic and carefully conducted scientific excavations can somewhat counteract the limitations of textual analysis by providing another voice, as it were. The objects, be they household furnishings or palace decorations, provide some insight into the ways in which ancient peoples responded to their human and physical environments. They can help us to understand how they prepared food, how they occupied their homes, how they envisioned their gods, how they honored their rulers, and how they treated their dead. The archaeological finds, when properly excavated, come with a context and, when compared with similar types of finds also from good archaeological contexts, can allow the archaeologist to see how people were holding on to or jettisoning older forms and ideas, how they were responding to outside influences, and how their lifestyles changed or remained constant over long periods.

Numismatics The study of ancient coins, numismatics, from the regions forming ancient Central Asia preceded all other investigations and served to stimulate the studies of texts and archaeology (see Coinage). Ancient Central Asian coins, bought from market vendors in India, Afghanistan, and Iran, began to be acquired by European visitors in the 18th century. These specimens then found their way to European collections where they excited collectors because of what they suggested. Many bore Greek legends testifying to the impact of the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE. It was the Greek conquest that first introduced coinage on a large scale to the region, and it was the successors of Alexander, the Greek rulers of the region, who began to strike coinage in earnest. Using the coinage, numismatists have determined a chronology of rulers for several parts of Central

Asia. Some of the rulers whose images and names were recorded on the coins could be connected to rulers named in the ancient texts that were being studied at the same period. Other rulers, those not named in other independent sources, were slotted into the chronology, and slowly a kind of political history for Central Asia evolved. The coin images and the legends that accompany them helped numismatists to chart the changing positions of languages as Greek was replaced by other local languages. The coins advertised shifts in political symbolism as rulers presented themselves in different ways and wearing distinct headdresses or costumes. The coin images allow historians to watch the competition between the various religious forces at play throughout Central Asia. The 20th- and 21st-century scientific archaeological excavations continue to generate many new coin finds. Because these come from good archaeological contexts and because they are carefully documented in terms of where they are found and in relation to what else, current numismatic studies provide much richer and more nuanced analyses. It is possible to evaluate how coins were actually used in the dayto-day economic life of Central Asia communities.

ANCIENT PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES As the Europeans became more and more engaged with India in the 18th century, philologists came to realize that the ancient Indian sacred language of Sanskrit was related to ancient Greek, and as the study of ancient European languages progressed in the 19th century, it became clear that Sanskrit was actually related to a large number of European languages. It also shared much in common with Persian, and its connections to more ancient forms of Persian became noticeable when Achaemenid inscriptions of the 5th century BCE were deciphered. As inscriptions and some texts in Middle Persian, the language of the Sasanian Persian Empire, were worked through, the association could not be ignored. Moreover, the ancient Indian religious Vedic texts of Hinduism, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, showed linkages with the ancient Persian religious text of Zoroastrianism, the Avesta. By late 19th century, European philologists posited the existence

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? of an ancient people who had spoken the language from which all these later related languages derived: Indo-European (or better proto-Indo-European). The religious features common to the Persian and Indian texts and other related religious beliefs and practices known from other groups, now assumed to be of Indo-European origin, came to be treated as part of the shared cultural heritage that this early proto-Indo-European group had bequeathed to its descendants. The discovery of written documents from sites in Central Asia during the early excavations and investigations of the scholar-adventurers and the later finds of Soviet and Chinese archaeologists along with more recent finds have provided the evidence that several of the ancient languages spoken in Central Asia, all the way to China itself, were in the Indo-European family. It is now accepted that during the period of our study, several peoples living in Central Asia spoke Indo-European languages. However, they were not all the same and had separated from the protoIndo-European mother tongue at different moments and via different daughter languages. For the study of lost ancient languages, philologists use a number of comparative devices. One is the creation of word lists usually placing words for common social items against one another to look for the degree of separation, that is, the words for mother and father that are assumed basic and among the most ancient words that commonly derived languages would share. For the study of ancient Indo-European languages, two of the more important findings from these analyses have been those that work with vocabulary associated with horses, carts, and chariots, and another the vocabulary of textile manufacturing (see Linguistic and Genetic Studies). Among the Bronze Age finds in excavations in the steppes of Central Asia are horses, horse tack, carts, and chariots. They are among the earliest, if not the earliest, discoveries of this type of material and have led to the conclusion that the horse must have been domesticated on the steppes and that it was on the steppes that chariots were first invented. The archaeology combined with the philological studies have prompted many scholars to ask where this occurred and when in the history of the spread

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of Indo-European languages. While not universally agreed to, there is consensus that this all happened in the Caucasus sometime about the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th millennia BCE (see Domestication of the Horse). The knowledge of the domesticated horse and later of the chariot (see Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession of Horse-Drawn Chariots, artifact 30) then spread as Indo-European speakers moved out of the region and developed into the separate ancient societies, the Greeks and Celts of Europe and the Indians and the Iranians of Central and southwestern Asia. The story has become a bit more complicated. Because of the special climatic conditions in parts of the Täklimakan Desert, ancient textiles have survived. Some textiles from the east of the Täklimakan were made using a weaving technique known as twill, in which the weft threads are arranged in a diagonal pattern. For each horizontal row, the weaver moves the weft thread one space over on the warp threads from the row below. The fabric produced is distinctive, and the technique was known to have been used by ancient European weavers. It was not known in China until much later. It is possible that weavers in both Europe and Central Asia discovered the technique separately, but two other findings suggest that such was not the case. Comparative word lists show that weavers in ancient Europe and in Central Asia used similar terms for aspects of weaving. Textile analysts have found that among the surviving fragments of twill weave from the Täklimakan, some are in the distinctive checkerboard pattern that is commonly referred to as tartan, a pattern well documented in the ancient European textile finds. It is now generally agreed that the separation of some, if not all, of the eastern speakers of Indo-European languages from the speakers of western or European Indo-European languages occurred after the development of wool textile manufacturing by weaving, something also dated to about the 4th millennium BCE (see Wool Working and Carpet Making). At this moment, it is generally accepted that the original speakers of proto-Indo-European first appeared in the Caucasus, though they expanded out into the steppe region. They were probably

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the original domesticators of the wild horse and later probably the inventors of the chariot. They were certainly early users of carts and are perhaps the people represented by two prehistoric steppe cultures identified as Sintashta and Andronovo (2800–1600 BCE). These developments gave these first speakers the ability to move, and move they did, but for what reasons remain unknown. Quite early some headed west down onto the Anatolian Peninsula where they became the Hittites in the Bronze Age (2000–1450 BCE). Somewhat later, others embarked on a long journey that eventually led them to Europe or went east, southeast into the Iranian Plateau and northwestern India and eventually regions of the Karakum, Kyzylkum, and Täklimakan Deserts. These populations carried not only the same knowledge of horses, carts, and chariots but also a shared weaving technology. Each of these early populations of Indo-European speakers then gave birth to daughters, the ancestors of the Indo-European languages spoken today. The ancient documents and textile finds from the archaeological excavations in Central Asia testify to the presence of these speakers of ancient Indo-European daughter languages. Their later beliefs, rituals, and social practices can be gleaned from the study of the surviving primary textual sources that survive from the region or about which we read in the ancient texts written by the authors looking at the region from outside. These early Indo-European arrivals did not find an unpopulated landscape. Earlier inhabitants had developed strategies to survive in many parts of Central Asia. Moreover, there were peoples on the periphery who were also already engaging with or were about to start engaging with Central Asian communities, peoples grouped into the language families that surrounded ancient Central Asia, Harappan, Dravidian, Tibetan, Chinese to the east, and Elamite, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian to the west. The cultural developments that took place during the roughly three millennia that concern this book (2000 BCE–1000 CE) in ancient Central Asia must be understood as products of many different sources that interacted, sometimes peacefully and sometime contentiously.

CULTURAL HISTORY FROM PREHISTORY TO THE ARRIVAL OF ISLAM The lay of the land, along with the particular history of excavations in Central Asia affected by the political history of the last century, has created a situation in which it is easiest to discuss the region as discrete units. The steppes divide into western and eastern zones. The area of the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts with the Kopet Dag Mountains comprises the western region. The Täklimakan Desert, Tarim Basin and Turfan Depression, Gobi Desert, and Gansu corridor, with the surrounding Tian Shan and Kunlun Mountains, are the eastern portion. To this west-east unit must be added the Oxus-Indus stretch with the modern country of Afghanistan geographically defined by the Pamir, Karakoram, and Hindu Kush Mountains with their valleys, the plain of the Indus River and the Thar Desert. Cultural and political history often adds the Gangetic Plain to this area. Each sector has its own early history, though by the time of the Bronze Age, there is some degree of interaction. By the end of 1st millennium BCE, all of Central Asia and the Oxus-Indus stretch is working as an integrated region in which events in one part impact developments in another.

Earliest Developments (until 3000 BCE) Finds of Stone Age tools from the Kazakh steppes in the east and southeast provide evidence that these regions were inhabited by foragers and hunters of the wild horses, saiga antelope, and onagers in the later Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. A  similar situation also obtained for the grasslands of the Pontic-Caspian region (the steppe joining the areas north of the Black and Caspian Seas). Cattle herders, perhaps moving from the Danube Valley steppe region, entered the Pontic-Caspian area about 5800– 5700 BCE. These people were also farmers and brought grain-based agriculture with them to the region. Within the Caucasus region, there are finds of Paleolithic exploitation, and along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, there are Neolithic finds. In the region known as the Khorezm (Khwarazm, Chorasmia), which includes south of the Aral Sea, a

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? part of the Karakum Desert where the Amu Darya forms its delta and extends south to the oasis at Khiva, there is evidence for occupation beginning in the Neolithic period. Excavated sites show populations of fisher folk and hunters who were making stone tools and stamped pottery. Elsewhere in modern Uzbekistan are finds of Paleolithic petroglyphs, rock engravings. At the southwestern edge of the Karakum Desert, in the Kopet Dag piedmont, archaeologists have unearthed an extensive cultural sequence attested at several sites. It begins with the emergence of the Neolithic village-based Jeitun (Djeitun) culture with mud-brick houses and distinctive pottery. The Neolithic eventually expands and develops into two distinctive types of exploitation. In the piedmont area of the Kopet Dag were sedentary villages supported by agriculture with sheep and goat pastoralism. In the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts, hunter-fisher-gatherer folk moved seasonally from established base camps to more ephemeral sites in order to follow the seasonal options offered by the landscape. These two patterns of exploitation continued into the 3rd millennium and the Chalcolithic Namazga culture (I–IV) of the Kopet Dag. Paleolithic hunter bands traversed Bactria, and the region shared in the early cultural developments of the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts. To date, there is no evidence for Stone Age occupation in the Täklimakan Desert or in the Hindu Kush, but Paleolithic stone tools have been recovered from the Tian Shan Mountains as well as in the Pamirs. There is also evidence for Paleolithic occupation in the Indus River system that extends into the Neolithic and the eventual formation of village-level cultures by the early 4th millennium BCE.

Bronze Age—Nomads and Settled Peoples (3000–1200 BCE) The Bronze Age in Central Asia was dynamic. New peoples entered and introduced adaptive strategies to exploit the varied environmental niches and possibly brought metallurgical technology. The domestication of the horse allowed for nomadic cultures to develop as it became possible to move large herds of cattle and sheep deeper into the grasslands in search of good meadows and adequate water (see

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Domestication of the Horse). It also permitted these herds to be grazed in the lowlands during the winter and the highlands during the summer, and so the two different ecozones became the domains of the long-distance large-scale nomadic herder. The spread of bronze working technology from the Maikop culture of the northern Caucasus Mountains onto the steppes possibly stimulated the hybridization of long wool-bearing sheep. Nomads could have paid for the bronze and other trade goods with the wool. In time, however, nomads established their own bronze working settlements. The metallurgy technology and breed of wooly sheep along with some additional manifestations of a new culture were carried east in migrations sometime in the mid-4th millennium BCE, all the way to the Altai Mountains. This nomadic culture, known as the Afanasievo culture (3300–2400 BCE), may well represent the first influx of proto-Indo-European speakers into the eastern steppe region and Southern Siberian and perhaps the bringers of what would become the Tocharian branch in the Tarim Basin. They may have also brought with them the knowledge of the wheel and the cart. This period of spreading Bronze Age nomad culture across the steppes also saw the first appearance of massive burial mounds, kurgans, in the western steppes north of the Pontic-Caspian region and the evidence of long-distance trade across the steppe lands. These major features in the landscape announced the arrival of a more stratified society among the Pontic-Caspian nomadic groups. Among the graves have been identified those of metalworkers who took their tools with them, suggesting the special status accorded to these individuals who knew the secrets of how to turn one metal, copper, into another stronger and harder metal, bronze. By about 2100 BCE, something was changing again in the nomad world of the western steppes; the chariot had been introduced or developed there. These were associated not with nomadic herders but with more, sedentary bands who lived in fortified settlements, which contained metalworking districts. This group, named after the site of Sintashta, has been posited as the Indo-European speakers who carried the language family south through the Iranian Plateau

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to northwest India to become the Indo-Aryan subfamily of Indo-European languages. During this same period, developments continued in the region of Kopet Dag, and the Namazga sequence continued as V and VI when the earliest evidence of proto urbanization for the region can be detected in the archaeological record. A movement of people from this area onto the southern Karakum Desert and the Bactria-Margiana Plain may have been responsible for the traces of urbanization that suddenly appear here as well and show clear associations with the Namazga sites. However, there are enough differences to also posit an indigenous development. The settlement of these deserts was only possible by the adaptive strategy of oasis exploitation, which was dependent on irrigation agriculture. The major architectural features of these sites are distinct and eventually evolve into strongly fortified structures (kalats) that are recognized as the telltale evidence of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus Civilization, present by the late 3rd millennium BCE. Though these large complexes have been identified as temples and palaces based on analogies with contemporaneous structures in Mesopotamia (see City Planning), it has also been suggested that they had quite different functions here in Central Asia. Using the evidence for the importance of trade in later Central Asian history, it has been theorized that these may have been early architecturally formalized marketplaces and caravansaries, which would mean that the region was developing economically and politically in a manner quite different from the much better understood region of Mesopotamia. That there was some interaction between the BMAC sites and the Indus Valley Civilization is hinted at by the presence of an Indus-style settlement at Shortughai in the valley of the Amu Darya and the finds of Indus-made objects in some BMAC sites. The Early Bronze Age developments, perhaps appearing about 2500 BCE, indicate that BMAC was one of the early-urbanized civilizations on the Eurasian landmass along with those in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and southeastern Iran. There is some limited evidence in the finds at sites from these regions to suggest that the areas were in contact,

but each seems to have been forming according to its own specific needs. For the Kopet Dag/BMAC developments, some scholars have argued that from the start, the ecology of Central Asia forced an integration of the settled agriculturalists and the pastoral nomadic stockbreeders of the steppes. If this is indeed the case and if the early urban centers of the region were dealing with the other great urbanized regions of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and southern Iran, then from the Bronze Age on, it is necessary to think in terms of a complex network of trade and exchange that linked several different and distant ecological zones together. Migrants from the BMAC may have carried their knowledge of oasis irrigation–based agriculture to the east, or nomads may have moved south from the northern steppes, the regions of the Afanasievo and later Andronovo cultures, bringing with them strategies for both herding and agriculture. Whichever happened, the evidence suggests that Caucasoid peoples first occupied the Tarim Basin during the early 2nd millennium BCE and quickly were able to make the hostile environment yield to oasis irrigation agriculture. Several distinct archaeological cultures have been identified from the excavations of mummies and burials along the north edge of the Täklimakan Desert, with the Qäwrighul culture centered on the Könchi River being the most extensive. These peoples very possibly spoke an Indo-European language that evolved into the Tocharian groups (A, B, and C). No early finds of Mongoloid peoples have appeared, so far, among the early mummies from Xinjiang, suggesting that the Chinese populations were not yet pushing west into the desert of the Tarim Basin (see Funerary Practices). The finds consist solely of graves at this point. Archaeologists have not unearthed any settlement remains. It is also during this same Early Bronze Age period that another group of IndoEuropean speakers in the family of the Indo-Iranian languages moved south in the great migration that brought new peoples, new technology—including the chariot—and new religious beliefs and practices into western Central Asia and south to northern India. By the time that these new arrivals came to the Thar and the valley of the Indus River, the older

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Early Bronze Age civilization of the Indus Valley had probably already collapsed (see Indus Valley Civilization). The Thar and the cultural developments in the region appear to play no major role in the formation of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age cultures in Central Asia and, for this study, do not emerge as important again until Roman trade into the ports in northwestern India beginning in the 1st century CE (see Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure, artifact 24).

Iron Age—Empires of Nomads and Settled Peoples (1200–325 BCE) During the Late Bronze Age, the environment in the steppes began to change. There was increased humidity and combined with an overall temperature fluctuation that by the 10th and 9th century BCE resulted in a more extreme form of mobile pastoralism possibly accompanied by a population increase, the creation of larger herds of animals, and even greater dependency on the horse for herd management. Peoples began large-scale migrations, and there seems to have been a change in leadership structure. At the site of Arzhan in a valley of the Uyuk River in the Minusinsk Basin in Tuva (southern Siberia) stands tomb Arzhan 1, consisting of a burial pit topped by a compartmented structure built of timber and all covered under a circular platform 100 m in diameter and 3 to 4 m high constructed of large stones. In the compartments were the bodies of 15 individuals and 160 saddled and bridled horses, all probably killed to accompany the deceased in the burial chamber. The two bodies in the burial pit were laid out with furs and ornaments of gold and turquoise, along with daggers, a battle-ax, and bronze arrowheads. This was an example of a conspicuous consumption burial, represented by massive investments of labor for the construction of the tomb itself and extraordinarily lavish expenditures of wealth in terms of the grave goods including sacrificed humans and horses. It marks the rise of new types of leaders, individuals capable of directing marauding groups in search of booty and honor. What made these nomads so powerful was their command of mounted warfare (see Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze with an Applique of a

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Steppe Warrior in the Pose of the Parthian Shot, artifact 38) and their abundant supply of horses. As they headed south in great migratory movements (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires), these new steppe nomads began to make themselves felt by the sedentary societies to their south. The first were the Cimmerians who ravaged much of Anatolia in the 8th–7th century BCE, but the major group was the Scythians, who probably emerged from the Altai Mountains and headed west. They eventually established themselves in the Pontic region above the Black Sea. Herodotus’s account (see Travelers, Early), along with archaeological investigations, places them in southern Ukraine along the Dnieper and Dniester Rivers. There was no centralized authority within the nomad societal structure. Individual rulers emerged to control certain groups, but the new form of nomad organization spread throughout the steppes. The Greeks would know the people, with whom they regularly interacted, as Scythians and located them in the Pontic steppes above the Black Sea. The Persians, who dealt with them mostly in the northeastern region of the empire and onto the Kazakh steppes, recorded them as Sakās. Herodotus, drawing on the work of an earlier writer, Aristeas, was able to populate much of the southern steppes with specifically named peoples, each not only sharing much in common with the Scythians but also possessing distinct cultural traits. From this point forward, there was regular interaction between the settled folk and the nomads, sometimes peaceful and mutually beneficial engagements and sometimes mercenary and predatory confrontations. These new nomadic groups may have originated in the Altai-Sayan Mountain region, where the Arzhan kurgans had had been erected, and now included a stratum of individuals whose lives were spent as warriors in the saddle. They might menace a trading caravan or provide protection for a price. They could serve as mercenaries for settled communities or could raid territories striking fear into the inhabitants who now needed to protect themselves from the onslaught of mounted warriors. The result of the new form of nomadic structure was the emergence of a highly stratified society. Those in the warrior group formed the highest stratum and reaped

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the rewards of vast quantities of portable wealth sometimes maintained in the form of foreign goods, sometimes worked by nomadic artists in pieces in the “Animal Style” (see Animal Style). The treasure was taken to the tomb by these individuals, of which the most impressive example is the Sakā Golden Warrior from Issyk in southern Kazakhstan (see Golden Warrior, artifact 34). The settled regions around Central Asia were also changing over the same period. The Assyrians emerged as the major power in Mesopotamia and, by the 8th century BCE, had embarked on a pattern of conquest that would yield them the first true empire in history. As Assyrian armies headed north, they encountered the Scythians whom they sometimes fought and other times employed as mercenaries. The contact brought high-value Mesopotamian products again into the steppes. By the 7th century BCE, the Greek city-states of the Aegean had penetrated the Black Sea and established daughter colonies on the northern shores. These Greek outposts were mainly commercial enterprises, and they found the Scythians willing to participate in exchanges. Settled Scythian communities could provide grains, other foodstuffs, and slaves, while the nomad bands could supply both the products of the pastoral economy and portions of the booty from raids. In return, craft workers in the Greek colonies manufactured items especially to suit the tastes of the new Scythian elite (see Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35). The East during this same period saw the culmination of China’s Late Shang Dynasty. The Shang had created a centralized state in the previous five centuries, and in the Late period, beginning about 1200 BCE, the dynasty took a new interest in the nomads on their northern border; the chariot appears for the first time in elite Shang burials (see Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession of HorseDrawn Chariots, artifact 30). Besides bringing the chariot itself from the nomad lands, the Chinese must have also imported from the steppes the trainers for the horses as well as accessory fittings needed to make the chariot. During the succeeding Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BCE), the chariot’s popularity increased, and the four-horse chariot made

its appearance. This chariot required even greater skill to operate. The chariot for the Late Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties was used in the aristocratic pursuits of warfare and hunting, was important for parading, and was a significant element in the conspicuous consumption burial rites of the elite. The importation of the chariot, and probably horses at the start, brought the Chinese court into commercial contact with the steppe peoples, and since this was an exchange of high-status goods for each partner, the connections had to have been in the upper echelons of each society. Unfortunately, the Chinese historical records provide no help in understanding how this exchange took place. However, the chariots did not come alone; copper-alloyed knives with distinctive animal head handles and circular bronze mirrors with loop handles attached to the center of the back, the products of steppe metallurgists as elite grave goods for the steppe nomad aristocracy, are found in elite burials of the Late Shang. Among what the Chinese must have offered were cast-bronze helmets, some of which that have been found as far away as the Scythian Pontic steppes. Central Asia went through another major shift in the 6th century BCE with the establishment of the first true Eurasian empire, the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The Persians had emerged in the Early Iron Age from among the several speakers of Iranian languages on the Iranian Plateau and elsewhere in Central Asia who had separated from the larger Indo-Iranian family probably in the Late Bronze Age. The Achaemenids, who took their name from a legendary founder—Achaemenes, burst on the scene in the mid-6th century BCE. In less than fifty years led by the first Achaemenid king of kings, Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE), they conquered all the territories surrounding the Iranian Plateau. They divided the newly acquired territories into administrative units, satrapies, four of which covered the area of Central Asia. Hyrcania and Parthia incorporated the region south of the Caspian Sea, while Chorasmia and Sogdiana represented the Karakum and Kyzylkum Deserts with their two great rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The eastern satrapies of Bactria, Gandhāra, Arachosia, and Sindh included the Hindu Kush Mountains and the area south to the

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Indus River Delta and the Thar. From this point on, these names would remain the way in which ancient Western writers would refer to these regions. The Persian Empire succeeded in uniting diverse peoples and territories from the Mediterranean in the west to the border of the Indian subcontinent in the east, from the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Oman in the south to the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, and Aral Sea in the north. The Persian king of kings annually called together representatives of the empire to meet and pay tribute in the Nowruz or New Year’s celebrations at Persepolis (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs). Achaemenid rulers exploited the special skills developed by peoples within their own regions in building projects like Persepolis and in the makeup of the armies used for conquest and maintenance of order. Relations with the nomad forces to the north, the Sakā in the Persian accounts, were volatile. Some rulers employed nomad mercenaries; some rulers fought them—usually with poor results—and others were able to maintain a degree of peace. However, those sedentary peoples living on the frontier with the nomadic communities could find themselves heavily harassed at times. The 250  years of Achaemenid Persian rule also witnessed the first full flowering of nomadic culture in the steppe region. It is during this period that Herodotus wrote his Histories, and so his descriptions of the range and variety of nomadic lifestyles offer a view into how successful these nomadic groups were at carving out niches for themselves. The archaeological finds from this period of cemeteries with great mounded tombs, the kurgans, of the warrior elite, testify to the wealth acquired by some individuals in nomad society. These kurgans were filled with foreign objects acquired through payments, trade or plunder (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27). Along with these are high-quality pieces made for the deceased by artisans in the peripheral settled areas like the Black Sea and Sogdiana or by artisans in the nomadic communities themselves that provide the evidence of nomadic patronage of the arts. Though the origins for the “Animal Style” probably go back to the Late Bronze Age and the nomads of the Altai Mountains, the spread of the style and the development

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of regional variations occurred during these centuries of Persian power. The “Animal Style” has become synonymous with nomadic steppe culture (see Animal Style), and during these centuries, certain Animal Style motifs were used by artists at the Achaemenid court, suggesting the kind of cultural interpenetration that began to happen. The lack of many surviving administrative records or firsthand historical accounts by writers living in the Persian Empire and the limited archaeological investigations of the Persian strata at Central Asian sites make it difficult to assess the effect of the Persian governance on Central Asia. There may have been some settlement in Gandhāra as suggested by some limited archeological findings in Bhir Mound at Taxila. The same may be the case in Sogdiana at the modern city of Samarkand (Afrasiab). However, the physical appearance of these early settlements is unknown. On the other hand, the finds of mummies in the cemeteries of the Täklimakan indicate that the settlements established in the oases of the north and east during the Late Bronze Age had continued to flourish and spread during the Iron Age. The finds from the cemetery at Chärchän (Qiemo Xian) or Zaghunluq (Zahongluke) 400 km (250 miles) southwest Lop Nor are dated to the 6th century BCE, and those in the Turfan Depression date to the 5th and 4th century BCE.

Alexander and the Joining of Central Asia to the Mediterranean Central Asia was to experience one of its most massive realignments with the conquest of the Persian Empire by the combined Macedonian and Greek army led by Alexander the Great. Alexander’s achievement can be credited to many things, but no small part was played by his charismatic leadership abilities, a feature about which most of the ancient writers comment. In a decade (334–323 BCE), he took his troops from Greece on a wave of conquest that saw them move across the Persian Empire and into its peripheral regions. By the end, the new Macedonian Empire stretched from the Greek mainland to the northwest border of India. All of western Central Asia was now joined to the Mediterranean world.

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His death left the empire without a ruler and ushered in a period of constant fighting among his generals. When peace was reestablished, Central Asia was attached to the large swath of territory that had been carved out by Seleucus I Nicator, which began the Seleucid Empire. Its eastern territories consisted of the heartland of the destroyed Achaemenid Empire on the Iranian Plateau, Mesopotamia, and western Central Asia to the Indus Valley. The Seleucid kings followed the pattern that Alexander had started. They were city builders (see City Planning) and used the urbanization programs as a means of displaying the new political and cultural reality to their non-Greek and non-Macedonian subjects. Alexander had founded many cities in the conquered regions, though none have actually been excavated. The one new Greek city so far found and excavated in Central Asia is Aï Khanum (“Lady Moon” in local Uzbek [see Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele, artifact 42]), probably established during the early years of the Seleucid Empire. Its ancient name has not survived. It sits in northern Afghanistan located strategically on a crossing of the Amu Darya River and occupies a cape defined by the Amu Darya on the west and the smaller Kowkcheh (Kokcha) on the south. A large mountain mass defines its eastern side and holds the citadel, and the main city was laid out on the flat land alongside the Amu Darya River. The rivers and the mountain mass provided protection to the settlement on three sides, and so the only easy approach was from the north, which was protected by a wall. Aï Khanum was only one of many new cities founded by the first Seleucid kings. Its plan and many of its public buildings betray its Greek conception. It possessed two of the expected elements of a Greek city, a theater and a gymnasium. It was not a polis governed by a city council, and so no boule has been unearthed. Instead, it reflects the reality of Hellenistic governance with its palace and associated treasury. Its citadel and defensive wall on the north entrance testify to the fact that it was planted in a hostile land. Bactria had not surrendered easily. It took Alexander two years to pacify Bactria and Sogdiana. Within the confines of the city,

there are remains of well-carved Corinthian capitals, Greek inscriptions—including a listing of the Delphic precepts on the base of the funerary monument for Kineas, one of the founders of the city—and short Greek texts surviving on pieces of parchment and papyrus (indicating trade with Greek-governed Egypt from where the papyrus originated). There are also some finds of good Greek-style sculpture, statues for a temple, antefixes for public buildings, and funerary monuments in the city’s cemetery. All this is testimony to the presence of Greeks and Hellenophiles in the city. Though no other large-scale Greek city remains have been located in Central Asia, archaeologists have identified the ruins of an Alexandria in the Paropamisadae in ruins near modern Begram and another Alexandria near Kandahar. The finds of Greek inscriptions testify to the degree to which Greek was the lingua franca for administrative matters within the territory governed by Greeks. It was also the language for coinage (see Coinage). The Greek conquest introduced the use of coins through the Seleucid Empire. Several mints struck coins for the Seleucid monarchs, and there may have been a mint at Aï Khanum. The coinage must have stimulated new types of economic and commercial ventures. Greeks had developed coinage much earlier and so were skilled at employing it for a variety of purposes. They certainly understood the value of having several denominations of coins tied to one another through a system of weights and values, which permitted much more refined exchanges and allowed for coinage of small denominations to be used in the marketplace. Large denominations worked well to pay for troops, particularly for the services of mercenaries. Coin images allowed rulers to make political statements and promote religious views. The coin types employed presented the image of the ruler, a portrait on the front or obverse, and often a Greek god on the back or reverse. By skillfully pairing obverse and reverse types, the Greek kings promoted themselves and their associations with certain gods. The coinage was a vehicle by which the new political, social, and religious orders were introduced to subject peoples.

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Central Asia was not destined to remain a region of the Seleucid Empire. It was far too distant from the centers of Seleucid rule and culture in the far west of the empire, and by 255 BCE, Bactria had separated itself off as an independent kingdom under the rule of Diodotos (see Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I [222–180 BCE], artifact 19). The initial core of the kingdom was concentrated in the Amu Darya River valley, or the Oxus River valley as Greek writers knew it. Aï Khanum was part of this early kingdom. The coinage, now minted locally, reflected the regional concerns of the Bactrian kings. During the 2nd century BCE, the Bactrian rulers expanded their kingdom through a series of wars of aggression that resulted in the formation of an empire that stretched from the Oxus River south to the Hindu Kush. Here the Bactrian kings encountered the Mauryan Empire, which had expanded from northern India to take over the former Greek possessions of Arachosia and Paropamisadae in the Hindu Kush of southern Afghanistan. There is no doubt that this policy of aggrandizement resulted in the spread of Greek cultural forms broadly across western Central Asia and south through the Oxus-Indus stretch. Greek Central Asia was what has been called a settler society. The Greek society that developed there was the result of colonists bringing with them parts of the homeland. Macedonian and Greek soldiers who took advantage of Alexander’s offer to stay and transform the conquered regions established the initial Greek communities. They did this by marrying local women and producing children who became the new elite ruling class. Since these were subjected territories being ruled from Central Asia proper, the degree of Hellenization must have been much stronger than would have been the case with conquered regions ruled by a foreign culture from a great distance. However, the question of how deep and meaningful was the penetration of Greek culture into Central Asia remains a point of debate. There is no doubt that the Greek domination changed Central Asia. The use of coinage would remain to this day the means by which most economic transactions took place and the in rulership were most widely announced. Greek language would be used at least until the early 1st

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century CE. Greek visual forms were integrated into the repertoire of artistic vocabulary, and many Greek gods and heroes were worked into the religious pantheon where they were often melded with other native and foreign deities (see Persistence of Classicism). The history of the Greek presence can only be sketched. The historians of Alexander’s conquests, whose writings are still extant, composed their books in the Mediterranean world not in Asia, and those that are extant were written in the Roman period. None of the ancient Central Asian Greek royal archives survives. Ancient authors from outside Central Asia mention only one text by an author who had firsthand knowledge of the region from the period, Megasthenes’s Indika, and his work exists only in a fragmentary form (see Travelers, Early), incorporated into the writings of other authors. Megasthenes was a Greek-speaking ambassador from the Seleucid Empire to the Mauryan court, and so he was not a Central Asian Greek. If there were other Greek-writing Central Asian authors, neither their names nor the titles of their writings survive. The few inscriptions provide tidbits of information but nothing that can be used to outline the historical record. The sources for the Greek presence are the writings of later Greek and Latin authors in the West. These authors only make occasional reference to Greek Central Asia, to what they called Bactria. It is from these isolated pieces of information and from the abundant finds of coinage struck by the various Greek kings that the history of Greek Central Asia has been reconstructed. The newly established Bactrian Empire that extended south to the Hindu Kush and was governed from the capital of Bactra in the north did not last long. In the final decades of the 3rd century BCE, Sogdiana separated itself and came under local rule. In 145 BCE Bactria was overrun by nomads from the East, first the Sakā and then the Yuezhi who were pushed out of their homeland by the Xiongnu. By 130 BCE, the Greek control of Bactria ended, and in 70 BCE, the Yuezhi took control of the Kabul region of modern Afghanistan. In the wake of the collapse of a Greek empire, what emerged were a series of small, hybrid kingdoms—combining

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Greek and local indigenous cultures—in the regions of Gandhāra and the Punjab, which are referred to as the Indo-Greek kingdoms. Greek-speaking rulers would operate here until the end of the 1st century BCE as is evidenced by the coin finds and by the existence of one surviving writing, the Pāli Buddhist text, Milindapañhā, or the Questions of Menander, in which one of the kings of a hybrid kingdom engages a Buddhist sage visiting his court in a philosophical debate. During this same period, India entered into its first period of unification. Under the rule of the dynasty of the Mauryas, founded by Chandragupta Maurya, most of the independent entities that had formed in India during the middle of the 1st millennium BCE were conquered and incorporated into a single empire. The empire emerged in the wake of Alexander’s disruption of the old order in the region and lasted from 326 to 180 BCE. The Mauryan emperors kept the Seleucid Empire at bay and succeeded in bringing Indus Valley and the Thar under their control. When the Indo-Greek kingdoms emerged in the region in the 1st century BCE after the collapse of the Mauryan and Bactrian Empires, they included a strong Indian cultural element in their makeup. It was in the setting of the Mauryan Empire that early Buddhism began to flourish (see Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding, artifact 47). It had first appeared sometime between the 6th and the 4th century BCE in northern India, but under the fosterage of the Mauryan emperors, particularly Ashoka (see Ashoka Pillar, artifact 31), the religion began to develop and spread outside of the Ganges River Basin. The Buddha Shakyamuni had been born as Prince Siddhārtha Gautama in Rupandehi District of Lumbini Province in modern Nepal in the mid-6th century BCE and was raised in Kapilavastu. His discov­ ery of humanity’s suffering set him on the path to find an end to the repeated suffering endured by humanity. He abandoned his princely life and entered on his quest. Many of his experiences took place on sites in the Gangetic Plain of northern India. It was while meditating under a Bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) in the town of Bodh Gaya that he attained enlightenment from which he would

formulate the teachings that serve as the basis of the religion of Buddhism. He taught the Middle Way (Skt. Madhyamā-pratipad) as the spiritual path to follow to end suffering (Dukkha) and the cycle of rebirths (Samsāra). To end the cycle was to become enlightened and to enter the state of Buddhahood (Samyaksaṃbuddha). Until he was 80, he continued to teach the Dharma, which in Buddhism means the cosmic law and order, and how the following of the Middle Way would lead to enlightenment and Buddhahood. He died or entered Nirvana at Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh (see Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana, artifact 11). Over the centuries, his followers established several schools of Buddhist thought usually with their communities of monks forming a monastic order (sangha) with a monastery (vihāra) (see Monasticism). His words, kept alive for centuries in the oral traditions of the various schools of Buddhism, were eventually written down to the form the sutras (see Texts and Translations) and the canonical scriptures of the various schools. The Mauryan emperors, particularly Ashoka, supported the Buddhist enterprise. They built monasteries and embellished pilgrimage sites with architectural features. Buddhism was never the state religion, but it does seem to have played a prominent role in Ashoka’s governing program after his conversion following his bloody victory over the kingdom of Kalinga. The simultaneous economic development that was happening helped the spread of Buddhism under the patronage of the Mauryan Dynasty. India was into its second great spurt of urbanization, which was encouraged by the Mauryan systems of administration, finance, and security. Agricultural production was able to support the burgeoning urban classes. Domestic economic activities increased, and internal and external trade expanded. Buddhism was just one of the religions that flourished on the subcontinent. However, its abandonment of the traditional concern with the caste system that was such a fundamental feature of the older Vedic religious system helped it to thrive in the heterogeneous settings provided by cities with their mix of peoples. It also permitted the religion to move out of the Indian cultural orbit. It began to

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? spread into Indo-Greek kingdoms by the 1st century BCE as evidence by the story of king Menander’s (Milinda) debate with a Buddhist sage recorded in the Milindapañhā.

Between Rome and China New Central Asian Empires By the 1st century BCE, the Seleucid Empire had been reduced to a rump state consisting of the very western region of Syria. The expanding Roman Empire annexed Syria in 64 BCE with the Roman general Pompey’s overthrow of the last Seleucid monarch, Philip II. Rome, for the first time, was now facing directly Central Asian powers. The Seleucid Empire had been steadily losing territory almost since its foundation. Chandragupta Maurya had been able to wrest away a landmass west of the Indus Valley that stretched from the Hindu Kush in modern Afghanistan through Balochistan province of Pakistan. The Bactrian kingdom became independent in 255 BCE. Then in the mid-2nd century BCE, the remaining Persian sections of the empire began to be acquired by a new force, the Parthians, starting with the conquests of Herat, Babylonia, Media, and Persia by Mithradates I (165–132 BCE). The Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE) was to form the major cultural and political force with which the Roman Empire would contest control of the Near Eastern region for the next three hundred years. The Parthian Empire began as the movement of an Iranian-speaking nomadic tribe from Central Asia, the Parni, led by the Arsaces, into the Seleucid satrapy of Parthia on the southeast coast of the Caspian Sea. The satrapy was already in revolt, and the Parni took advantage and seized control of the province. Arsaces became Arsaces I, establishing the ruling dynasty, the Arsacids, of the newly formed, independent Parthia. Though the actual conquest did not occur until 238 BCE, the later Arsacid court claimed that the empire began in 247 BCE, perhaps when the Seleucids lost control of the satrapy. Though later Seleucid kings tried to reclaim the lost territories, they were unsuccessful, and by the middle of the next century, under the leadership of Mithradates I, the independent Parthia had more than doubled its size to become a territorial empire

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that encompassed parts of the old Achaemenid heartland. The conquests also brought under Arsacid control several major Seleucid cities. The Arsacid court took on a philhellenic quality. The site of Nisa in modern Turkmenistan has yielded a number of significant finds, which testify to the strong Greek cultural overlay. Hellenic culture continued to thrive under Parthian rule, and the empire was a conduit by which Greek ideas and art forms from the Mediterranean continued to enter Central Asia during the later Hellenistic and later Roman periods. The Parthian Empire was itself an incubator of its own Greek forms. However, other cultural forces were also at work. Nisa may have served as an Arsacid mausoleum and dynastic shrine on the model known from Seleucid dynastic sanctuaries and some of the other dynastic sanctuaries in kingdoms independent from the Seleucid Empire, all of which may owe their inspiration to the Achaemenid royal tombs outside of Persepolis (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I, artifact 32). The other great Central Asian empire to emerge during these centuries was to occupy the Oxus-Indus stretch, which formed the eastern border of the Parthian Empire. The Kushan Empire (ca. 30–375 CE), like the Parthian Empire, was founded by a nomadic group that invaded a sedentary region and then adopted a settled lifestyle. The Yuezhi confederation of five clans formed in the Gansu area of northwestern China. In 176–160 BCE, the Xiongnu forced the Yuezhi out of the Gansu, probably as a result of the growing pressure being put on the Xiongnu by the Han Dynasty, a series of events chronicled by Sima Qian in Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records or Records of the Grand Historian). Their migration resulted in one group moving west to the territory of Bactria and in the process dislodging the Wusun and the Sakās. The Yuezhi invasion may have been partly responsible for the collapse of the Greek Kingdom of Bactria in 130 BCE. A remnant of the Bactrian Greek society moved south to establish the Indo-Greek kingdoms in the northwest India (modern Pakistan) and Hindu Kush, but Greek Bactria no longer existed. This disruption of the established nomadic distribution resulted in Yuezhi occupying

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Bactria and the Fergana Valley, the Wusun becoming established in the Ili Valley and Issyk Kul regions of the Kazakh steppes, and the Sakās moving south of the Hindu Kush to the lower reaches of the Helmand River valley. As the Sakā were forced to relocate, they pushed against their western neighbors, the Sarmatian tribes (Sauromatae-­Sarmatians), whose movement into the older Scythian territory is recorded by the Roman period Greek writer Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE). Of the individual tribes that formed the Sarmatians, the Alans, who harassed the Parthians on their northern frontier, were to have a long history of engagement with the Classical world. They remained a force into the 5th century CE when their migrations to the West took them to Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and eventually to North Africa with the Vandal invasion. The Sarmatians destroyed what remained of the Scythian world and drove the old Scythian warrior elite from the region. The archaeology of the northern Pontic region reveals the changes. Over the next four centuries, the Sarmatian tribes consolidated their control of the Pontic steppes and spread west into the Hungarian Plain. By the early 5th century BCE, some of the Greek and mixed settlements around the Sea of Azov at the northeast of the Black Sea banded together under the leadership of one city, Pantikapaion (modern Kerch), to form the Bosporan kingdom. It maintained economic linkages with the Mediterranean world, though in time the population became so mixed that the kingdom was virtually Sarmatian. It was a center for the production of Greek-style luxury objects, which were often commissioned by steppe nomads (see Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35). In 65 BCE, Rome annexed the kingdom, though it continued to operate as a transitional zone between the sedentary world of the Black and Aegean Seas and the nomadic world of the steppes. The Yuezhi expanded west into the Parthian territory but were forced back by the Parthian forces in 115 BCE, confining them to Bactria from where they began to expand southward. According to the Chinese Hou Hanshu, the Kushan Dynasty was established when the Guishuang (Kushan in the West)

tribe of Yuezhi gained control of other tribes and formed the confederation into an aggressive fighting force under the leadership of Kujula Kadphises in the 1st century CE. Their actions increased the size of initial Bactrian region by annexing and conquering kingdoms to the south. These included the Indo-Parthian kingdom (19 CE–226 CE) that had formed by taking over the remaining Indo-Greek kingdoms and the Indo-Scythian kingdom centered around Taxila. The southern migration of nomadic Sakā peoples, an event that has come to be referred to as the Indo-Scythian invasion since the Sakās are often considered a sub-branch of the Scythians, may have been responsible for the initial destructions at Aï Khanum in 145 BCE. They then moved into the region of Drangiana in the south of modern Afghanistan, which became known as Sakastan or Seistan. They battled with the Parthian forces, which blocked their expansion to the west, but the Sakās were able to extend their control east into the remaining Greek-controlled regions, eventually taking over the Indo-Greek kingdoms of the south. The presence of the Sakās as political states was noted by the 1st century BCE Greek writer Isidorus of Charax in his Parthian Stations and again in the mid-1st century CE by the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei (PME) (see Travelers, Early) and by the 2nd century CE geographer Ptolemy. These are the states that are labeled the Indo-Scythian kingdoms and, like the Indo-Greek kingdoms that precede them, are best understood from the coinage that they struck. The Sakā leader Maues took over the Indo-Greek kingdom of Gandhāra with Taxila as its capital and extended it south to the Gangetic Plain in 80 BCE. The kingdom lasted until the mid-1st century BCE when a new group the Indo-Parthians took control. In the 1st century CE, a group of Sakā were able to take over Ujjain in India’s northwest and form the Sakā kingdom of the Western Satraps. The Indo-Parthians were another group of Iranian speakers, and though their coinage resembles that of the Parthian Arsacid Dynasty, hence the name Indo-Parthian, there is no real evidence for a direct relationship between the Arsacids and the rulers of the Indo-Parthian kingdom. The best-known ruler

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? was Gondophares I, the founder of the kingdom, who figures in the story of the Apostle Thomas’s journey to India, recorded in the 3rd century CE, Acts of Thomas, in which the apostle finds himself in service to King Gondophares. Indo-Parthian Taxila is also recorded in Philostratus’s account of the travels of the 1st century CE Greek philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana (Life of Apollonius 2.20) (see Travelers, Early). The Indo-Parthian kingdom (12 BCE–130 CE) included portions of the Indo-­ Scythian kingdom established by Maues in the older Indo-Greek kingdom of Gandhāra. The Taxila was again the capital city. As with the Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian kingdoms, the Indo-Parthian kingdom is best known from the coinage struck by its rulers. The archaeological evidence for all three phases of kingdoms, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Indo-Parthian, comes largely from the excavations of the site of Taxila, but there is no agreement as to exactly which monuments and finds belong to which kingdom. At its height, the Kushan Empire controlled the Oxus-Indus stretch extending from the Syr Dara south to the Gangetic Plain and providing a direct linkage between India and China. It formed a barrier to the expansion of the Parthian Empire to the east. Like the Parthian Empire, it comprised a heterogeneous population of those whose cultural origins were Greek, Sakā, and other steppe nomad, Iranian, and Indian. It is not clear if portions of the Tarim Basin were ever long under Kushan control, but there is no doubt that there were regular contacts between the Kushan Empire than oasis cities and kingdoms of the Täklimakan region, particularly those on the southern route around the desert. The Han Chinese watched the rise of the Kushan Empire (Sima Qin, Shiji, Records of the Grand Historian and Ban Gu, Hanshu, Book of Han) and were in contact with it through diplomatic and, probably, commercial exchanges. Like with the Indo-Greek, Sakā Indo-Scythians, and the Iranian Indo-Parthians, the ruling class that formed the upper stratum of society was different from the mass of subjects that it ruled. The Kushan Dynasty seems to have never forgotten its nomadic heritage, at least based on the royal dress as revealed on the coins struck and the dynastic

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imagery at the dynastic shrine at Surkh Kotal (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, ­Kanishka I, artifact 32). The internal chronology of Kushan rulers, which is heavily reliant on the interpretation of coinage, is not clear, and the dates for the best-known king, Kanishka I, are still a major point of scholarly debate. The Kushan kings continued the pattern of the Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian rulers by continuing to use Greek cultural elements for their own purposes. They employed the Greek alphabet to write the Kushan language, but they also made uses of the Kharoṣṭhī script derived from the Aramaic used in the Achaemenid Empire. Their coinage had legends in both Greek and Pāli, the latter written in Kharoṣṭhī. Certain aspects of Greek religious practice seem to have survived, but Indo-Aryan religious forms of the older Yuezhi culture, Persian Zoroastrianism, Indian Hinduism (emerging from the earlier Vedic religion) (see Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper Standing before God Shiva/Oesho, artifact 41), and Buddhism, all found a home in the empire. Buddhist monks discovered the empire open to their teachings and proselytizing, though Buddhism never became a state cult. Buddhist monasteries of both the Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions were established in and around Taxila, especially in the Swat Valley of modern Pakistan (see Monasticism). The flourishing of Buddhism and the development of the monastic system in the empire encouraged a radical change in the earlier art forms. Until the 1st century CE, Buddhist art had been limited to narrative images that portrayed aspects of the Buddha’s life but never showed the Buddha himself. In the hands of artisans working in the two capitals of the empire, Purushapura (Peshawar) and Mathura, the Buddha was given form for the first time (see Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding, artifact 47). In the ateliers of Taxila the capital of Gandhāra, in a region with a tradition of established Greek forms, the Buddha began to be conceived in a style that recalls early Hellenistic Greek art with its interest in the fully corporeal human form, though a strong Parthian quality is also seen in the frontal presentation of the figures (see Persistence of Classicism). This interest in the human body and its

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rational movement was exploited even more in the production of images of bodhisattvas (see Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya, artifact 2). This new style of Buddhist art, known as the Gandhāran style, was carried throughout the northern ranges of the empire and was exported, along with the Buddhist religion, to the oasis communities of the southern Tarim Basin. Much of what promoted this spread was the extensive trade networks that allowed Buddhist monks to move with merchant caravans. The Buddhist religion was a universal faith, which was open to any believer, and could spread into any community that was willing to accept it. Moreover, as the various schools emerged, they broke down into two great groupings, Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism. Both types of Buddhism found homes in the Kushan Empire and outside of its borders in the western parts of Central Asia and in the Tarim Basin oasis cities. The archaeological remains of the monasteries within the Kushan realm reveal that the religion was receiving heavy patronage resulting in impressive architecture and sculpture. Much of this patronage probably came from merchants, particularly for those monasteries of the Mahāyāna tradition. The wealth made by these merchants offers some idea of the economic prosperity that must have been a legacy of the Kushan Empire’s administration. Good administration allowed the economy to thrive, and within the cities of the empire, the craft workshops must have produced finished goods that could be sent out. Certainly, the empire’s control of certain significant raw materials within its borders, like lapis lazuli sources, would have spurred trade. Buddhism was a catalyst for international commercial exchanges. The Mahāvastu, a Buddhist text of the 1st or 2nd century CE, encouraged believers to decorate Buddhist monuments with silk. Though India produced a native silk, Chinese silk was considered of higher quality. The faithful needed access to Chinese silk throughout the Kushan Empire in order to properly decorate Buddhist shrines within the new monasteries. In a 2nd or 3rd century CE scripture, the Saddharmapuṇḍarika, the Buddha instructs his disciples to make stūpas and bury reliquaries (see Bronze Reliquary Box, artifact 49)

decorated with the seven treasures. The Mahāvastu (The Great Event), an early Sanskrit text, is the first to codify the seven treasures, or the sapta-ratna. These were seven appropriately precious substances for association with the Buddha: suvaṇa (gold), rūpya (silver), vaiḍūryā (lapis lazuli), muktā (pearl), lohitikā (red precious stone or red coral), musāragalva (ammonite, agate, or coral), and sphāṭika (crystal or quartz). Sphāṭika (crystal or quartz) could be replaced by glass, and glass beads are abundant at Kushan Buddhist sites. Glass was one of the items that workshops in the eastern Mediterranean produced when the region was under Roman control, providing a desired commodity in the developing trade between the Mediterranean and Central Asian regions.

Trade The trade connections between the far east of Central Asia and China and the far west of the Mediterranean began in earnest during the later Seleucid and Roman periods. Already by the 1st century BCE, if we trust the story of Cleopatra’s dress in Lucan’s Pharsalia (10.141), silk was available on Mediterranean markets. The silk may have been either Chinese or Central Asian or even Indian (see Silk). It was most likely the silk threads or floss that was desired rather than woven silk garments or even cloth, since Lucan describes unravelling the silk to reweave it. The 1st century CE Roman author, Pliny, asserted that India absorbed a massive amount of the Roman world’s wealth on an annual basis, some 50 or 100 million sestercii (Natural History 6.26.101; 12.1.84), at least some of it for the purchase of silk. The Roman historian, Tacitus, records that Emperor Tiberius lamented the shameful luxury of wearing silk apparel indulged in by both men and women in 1st century CE Rome (Annals 2.33), and the decadent connotation associated with silk can be found in the works of Propertius (1.2.2; 2.3.53; 4.5.57), Horace (Carmina 4.13.13), Ovid (Ars Amatoria 2.298). Clearly, silk was an exotic product that Roman period authors sought to explain. Pliny knew of China (Seres) (Natural History 6.54), but he did not associate it with silk, which he thought came from Assyria (Natural History 11.75–76). This may

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? indicate the confusion that surrounded the ultimate origin of exotic foreign goods found at either end of the long-distance trade network. There were so many intermediary points where goods were offloaded and then reshipped with new carriers that origins became lost for both the consumer and even the local merchant. However, clearly some people in the West did know that China and silk were related since the word used for China in western texts, Seres, was a variation of the word for silk, sericae or serikon (Pausanias 6.26.6: though the passage is possibly corrupt). Certainly, there is evidence of isolated products of far eastern origin showing up in far western archaeological contexts from as early as the Late Bronze Age and vice a versa. As has already become clear, trade networks that joined the two ends of the Eurasian continent have existed since at least the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, which were quite capable of moving the odd item thousands of miles from its place of manufacture. However, the outburst of long-distance exchanges, driven, it seems, as commercial rather than state enterprises that appear in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods, represents something new. Recent analysis of certain sculptural finds from the setting of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) in China has suggested that Qin Dynasty patrons may have become familiar with Hellenic forms of art and desired Qin artisans to emulate them. It has even been suggested that Alexander’s exploits in Central Asia had become known to the Qin court and may have influenced the first emperor of a united China Qin Shihuangdi, “First August and Divine Emperor of Qin.” This might explain a willingness on the part of the Chinese elite to purchase some types of western goods, though the archaeological finds that form the early period of interaction have not revealed much to support such a claim. However, the sudden appearance of large quantities of Chinese silk in Central Asia is the result of another emperor’s actions. The emperor Wudi (156–87 BCE) of China’s Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) wanted to acquire the famed “Heavenly” horses of the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, what the Chinese called Dayuan, north of Bactria. These were fast, powerful horses

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capable of carrying armed soldiers. The Han armies needed them to fight the Xiongnu nomads (see Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot, artifact 14, and Nomad Kingdoms and Empires) on the northern border. The horses also helped propel the Chinese into the western regions of the Tarim Basin, which the emperor had already begun to explore with the mission of Zhang Qian to the land of the Yuezhi in search of an alliance against the Xiongnu in 138 BCE (Sima Qin, Shiji, The Records of the Grand Historian). To pay for these horses, the Chinese emperor sent bolts of silk, and later, after the Chinese took control of the region in 102 BCE and began the process of establishing garrisons in various places in the Tarim Basin, the central government paid the garrisoned troops in silk. For the first time, Chinese silk could be found with some abundance in Central Asia, and this must have led to more of being shipped to the West where eventually a market developed among the wealthy in the Roman world. The arrival of the Han Chinese as garrison soldiers and administrators in the western regions also brought Chinese coinage (see Bronze Coin with Square Hole, artifact 20), which began to operate as an alternative currency to the Greektype coinage throughout the region. To date, nothing clearly of Chinese origin, except silk, has appeared in the archaeological or literary records of the Roman world. The other items that made the trade enterprise worth the investment must have been things that were acquired along the way as goods were transshipped at the various nodal points of the caravan networks. In China it is no easier to find the presence of Mediterranean goods. There are a few isolated examples of Mediterranean items from Han period tombs, including a few coins, but nothing substantial. The caravans entering Han China from the West were no doubt laden with exotic goods obtained from other places in the lands between the Mediterranean and China itself. Moreover, it is worth considering that by the start of the Common Era, products that might be associated with either extreme end of the exchange system, silk in China, and classically inspired art objects like silver plate or even coinage could be found outside their places of origin. Several of the oasis kingdoms

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in the Tarim Basin produced high-grade silk, which could be traded as bolts of cloth, finished garments, or floss. Classically inspired works were being manufactured in Parthia and probably also in Bactria and Gandhāra, the areas where some semblance of Greek culture had perhaps survived, albeit heavily modified by the influences of local cultural forces (see Persistence of Classicism). One of the options for caravans moving overland was to pass through the Parthian Empire. The borders would have confronted a caravan headed from the Mediterranean to the east beyond the city of Palmyra (Tadmor) in the Syrian Desert. The city, often an independent city-state, provided the nodal point at which caravans coming from the southern incense route met with those approaching from the ports of Tripoli and Antioch or coming south from Asia Minor. The incense merchants came loaded with frankincense from the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, some of which had passed through the port at Aila (Aqaba) on the Red Sea. The caravans headed north through Petra and continued up the ancient King’s Highway to Damascus. At Damascus, the routes headed east, joined by that coming from the port at Tripoli and headed to Palmyra, the major oasis in the Syrian Desert. At Palmyra the goods were probably off-loaded and new items acquired and fresh caravans took up the shipment of the cargoes. A few of these caravans no doubt headed to Dura Europos (see Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos, artifact 1), a Hellenistic foundation that was contested by both Rome and Parthia during these centuries. Dura Europos offered another place where goods could be reconsolidated and shipped. Some goods could be sent downstream on the Euphrates River along the western edge of the Parthian Empire to Charax and the entry to the Persian Gulf where they entered into the Indian Ocean trade network. Other goods would move overland through the Parthian Empire. An alternative land route left from the great Hellenistic port city of Antioch, one of the largest cities in the Roman world, and headed east probably passing through Edessa and Nisibis and Hatra. One of the goals of both these land and sea routes must have been the old Seleucid capital of Seleucia on the Tigris, which was now conjoined

with the sometime Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. There may have been a secondary caravan route that connected Seleucia-Ctesiphon with Petra and the incense route. There were certainly alternative routes. Caravans in the Anatolian Peninsula could head north via the river crossing at Zeugma after engaging in trade with the cities and towns of eastern Anatolia, Armenia, Iberia, and Albania. From Hatra, caravans continued east through the Parthian Empire and eventually found themselves on the border with the Kushan Empire. The cargo could be shipped through the north into Sogdiana. Some of it, probably loaded onto new caravans of Sogdian merchants, was taken east into the Tarim Basin oasis kingdoms and towns to the official border with China at the start of the Gansu corridor. By the end of the 1st century CE, the Tarim Basin was under Han control, and garrisons had been established in many of the towns. Goods could also move south into the Gandhāran region of the Kushan Empire via Begram. From there goods could be sent south into northern India. There were several advantages to this trade network. These were well-trodden routes. For most of the time, caravans were within the confines of empires, which maintained some degree of security. There were well-established cities along the routes, which could provide places to exchange goods through trade allowing the caravan to make a profit and acquire new local objects. Many of the towns provided accommodations for caravans, caravansaries. In later centuries, these were also built in areas without towns by far-thinking local rulers who wanted to encourage long-distance trade to pass through their lands. Though no such ancient caravansaries have been found, they may still have dotted the more barren stretches of landscape. Some towns were nodal points where many caravan routes interconnected, and where it was possible for goods to be transshipped and for caravans to acquire new animals or personnel for the continuing journey east or west or acquire other merchandise. Caravans starting from China emerged at the end of the Gansu corridor and entered into the Tarim Basin. At this point, the caravans headed along either the northern or the southern routes around

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? the Täklimakan Desert, which came together at the western end of the Tarim Basin. Here the caravans could off-load goods and send them via other caravans further west and return to China picking up merchandise in the oasis towns and kingdoms to be sold in China. The goods headed west could move via the same routes as items came east, via the southern route through the Kushan Empire or the western route through Sogdiana to the Parthian Empire’s eastern border crossings where the evidence of Chinese silks have been found in Palmyra (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3). However, there were disadvantages to using these routes. Imperial customs’ officials collected on behalf of the central governments and, no doubt, for their own benefit. The governments liked to control the movement of goods in and out of their borders, as has been confirmed from the finds of official documents regarding the movements of caravans in the Chinese-occupied portions of the Tarim Basin (see Texts and Archaeology). Using the routes through an empire subjected the merchants to potential problems at border crossings. There were cities within the Parthian Empire, like Hatra and, at times, Palmyra, and in the Tarim Basin that operated as independent or quasi-independent states and imposed their own tariffs on goods entering or leaving. All these added costs had to be borne by the merchant and were passed on to the consumer increasing the cost of items, even objects of little intrinsic value. The only way to avoid the added economic expense was to circumvent the imperial structures that tended to control the major trade routes. On land, this could be done by going north via the steppes. There were several places where caravans could do this. Exiting China through the Gansu corridor, it was possible to move north of the Tian Shan Mountains via Turfan. The caravan then continued west through the Dzungarian Basin and into the Kazakh steppe in the Semirech’ye (Seven Rivers) region. This was the old heartland of the Sakā people and was probably the route taken by the Yuezhi as they were forced west by the aggression of the Xiongnu. The caravans then could skirt the northern edge of Margiana, following the Syr Darya

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River to the Aral Sea and then going north around it toward the Caspian Sea. The Caspian would also be by passed to the north. The caravan then moved through the Pontic-Caspian steppes or through the southern Caucasus regions of Iberia and Armenia, the latter sometimes an independent kingdom and sometimes a protectorate under control of one of the empires, to the Black Sea at which point the caravan could enter into the Roman trade networks. Roman ports on the Black Sea, like ports on the Mediterranean, provided access to the wealth of trade linkages that connected together all the Roman Empire from northern Europe to the Mediterranean and from the western edge of the Mediterranean to the eastern shores. At the eastern edge of the Black Sea was the old Bosporan kingdom, and here the caravans from the east might deliver slaves and hides acquired while passing through the nomadic regions. Those arriving from the Mediterranean or Aegean might off-load clothing and wine. For caravans that chose this route going out of the Roman world, the endpoint at China’s Gansu corridor provided similar access to a well-developed internal trade system in China proper. However, the northern route also was full of real threats. There was no imperial government, and so security rested solely with the caravan leader’s ability to negotiate with the various nomad groups that controlled parts of the route, and this would have required payments of some type (see Adult Man’s Caftan). Many places were subject to bandits, and the potential loss of goods and lives was very real. There were few places to stop in the steppes and few opportunities to replenish the caravan’s personnel, though obtaining animals was probably not too difficult. Trade, no doubt took place, and it might well have been possible for caravans to obtain furs on this route as it intersected with the fur routes headed south from the forested zone north of the steppes. Unlike the routes through the empires, this route did not provide easier short legs since the profit from the venture only reached fruition at the endpoint. A caravan taking the steppe road engaged in a much more long-distance trade than would be the case for those who did the southern routes with a higher degree of uncertainty and risk. However, the route did bypass

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most of the intermediaries who were constantly taking bites of the potential profit. The wealth of goods that may actually have come via this route can be seen in the finds of the great kurgans at Pazyryk (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27) and Noin Ula. The cemetery at Pazyryrk consists of twenty-five kurgans erected in the high Altai Mountains during the 5th–3rd centuries BCE, according to the most recent radiocarbon and dendrological analyses. Exactly which nomadic group built these is still a contested point, but a Sakā tribe seems most likely. The richness of the finds suggests a people engaged in predatory nomadism. The two hundred burial mounds at Noin Ula sit north of Ulan Bator on the Selenga River in Tov Province. They formed a royal grave precinct for a Xiongnu during the late 1st century BCE and 1st century CE, and the individual buried in kurgan 6 has been identified as the Xiongnu ruler, Uchjulü-Jodi-Chanuy (Chinese Wu-Zhou-Liu-Ju-Di; r. 8 BCE–13 CE). At both sites, the funerary chambers became flooded soon after the burials. The water was frozen in the cold winters and never fully thawed during the short summers. The grave chambers became freezers, which allowed for the preservation of organic materials that are normally lost due to the process of decay. The organic materials, textiles, lacquer ware, and wood testify to the type of high-quality finished products that were entering this region from throughout the Central Asian region and the periphery regions of China and the Black Sea. Some items, like the elaborate carriage, possibly of Chinese manufacture, found in kurgan 5 at Pazyryk or the inscribed Chinese lacquer cup, a present from the Chinese emperor to Uchjulü-Jodi-Chanuy, from kurgan 6 at Noin Ula could have been diplomatic gifts from settled communities. Other objects such as the pile carpet from kurgan 5 at Pazyryk might have been an heirloom since the piece looks to be Achaemenid Persian, though it could also have been the product of Persian looms under Seleucid control. However, trade caravans plying the route north of the Roman Parthian Empires must have carried many foreign works, particularly textiles of Chinese and Central Asian and Black Sea origin, into the area. Whether the objects in the tombs represent payment

for services rendered by these nomads, perhaps as security forces, or for safe passage through their territory, or plunder taken from the caravans by force is impossible to determine. What they do show is the wealth of finished goods that were carried along the great east-west routes across Central Asia in the later 1st millennium BCE and early 1st millennium CE. It is not really certain what made up the bulk of the goods shipped over these routes. By the middle of the 1st millennium CE, it is clear that Mediterranean glass was a commodity of high value in China. The find of 180 glass vessels of Mediterranean manufacture in a possible treasury room in a Kushan palace at Kapisa near Begram reveals just how important Roman glass was in Central Asia already during the 1st century CE. The odd piece of classically inspired metalwork that shows up in Chinese graves could indicate a more formidable desire for these items, but not enough have been found to really support such an argument, and as has been suggested already, these could have been produced in the Parthian Empire. The discovery of plaster casts with classical ornaments used for the production of metal wares among the finds in the Kapisa palace treasure room might indicate that there was a demand for such objects in Central Asia and possibly Han China, perhaps resulting in their production in the Kushan region as well. It is equally difficult to determine what from China or Central Asia was desired in the Mediterranean. Lapis lazuli remained a popular stone in the Roman world and throughout the Near East. Turquoise was also a possible item of trade. Among the stones categorized and evaluated by Pliny (Natural History 37), several are of Central Asian origin suggesting that semiprecious stones in general were an important item of exchange. The discussion of silk in the ancient writings is all confined to the middle of the 1st century CE; after that there is nothing to indicate that silk was arriving in abundance. Only a few fragments have been found in the excavations at Palmyra and a bit of silk floss from Dura Europos (see Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread, artifact 21). Emperor Claudius did use elephants for his invasion of Britain, but those were no doubt brought by sea from India.

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? There is little evidence of any direct communication between the two extremes of the networks, but there were connections between the far West and far East and Central Asian states. The ancient literary sources mention a Kushan embassy to the court of Augustus, which brought tigers for the first time to the Mediterranean (Cassius Dio, Hist. Rom. 54.9), and Sima Qin (Shiji, Records of the Grand Historian, 123) records the arrival of an official Han embassy to the Parthian court. A few intrepid entrepreneurs may have actually explored much of the length of the connections. A  Macedonian Syrian, Maës Titianus, compiled an itinerary of one of the routes from the Mediterranean to the Pamirs, which has come to be known as the Itinerary of Maës Titianus. It does not survive and probably was never formally written down since it was more of a business document that spelled out the network of agents that were used for the transshipments of the goods from the Mediterranean. However, it was referenced in the work of Marinus of Tyre (ca. 107–114 CE) whose writings are also lost but who did serve as a source for Claudius Ptolemy as he was preparing his Geography (ca. 150–160 CE), the text of which does exist. Maës Titianus represents one of few merchants who possibly traversed much of the overland route, but much more frequently, it can be assumed, merchants in the Roman region or in Han China depended on commercial agents, middlemen, to acquire specific items that they assumed had a commercial viability in the home markets. The Chinese text, Hanshu (History of the Han Dynasty), mentions the arrival of a group from Da-Qin (Rome) at the court of the Emperor Huan in 166 CE. Though it is presented as an official embassy, there is better reason to suspect that this was a private commercial undertaking. The gifts brought, which did not impress the Chinese court, included ivory, rhinoceros horns, and tortoiseshells, all of which could have been obtained during a sea voyage along the coast from South Asia. Even though it is difficult to assess what actually motivated the long-distance overland trade through either the literary or the archaeological record, it must have been important. In 116 CE, Emperor Trajan undertook major military campaigns against the

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Parthians, which appear to have been driven by the desire to acquire control over a great portion, if not all, of the trade routes passing through the empire. He departed from Antioch with his army and captured Dura Europos and then followed the Euphrates River south to take Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Charax. The addition of most of this territory did not survive his death, but the annexation of the Arabian Peninsula did, which permitted Rome to control the movement of the seaborne trade into and out of the Red Sea and removed the Arab middlemen— the Nabataeans. The way to circumvent the Roman and Parthian Empires and the added costs was to ship goods by sea. This was perhaps the more important route for the Mediterranean world since the commodities of highest demand were spices, and the main supplier of these were the Indian kingdoms. Mercantile shipping along the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Red Sea may date back to the Bronze Age, though nothing in the archaeological or literary records supports this notion other than the mention of pepper in the writings of Theophrastus (Enquiry into Plants 9.20.1). If it did exist, it must have been limited coastal hugging trade rather than long-distance hauls. However, it does seem clear that with the Ptolemaic occupation of Egypt, longdistance trade with India via the Red Sea did seriously commence. The coastal peoples of the region, the Arabs and Indians, who knew the monsoon wind systems, most likely controlled it. The Mauryan emperor, Ashoka, mentions Ptolemy Philadelphus (r. 283–246 BCE) in a royal edict. There was no direct land linkage between the Mauryan and Ptolemaic empires, and so a sea linkage is most likely. It has been noted that the Ptolemaic monarchs were always seeking battle elephants that were trained in India. It may have been this need for a weapon type that motivated the Ptolemies to establish a direct sea connection with India. The Roman period saw the real exploitation of the sea trade with India. Mediterranean seamen mastered the monsoon winds and, with that knowledge, were able to become aggressive traders moving Roman gold coin to India to pay for spices and other goods. Merchandise moved into and out of

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the Mediterranean through the port at Alexandria, and archaeological work over the past few decades has shown just how this happened. The route out of Alexandria was down the Nile to Coptos where it connected with two roads to the Red Sea, one to Myos Hormos on the north coast and the other to Bernike on the south coast (Strabo 17.1.45; Pliny Natural History 6.104). Both ports have yielded enough archaeological finds to suggest that the ports were built up during the centuries of Roman use. There were tax collectors resident at the ports, so just like the trade overland, the trade by sea was subject to increased costs. Finds have revealed that this portion of the trade was partially in the hands of Italian families, some of whom were also engaged in trade with Gaul. Whether these Italian representatives made the trip east to India cannot be determined from the evidence; the find of the carved ivory figure from Pompeii (see Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure, artifact 24) could have been a souvenir from such a journey. Lapis lazuli beads were discovered in the excavations of the ancient site of Axum in modern Ethiopia, which certainly must have been the result of this trade network with India that extended further down the coast of east Africa. Moreover, the Axum region had long connections with the southern Arabian region dating back to the 8th century BCE. The Periplus Maris Erythraei (PME), a sailing log for the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean written in the second half of the 1st century CE by an unknown author, provides the most detailed information on how sailors from the Mediterranean approached the voyage to India and what they traded. It is possible that with the knowledge of the monsoon winds, Mediterranean, most likely Syrian, captains could sail out of the Red Sea making a few stops on the coast of the Arabian Sea and then cross directly to Muziris on India’s southern coast, at the mouth of the Periyar River. The PME (53–55) tells of ships regularly arriving at the port, and Pliny describes it as the primum emporium Indicae (Natural History 6.104). This southern region, Kerala, supplied the most abundant spices that were the focus of the trade. Though the southern port provided access to a major exotic good, the northern ports of Barbarikon

and Barygaza connected the Roman trade to the Kushan Empire. Barbarikon (PME 39) stood at one of the entrances to the Indus River system, and connected to Taxila, one of the Kushan capitals and the major city of the Gandhāran region and a city that had served as the capital of an Indo-Greek kingdom. During the late 1st century BCE and early 1st century CE, before it became part of the Kushan Empire, it had been the capital of the Indo-Parthian kingdom, the Indo-Scythian kingdom established by Maues in 80 BCE, and the Indo-Greek kingdom of Gandhāra. It must have been at the port of Barbarikon that Apostle Thomas disembarked when he sailed to India. Barygaza (modern Bharuch) was linked through land-based trade networks to the Ganges Valley, the other center of Kushan power. At these ports, local Indian goods like native silk must have been on view. Probably the Mediterranean merchants were buying ivory, not only carved like the piece from Pompeii but also in raw form to be worked by Mediterranean artisans. India was the major producer of cotton cloth, which would also have been a new commodity for the Mediterranean consumer as would have been the gemstones like carnelian, and pearls for which India had been famous for centuries. These ports provided access to exotic foreign products, which entered the region because of its significance to a major empire. The PME (56) lists the availability of Chinese silk cloth. What the Roman merchants brought to this trade was gold coinage, which may have been used as bullion in India but also gold-, silver-, and bronze-worked plate (Pliny Natural History 33.1.4–5), the value of which may have been increased by the decoration.

From Constantinople to Chang-an, the Silk Roads and Central Asia during the Period of the Byzantine, Sasanian, and Tang Empires By the middle of the 3rd century CE, both the Kushan and Parthian Empires had succumbed enough to internal weaknesses that they could not survive the emergence of a new unifying force in Central Asia. The Chinese empire of the Han had broken apart. A  series of local dynasties, several of foreign— nomadic—origin, controlled northern China. They would continue to do so until the formation of the

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Sui Dynasty in 581 CE. The Roman world was suffering from internal disruptions, in part brought on by pressures on the northern borders. Though the empire would be reconsolidated in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries by Diocletian, the empire was in the process of redefining itself, and when it emerged fully in the 4th century CE, it was a new force. The House of Sasan, from which the Sasanian Empire takes its name, appeared in the southern Persian province of Pars, the heartland of the Achaemenid Empire. Under the leadership of Ardashir, these first Sasanian forces confronted and defeated the Parthian emperor Artabanus IV. Within a short period, the remaining Parthian forces and those vassals loyal to the Arsacids fell to Ardashir I. By 224 CE, he was crowned the sole ruler of Persia at Ctesiphon. During the course of the mid-3rd century, Shapur I, Ardashir I’s son, expanded the empire by taking control of Bactria, and the western parts of the Kushan Empire, and began a pattern of confrontations with Roman forces that would continue for the next three hundred years. The Sasanian Empire reconstituted much of what had formed the older Achaemenid Empire (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs) and recognized a direct line of affiliation between itself and the former power. The new empire was known by its inhabitants as Ērānshahr. It finally fell to the advancing Arab forces who marched against it under the banner of the new religion of Islam between 633 and 651 CE. The Sasanian structure was much more centralized than had been the case under the Parthians. The emperor, the shahanshah (king of kings), ruled over a highly stratified imperial order. The various local nobilities that had formed the vassals of the Parthian Empire were now incorporated into this new structure and received privileges according to their new ranks. The Sasanian emperors struck the coinage and controlled the flow of money. They also strove to promote internal craft industries, particularly in weaving, metalworking (see Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting, artifact 33), and glass making (see Faceted Glass Bowl, artifact 25), which resulted in Sasanian goods becoming desirable items on the Silk Road networks. From the mid-4th century CE to the fall of the empire,

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Sasanian power served to hold back the new nomadic forces—the Hunnic states. Known collectively as the Xionites or Hunas—and referenced separately in chronological order as the Kidarites, Alchon Huns, the Nezak Huns, and the Hephthalites (Ephthalites or Sveta Huna—White Huns)—these groups, particularly the Hephthalites, who settled in Bactria, threatened the prosperity of the settled regions of the south (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires). Though the Sasanians were largely successful at holding back the Hephthalites from the Iranian Plateau, they could not prevent them from entering the regions of the old Kushan Empire. The Sasanians had already split off the western portion of the Kushan Empire, and the Hephthalites took Gandhāra by 470 CE and then conquered Sogdiana in 493 CE. They turned east taking Kashgar and Khotan and marched through the Dzungaria Depression and seized Turfan. The Sasanian shahanshahs revived the older religion of the Achaemenid royal house, Zoroastrianism (see Zoroastrianism). The religion had spread widely among Iranian speakers (see Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, artifact 50) and existed in several variants. Under the guidance of the late 3rd century CE high priest Kartir (Kartēr, Kerdēr, Kerdīr, kKrdēr, Kirdīr), the faith was restructured and restored in an orthodox form; the sacred text—the Avesta (see Texts and Translations) was codified, and the religion was promoted as the state religion for the empire. However, the Sasanian Empire was never mono-religious. The Mesopotamian portion of the empire was one of the early homes to variants of Christianity, and Christianity existed, often flourishing in the realm. Christianity took a distinctive form with the spread of the Church of the East (see Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Including Crosses, artifact 46), which dominated the Christian communities of the empire for much of the early history and spread east as far as China. It was eventually challenged by the rise of the Syrian Orthodox Church and the spread of the Chalcedonian Christianity promoted by the Byzantine emperors and the popes in Rome, both of which entered the empire through the Sasanian conquests of the Byzantine territories. The other great offshoot of

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Christianity, Manichaeism, also found a home in the empire, though not always without problems. Located in various parts of the empire were Jewish communities. As the Sasanian Empire was in its early, formative stage, the Roman Empire to the west was undergoing its own transformation. By the middle of the 4th century CE, the empire was being governed from two capitals, one in the west, usually on the Italian Peninsula, and the other in the east, at Constantinople (Istanbul). Both halves of the empire were also undergoing a radical cultural shift leading to the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion. Paganism was systematically suppressed, and Judaism, while allowed to continue, was severely restricted. By the end of the 5th century CE, the western Roman Empire ceased to exist having been overrun and toppled by the invasions of Germanic peoples. The eastern empire, which is most commonly referred to as the Byzantine Empire, had been formed of the eastern Mediterranean and eastern North African portions of the old Roman Empire. Greek became the common language of the empire, and the Byzantine emperor became the temporal and spiritual head. Constantinople emerged as one of the ends for trade along the Silk Road, particularly for any trade that passed through the Pontic region since it was situated at the entrance to the Black Sea from the Aegean Sea. The formation of the Byzantine Empire influenced the developments in Central Asia in a number of ways. Among the most grievous issues to plague the early Christian church was the definition of Christ’s nature. The debates among the early theologians developed into what are known as the Christological Disputes. At stake was the answer to the question: Was Christ more human or more divine? In 451 CE, the Byzantine emperor Marcian convened a council at Chalcedon, outside of Constantinople, to answer the question definitively (Fourth Ecumenical Council). The Council of Chalcedon issued its response, the Chalcedonian Definition, which declared Christ to have two natures in one person and hypostasis (unity of subsistence). Both natures, the Godhead and the manhood, are complete. As the emperor and the church in Constantinople were looking to rein in

the various versions of Christianity that existed both inside and outside of the empire, the Chalcedonian Definition was promoted as the orthodox interpretation, rendering all other interpretations heretical. The responses were swift. Several regional Christian churches had already developed in Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia, and the Near East. These Christians saw Christ’s nature differently, favoring a view that Christ is God, the Incarnate Word, who possesses perfect Godhead and perfect manhood and whose fully divine nature is united with his fully human nature but without mixing, blending, or alteration, though the human nature is understood to be fully absorbed into Christ’s divinity. Orthodox Christians condemned this interpretation, miaphysitism, as heretical and labeled monophysitism. The Syrian Orthodox Church followed the miaphysite interpretation. The church continued to exist within the confines of the Byzantine regions of Syria but under persecution. It was also successful in extending its reach to the Christian communities in Ethiopia and Armenia and had fellow believers in the Coptic Church of Egypt. However, as Sasanian military moves brought under control of the Syrian portions of the Byzantine Empire, the Syrian Orthodox Church became a key player in the religious politics of the Sasanian Empire where it had a rival, the Church of the East. The Church of the East followed a different interpretation that had already been condemned as heretical by the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE (Third Ecumenical Council). In its view, put forward by Bishop Nestorius, the Virgin Mary was the Christotokos, “the Birth Giver of Christ” but not the Theotokos, “the Birth Giver of God,” which was to become the orthodox interpretation following the Council of Ephesus’s declaration. The doctrine that Nestorius propounded and that has resulted in the followers of the Church of the East being labeled, erroneously, Nestorians was based on the distinction between Christ’s human and divine natures. Nestorius was not the inventor of the theology that he preached. It represented the Antiochene tradition as taught by Theodore of Mopsuestia with whom Nestorius had studied. The Church of the East emphasized the separation of the dual natures

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? of Christ. It offered a middle ground between those who argued that in Christ God had been born as man and those who argued that God as an eternal being could not be born. The problem stems from trying to reconcile orthodox views of the yet earlier First Council of Nicaea (First Ecumenical Council) of 325 CE, which ruled that Jesus Christ was God consubstantial (Latin: consubstantialis for Greek: homoousios) with the Father. This became the orthodox teaching regarding the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are of one substance. In terms of orthodox Christology, Christ is then understood to be consubstantial with the Father in his divinity and consubstantial with humanity in his humanness. This view was not universally accepted, leading to the alternative interpretations, which were declared heretical by the various ecumenical councils that came to define orthodoxy as represented by the churches in Constantinople and Rome. The decisions of the ecumenical councils of the 4th and 5th centuries rendered heretical many devout Christians and led to splits between the Orthodox church and the heretical churches. Within the realm of the Byzantine Empire, heretical churches operated but often under harsh scrutiny and persecution. The Church of the East, since it did not exist in the Byzantine realms, was able to flourish at various moments under the protection of the Sasanian emperors. The church was not allowed to seek members among the Zoroastrian practitioners who were followers of the state religion, but it could look for converts among the other Christian groups and among the followers of other religions in the empire. Nobles, who were already Christian when the Sasanian Empire was established, were allowed to practice their faith without loss of position within the Sasanian hierarchy. Moreover, the Church of the East was able to spread outside the confines of the empire with missionary activities to the East. Eventually, the Church of the East would become established in the Tarim Basin and in China proper. When the Sasanian emperors incorporated territories with populations of miaphysites, members of the Syrian Orthodox Church, they began to pit the hierarchy of the Church of the East against the hierarchy of

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the Syrian Orthodox Church. Even though both the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the East owed no allegiance to the Byzantine emperors, during periods when the two empires fought, all the Christian communities within the Sasanian Empire were persecuted, but there were often periods of relative peace when all the Christian communities could prosper. The formation of a unity between the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine emperors resulted in the imperial sponsorship of many churches throughout the Byzantine Empire. These churches, along with those paid for by congregations and individuals, needed to be opulently furnished and priesthood appropriately garbed. These needs may have been one of the forces that pushed the desire for silk that marks the early Byzantine associations with the Silk Roads and with Central Asia. The early emperors tried hard to control the flow of silk into the empire and to determine how it would be used, especially since the costs of obtaining silk from merchants were high because of the tariffs imposed by the Sasanian Empire. By the 4th century CE only the comes commerciorum, the head of the market towns on the border, was authorized to buy silk from foreign merchants. Laws were passed that forbade ordinary citizens wearing high-quality silk. Purple silk was reserved for the emperor, his family, and their entourage. All these actions suggest that foreign silk had become a major item in the Byzantine world, and there was, no doubt, a thriving black market. According to Procopius (Secret History, 25), Emperor Justinian learned the secret of silk production from two eastern monks. With that knowledge in hand, the Byzantine court established silk production along the Mediterranean coast at Tyre and Beirut, though the Byzantine silk could never displace the desire for the foreign product. Whether this foreign textile was coming from China, from oasis towns of the Tarim Basin like Turfan and Khotan, or from the Sasanian Empire cannot be determined since too few examples remain. The few non-Byzantine fragments that have been isolated in churches’ treasuries in the West look to be largely of Sasanian origin, though a few may have come from the Sogdian region. Silk garments denoted status.

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Silk-dyed purple carried the imperial connotation, as in the great mosaic of Justinian from San Vitale in Ravenna. Relics were wrapped in silk, and holy books were covered in the fabric. The need for so much silk must have prompted the formation of silk workers’ guilds. There were silk merchants, dealers in raw silk, and workers of raw silk. Eventually, the state formed imperial factories, which claimed the best silk for their production. Eventually, Byzantine imperial silks, often patterned silks, would be used in a formal manner. They were worn as official court uniform. They could be given, in the form of clothing, as gifts from the emperor to members of the court and distinguished visitors during celebrations. They were presented to Western European monarchs as signs of friendship and perhaps as marks of a symbolic dependence of the western monarch on the Byzantine emperor. The importance of the trade was such that Emperor Justinian attempted to circumvent the Sasanian control of many of the routes by encouraging the use of the steppe roads that bypassed the Sasanian Empire in the same manner as they did during the Parthian and Kushan periods of hegemony. However, the Sasanian emperors’ power extended further than that of their predecessors. The steppe road gambit did not yield the results that Justinian had hoped. It may have been to more fully secure control of the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea that led Khosrow II (r. 590–628 CE) to take the Sasanian armies into Egypt. The Sasanians held it from 618 to 629 CE. However, Sasanian engagement with the Red Sea region dates at least to the previous century when the Sasanian Empire became involved in a proxy war with the Byzantine Empire and that also involved the Axumite Kingdom of Ethiopia. In the far East, China entered a phase of disorder and disunion known as the Six Dynasties (3rd–6th century CE). The end of the Han Empire in 220 CE saw the Chinese heartland divide into northern and southern parts at the Yangtze River. For the next three centuries, both areas would be governed by a series of successive governments. In the south, the older Han traditions would prevail, and the ruling elite would be drawn from Han Chinese. The southern dynasties that collectively are known as the “Six

Dynasties” are Sun (Eastern) Wu (222–280 CE), the Eastern Jin (265–420 CE), and the four “Southern Dynasties” of the Liu (Former) Song (420–479 CE), Qi (479–502 CE), Liang (502–587 CE), and Chen (557–589 CE). In the north, the situation was to be quite different. Initially native dynasties, the (Cao) Wei (220–265 CE), followed by the Western Jin (265–316 CE), governed the north. Northern nomads had been pressing against the region, and in the early 4th century, they successfully pushed out the Western Jin and established a sequence of foreign dynasties that ruled until the reunification of China by the Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE). This period of the “five barbarians,” wuhu, came to establish the “Northern Dynasties.” The Xianbei, under the leadership of the Tuoba, took control of the north under the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534/535 CE), which then split into the Eastern Wei (534–550 CE) and the Western Wei Dynasties (535–557 CE), which were, in turn, replaced by the Northern Qi (550–577 CE) and finally the Northern Zhou (557–581 CE). This was a time that lacked a long sequence of sustained order and peace and witnessed much civil disturbance, particularly in the north. It was also a period of sustained openness, and influences from the West began to regularly enter both halves of China. The sea routes into southern ports provided a means by which south Asian and Indian products penetrated China. The Northern Dynasties maintained the overland trade routes and connections into the steppe lands. The result of these connections was the spread and establishment of Buddhism throughout both the north and the south. Buddhism had first entered China during the Han Dynasty, but its impact was limited. Now the north, in particular, welcomed Buddhism, which came in via the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin. Buddhist missionaries, some from India and others from the old territories of the Kushan Empire, carried Buddhism to the capitals of the Northern Dynasties. They established monasteries, many of which were situated in association with cliffs and cave shrines at places like Datong and especially Mogao outside of Dunhuang. At these sites the northern artists developed distinctive styles of sculpture that show how they responded to the influences of late Gandhāran art. The spread of

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Buddhism along the land and sea trade routes shows clearly how linked Buddhism was to the developing international economic exchanges. On the other side of the northern border, the period witnessed changes in the nomad lands of Mongolia. The Chinese sources speak of the ascendancy of the Avars. Initially they pledged loyalty to the Wei sending annual tributes of horses, fur, and cattle, which allowed them to acquire luxury goods of Chinese manufacture. They came to dominate the other peoples of the steppe region from the Gobi Desert east to Manchuria and west to Lake Baikal. However, to their west another steppe force was in formation, the Turks. While they acknowledge a subservient position vis-à-vis the Avars, by the second half of the 6th century, they had adequate power to destroy the Avar Empire and sent the remnants in a westward migration. The Avars eventually settled in the Pontic region and then moved further west into the Hungarian Plain where they were to be a major problem to the Byzantine Empire (see Gold Belt End, artifact 6). The Turks were soon to emerge as the dominant force in the steppe lands, controlling westward to the Volga River. From the Hephthalites, they took control of the Tarim Basin and Sogdiana and began to employ the Sogdians for their own commercial projects, including sending embassies to Constantinople and the Sasanian Empire to negotiate trade agreements. Two of the Turkic-speaking peoples to play important roles in the last period of pre-Islamic Central Asia were the Uyghurs and Khazars. The Uyghurs are first mentioned in 5th century CE texts. By the mid-7th century CE, they had established themselves as a separate entity, a khanate, in Mongolia in the Orkhon Valley. In the mid-9th century CE, the khanate was attacked and destroyed by the Kyrgyz. The surviving Uyghurs fled south eventually ending up in the Tarim Basin where they formed the kingdom of Kucha with Gaochang City as its capital. The Uyghur khans converted to Manichaeism and probably supported the monastery and library in the capital. The Khazar homeland was also Mongolia. They too were forced westward by the constant pressures in Mongolia, and they pushed before them the Avars.

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By the mid-5th century CE, the Byzantines were aware of their presence in the Caspian region according to Priscus (d. ca. 472 CE) who identifies them as the Akatzirs. In the mid-6th century CE, the Khazars successfully displaced the Avars in the Volga region and took control of the steppe land between the Caspian and Black Seas, including the valleys of the Volga and Don Rivers, eventually extending their power to the territory between the Dnieper River and Aral Sea. In this process, they dislodged the Bulgars who had moved into the Pontic steppe area east of the Sea of Azov. The Khazars found themselves in possession of one of the major crossroads for caravan trade headed into the steppe lands from the Mediterranean or aiming for the Black Sea from the eastern steppes. By the 9th century CE, the Khazar entity was recognized to be a centralized state with a developed monarchy and a substantial territory; it was an empire. The ruling class had adopted Judaism according to the 10th-century Persian explorer and geographer, Ibn Rusta. How deeply Judaism penetrated through the social ranks is not clear, but the Arab explorer, Ibn Fadlān, claimed that all the society was Jewish. There seems to have been little contact with the major Jewish centers in Iraq, and Khazar adherence to Jewish practices seems to have been somewhat loose, especially since certain Turkic shamanic customs appear to have survived (see Shamanism, Ancient Central Asian). On the other hand, the region must have offered some connections for Jewish merchants operating elsewhere in Central Asia. Certainly, the empire controlled the flow of goods coming south from the Russian forests, particularly furs, which were in demand in the ports of the Black and Caspian Seas. The empire succumbed to outside attacks, probably from forces coming out of the Russian region to the north, sometime in the mid-10th century CE. Among those most heavily involved in the land exchanges were Sogdian merchants from northwestern Central Asia, modern Uzbekistan. They had already been active merchants on the northsouth route during the early part of the 1st millennium CE when the region was still the heart of the Kushan Empire. Later they turned more and more of their attention to China proper. During the Six

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Dynasties, they had already founded merchant and artisan  ­ communities, particularly glass making, in China proper. Within their homeland, Sogdian artisans had produced high-quality luxury items, ­ including objects that retained a Classicizing quality in terms of the both subject matter and execution, which were desired by some of the elites, espe­­­cially  in the north. Because of their skill with languages, Sogdian translators had many clients including Buddhist monks from China who wanted Buddhist sutras translated from Indian and Central Asian languages to Chinese. Buddhist monks from China, like Faxian, began to make the trip from China to India to obtain Buddhist texts and left behind a record of their travels and experiences. Sogdian translators may have also assisted the Christian m ­ issionaries from the Church of the East who needed their Syriac texts translated into Central Asian languages and Chinese (see Texts and Translations). In China, the unifying force of the Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE) replaced the political chaos of the Six Dynasties. Though short lived, the Sui prepared the way for the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), which witnessed a unified China with a long reach into Central Asia and South Asia. The openness to the outside world that marked the period of the Six Dynasties now became the official policy of the Tang, at least for the first half of its life. Tang artisans began to produce quantities of objects for the international trade, in particular, high-quality ceramics. The Belitung shipwreck, found off the Belitung Island in the Indonesian archipelago, is the first largescale wreck of a vessel engaged in the sea exchange during the Tang period to be found and excavated, albeit in less-than-ideal circumstances. The finds include several different categories of high-quality ceramics, which were headed for the ports of South Asia and perhaps even further. There are other high-end luxury objects, including the largest Tang period gold cup so far found, which was decorated with images of foreigners, including musicians and a Persian dancer, suggesting that the Chinese living deep in the heartland of the empire were used to seeing foreigners, at least in the bigger cities. Similar luxury items also moved out of China on the backs

of pack animals for the trips along the various overland silk routes. The Chinese imported Sogdian and Sasanian products like gilt silver plates and bowls (see Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting, artifact 33) and the blown glass, which Chinese workshops could not yet produce (see Facted Glass Bowl, artifact 25). During the first century of Tang rule, China experienced a massive expansion. Chinese military presence was now felt well into Central Asia with the capturing of the Gansu corridor followed by the Turfan oasis (640 CE) and then the oasis towns of the northern and southern routes around the Täklimakan. Tang inroads went further north and west into the Turkic territory north of the Tian Shan Mountains up to the Altai and in Sogdiana and Čagania (Chagan) (see Adult Man’s Caftan). The organization and administration of these newly acquired lands can be somewhat understood from the reading of the cache of administrative documents found in the excavations of Turfan. It is clear from these documents that the expenditures of garrisoning and administering these conquered regions were costly to the central government. The standard means of payment to troops in the mid-8th century CE was in bolts of silk fabric, which could then be cashed in in the local markets. The Tang state, in essence, subsidized the silk trade in Central Asia. By providing, on a regular basis, large quantities quality silk, the state would have depressed prices for the commodity on the local markets. The silk could be purchased cheaply and then be resold in the West for a substantial profit, since the demand for Chinese silk remained high even after the Byzantine Empire was capable of producing its own silk. This probably did not work in the Sasanian Empire because of the imperial Sasanian policy to not allow Chinese silk to enter the realm in order to stimulate the local production, some at least from imperial workshops. The unity of the kingdom along with good governance and openness to international exchanges helped make Tang China prosper. The prosperity, especially when tied to mercantile activity, helped to promote and support the increasingly powerful Buddhist institutions in China and in the Central Asian regions. Buddhist monks located monasteries

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? in several Chinese cities and throughout the Tarim Basin oasis towns and west into southern Sogdian area at Termez. Even after the collapse of the Kushan Empire, Buddhism still flourished and spread with monasteries being built in eastern Afghanistan. Under Tang patronage, the great cave monastery at Mogao received several new shrines, many reflecting the growing popularity of Buddha Amitabha and the Sukhavati or “Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss” Buddhism (see Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket, artifact 15). The network of Buddhist monasteries of both the Theravāda and Mahāyāna schools connected China to India via the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin. It was by using these monastic communities that the Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuan Zang, traveled to and from India in the 7th century CE and left a record of the travels (see Travelers, Early). While the reach of Buddhism was by far the greatest of the foreign religions that now made major inroads into China, the Church of the East also became a feature of the life of the capital, Chang-an, and some other cities in China. The Manichaean faith became an important force in the Tarim Basin and had a monastery at the Turfan oasis, especially under the patronage of the Uyghurs who established the kingdom of Kucha in the 9th century CE. The wealth to be reaped through international trade can be seen in the remains of the Sogdian cities in Central Asia located between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers. The cities of Pendjikent, Paikent, and Afrasiab (Samarkand) included the houses of wealthy merchant princes. The Sogdians were an Iranian people and shared certain cultural traits in common with the Sasanians including a version the Zoroastrian religion (see Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, artifact 50, and Funerary Practices). They were quite different on one particular aspect, the role of merchants and commercial activities. While the Sasanian emperors wanted to profit from the trade that passed through their lands and followed political agendas that strove to control the overland and sea-based traffic as much as possible, the class of merchants did not rank high in the Sasanian social hierarchy. In the case of the Sogdians, merchants occupied the elite positions within the society. The

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excavated houses of the merchants are extensive, multi-roomed, and elaborately decorated. They included major public spaces clearly designed to display something about the family, its wealth, its social standing, and perhaps its international connections (see Adult Man’s Caftan). The Sogdian region prospered even when under foreign domination by the Hephthalites and Turks. These commercial ties were extensive and often family based. Surviving records show that families extended their control of trade by using networks of family linkages that stretched from India to China. Already during the Six Dynasties in China, Sogdian outposts could be found, and these only grew in importance during the Tang. The Tang government recognized these communities, allowed them to live by their own laws, and assigned them their own governors or headmen, a sabao, who had Chinese official rank. Most likely, the Sogdians resident in China followed the Zoroastrian faith, though the fact that their bodies were laid out on funerary couches rather than their bones being placed in ossuaries (see Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, artifact 50) suggests that as in their Sogdian homeland, their Zoroastrian faith was not exactly like that practiced in the Sasanian world. At least some of the wealth to be gleaned from international trade was probably displayed by garments, which probably also served to highlight the wearer’s ethnic affiliation. The Sogdian artisans may have become the keepers of the, now ancient, Classical heritage of Central Asia. Sogdian metalsmiths seem to have produced Sasanian-style vessels with classically inspired motifs. Among the subject matter that decorated the painted walls of some Sogdian merchant houses seem to be stories taken from the corpus of Aesop’s fables. That Aesop (6th–5th century BCE) himself was known by name in Central Asia is assured by the discovery of a reference to him among the textual fragments unearthed at Turfan. Whether these Classical references should be understood as residual elements from the earlier period of Greek settlement in Central Asia or whether they are better understood as something that only recently entered the area, the result of the trade network connecting Sogdiana with Sasanian Iran and the Byzantine Empire cannot

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be determined. Like the Parthians before them, the Sasanians had exploited Mediterranean art forms in a highly selective manner (see Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer, artifact 16). It has been suggested that the Aesop material may have come into Central Asia with the movement of Manichaean missionaries into the region from Iran. However, under pressure from the western Turkic khanate, some Sogdians participated in an embassy to Constantinople to negotiate an alliance against the Sasanian Empire in 568 CE, and so there were direct relations with the Byzantine Empire that could have allowed for Classical influences from the ancient source to re-enter the region. On the other hand, the Sogdian merchants also maintained relations with India. For some of the residential mural paintings, the Sogdian artists took clearly Indian narratives from the Pañcatantra and the Mahabharata. The fables of Aesop could have been considered to be Indian animal tales, like those in the Pañcatantra, and may not have been regarded as western in origin.

The Arrival of the Arab Armies and Islam and the End of the Ancient Systems In the middle of the 7th century CE, the old cultural structure of Central Asia, one that had taken shape over millennia, was in the process of massive change, a change that would end the ancient systems by providing a new unifying concept that would eventually bring together both sedentary and settled peoples, the religion of Islam. Islam was carried into Central Asia by the Arab armies that began their conquest of the region in 637 CE with the destruction of the Sasanian forces in the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah followed by the fall of Ctesiphon in 638 CE. By 651 CE, the Sasanian Empire was finished. In 706 CE, the Arab armies crossed the Amu Darya and began to capture Sogdian cities, Paikent in 706 CE, and Afrasiab (Samarkand) in 712 CE. The Tang emperor sought to halt the advance, and in 751 CE, the Tang and Arab armies fought at the river Talas. Though both sides claimed victory, neither advanced after the battle. The initial eastward movement of Arabs

halted, and the Chinese pulled back, retreating from all the territory outside of the Tarim Basin. The Arab governing Umayyad Dynasty spent energy consolidating the conquered territories during the first half of the 8th century CE from their capital at Damascus in Syria. The empire that they controlled stretched from the Iberian Peninsula in the West to the Sogdiana in the East and represented the largest land empire ever cobbled together. The unifying creed of Islam was not immediately made available to all subjects of the empire, since Jews and Christians could be incorporated as dhimmi, protected subjects who were required to pay a special tax, which provided a substantial income for the state. The old bureaucratic structures in conquered regions were harnessed for the purposes of governing the new lands, and the conquering Muslim Arabs were not allowed to live with the subject peoples but were restricted to the new garrisons built in subject regions to maintain the peace. However, even as a new system was taking shape, the old and well-established trade networks were maintained and expanded. Muhammad, the prophet of the new faith of Islam, had been a merchant, and Islam raised the status of merchants and businessmen and promoted trade. The size of the empire was too great to be successfully governed and administered by a premodern state. Internal discontent boiled over, and by the middle of the 8th century CE, rebellions erupted in several places. In 750 CE, a new force, the Abbasid Dynasty led by Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah (722–754), defeated Umayyad army at the Zab River, south of Mosul in modern Iraq. The Abbasids established their capital much further east at Baghdad and let go of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, the western portions of the empire. The eastern regions became the major concern. At the same time, more and more of the dhimmi made use of the right to convert to Islam. The action made the convert a member of the community of Moslems, the ummah, and opened opportunities denied to protected subject peoples, as well as an end to the special tax. The change in status was especially useful to merchants, because it offered them the chance to

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? move from one Muslim community to another as they engaged in any type of long-distance trade. Differences in culture, language, and ethnicity were now somewhat papered over by the shared religion. The increase in non-Arabs among the ummah led, in time, to a de-Arabizing of the faith, as more and more Persians, northern Indians, Turks, and even Chinese converted to Islam. The stabilization of Central Asia under the Abbasid Caliphate also resulted in its direct connections between the region and the Mediterranean world. The spread of Islam through much of Central Asia created a new environment, one that could not incorporate all the faiths in the region. Although the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church continued to function and communities of Jews were accommodated, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and Buddhists were persecuted, and all three declined substantially or disappeared. The changes brought to Central Asia and the surrounding regions by the Arab conquests and the introduction and slow but steady penetration of Islam resulted in quite a different world emerging, one with a new identity that falls outside the purview of this study. Initially, all of Central Asia joined an empire that incorporated the entire southern Mediterranean. The cultural and religious divisions that had marked the previous eight hundred years were largely gone, and the flow of goods and ideas between the East and West was now facilitated rather than hampered. The spread of Arabic as the language of the faithful only helped to promote a sense of unity, especially as conversion ramped up during the Abbasid Caliphate. This is a world with a new set of concerns that are best studied in relationship to the formation of Medieval Europe and later Tang China.

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Chakrabarti, D. India, an Archaeological History: Palaeolithic Beginnings to Early Historic Foundations. 2nd edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chang, C., and K. Guroff, eds. Of Gold and Grass, Nomads of Kazakhstan. Bethesda, MD: FIAE/ Mosaic, 2007. Chapman, P., G. Badger, H. Boot, G. Chan, K. Jeffs, G. Maxwell, and C. Scott. Wild China: Natural Wonders of the World’s Most Enigmatic Land. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Ancient Middle East. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Frumkin, G. Archaeology in Soviet Central Asia. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Graetz, R. ed. Discovering Central Asia, an Introduction to Its History, Culture, Geography and Politics. Missoula, MT: University of Montana Press, 2012. Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th– 10th Centuries). London: Routledge, 1998. Hansen, V. Silk Road: A  New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Dani, A. H., and V. M. Masson, eds. History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. 1: The Dawn of Civilization: Earliest Times to 700 B.C. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 1992. Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Davis-Kimball, J., and M. Behan. Warrior Women, an Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Demange, F. Glass, Gilding, and Grand Design, Art of Sasanian Iran (224–642). New York: Asia Society, 2007. Dunlop, D. M. History of the Jewish Khazars. New York: Schocken, 1967. Errington, E., J. Cribb, and M. Claringbull, eds. The Crossroads of Asia, Transformation of Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cambridge: Brooklands House for The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992. Fowlkes-Childs, B., and M. Seymour, eds. The World Between Empires, Art and Identity in the

Harper, P. O. The Royal Hunter, Art of the Sasanian Empire. New York: Asia House Gallery, 1978. Harris, D. Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia: An Environmental-Archaeological Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2010. Hiebert, F., and P. Cambon, eds. Afghanistan, Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008. Hildebrandt, B., and C. Gillis, eds. Silk, Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Holt, F. Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Introduction: What Was the World of the Ancient Silk Road? Jinshi, Fan. The Caves of Dunhuang. Hong Kong: London Editions and The Dunhuang Academy, 2010. Juliano, A., and J. Lerner. Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Asia Society, 2002. Kohl, P. L. The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kuhrt, A., and S. Sherwin-White, eds. Hellenisim in the East. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Kwang-chih Chang, Xu Pingfang, and Sarah Allen, eds. The Formation of Chinese Civilization, an Archaeological Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Li Jian, ed. The Glory of the Silk Road, Art from Ancient China. Dayton, OH: The Dayton Art Institute, 2003. Ligabue, G., and S. Salvatori, eds. Bactria: An Ancient Oasis Civilization from the Sands of Afghanistan. Venice: Erizzo Editrice, 1988.

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in Antiquity. The Papers of a Symposium Held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology March 19, 2011. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2014. Mairs, R. The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of Californian Press, 2016. Mallory, J. P., and V. H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 2000. Marshak, B. Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2002. Masson, V. M., and V. I. Sarianidi. Central Asia: Turkmenia before the Achaemenids. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. Pfeffer, P. Asia: A Natural History. New York: Random House, 1968.

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of the Ancient World, New York University, 2012. Stoneman, R. The Greek Experience of India from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Thapar, V. Land of the Tiger: A Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tomber, R. Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper. London: Duckworth, 2008. Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders, a History. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Wang, H. Money on the Silk Road. The Evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800. London: British Museum, 2004.

Watt, J. C. Y., and A. E. Wardwell, eds. When Silk Was Gold, Central Asian and Chinese Textiles. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998. Whitfield, R., S. Whitfield, and N. Agnew. The Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Art and History on the Silk Road. London: The British Library, 2000. Whitfield, S. The Silk Road, Trade, Travel, War and Faith. Chicago, IL: The British Library and Serindia, 2004. Willow Weilan Hai, and J. May Lee Barrett, eds. Art in a Time of Chaos, Masterworks from Six Dynasties China, 3rd–6th Centuries. New York: China Institute, 2015.

Alphabetical Entries

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Alphabetical Entries • Amazons

AMAZONS The Amazons, women warriors who lived without men, began their appearance in Greek literature with Homer and continued to interest Greek and Latin authors well into the Roman period. They were always argued to live to the East, just beyond where the Greeks had established themselves and outside the realm of Classical culture but close enough to engage with the Greek and Greek-influenced cultures of the Mediterranean and Black Seas and cause problems. Individual Amazons figured prominently in the stories of Herakles and Theseus. Herodotus 4.110–117 told the tale of how the Sarmatians (Sauromatians), a group to the east of the Scythians who spoke a variant of Scythian, were the offspring of a meeting of young Scythian men with a lost group of Amazons. According to Herodotus, the Scythians knew the Amazons as the Oiorpata, the “killers of men.” Amazons formed an important visual subject and appeared regularly in Athenian black- and red-figure vase paintings and in the relief carvings that decorated Greek temples. In the decades before the Persian Wars (490 and 480 BCE), the Amazons are shown dressed in short tunics and with crested helmets, resembling the garb of Greek soldiers. After the Greek victories over the Persians, the Amazons acquired much more eastern garments, high boots, tight trousers, caftan jackets, and pointed hats. Though the stories of Amazon warriors circulated well into modern era, they were generally dismissed as ancient travelers’ tales with no basis in fact. However, the excavations of kurgans within the steppe lands of Central Asia have revealed that in certain circumstances, women were buried with grave goods normally associated with men. These are high-status burials and do not provide support for the notion that there existed a society of women warriors in Central Asia. Even the Sarmatians, who have been identified in the archaeological record, provide tombs for men and women indicating that this group that Herodotus described as descendants of the Amazons did not adopt the single gender lifestyle associated with one of their progenitors. The archaeology does show that within some of the nomadic groups, particularly in the eastern

Kazakh regions, women of high status could assume male characteristics, in certain settings. In kurgan 1 at Ak-Alakha on the Ukok Plateau, a Sakā site, a woman’s corpse was found in a double burial with a man whose remains suggested that he had been disabled by arthritis. The female was dressed in male clothing and given male attributes by means of the items placed with her. It has been suggested that in her life she had assumed the role of the male with whom she was buried as he became more enfeebled. Several of the graves from the Sarmatian region of the lower Volga area west of the Ural Mountains and north of the Caspian Sea are identified as being those of warriors based on the grave goods but have been shown to contain the remains of women rather than men. There are female skeletons from a cemetery in southern Siberia that show evidence of damage to the left arm bones that could have happened when these women used their left arms to ward off blows while they attacked with their right. It has been argued that the famous Gold Man from Issyk (see Golden Warrior [Reconstructed Costume], artifact 34) was actually a young woman based on the size of the restored garments. A  similar headdress has been found in the grave of a woman, which might further support the identification. Other burials from the Sarmatians of the Kazakh steppes show that in some nomadic groups, such as in the Pokrovka graves, women also had important religious roles. It seems likely that in all of the nomad societies of the steppes, girls were active horse riders. They must have been entrusted with caring for the flocks and moving them around the steppes and protecting them from predators, as is still the case in Kazakhstan and Mongolia. They probably hunted and perhaps participated in raiding in certain communities. Modern Mongolian women are skilled as archers and participate in the Naadam Games, though there are still clearly limits on what is allowed in the crossing of gender lines. Women are still not accepted as eagle hunters.

ANIMAL STYLE “Animal Style” is the term that has been given a large collection of objects that share traits of subject matter and compositional arrangement and were

Alphabetical Entries • Animal Style made by or for the various steppe nomad peoples who emerged in the first centuries of the 1st millennium BCE. The category, “Animal Style,” first began to be used to describe these works during the early 20th century, and it has continued to be employed into the present, though the study of the origins and development of “Animal Style” has evolved over the past several decades because of the increased archaeological work throughout the territories of the former Soviet Union. The “Animal Style” decorated articles of personal adornment and horse trapping. The items were portable and often of intrinsically valuable materials and fit easily into the living pattern of nomads. The “Animal Style” can be discussed in terms of the subject matter, the compositional forms, the materials used, and the possible meanings of the images. The subject matter is quite specific, wild animals of the Central Asian mountains: two hunters and two hunted. All the variations on avian hunters most likely derive from the golden eagle, the major bird of prey in the mountains. The spotted leopard and the snow leopard probably inspired the different carnivorous felines. The two prey animals capable of fighting their captors because of their strength and force were originally the red deer stag—though possibly a reindeer stag—and the mouflon ram. This group of four animals form the subject matter for nomadic artists for over one thousand years and interested nomadic commissioners from the Pontic steppes in the west to the Mongolian region in the east. The compositional forms stress movement. There are varieties of ways in which animals can be presented. The single stag is often shown alone with the legs bent beneath him. When animals are paired, it is usually in a combat with the hunter, avian or feline, grabbing or pouncing onto the back of the prey animal (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27). The bodies of the animals are usually broken down into compartments, and often one part of an animal’s body is shown transformed into another form or animal. This process of transformation stresses change, and along with the suggestion of action or movement, change is an important aspect of the compositions. To achieve this sense

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visually, the artists worked designs that rotate with one element linking to another. In other instances, an attribute of animal can be made the focus of the image by giving it greater emphasis than would normally be expected, such as oversizing the antlers of a stag. Since all these animals are mountain dwellers, it has been argued that the style first emerged in the 9th century BCE among the nomads living in the Altai area, which is more or less in the center of the steppe lands. Among the finds from east of the Altai proper are the early Deer Stones, dated to ca. 1300 BCE, of western Mongolia. These show carved figures of flying deer worked into a composition that seems to be the image of a warrior. The upright stones may have been erected to commemorate deceased heroes. The carved flying deer may have been a reference to tattoos worn by the individuals honored with the stone monuments. From an origin in the Altai Mountains, the style was carried across the steppes as nomads moved west and east from the Altai region in the first part of the 1st millennium BCE. If this is a correct interpretation of the origins of the “Animal Style,” it explains why so much of the art is found in metalworking. The nomadic cultures of Kazakhstan had developed metallurgical skills during the Bronze Age of the 2nd millennium BCE. The artisans then expanded their metalworking skills to gold working in the early 1st millennium and began to produce these new forms. The creation of the style seems to overlap the societal change among nomads that is referred to as “Predatory nomadism,” in which a caste of nomads came to form a mounted warrior stratum, a group that was used by a specific nomad group to harass other nomad clans or tribes, sedentary peoples, or even trading caravans (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires). The appearance of quantities of intrinsically valuable items in the elite graves, precious metals, and stones, sometimes of foreign origin, points to the success of this new militaristic aspect of nomadism and its ability to wring valuable items from those threatened by it. The subject matter focuses on strong animals, often in scenes of combat, and the use of compositions that stress action would fit with a nomadic lifestyle that honored success in martial engagements.

4

Alphabetical Entries • Banqueting

The subject matter changed and developed somewhat over the centuries in which the “Animal Style” was employed. Horses and even Bactrian camels occasionally appear, but only as hunted animals. Mythical, hybridized hunters like the eagle-griffin can be found on later pieces, but the animals most commonly found on the steppes never replace the mountain animals. This suggests that long after the steppe nomad groups of the Early Iron Age had left their homeland in the Altai, they continued to have a cultural memory of that past and kept it alive in the choice of images used for the distinctive nomad “Animal Style.” The finds in the elite tombs, particularly the kurgans, of “Animal Style” objects made of gold seem to indicate that some of the items must have functioned as badges of honor marking the achievements of deceased warriors and warrior leaders in these aggressive nomad societies. When individual images of stags or felines or hybrid creatures appear on the gold foil attachments to the clothing of women (see Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments, artifact 8), they must acknowledge the women as well, perhaps marking them as the mothers, wives, and daughters of such warrior men. It is also possible that some women were treated as successful warriors, especially if the “Golden Warrior” (see Golden Warrior [Reconstructed Costume], artifact 34) was actually a woman. In this case, the headdress contains images of felines that may be spotted or snow leopards. The forms may also have contained elements of religious iconography giving the images a symbolic meaning quite separate from the role of distinguishing warriors. The compositional emphasis on movement and change has been argued to represent the concepts of rebirth and regeneration. When the stag’s antlers are emphasized by ending each tang with a bird’s head, the iconography may be that of the Tree of Life, which was a feature of Siberian religious belief, and the Tree of Life is itself tied to concepts of death and rebirth. These were both concepts associated with shamanism, which was probably practiced by many of the steppe peoples, though best known among the Turkic and Mongolian nomads (see Shamanism).

The “Animal Style” had a long life among the nomadic peoples of the steppes and was carried into Western Europe by Germanic peoples during the migration period at the beginning of the early Middle Ages. It was picked up and reconceived by Greek trained artists in the Black Sea region who provided finished gold work for the tombs of the high-ranking Scythian warriors (see Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique Showing Aspects of Scythian Life, artifact 5). The compositions even found a home among sedentary peoples. The double staircases that lead to the top of the great platform of the apadana at Persepolis (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs) are decorated with large relief carvings of a lion attacking a bull. The subject matter is not quite “Animal Style” but the composition is.

BANQUETING All the cultures that lived in Central Asia participated in a banqueting structure that was used to strengthen societal bonds. Drinking played an essential part in the banquet celebrations. By drinking and eating, those who took part in a banquet reestablished existing ties and created new ones. The importance of the banquet within ancient Central Asian societies can be witnessed in the role that it plays as a setting for many Central Asian stories and in the abundance of drinking cups that have been found in archaeological contexts. For nomadic cultures of the steppe regions, the funerary banquet was an essential part of the burial ritual. Herodotus (4.75) describes it for ordinary Scythians, and similar practices may have been common throughout the nomadic regions during the 1st millennium BCE and the 1st millennium CE. In some nomad tombs in Kazakhstan, the finds of ceramic vessels and wooden trays with removable legs along with the remains of animal bones may provide evidence of funerary banquets at which meat was eaten and kumis, fermented mare’s milk, was drunk. Herodotus (4.24) records the practice of the Issedones, one of the Scythian tribes, in which the body of a dead man was butchered and mixed with the meat of his butchered sheep and then served to his sons and kinsmen as a funerary meal. It has been suggested that as early as the Bronze Age, the

Alphabetical Entries • Banqueting burial of important individuals in the nomad society was a significant social event. The burial could only take place after the ground had thawed. The body was moved to the location where the major burial mounds stood. The members of the group then engaged in the communal work of digging the tomb, building the structure placed within it, and then raising the mound after the interment. The activity reinforced social cohesion that was made even stronger by the shared meals that would have occurred during the process of constructing the kurgan. Though Scythians, according to Herodotus (4.80), did not indulge in drinking wine in the manner of the Greeks and were opposed to drunkenness, they did drink. Herodotus (4.65) records the custom of drinking the blood of the first man that a warrior kills. It was also the practice to keep and turn into drinking cups the skulls of defeated enemies or family members with whom a warrior had had a quarrel and defeated in a fight. The cups were used in settings in which the host passed them around to visitors and told the story attached to each. Though no such cups have been found in excavations, numerous drinking vessels have surfaced. These include horns as well as open vessels in gold and silver, some with Greekstyle decoration, which could certainly have been used for drinking. Among the finds from the elite tombs in the nomad regions are foreign-made drinking cups, including those that were crafted in Sasanian and Sogdian areas (see Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration, artifact 18). Banqueting was a well-established tradition among the sedentary cultures of Central Asia. Though there is no independent archaeological evidence to confirm that the Greek symposium or male drinking party was an established feature of life in the Greek settlements of Central Asia, it is hard to believe that this practice would not have come east with Alexander. It is hard to know if the Roman practice of dining was at all introduced to Central Asia. Traders plying the coastal sea routes to India may have entertained one another in some ports with large foreign communities with feasting in the style practiced in the Mediterranean (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3), but there is neither

5

archaeological nor literary evidence to support such a notion. As far as can be determined, the actual shippers were most likely from Syria rather than Italy or the Roman West. Conquests during the 2nd century CE introduced the Roman presence as far as northern Mesopotamia. With the establishment of Roman garrisons, some degree of Roman-style culture must have been introduced. However, the heterogeneous nature of the Roman army by the 2nd century CE (see Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos with Portrait of Heliodoros, artifact 1) may rule out any real wholesale arrival of specific practices as they were known from Italy or the Roman West. The Sasanian aristocracy used the banquet as a place in which to reaffirm social status, the setting in which the lineage stories were retold. At the feasts of Nowruz (the vernal equinox that marked the start of the new year) and Mihrajan (the autumnal equinox), the king of kings received gifts and presented his courtiers with the clothing that he no longer needed, the summer garments at Mihrajan and winter at Nowruz. The Sogdian realm may have been a place where the banqueting forms of the sedentary peoples intersected those of the nomadic steppe peoples. Sogdian trade relations brought the two groups into regular contact, and there are Sogdian funerary images that show high-ranking Sogdians enjoying a feast in the out-of-doors with hunting yurts for protection. Within the town houses of merchants and nobles, painters decorated the reception rooms with wall paintings. Among the scenes included in the secondary parts of the walls were illustrations of heroic tales, which often included scenes of banqueting. There are also scenes that seem to show contemporary men, possibly merchants, banqueting. The traditions of banqueting that had developed among the sedentary and nomadic cultures of Central Asia met up with an equally well-entrenched social habit of feasting in China. During the Han Dynasty, when China officially began to establish formal relations with the western regions, the banquet must have served as a standard part of the diplomatic etiquette during which the Chinese envoys and their western hosts could size up one another. It may well have been in such settings that some of

6

Alphabetical Entries • City Planning

the luxury items of the West such as blown glassware (see Faceted Glass Bowl, artifact 25), gold and silver drinking cups (see Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China, artifact 26), and even certain foods, most particularly grape wine, were first introduced to members of the Chinese court. During the period of the Six Dynasties (3rd–6th century CE), northern China was ruled by foreign emperors whose origins were nomadic. This may well have allowed both the court and the nomadic rulers in the northern regions to find a means of engaging one another through the commonly understood banquet system.

CITY PLANNING Prior to the arrival of the Greeks with the conquests of Alexander the Great, there were probably no systematic and theoretical underpinnings to the ways in which urban forms took shape in Central Asia, but there were cities. What must have governed the early urban shapes was on-site experimentation followed by tradition. Once something worked, it became the tradition and was maintained until it failed or the culture disappeared. The Neolithic herding and farming Jeitun culture that developed at the foot of the Kopet Dag Mountains and the edge of the Karakum Desert was building village-level settlements with mud-brick houses in the 7th millennium BCE. However, it was not until the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BCE, out in the oases of the Murghab deltas in the Karakum Desert, that the first great urban experiments would happen with the formation and spread of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). These proto-urban forms, best represented by the site of Goňur Depe, were designed as massive defensive constructions that must have also presented an impressive display when approached from the desert wastes. The past few decades of excavations on the steppe lands have revealed that proto-urban forms may well have first developed here rather than in the sedentary regions of Central Asia. Using the criteria that define ancient cities of the Near East, these BMAC constructions can be defined as cities from the evidence for monumental public and ritual architecture, areas set aside for

craft specialization, and the presence of both elite and non-elite residents. Indeed, it has been suggested that the development of urbanization in the BMAC area may be related somehow to similar events happening in western Afghanistan in the Helmand Basin, at Shahr-i Sokhta in Iran, and in the Indus Valley at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. The cities of the BMAC share a mud-brick building tradition and a formalized plan that consists of roughly concentric squares. The inner square defines the main building group, often referred to as a palace-temple. Though no superstructures survive, some portion of this construction probably rose high enough that it would have appeared above the line formed by the outer defensive wall, what in later settings is referred to as a kalat (Qalat) or fortress construction. The fortified exterior wall was equipped with bastions, and additional towers along the circumference are found for some of the fortifications. The interior arrangement of structures hints at some type of planning, providing for a degree of organization and symmetry and supplying open areas to balance more densely built up sectors. The plans suggest a social hierarchy reflected in the urban arrangement. The ruling class occupied the most protected inner reaches with the artisan group in the areas just outside. The discovery of elite burials at Goňur Depe supports the notion of a highly stratified social structure. At its height, Goňur Depe reached an enclosed area of about 40 ha. And it must have housed several socially distinct groups behind its walls, possibly even offering protection to trading caravans traveling through the region since its economic ties connected it south to the Indus Valley, west to Elamite Iran, probably east to the Fergana Valley and north into the steppes. Not all the urban areas in the Karakum Desert share the BMAC format. The contemporaneous settlements at Altyn Depe exhibit no defensive walls and a much less ordered dispersal of residential and functional spaces connected by winding streets. These earliest experiments with urban forms in the sedentary regions of Central Asia were paralleled by developments on the steppes. Recent archaeological explorations of the steppes have revealed that even as the steppes were being more fully exploited by the emergence of a truly nomadic culture, there

Alphabetical Entries • City Planning were also proto-urban experiments taking place in the intermediate zones. The Sintashta culture of the Kazakh steppes on the eastern slopes of the southern Ural Mountains offers the most dramatic evidence for this steppe form of urbanization. These too were fortified settlements but built of wood. They were circular enclosures surrounded by timber-laced earthen walls. Behind the walls were rectangular, trapezoid units, identified as houses, closely packed together and sharing common walls. These units opened onto an interior street. In some cases, a second smaller enclosed area occupied the center of the complex, and it too contained the same type of housing unit, but these open onto a central circular plaza-like space. Unlike the BMAC, there is no evidence for social hierarchical distinctions in the housing types, though there is evidence of social hierarchy in the burials. While the economy of the Sintashta communities was pastoral, with the herding of cattle, many of the housing units show the remains of smelting furnaces for copper working. The copper probably came from mines in the southern Urals, and it was worked at these sites for both domestic use and trade with the cities to the south. The Greek introduced the notion of systematic urbanization according to preconceived theories on how a city should be planned and what it should contain. The founding of cities was an official policy followed by Alexander and his successors, a means of pacifying conquered regions and introducing the physical manifestation of the new order. How integrated with Greek newcomers and conquered natives these new cities were remains a point of debate, and there are reasons to believe that most non-Greeks were not resident within these new foundations. Only one Greek city in Central Asia has so far been excavated, Aï Khanum (see Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele, artifact 42) at confluence of the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Kowkcheh Rivers. Its basic format accords with the general principals of Greek urban planning with straight streets that cross at regular intervals to form blocks into which are set major public buildings such as the gymnasium, the temples, and the palace along with residential quarters. There is a high rise that supports an upper city, containing the

7

citadel and some residential areas, and also serves to support the theater that transitions the zones of the upper and lower city. It is assumed that other, similarly laid out cities must have existed throughout the territory that became the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom as well as in the eastern region of Afghanistan where the Seleucid presence lasted longer. Though the plan clearly owes several of its features to Greek urban ideas and many of the public buildings such as the theater and the gymnasium are of Greek origin, the specifics of both the plan and the construction of the structures betray strong local influences. The plans for elite houses look much more local than Greek, and this is true for the palace as well. Even the temples have a strong indigenous quality (see Persistence of Classicism). The excavations of the site have shown what appear to be large areas of unbuilt-on land, and it has been argued that the city may have never been anywhere near as full of buildings and people as might be expected from the area surrounded by the defensive walls. Greek urban forms were probably introduced into the Gandhāran region at Taxila when the Indo-Greek kingdoms were established in the south with the fall of Bactrian Empire. The site of Taxila in modern Pakistan occupies a valley plain surrounded by low hills and through which flows the Tamrā Nālā. It was a fertile region and the meeting point for several trade routes that connected the Indian subcontinent with western Central Asia, Kashmir, eastern Central Asia, and China. Already during the Achaemenid period, there may have been a town, though this is a highly contested point, at the site of Bhir Mound. The excavations have not revealed the plan of the town, though the streets excavated appear to be winding. Sometime in the 2nd century CE, a local Indo-Greek ruler established a new foundation to the northeast of Bhir Mound at what is now called Sirkap. This would remain the location for the city for almost three hundred years until a Kushan ruler relocated it again at the end of the 1st century CE. Sirkap has been excavated, and much of the site has been uncovered. As with most archaeological sites, what has been revealed is the town in its last phases, during the period when it was under Indo-Parthian rule. However, the basic format of the town must

8

Alphabetical Entries • Coinage

date to its Indo-Greek foundation. It encompassed a high point on which probably would been placed the citadel. Earthen ramparts or sun-dried bricks probably protected the first city, as was the case at Aï Khnum, and only later, perhaps in the later 1st century BCE, a stone wall was constructed to protect a portion of the city. The interior of the city reveals the underpinnings of a grid that dictates the arrangement of the streets and the formation of blocks, and the grid appears to be even more regular than that at Aï Khanum. However, the blocks are much more densely packed. Where Aï Khanum, and possibly other cities in the Greek areas of Central Asia, had open spaces, maybe used as gardens, in Sirkap, every space was filled with some type of building. The large houses themselves are composed of many small rooms arranged around interior courtyards. To date, the excavations have not revealed the expected Greek buildings, no gymnasium and no theater. There is a temple of Ionic style outside of the city confines proper, and within the city are the remains of several stūpas, nothing at all of Greek religious architectural type. The finds at Sirkap suggest an urban form that possessed a degree of Greek planning sensibility but which was quickly submerged by local building and usage patterns (see Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment, artifact 9). The excavations of most of the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin have not shown a clear pattern of urban development. At Niya on the southern route around the Täklimakan, about seventy structures have been uncovered. The buildings, mostly houses, were arranged on small loam or loess terraces, perhaps to raise them above a marshland. The city was spread over 45 sq km and perhaps could hold about eight hundred to one thousand families. The religious structures found to date are integrated in among the domestic building. Traces of canals must indicate the degree to which the local water had to be moved about to support the population and the town and probably influenced the placement of houses. The ruins of Gaochang City, in the Turfan Oasis, date from the Tang period. The remains are in goodenough condition to allow archaeologists to analyze the city’s Tang period plan. It consisted of an interior

and exterior city, each walled. The palace area was located on the northern side of the outer city. A massive monastic complex occupied the southwestern corner of the outer city, which also included an area for workshops and a market. This was the area for the production of local artisans and for the sale of those goods to the resident population. The placement of a market in the outer city may have been to allow for easier access for the merchants coming in from other areas. Their animals did not have to pass through the residential areas of the city to reach the market. The separately walled inner city was probably the older section of Gaochang City. Houses were built by digging down into the ground to provide dwellings that would remain cool in the oppressive heat of summer.

COINAGE The Greek and Chinese systems of coinage, two independent traditions, operated on the Silk Roads of Central Asia. The Ionian Greeks developed coinage in the 7th century BCE in their cities along the west coast of Asia Minor, taking an earlier invention of their Lydian neighbors. Greek coinage, which was to become the basis for all western coinage, used metals of intrinsic value, most commonly silver but also gold. The coinage’s value was dependent on specific weight and purity of metal. The weighed unit of metal was formed into a disk, what is called a flan, and the flan was then placed on top of a carved round iron surface placed in an anvil, a fixed die. A second, handheld, carved die was positioned over the flan. The handheld die was hit with a hammer impressing the image from die onto one surface and the image on the fixed die onto the other surface. The resulting coin is referred to as a struck coin. Many coins could be struck from the paired dies. When one die became too worn or damaged to continue in use, a new carved die could replace it. The coin’s two sides were used to carry visual messages. When the Greeks introduced coinage into the newly conquered regions of Central Asia and the Oxus-Indus stretch, the coins had assumed a particular form. The main side, the obverse, usually carried the portrait of a ruler, and the reverse, an image of a Greek deity, often associated with the

Alphabetical Entries • Coinage ruler. In addition to the images, there were often inscriptions, a ruler’s name and titles, and perhaps some other reference. The mints, the places where coins were produced, often marked their output with symbols, which appear on the obverse or the reverse. Since the Greeks had been developing an economy based on monetary exchanges, rather than barter, for more than three hundred years at the time of the conquest, it was essential for them to introduce coinage into their newly acquired territories. The Achaemenid Persians had struck coins, which they used in the western regions of their empire but not much in the eastern areas. There also may have been early forms of coinage on the Indian subcontinent. However, for the peoples of Central Asia and the Oxus-Indus stretch, Greek coinage and its economic structure were new. Seleucid kings began issuing coins from several mints in their empire, and as the Bactrian region began to initiate a movement toward independence, one of the first actions was for its new rulers to strike coinage (see Gold Tetradrachma of Demetrios I [222–180 BCE], artifact 19). Once the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom became its own entity, the kings used coinage as vehicle for expressing their rule. Their coins provided the visual information on who was ruling at any given moment by means of the portrait on the obverse, and the reverse carried the image of the Greek deity with which the ruler wanted to be associated. In this way, the visual force of Greek art as well as aspects of Greek pantheon spread throughout the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom and among the conquered subjects. The coins also carried inscriptions in Greek, which assisted in the spread of the Greek language and script. The new coinage was used for commercial transactions, since Greek officials and military men were paid in coinage, and it was used to pay for mercenaries that the Bactrian kings used both for the expansion of the kingdom and in their civil wars. The economic value of coinage as a means of making commercial exchanges much easier and the potential political propaganda uses that the images on the obverse and reverse could have were not lost on later rulers in Central Asia. The Arsacid Dynasty

9

that ruled Parthia issued coinage once they established themselves, and their coinage was used or imitated throughout Central Asia. After the fall of the Graeco- Bactrian kingdom, the rulers of the IndoGreek kingdoms that emerged in the south continued to strike coinage with Greek-style obverses and reverses that carried Greek inscriptions, until they were totally eradicated in the first decade of the 1st century CE. Their successors, the Indo-Scythians, continued to issue coinage of a similar type but with bilingual inscriptions, Greek on the obverse and a translation into an Indian language using Kharoṣṭhī script on the reverse. These were replaced during the Indo-Parthian period by coins that borrowed images from the Arsacid coinage and continued the bilingual inscriptions. Many of these Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Indo-Parthian coinages were produced in the mint at Taxila. The Indo-Scythian rulers had favored images of themselves as full figures rather than in the Greek style of solely profile heads. The Kushan kings chose also to be represented in full form. Several of the Kushan rulers were shown garbed in their traditional nomadic dress, and the obverse images closely resemble those of the statues that form the royal sanctuaries (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I, artifact 32). As the Kushan Empire was incorporated into the Sasanian Empire, the Sasanian coinage replaced the local Kushan forms and became the dominant currency in western Central Asia until replaced by Arabic coinage. Roman coinage, particularly gold coinage, entered the region via the sea trade and port at Barbarikon and did influence some aspects of the Kushan coinage. Later, during the Sasanian hegemony, Byzantine coins, particularly the gold solidus, also moved eastward though probably more commonly overland. In the West, Byzantine coinage was most significant in the eastern Mediterranean until the advent of Arabic coinage following the Arab conquest of the much of the region. Georgia’s location between the western edge of the Sasanian Empire and the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire and its close religious ties to the Byzantine Empire influenced its coinage types. Sometimes the coinage followed the Sasanian prototypes and other times the Byzantine.

10

Alphabetical Entries • Coinage

So long as the foreign coins were of good and not debased metal, they could be made to function in the local economic system by being struck over with local dies. They could also be collected as bullion, the value of which was just the weight of the metal itself. Because so few primary written documents survive from western Central Asia, the political history along with the changing nature of the forces in control of the region during any period has been reconstructed largely based on the evidence of coinage. Western-inspired coinage also made its way to the eastern part of Central Asia, the Tarim Basin, during the period of the Han Dynasty, when a rival coinage, the Han Chinese coins, began to appear in the oasis cities of the Täklimakan region. Chinese coinage developed in a manner different from Greek forms. Chinese coins were made of bronze, not gold or silver, and were not struck but were cast in molds with a square hole in the middle (see Bronze Coin with Square Hole, artifact 20). Though the coins followed standard formats and weights and so operated like Greek coins, they had no intrinsic value based on the metal. Unlike Greek and later Roman coins, there was no point in collecting them as bullion. What made them effective currency was that the Chinese government would issue them as payments and would accept them back. They could operate wherever Chinese goods and services were available, so in China proper and in those regions under Chinese direct or indirect control and in those places on the trade routes connecting them to China. The Chinese governments issued coins, and several of the oasis cities in the Täklimakan produced imitation Chinese coins that could be used locally or in the neighboring oasis communities. When Chinese authorities were dominant, the coinage was of Chinese origin, and when the Chinese presence was weak, local imitations circulated. Once introduced, Chinese currency formed a feature of the economic structure of eastern Central Asia. Like Greek coins, the Chinese coins carried messages on the obverse and the reverse, though the messages took the form of inscriptions of two or four characters rather than images. The earliest coins circulating in Central Asia bore the

inscriptions banliang, “half liang,” and wuzhu, “five grains,” each referring to the weight of the coin. In 621 CE, the Tang Dynasty issued a new coinage, the Kaiyuan tongbao, to replace the wuzhu. The Chinese coinage entered eastern Central Asia as the Han Dynasty established garrisons and farming colonies in the region. Coinage was used to pay the troops and to pay farmers for the foodstuffs that they supplied to the garrisons. However, Chinese coinage did not operate in a vacuum. The coinage from western Central Asia based on Greek forms also operated in the oasis cities. The archaeological finds show that both coinages were in use at the same moment in certain places. The oasis kingdom of Khotan during the 1st–2nd century CE issued a coinage that combined Greek and Chinese types. These Sino-Kharoṣṭhī coins, the “horse” coins of Khotan, work in both systems. One side features a horse with a Kharoṣṭhī inscription naming the king of Khotan who issued it. The other side has a tribal symbol, a tamgha, and a Chinese inscription stating the weight of the coin in grains. In theory, these coins could function in transactions that used either Greek-based currency like the Kushan Empire or Chinese currency. The rich supply of primary documents from some of the oasis towns in the Tarim provides important information about the nature of economic interactions allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how coinage functioned in eastern Central Asia. The finds make clear that while coins were used for a variety of transactions, they did not completely replace other means of making transactions. Cloth, particularly silk, in specific quantities and qualities, remained a standard means for making payments or for keeping records. Grain also was still employed. During periods when the Chinese presence was strong, the coinage tended to be the favored medium of exchange for smaller items since large payments in the coinage became difficult because too many coins were required. Silk was the standard substitute. When Chinese presence weakened and the local imitation coinage issued by the oasis states was the currency in circulation, then often alternative forms of payment became the more common. This was probably because the local imitation

Alphabetical Entries • Domestication of the Horse coinage had no meaningful value outside of the specific issuing state and its immediate neighbors. The lack of similar caches of primary documents for western Central Asia makes it impossible to state with any certainty that what happened around the Täklimakan was also the pattern for other parts of Central Asia. However, Russian accounts of the interactions between nomads and settled peoples in the more western parts of Central Asia indicate that at least in the mid-19th century CE, the several types of reckoning, including sheep, were used for keeping accounts and probably for making exchanges. Archaeological finds have shown that not all coins were used for commercial purposes. Byzantine gold solidi have been found in funerary contexts in some cemeteries in eastern Central Asia. These discoveries suggest that the Byzantine coins were selected and held back from circulation in the Tarim Basin to be part of the grave goods for certain people.

DOMESTICATION OF THE HORSE Over the past couple of decades of research, a scholarly consensus has emerged that the horse was first domesticated in the steppe lands of Central Asia, probably in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, and from there spread to other parts of the Eurasian continent. True wild horses (Equus caballus) are an endemic species to the steppe lands. They are one of several equid breeds found in Eurasia. The wild horse is perfectly adapted to the steppe environment, able to survive on the native grasses and possessing the ability to dig up the grasses under the blanket of winter snow and then move the snow away using the muzzle. They live in herds of either one stallion and several mares with fouls or in bachelor bands and can easily move through the steppes in search of better grazing. In the mixed group, the lead mare guides the other females, while the stallion contends with rivals from the bachelor band. It is now thought that the true horse first emerged in Mongolia or Manchuria and then spread westward, following the grasslands, eventually onto the European Peninsula sometime before the last Ice Age. The current-day Przewalski’s horse may be a survivor of that early stage, though this is not universally accepted.

11

A sub-species, a smaller horse, the Equus hydruntinus, evolved on the Pontic steppes. Beginning in the middle of the 5th millennium BCE, some funerary sites in the Pontic-Caspian steppes include horse carcasses along with those of sheep and cattle. At the same time, objects of bone and stone with carvings of horses also appear. These finds have led some archaeologists to argue that domestication had already occurred. Others see the evidence as pointing to a closer relationship between humans and horses but not necessarily domestication. Horses had certainly been hunted for meat during earlier periods, but domesticating the horse made good sense for an evolving herding society. A small group of domesticated horses could be much more easily maintained than the cattle or sheep that formed the larger groups of domesticates. Unlike the horse, sheep and cattle could not fend for themselves in the winter snows. They do not know how to find grasses under the snow; neither can they break through the snow or ice crust with their hooves to reach the grass nor can they move the snow with their soft snouts. They both depend on winter fodder. A small herd of domesticated horses could provide a source of emergency food for a pastoral group during the winter months. Domesticated horses can also be used for their milk, which can be processed into cheese or a slightly alcoholic drink. Though there is no archaeological evidence to suggest how domestication took place, it seems most likely that a stallion was killed and his harem was captured by guiding the lead mare. In this manner, the harem came under human control. For breeding purposes, a less aggressive male from a bachelor band could have been selected and separated from the group. To keep the captured horses nearby would have required no more than hobbling their legs to prevent them from wandering off onto the steppe. It seems most likely that the need for an assured winter food source was what prompted domestication. The herding of domesticated sheep and cattle began on the steppe before the domestication of the horse. The climatic period during which all of this occurred is known as the Atlantic period, a time during which the earth’s climate warmed and

12

Alphabetical Entries • Funerary Practices

the steppe lands increased while the forested river valleys decreased. The river valleys had been the home to foraging folk, hunters, and gatherers, but the shrinking niche pushed some peoples to find new ways of exploiting the steppe grasslands, and hence the spread of a pastoralist herding-based society. The best way fully to exploit the steppes for herding was to be able to move large numbers of sheep and cattle around the grasslands to take advantage of the best new growth. Doing this on foot limited the possibilities, but doing it on horseback expanded substantially the distances that could be covered. There must have been strong incentives to turn the horse from domesticated food source to a new means of transport. The horse-riding herder could take the cattle and sheep much greater distances, and by sitting atop the horse gained the advantage of height for overseeing the herds. The best archaeological evidence for beginning of riding has been found in the excavations at Botai in north-central Kazakhstan, a number of horse molars in a layer dating to between 3700 and 3000 BCE. To ride a horse requires a means of controlling the beast, and this is best done using a bridle with reins attached to a bit, which allows the rider to direct the horse left or right. Several of the molars found at Botai show signs of wear patterns that several scholars have interpreted to be the result of leather or rope bits wearing on the tooth enamel. Only a small portion of the horse findings from Botai show this pattern of tooth wear. However, an analysis of the totality of the horse remains found shows that there is a roughly 1:1 ratio of females to males. This has led to the conclusion that wild horses were rounded up to be slaughtered indiscriminately, harems with their stallions and bachelor bands together. Only hunters on horseback would have had the maneuverability to undertake such a mission and carry it through effectively. The Botai material would indicate that horse riding had become a feature of steppe life, at least for the emerging pastoralists by the end of the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier. The domestication of the horse followed by taming it to ride were important accomplishments for the peoples living on the steppes, but they were to have much wider ramifications. Over the course of

the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, the steppe pastoralists effectively colonized the entire Eurasian steppe lands and came into regular contact with the sedentary societies to the south. It was perhaps through the contact with sedentary peoples during the 4th millennium that carts were first introduced through the Maikop culture in northern Caucasus region into the steppes. The cart provided the last needed item for pastoralists to take control of the deep steppe lands. The cart permitted some pastoral communities to become entirely nomadic, carrying their household needs with them. In Mesopotamia, where the wheeled cart may have first developed, though the question is still debated, onagers (Equus hemionus), the native equid of the Near East, pulled the cart. In the steppe region, the horse could be used as the draught animal. By about 2100 BCE, a new group emerged on the steppes, between the Ural and the Tobol Rivers, the Sintashta culture, which is now credited with redesigning the cart to more efficiently harness the power of the horse through the creation of the chariot (see Stone Fragment Showing Procession of Horse-Drawn Chariots, artifact 30). Once invented, the chariot spread widely and rapidly, and within five hundred years, chariots could be found throughout Mesopotamia and the Near East, the Aegean region, and China. Moreover, along with the chariot came the horses. It seems quite likely that during the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, steppe peoples were engaging in long-distance exchanges with the sedentary peoples, bartering horses for products from the emerging urban societies of the south. Finished textiles may have been one of the major products sent north to pay for horses.

FUNERARY PRACTICES Much of the archaeological knowledge about ancient Central Asia comes from tombs. Though Central Asia peoples followed several different funerary traditions, in many instances they deposited grave goods with the dead. For modest burials, the objects placed with the remains were limited to a few items of minimal value either intrinsically or societally. In elite settings, the goods included were often of high value made of precious materials and

Alphabetical Entries • Funerary Practices worked by skilled artisans, and often, high-status objects, which carried meaning within the society, were placed in the grave. The last statement that reaffirmed a prominent person’s high status within the community was made by sequestering objects of value within the confines of the monumental tomb. By far the richest tombs were those that the herding and nomadic peoples began to erect on the steppes as early as the 4th millennium. The people known as the Yamnaya complex, to east of the Black Sea, built mounds, kurgans, above the graves of select individuals and placed into the graves objects of societal significance, such as wheeled carts, which required skill to construct. Slightly earlier, the folks living on the west coast of the Black Sea around Varna, modern Bulgaria, were interring some of their dead with abundant objects manufactured in gold as well as tools and weapons of copper, testifying to the skill in metallurgy that had developed in the region. The pattern for this type of steppe burial continued for the next two millennia, and the excavations of these kurgans have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct the social changes that occurred among the steppe peoples over the centuries. In the certain places in the steppe range, particularly in the Kazakh steppe, the Altai Mountains, and western Mongolia, something quite important for archaeology happened over the centuries. Several kurgans were damaged, sometimes not long after they were sealed. Often looters broke through the kurgan and opened a hole in the roof or walls of the wooden grave chamber under the mound. The opening allowed water to collect within the chamber and to freeze during the winter months. Eventually, enough ice formed that it never melted during the summer, and the chamber became a deep freeze, preserving objects that are normally lost to decay, those made of organic materials like wood, fabric, leather, bone, and even the skin of the deceased (see Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk, artifact 37). Many of the sedentary peoples of Central Asia also treated their dead in such a manner that grave goods of organic material survive. Inhumation burials were the common way of treating the bodies

13

among the various oasis dwellers of the Täklimakan region beginning in the Bronze Age. The different groups that settled around the desert developed distinctive tomb structures and burial traditions. Some peoples placed bodies in wooden coffins. Others laid the body out at the bottom of pit and then layered grave goods above the body. Others built kurgans. Since the graves were placed into the desert sands, the dryness worked to preserve not just grave offerings but also the soft tissues from bodies of the deceased. To date no evidence has been found that any of the peoples of the Tarim Basin practiced artificial mummification. What occurred was the result of the natural processes. In a couple of cemeteries, the tomb construction may have aided the process of preservation. At Zaghunluq, the corpses were placed atop wooden planks that allowed the dry air to circulate around the body permitting a more rapid evaporation of moisture. The saltiness of the soil also helped to ensure the preservation of bodies by aiding to dehydrate the remains and retarding bacterial growth. The same conditions that preserved the dead also protected organic grave gifts. Because the natural environment works to protect the grave contents, it means that for the Tarim Basin graves, surviving materials come from both elite and non-elite burials. It is possible to gain a much better understanding of funerary treatments for the full strata of an oasis community. The finds have included textiles that were used to wrap the bodies of the deceased as well as presented as funerary offerings, wooden objects, fiber items like mats, and plant materials. Also, historically valuable finds of written documents have been recovered from some burials (see Texts and Archaeology). Some writings are preserved on wood, and others on plant fibers. It was the practice among some peoples to use old paper documents, which no longer had any value, to repair worn shoes. These documents have provided a window into daily life in some of these settlements. The Zoroastrian Sogdians in their homeland exposed bodies to be defleshed and collected the bones in ossuaries (see Mullah Kurgan ­Ossuary, artifact 50). The ossuaries form a special category of funerary art that was used widely by all social strata. The Sogdians living in China were not

14

Alphabetical Entries • Indus Valley Civilization

permitted to follow the same practices. The corpses had to be placed within tombs where they were laid out on stone couches. Some elite Sogdian tombs in China have been excavated revealing a whole category of Sogdian funerary sculpture made for Sogdians residing in China. Buddhist treatment of the dead introduced cremation into Central Asia. For certain individuals, who were regarded as having reached the state of enlightenment, Buddhahood, the cremated remains would be collected and deposited into a receptacle that then became a reliquary to be venerated within a shrine, sometimes a stūpa (see Bronze Reliquary Box, artifact 49).

INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION During the formative phase of the development of Bronze Age culture in Central Asia, the strongest outside force influencing the region was that of the Bronze Age civilization of the Indus Valley. An Indus Valley outlier, an outpost in Central Asia on the Oxus (Amu Darya) River, has been excavated at Shortugai in modern Takhar province in Afghanistan. It was established about 2000 BCE and was probably intended to assure a steady supply of lapis lazuli from the mines in northern Afghanistan. Though the origin of the colonists at Shortugai cannot be determined, it can be assumed that some of the cities in the Indus Valley region were particularly interested in the maintenance of trade with Central Asia. Shortugai is far too distant from the homeland to have ever been intended as a foothold for some type of conquest. The Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization came into being in the first half of the 3rd millennium BCE, at the same time as the Sumerian city-states of Mesopotamia and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Like its Mesopotamian and Egyptian counterparts, it was a riverine culture, developing and spreading along the river systems formed by the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra waterways. It flourished as a defined culture for about seven hundred years, from 2600 to 1900 BCE, in Punjab and Sindh regions of modern Pakistan and India. It was an urban culture, defined by a number of cities, of which Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are the best known.

Though the urban ruins reveal similarities with the contemporary urban remains from Mesopotamia, there are important differences that clearly indicate that the culture of the Indus Valley civilization was quite different from that which took hold in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Burnt or baked mud brick, not sun-hardened mud brick, was the building material. The cities were raised on mud-brick platforms to put them above the level of the flood, and major drainage systems were worked into the design to move wastewater and floodwater out of the city area. Cities were laid out on a careful grid pattern with wide main streets and avenues running in a regular east-west, north-south pattern, unlike the more organic and less organized urban fabric of the Mesopotamian cities. The grand constructions were large halls, sometimes called granaries in the scholarly literature, the functions of which have still not been determined. This is different from Sumerian cities in which temples and palaces formed the large-scale structures. It is the careful urban planning that has made it possible to identify the remains at Shortugai as being the product of the Indus Valley civilization. As was the case for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization patronized an artisan class, and like the urban artisans of Mesopotamia, they worked for both the elites and the common peoples of the cities who could afford to pay for their products. Excavated finds have revealed well-made pottery, small-scale terracotta figurines, stone sculpture, copper vessels, extremely strong and hard bronze objects, and finely worked bead jewelry. Indus Valley jewelers crafted hard stones like carnelian into fine beads and were capable of making the longest and slenderest carnelian beads in the ancient world. They created a special drill tipped with a rare stone, ernestite, that was hard and durable enough to drill a small hole through the long stones. These long and slender carnelian beads were traded into Mesopotamia and probably more widely. Lapis lazuli, a soft stone with a rich blue color, was also prized and could only be obtained from sources in modern Afghanistan in Central Asia. The Indus Valley civilization did create a written script. It survives only on a few seals that must

Alphabetical Entries • Linguistic and Genetic Studies have been inscribed with the names of the owners. These would have been used to mark ownership by impressing the seal on a surface. Whether the Indus Valley peoples used writing more extensively to record their history or beliefs in a manner similar to the ways in which Mesopotamians and Egyptians used writing cannot be determined from the finds to date. Moreover, the small corpus of extent examples has not provided enough information to permit the writing system to be deciphered.

LINGUISTIC AND GENETIC STUDIES Since the 18th century, when European scholars first became aware that the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit used for the Vedic texts was related to Greek, the study of the origins and spread of the ancient languages of Central Asia has become a major area of scholarly investigation. This examination was made possible by the survival of so many textual fragments from such a variety of different cultural and geographical contexts and from a wide date span. Studies in historical linguistics have made possible the isolation of no fewer than seventeen distinct languages, and these represent only the languages that survived in one of the twenty-four distinct written scripts. There may well have been more languages spoken in ancient Central Asia, and new scripts recording those languages may yet appear from excavations. More than two centuries of analysis have provided a working framework for the chronological development of the ancient languages and their spread. The Sanskrit of India recorded in Brāhmi script was identified as a language belonging to a family known as the Indo-European languages from which the ancient languages of Europe: Greek, Latin, and the Celtic and Germanic languages all sprang as well. It is now understood that this language family, both in its European and Asian forms, was not indigenous to either region. It had spread from elsewhere, and a variety of diffusion patterns have been proposed. In general, it is accepted that the language family emerged in its first form, proto-Indo-European, in the region between the Dnieper and Ural Rivers among hunter-gatherers, probably at a point when they were beginning to adopt agriculture and transhumance

15

herding. These people carried proto-Indo-European southwest into Anatolia and eventually west into the Danube Basin and east into the steppes of Central Asia and southeast into the Iranian Plateau and north India. The separation from the place of origin and the movements in all directions resulted in the evolution of several distinct Indo-European language families and many individual languages. In Central Asia, these came to include the ancient Indo-Aryan languages of the Prakrits in north India and several languages of the Iranian Plateau, including Old Persian and Middle Persian, and the liturgical language of Avestan, as well as Bactrian, Sogdian, and Khotanese. The Tocharian groups, A, B, and C, in the Tarim Basin represent the most easterly extent of the Indo-European languages. On the northwest edge of Central Asia were the Armenians, speakers of an independent Indo-European language. When this process of development and spread began is not certain. However, the languages of the Indo-European family share certain common vocabulary related to woven wool textiles, wheels, and wagons. Since the archaeological evidence for any of these items does not exist before 4000 BCE, it is generally assumed that proto-Indo-European did not develop earlier than the 4th millennium BCE and took shape in that region where the speakers were experimenting with wool textile weaving and making wheeled vehicles. One of the places, though not the only, for the evidence of the domestication of sheep and processing of wool into woven textiles is the northern Caucasus Mountains. Remains of wagons, dating to between 3000 and 2000 BCE, have been found in Ukraine. They were included as grave gifts in major burials that were marked by mounds. These wagons are not the earliest evidence for the wheel and the wagon, but they represent the largest early concentration of both items. It is generally accepted that Proto-Indo-European took shape among the people of Pontic-Caspian steppes who were raising sheep for wool and weaving the wool and using wheeled carts. Large-scale herding of sheep and employing carts suggest that these people must also have been raising domesticated horses (see Domestication of the Horse). By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, some of these people had

16

Alphabetical Entries • Monasticism

begun the migration movements that would eventually spread the Indo-European languages throughout the Eurasian continent. Eventually, Chinese would enter Central Asia via the Tarim Basin through Han Dynasty military expansion and trade. Turkic and Mongolian languages moved into the region also through the Tarim Basin. Semitic Syriac came in with the Christianization of Central Asia by the Church of the East. Besides the new languages introduced during the historical period and that have left their traces through written documents, there must have been older languages spoken in parts of Central Asia before the arrival of the Indo-European speakers. Clearly the people of the Indus River region who established the culture known as the Indus Valley civilization (see Indus Valley Civilization) of the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3rd and 2nd millennia CE) spoke a non-Indo-European language, which they may well have spread through trade networks in the Oxus-Indus stretch. The evidence of human occupation back to the Late Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods in the northern regions of Central Asia in modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and even the southern Tarim Basin at Khotan, shows that prehistoric peoples were already exploiting selected areas of Central Asia. In southwest of the Iranian Plateau, the non-Indo-European, non-Semitic-speaking Elamites created a major Early Bronze Age civilization, distinct from but related to the developments in nearby Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BCE, centered around Susa. The arrival of Indo-European folks, in more than one sub-family of the Indo-European language tree, may well have overwhelmed these existing populations, resulting in an Indo-European domination beginning in the 2nd millennium BCE. Scientific genetic investigations began with gene sequencing of material obtained from mummies preserved in the Täklimakan. The work remains the most comprehensive examination of the genetic distribution for any ancient population in Central Asia. The results are limited by the small number of good ancient donors, their restricted area of occupation, and the lack of precise knowledge about the modern population’s genetic distribution. The studies have focused on extracting mitochondrial DNA. The

results have confirmed what the linguistic studies show. Some of the settlers in the Tarim Basin have genetic markers that link them most closely to European populations. This makes sense if the speakers of proto-Indo-European split at about the same time. One group headed west, and one group headed east. Both groups then began to subdivide into smaller splinter units from which emerged the speakers of the actual languages attested by the documents. The physical appearance of some of the painted figures in the various ancient Central Asian artworks seems to reinforce the notion that a portion of the population throughout Central Asia was Caucasoid in racial terms, defined in the paintings by red or brown hair and gray, blue, or green eyes. If the painted images reflect reality, then the Caucasoid element in the population remained significant throughout the early historical period and remains dominant in some parts of Central Asia to this day. Among the mummy finds from the Täklimakan are those with preserved reddish hair. Some of the deceased were buried with blue stones placed over the eyes, perhaps referencing the original eye color (see Infant Mummy, artifact 48). The cranial studies would seem to support the argument for the presence of a European related group among the larger population of Central Asia. The cranial studies of the Tarim Basin skulls show the existence of two Caucasoid subtypes: the eastern Mediterranean or Indo-Afghan type and the Pamir-Fergana type.

MONASTICISM Monasticism is the practice by which individuals seek to remove themselves from struggles and temptations of everyday in order to devote themselves to their own spiritual perfection through devotion to the divine. All three of the great proselytizing religions that entered Central Asia in antiquity, Buddhism, Christianity, and Manichaeism had monasticism as an aspect of the faith as it spread. It was in the monasteries that the sacred scriptures that formed the basis for each of the three faiths were collected in libraries for study, were copied for further transmission, and were translated into the new languages (see Texts and Translations). The monasteries were also architectural features in

Alphabetical Entries • Monasticism the ancient landscape, complexes designed to house many monks, and sometimes nuns. They also served the needs of the converted lay population, including the traveling merchants who often provided the means, in their trains, by which monks and missionaries moved around the territories and into new regions and also the patronage for the funding of monastic enterprises. From the earliest days of the Buddha’s preaching, he had followers, a community committed to him and his teaching, the sangha. These early believers in the Buddha’s message of escape from the cycle of death and rebirth, samsāra, through the following of the Middle Way, and the dharma that he preached, became the first monks of the Therāvada school. They were dedicated to seeking full enlightenment for themselves by a rigid observation of the guidance provided by the Buddha. In India, in the last centuries before the change to the Common Era, the vihāra, an architectural complex with cells opening to a central court entered through gate, took shape. Eventually these complexes were given an architectural focal point, the stūpa, a mound covering or containing a relic of the Buddha, which served for devotional circumambulation. These could also be designed to operate in cave settings so that a group of caves could function as center for Buddhist practices. Here the monks and lay devotees could come to partake of the Buddha’s message, listen to teachings, and engage in personal meditation activities, all with the goal of cleansing the mind and facilitating the goal of reaching an enlightened state. By the reign of Ashoka (see Ashoka Pillar, artifact 31), the royal family was patronizing such complexes as that at Sanchi. As Buddhist missionaries preached in the Kushan Empire, they brought with them these concept of architectural ensembles designed to promote the practices of the Buddhist faith. The different schools of Buddhism had their complexes, and as they ­established themselves in the Gandhāran region of the Kushan realm, these became the physical manifestations of Buddhist presence on the landscape. They grew much larger. In addition to the stūpa, there were now communal prayer halls, preaching and teaching spaces, smaller chapels, and meditation

17

rooms and cells for monks themselves. Many of the spaces, and particularly the stūpas, received decoration, usually in the form of sculpted reliefs. It was in the Kushan Empire that the sculptural form of the Buddha himself was first created at both Mathura and Gandhāra (see Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding, artifact 47). In Gandhāra, the Bodhisattva also was given a sculpted form (see Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya, artifact 2). These sculptural decorations were probably also complemented by painted forms that have not survived, and together the decorations worked to help the faithful in their search for enlightenment. Buddhism, and with it monasticism, was brought north by missionaries who took the faith into Bactria and Sogdiana, where the reception was perhaps not as welcoming, maybe because of a stronger Zoroastrian presence. They were able, however, to find a home for Buddhism in eastern Afghanistan, where it flowered and monasteries were built even after the Sasanian conquest. To the east, moving along the caravan routes around the Täklimakan and approaching the southern edge of the Tarim Basin over the Tibetan Plateau, the missionaries were extremely successful in converting the oasis towns. Here Buddhism flourished for centuries. The Chinese monk Xuanzang (602–664 CE), describing his travels throughout this region, mentioned oasis cities with dozens of monasteries and hundreds of monks. These included the features already present in the monasteries in Gandhāra. Since Xuanzang was headed to India to obtain sacred scriptures in their original languages and scripts, he probably stopped here to improve his own command of Pāli and Sanskrit and their writing systems, these Tarim Basin monasteries were famous for their schools of translation (see Texts and Translations). They must have had guest quarters to accommodate a traveling monk. Among those that have survived in the archaeological record, it is clear that they too were decorated with sculptures and paintings. One type of monastery to develop along the northern edge of the Täklimakan, and which then spread into China, was the cave monastery. Cave monasteries could make use of existing grottoes or could be the result of man-made caves cut into a cliff face.

18

Alphabetical Entries • Monasticism

In their initial form, they borrowed the notion of the stūpa as the focal feature but substituted a central pillar carved from the cave’s interior around which the faithful could circumambulate. The pillar held a sculptural form of the Buddha that provided a focus for the interior. The painted walls surrounding the pillar had images that reinforced the faith such as Jataka tales of the Buddha’s previous lives and the Parinirvana of the Buddha (see Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana, artifact 11). These small chambers with their richly decorated interiors provided a space for personal meditation. Many of these cave monasteries were of the Mahāyāna sect, and in China, they were all Mahāyāna. The Mahāyāna School allowed for believers, who were not ready to assume a monk’s life to reach enlightenment, to earn merit by patronizing the monasteries. In many instances, specific patrons, including the royal family, whose images are sometimes included in the decoration, paid for the individual cave units. This type of monastery entered China during the Six Dynasties when the Wei of the north began to patronize the new religion and paid for the creation of several grotto monasteries. The great grotto complex at Mogao outside of Dunhuang began during this period but was to become of great importance during the Tang Dynasty, when even the imperial court in Chang-an paid for some of the work that was done in the complex. Certain Christians early preached the notion that one could best emulate the life of Christ and thus escape an eternity in hell by moving into the desert and living a life of deprivation to escape from the temptations of the flesh. These individuals, most commonly found in Syria and later Egypt, took to spending their lives largely alone, in desert caves, eating minimally, and concentrating on prayer. Theirs was a hermit’s life, a type of monasticism known as anchorite. The early sects of Christianity reacted against this extreme monasticism and promoted a different, more communal monastic option, cenobitic monasticism. Monks lived together under a rule that guided daily life, shared in the work of the monastery, ate together, prayed together, and engaged in communal acts of devotion. Both the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church

made use of cenobitic monasticism and constructed such monasteries throughout the lands where they preached. The Sasanian government did not forbid the construction of such monasteries. They became centers for the promulgation of the faith and for the contemplation of the sacred scripture and centers of learning for the study of the writings of the early church fathers and of the important theologians of the Church of the East or the Syrian Orthodox Church. Missionaries carried the Christian monasticism to the east. The oasis at Turfan has the remains of a monastery of the Church of the East, and the text of the great stele erected in honor of Alopen (ca. 635 CE) in Chang-an, who first brought Christianity to China, mentions the existence of several monasteries belonging to the Church of the East in various cities in the Tang China. These monasteries were also architectural complexes, built with a hierarchy of parts. The church was the main focus, since here was presented the ritual of the mass and the celebration of the liturgy. This was the communal experience shared by Christians of all of the various sects, and while specific aspects of the liturgy differ, there were commonalities. Based on the archaeological remains, early churches of the Church of the East were rectangular in shape with one or three naves and were constructed of stone or fired bricks. They were aligned east-west with the altar at the east end and the entrance on the south wall, sometimes preceded by a forecourt. The lintel was kept low and the threshold block was high so that entering the church would be a humbling experience. The altar, to which the clergy had sole access during the liturgy, was physically separated from the nave in which the laity stood. A  stone or wooden screen separated the altar area from the nave. While the church was the main architectural feature of the monastery, there were also spaces and rooms for other activities such as the copying of texts, communal eating, and sleeping. Because Christianity existed as a minority faith throughout the Sasanian Empire, Central Asia, and China, some monasteries were built more like fortifications to provide protection should the environment turn hostile. Little survives of early decoration in the monasteries either of the Church of the East (see Stucco Architectural

Alphabetical Entries • Nomad Kingdoms and Empires Roundel with Palmettes from a Window, artifact 10) or of the Syrian Orthodox Church, but the painting of the possible Palm Sunday Procession from the monastery church in the Turfan oasis would suggest that interior decoration was a standard feature. The Church of the East spread its creed and its monasticism into the Tarim Basin and China. It probably also existed in Sogdiana and possibly Bactria. The Syrian Orthodox Church was limited in its spread eastward by the strong presence of the Church of the East, but it dominated in the western regions of the Sasanian Empire, especially when the empire expanded to take control of old Byzantine territories. It too spread its miaphysite creed by sending forth missionaries. It was probably these missionaries, the so-called Nine Syrian Monks, who brought monasticism to the already Christianized Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The Coptic Church of Abyssinia was in its formative stages at the same time that the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires fought over control of the maritime routes between the Red Sea and India. The Manichaean faith was also spread by monasticism. The strong emphasis toward self-abnegation and denial in Manichaean practice made anchorite monasticism an appealing form. Early Christian writers excoriate the extreme asceticism of the Manichaeans. There is some evidence that Manichaeans sought to enrich their ranks with anchorite monks in Egypt who would be drawn to the even more extreme form of self-denial practiced by the Manichaean Elect. The sources are not clear on how the Manichaeans structured their monastic enterprise, and since the anchorites of Egypt and Syria were often isolated hermits, there may have been little or no real architecture. However, in later centuries and in the eastern regions, there may have been actual communal monasteries. The finds of what must have been a library of sacred texts in the ruins of Group K at Qočo in the Turfan oasis would seem to suggest the existence of some type of architectural complex with a variety of spaces, perhaps a hall for communal rituals such as “Feast of Bēma,” which commemorated the martyrdom of Mani, as well as cells for monks or Elect, and a scriptorium for the production of the manuscripts, the fragments of which have been found.

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NOMAD KINGDOMS AND EMPIRES The most recent scholarship is suggesting that horse domestication first appeared in the late 5th millennium in the Pontic steppes and developed into horseback riding from which it then spread during the 4th millennium out to southeastern Europe, central Europe, the Caucasus, and the Kazakh steppes (see Domestication of the Horse). The archaeological evidence is admittedly limited, and more excavations will no doubt refine and change this hypothesis. The impetus for riding must have come because of the need to manage larger mix herds of domesticated horses, cattle, and sheep, which came into being as folks abandoned farming and took more and more to a pastoral existence, exploiting the grasslands. This change in lifestyle for one group of people by the mid-4th millennium BCE created a frontier zone that separated the agricultural societies from the newly emergent nomadic herding societies. Whether this was a contested frontier fraught with danger is hard to determine from the existing evidence. However, there is probably good reason to believe that the development of the skills of horsemanship that must have become a standard part of the life of nomadic peoples may well have given them an advantage over their sedentary neighbors if conflicts arose. If the later literary sources can be trusted to contain traces of the Bronze Age culture that emerged among the proto-Indo-Europeans of the steppes, then it is most likely that these were small raiding parties of young men who hoped to gain individual glory through an act of aggression. That some men must have acquired such status may be seen in the formation of new burial forms that now include the erecting of large mounds over the burials, kurgans, of certain individuals who were interred with rich offerings of stone maces as symbols of power and weapons, which must have glorified the success of raids. It has been proposed that this new nomadic structure operated with oaths of loyalty that bound people into a patronage structure with the most successful raiders who may have used communal feasts and gift giving as a means of maintaining allegiances. The earliest nomads of the steppe lands were most likely speakers of protoIndo-European languages and were members of the

20

Alphabetical Entries • Nomad Kingdoms and Empires

proto-Indo-European ethnic stock. As the knowledge of how to exploit the grasslands through horse domestication and riding spread, peoples of Mongolian and Turkic ethnicity also adopted the lifestyle and became major players during the later 1st millennium BCE. The real nomad armies did not emerge from the steppes until the first centuries of 1st millennium BCE, the Early Iron Age. They were a product of a changing social structure, one with a more nuanced hierarchy, which coincided with a technological change in weaponry, the invention of the short, recurved, composite bow, the “cupid” bow, about 1000 BCE. Until this bow appeared, riders had to contend with the long bow, which was much harder to move around the horse, especially over the hindquarters (see Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35). The evidence of a societal shift appears in the Arzhan kurgans in the Tuva region of southern Siberia dated to the late 9th–7th century BCE. These were burials for two couples, richly furnished with gold objects and with precious stones. The finds suggest a setting in which plunder or payments or extortion had rewarded these individuals with an abundance of materials of intrinsic value. The evidence for massive funerary feasts that must have attended each interment would indicate that the deceased were rewarding those who had served them in life. The evidence has been interpreted to show that the nomad society of this eastern area had assumed a more nuanced hierarchical structure with a warrior caste led by a chieftain successful at planning and overseeing raiding expeditions occupying the top rung. This is the first real evidence for predatory nomadism in which a portion of the society was devoted to aggressive predation on outsiders and was rewarded with wealth, both portable luxury goods and probably livestock as well. The descriptions of predatory nomadic behavior fill the pages of the writings of Herodotus, Strabo, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Sima Qian, the primary sources for the story of the interactions between nomads and sedentary peoples. The Cimmerians were the first to appear as real threat to the sedentary peoples during the 10th–9th century BCE, and their

destructive sweeps through the Anatolian Peninsula have been documented in the archaeology. They were pushed out of the Pontic steppe by the arrival of the Scythians in the 8th century BCE, who may have originated in the region in which the Arzhan kurgans stand before spreading west and who dominate the literary and archaeological records until the 3rd century BCE. Like the Cimmerians, they were a frightening force for the sedentary peoples and were not easily defeated in any type of battle. Unlike the Cimmerians, they did learn to live with sedentary peoples as neighbors. They established an almost symbiotic relationship with the Greek settlers on the Black Sea. They also served as mercenaries for the Achaemenid rulers. A parallel development occurred along the northern frontier zone of China during the 9th–7th century BCE. The relationship of Chinese sedentary societies of the Shang (1600–1046 BCE) and Zhou (1046–256 BCE) Dynasties had already established ties with the nomadic groups. These peoples lived in Mongolia above the region defined as an arc stretching from the Liao River to the upper reaches of the great bend in the Yellow River and incorporating the Inner Mongolia Plateau and the Ordos region. From these nomads the Chinese took the chariot (see Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession of Horse-Drawn Chariots, artifact 30) and had made it an important feature in Chinese warfare and a mark of social status. There are a number of other items found in Chinese elite graves of these centuries that point to trade relations with the steppe peoples, and it can be assumed, though there is no evidence yet, that the Chinese were sending silk into the steppes. One item type that does survive in steppe graves is a Chinese cast-bronze helmet, five examples of which have been unearthed in Scythian burials at Kelermes. The nomadic peoples developed a unified cultural complex that by the 10th century BCE was defined by metallurgical craft skills that had been borrowed from peoples to the north-west and the use of early forms of “Animal Style” decoration (see Animal Style). The presence of weapons sets in graves along with horse sacrifices at this point suggests that these nomadic peoples were also beginning to practice a

Alphabetical Entries • Nomad Kingdoms and Empires more predatory type of nomadic lifestyle in relation to their sedentary neighbors. By the 6th century BCE in the Ordos region, features associated with Scythian culture make an appearance, including horse riding, archery, and a more developed “Animal Style.” The change in the social structure of the nomads seems to have placed new pressures on the seminomadic peoples to the south who were displaced and migrated into the settled region of the Central Plains of the China, causing a change toward a more hostile relationship between the Chinese and their nomadic neighbors. Superior horsemanship combined with excellent archery skills and an appropriate bow for use in the saddle allowed these early aggressive nomads and their later successors to cause major problems for the sedentary peoples on whom they often placed pressure. Unlike the sedentary forces that came to meet them in battle, the nomads were mobile and had developed military tactics out of their experiences hunting steppe animals. They never fought battles unless they were certain of victory. They avoided open combat and sought to lure the sedentary armies into traps, often feigning retreat as a means of drawing the enemy into a long and usually dangerous pursuit that left the pursuers fatigued and unable to fight when the main nomad army appeared (see Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze and with an Applique of a Steppe Warrior in the Pose of a Parthian Shot, artifact 38). By the 5th century BCE, several groups of nomads, perhaps related to the Scythians as is suggested in Herodotus’s account, lived in the Kazakh steppes. Among these were the Sakās. Some of the Sakā territory, the Sakā Tigrakhauda, was incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire, and clearly Achaemenid objects moved north, perhaps as payments for mercenary services or as diplomatic gifts or as bribes to cease harassing the neighboring sedentary communities. What is clear is that the interactions between the highly organized and urbanized world that had taken shape below the steppe band needed to engage with the steppe nomads who had also developed a sophisticated, hierarchically stratified society in which warrior prowess played a significant role, often at a cost to other nomads and to sedentary

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groups living nearby. The increasing long-distance trade in both east-west and north-south directions opened up an area of potential conflict or cooperation. The organized nomads could use their warrior bands to plunder trade caravans, or they could use them to protect the caravans and be paid for the service (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27). It is during this same period that some of the Sakā moved in the Täklimakan region and settled, as seems to be shown in the archaeological findings and in the Hanshu (History of the Han Dynasty) accounts. In China, the relations between the settled communities of the Central Plains and the agro-pastoralists and true pastoral nomads of the north had reached the point that in several places, walls were built to keep the northern peoples out. During the Qin Dynasty (221–210 BCE), a truly long wall, extending to the Ordos, was constructed. For about seven hundred years of the 1st millennium BCE, the nomad societies of the steppes developed local social structures and a cultural form that supported a more militant lifestyle with at least a portion of the population forming a distinctly warrior caste, which may have included women in certain settings (see Golden Warrior [Reconstructed Costume], artifact 34, and Amazons). These nomadic groups were capable of exploiting other, less well-defended pastoralists and neighboring sedentary communities. More important, the militarized nomads placed pressure on the centralized governments to the south who were forced to negotiate by providing opportunities for trade, by paying tribute to avoid attacks, and by hiring nomadic warrior bands as mercenaries. In each scenario, the nomadic warriors and the leaders benefited by receiving vast amounts of high-quality and often intrinsically valuable commodities, which eventually ended up in the graves of high-ranking individuals. However, these were not true nomad empires. In the 3rd century BCE, Mongolia experienced a major upheaval; a powerful nomadic group, the Xiongnu, a people from the Altai, emerged, expanded, and systematically absorbed other nomad tribes or forced them to move out of the region to the west. This pattern of nomadic communities being

22

Alphabetical Entries • Nomad Kingdoms and Empires

uprooted and forced to migrate west because of a new, superior nomad force now becomes a recurring motif in the steppe lands. The Xiongnu exhibited a changed, more militarized, nomad structure. They subordinated other nomad clans and forced them to pay tribute. They confronted the army of the Han Dynasty and defeated it, forcing the Han pay an annual tribute. They pushed the Yuezhi and Wusun, separate and unrelated nomadic groups, probably of non-Mongolian lineage, to the west, where their arrival disrupted the balance in that region by forcing the Sakā to the west and south and probably helping to lead to the fall of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. They formed what can be understood to be a nomad empire, the first steppe empire. What made the Xiongnu so effective must have been their command of mounted warfare. They were, in effect, a cavalry that used an incredibly effective bow that made them capable of routing the Han army. It was not until the Han Dynasty, under Emperor Wudi (r. 141–87 BCE), developed a successful counter-cavalry using the famed “Heavenly Horses” from the Fergana Valley in modern Uzbekistan that the Xiongnu threat was neutralized and the northern border secured. To obtain the horses, the Han army moved into the Tarim Basin and established garrisons throughout the region to assure the supply. One of the interesting results of this forced migration and resettlement of steppe nomads was that in many instances, the displaced groups eventually overwhelmed settled regions and then redefined themselves as sedentary people. Some of the Sakās moved to Gandhāra and established the Indo-Scythian kingdom over the earlier Indo-Greek kingdoms. A group of the Yuezhi settled in the old region of the Graeco-Bactrian Empire and founded the Kushan Empire, which eventually incorporated the Indo-Scythian kingdom. The disruption of the eastern steppe lands by the expansion of the Xiongnu had ripple effects even in the western steppes. In the 3rd century BCE, a new people, the Sarmatians (Sauromatae, Sauromatians), crossed into the Scythian territory and brought an end to the Scythian world through plunder and extermination, according to the ancient source, Diodorus Siculus (2.43.3). Like the other nomads by this

time, the Sarmatians formed a skilled cavalry. Their various tribes took control of large portions of the western steppes all the way into the Hungarian Plain bringing them into regular contact with the frontier Roman forces. Some of the Sarmatian tribes came to serve as auxiliary cavalry for the Roman infantry in the Dacian Wars (101–106 CE) but then ended up fighting the Roman legions in the Marcomannic Wars (166–80 CE). In the 3rd century CE, a movement of peoples from southern Siberia brought Turkic-speaking groups into Central Asia. The process would last for five hundred years. The pressure exerted by the Turkic migration probably pushed from their home in Dzungaria or southern Siberia, a group known in the ancient sources as the Hephthalites. They moved into the territories that had earlier been Sakā or part of the Kushan Empire. The ancient source, Procopius (Secret History 1.3), identifies them as Huns but states that they did not have dealings with the other Hunnic groups also operating in the OxusIndus stretch, the Kidarites and Xionites (Chionites). They stayed in Central Asia and, by the early 5th century CE, had become a major problem for the Sasanian Empire whose northern borders they attacked. They were also successful mounted fighting force, able to defeat the heavily armored cavalry forces sent against them, the cataphracts (see Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius from Dura Europos, artifact 39). The Sasanians were obliged to spend heavily to build a massive defensive wall on the eastern Caspian Sea, the Gorgan Wall. Eventually, the Hephthalites controlled from Gandhāra in the south to Sogdiana in the north and to Khotan on the southern route of the Tarim Basin. These Hunnic nomads lived as warrior chieftains ruling sedentary peoples, but they also appear to have patronized the artisan workshops among the sedentary peoples and commissioned luxury metalwork with Classicizing styles and motifs (see Persistence of Classicism). The disruptions in Central Asia provided an opening in southern Mongolia for other nomad forces to fill. In the early 5th century CE, one of the clans of the Xianbei crossed into northern China and established themselves as the Wei Dynasty (Toba Wei) (386–535 CE). At the same time, a nomadic

Alphabetical Entries • Nomad Kingdoms and Empires confederacy known as the Juanjuan emerged, first playing a tributary role to the Wei but eventually becoming a powerful force holding the land between the Gobi Desert and Lake Baikal. By this point, the Turkic-speaking nomads had assumed a powerful role and forced out the Juanjuan sending them on a westward migration where they may have become the Avars of the western sources (see Gold Belt End, artifact 6). Eventually, the Turkic presence spread from Manchuria to the Black Sea, and, by the late 6th century CE, it split into two distinct empires, the eastern and western khanates. The reunified China under the early Tang Dynasty in 630 CE was able to destroy the eastern khanate. Among the tribes forming the eastern khanate, the Uyghur emerged as an independent power, establishing their own khanate in Mongolia. They allied themselves with the Tang and so survived the destruction of the eastern khanate but were themselves defeated and pushed out by the Kyrgyz in the mid-9th century CE. Eventually, a portion of the Uyghur reestablished themselves as a kingdom, Qočo, in the region of the Turfan oasis in the Tarim Basin where they converted to Manichaeism. Under the Uyghur control in the Turfan oasis, the Church of the East also prospered (see Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Including Crosses, artifact 46). The western khanate played an important role in the military politics of the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires, helping the Sasanians against the Hephthalites and later working with the Byzantines against the Sasanians. All the while, the khanate exerted pressure on the Avars, forcing them ever more westward and into the Byzantine realm. The wars between the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires allowed the western khanate to take over parts of the southern Caucasus, including Armenia as well as the Crimea on the northern Black Sea. In the West, the pressure exerted by migrating nomadic groups being forced to move was felt on the Roman and later Byzantine frontiers. The last of the Sarmatian tribes, the Alans, in the 5th century broke through the eastern border of the western Roman Empire and, together with the Germanic Vandals and Suevi, blazed a destructive path through Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula where they were later forced into the northwestern corner by the Germanic Visigoths

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(see Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch, artifact 28), and North Africa. The Huns were among those who had attacked the Alans and sent them moving. They may be an offshoot of the Xiongnu, but that is not certain. By the last quarter of the 4th century CE, the Romans and the Huns were in direct conflict, and the Huns had shown themselves a disciplined and capable fighting force. Though Hunnic tribes operated on several fronts in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, the southern Caucasus, Syria, and lower Danube, it was in the latter regions, the Rhine and Danube frontiers and the Hungarian Plain, that the Huns were most consistently active. They operated as a confederacy of tribes and were successful in defeating both western Roman and Byzantine armies sent against them. Their pushes against Byzantine power permitted the Avars (see Gold Belt End, artifact 6) to move into the Balkans where they would remain a force until the migrations of Slavs and Bulgars along with the armies of the Franks destroyed them in the 9th century. It was the Khazars, a Turkic people who migrated across the western steppes in the 5th and 6th centuries CE, who set the Avars and Bulgars moving further west into the European territory. By the 9th century CE, they had settled in the region through which ran the great north-south flowing rivers, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, which gave the Khazars control over the trade moving down the rivers to the Black and Caspian Seas. The Khazar elite converted to Judaism, which separated the Khazar kingdom from the Byzantine Christian world that dominated the West, especially after the conversion of the Slavs and Bulgars in the mid-9th century CE and the Muslim world of the south. The arrival of the Arab armies under the banner of Islam was to change the situation dramatically beginning in the mid-7th century CE. The Sasanian Empire fell in 651 CE, and the Arab forces moved northeast over the course of the next century. In 751 CE, Arab forces fought the Tang Chinese army at the Battle of Talas. The battle halted the eastward advance of the Arabs and forced the Tang Chinese to withdraw from Central Asia. The subsequent rebellion in China reduced substantially the part China would play in Central Asian politics for the

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Alphabetical Entries • Persepolis Apadana Reliefs

next several centuries. The Arab conquests united Central Asia with the ancient Near East under single rulership, and with the start of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE), the power of Islam as a universal faith came to play a central role as more and more subject peoples converted. The political unity was matched by a religious unity. Until the 13th century CE, the nomadic peoples and their sedentary neighbors would continue to operate in a symbiotic manner, but the steppes had one last great migration to send forth with the eruption of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan in the 13th century CE, which would once again change the story in a dramatic manner. Over five thousand years, the steppes produced peoples who developed cultures well-tuned to life on the steppe and constantly changing how they exploited the possibilities. Their discoveries of horse domestication and riding, along with the invention of the chariot, were all to play significant parts in the cultural expansions and changes for the sedentary peoples of the south. The steppe nomads were dynamic forces in the formation of the great trade routes that eventually linked together the Eurasian continent. They also stimulated the economic development of the south by providing markets for products as well as supplying both raw materials and finished goods for the southern communities. They challenged the military might of the settled regions. Their skill as mounted bowmen and later as disciplined cavalry fighters made them fearful opponents and led to the southern kingdoms and empires learning how to build massive physical defenses and how to fight as cavalry forces themselves.

PERSEPOLIS APADANA RELIEFS Darius I (522–486 BCE) started the construction of the great ceremonial center at Persepolis, in the countryside of Pars, the ancient homeland of the Achaemenids. The complex was added to over the next two centuries and consisted of a series of buildings and courtyards, of which the most significant was the great audience hall, the apadana. The complex was probably used for yearly festivities at which time the imperial court, the major figures from throughout the Persian land, and representatives of the subject peoples would come together

to pay homage to the king of kings, who would sit enthroned in the apadana hall. It has been proposed that this annual event coincided with the New Year’s or Nowruz celebrations. The ceremonial complex is raised on a high terrace above the plain and must be approached using a great staircase that connects the plain to the top of the platform. The staircase ends at the great entrance, the Gate of All Nations, that then leads into the courtyard in front of the main, north façade, to the apadana. The apadana itself is an enormous colonnaded hall resting on a raised platform, several meters high. Two facing staircases provide the access to the top of the platform and the formal pathway leading to the throne. The Achaemenid Empire was the first empire to embrace the central portion of the Eurasian continent. At its height, it stretched from Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Aegean Sea in the west to northwest India, Gandhāra, Bactria, and Sogdiana in the east. The territory was massive and incorporated subject peoples from many different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds. Among the peoples were those from western Central Asia, the Gandhārans, Sogdians, Bactrians, and Sakās. The great complex at Persepolis was designed to acknowledge and to celebrate the diversity of the empire brought together in harmonious unity. The foundation on which the whole series of structures stands was constructed of stones of a variety of sizes placing visual emphasis on the strength of the structure constructed from the disorder of the building material. The north and east sides of the apadana platform were decorated by two sets of relief sculptures, almost mirror images of each other, placed on either side of centrally situated double staircases. Horizontal bands presented groups of male figures, each fully delineated in a profile view. The units consist of several figures joined together by a common costume with a single figure dressed differently in the lead position. Along with the figures, there is an occasional animal, most commonly a distinctive beast of burden. Most of the figures also carry items. Separating the groups are cypress trees so that each cluster is read as a separate entity. Among the relief sculptures are those of individual armed

Alphabetical Entries • Persistence of Classicism men. The sculpted ensemble represents processions of subject peoples preparing to present themselves before the king of kings at the celebrations. They wear their regional dress by which they can be recognized and carry the distinctive goods of their areas to be given to the king of kings, and sometimes their typical domesticated work animals come with them. They are proceeded by the Persian or Median ushers, wearing their distinctive court garbs, who guide them through the ceremonies and are attended by the guards identified by the weapons that they hold. The complex at Persepolis was intended to honor the good rule of the Achaemenid king of kings by celebrating the benefits that he had brought to the empire. The presentation of the subject peoples, among whom were the representatives of Central Asia, served to demonstrate that the Achaemenid Empire had brought prosperity to all that were under its rule. The iconographic program was clearly political, but in order to make that political message clear, the sculptors turned to the representation of the various peoples who made up the empire. The celebrations at Persepolis celebrated imperial rule by stressing ethnic diversity within the empire, and for the first time in ancient political art, the sculptors of the apadana decorations honored the ethnic and cultural diversity of peoples by stressing the differences in each of the figural units so that the message becomes one of imperial unity through diversity. Giving visual forms to the variations among the peoples who comprise a single entity will remain a feature of Central Asia art. It can be seen in the later representations of the mourners who gather around the body of the Buddha in scenes of his death. As is true of most art that serves as political propaganda, the image and the reality are often quite different. Though many scholars agree that Achaemenid rule was relatively benign and actually quite beneficial to most parts of the empire, many regions did rebel. This seems to have been the case for Central Asia where there is evidence of Bactrian revolts in which the Sogdians and Sakās provided support to the rebellions. Imperial forces had to suppress the opposition, and in addition to the relief and inscription at Behistun a number of seal images have been found that appear to celebrate the successful end to

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an uprising in Central Asia with the opposition represented by distinctive clothing.

PERSISTENCE OF CLASSICISM In the wake of the conquest of Central Asia by the forces of Alexander the Great came the Classical forms of civilization that Greeks had made the hallmarks of their culture—Greek language, Greek literature, Greek social customs, and Greek visual arts. The Greek world was one of urban forms. Though Central Asia had witnessed early urbanization during the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex of the early 2nd millennium BCE, during most of the 1st millennium, cities had probably not played a major role. The Achaemenid Empire did not promote cities, and great centers on the Iranian Plateau were ceremonial (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs), but that changed with the arrival of the Greeks. New Greek foundations are known from the ancient literary sources, but to date, only one Greek city has been found and excavated, Aï Khanum in modern Afghanistan (see Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele, artifact 42). As they were pushed out of Bactria and the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom, the Greeks fled south and continued to promote an urban life. It was probably the Indo-Greek rulers who established the second urban core at Taxila known as Sirkap. Within the cities, based on the findings from Aï Khanum, it is reasonable to assume that Greek foundations in Central Asia contained the features of a standard Greek city—a good network of crossing streets creating blocks of organized space into which were placed a gymnasium, a theater, temples, and elite houses. There were public inscriptions in Greek, a cemetery with Greek-style sculpted tomb monuments, and temples housing Greek-style cult statues, dedicated to Greek gods. There was also Greek coinage (see Coinage) with well-designed obverse images featuring excellent portrait likenesses of the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom’s rulers (see Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I [222–180 BCE], artifact 19) and reverse images of Greek gods. It is probably safe to assume that during these early years, artists trained in Greek forms made the long and arduous journey to the eastern outpost of

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Alphabetical Entries • Persistence of Classicism

Greek civilization, though the actual numbers must never have been too great. Local artisans from the Bactrian region who were trained by the immigrant artists in the appropriate forms and styles must have manufactured most of the Greek-style artworks and architectural embellishments. It is hard to know if residents of these cities ever heard Greek plays performed in their theaters or even engaged in Greek athletic games (see Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exteror, artifact 17). The degree to which Greek or Classical cultural forms actually penetrated multiple layers of cultural strata that formed the Central Asian experience is a debated point. It does seem clear that from the very start, Classical concepts were modified by local realities. Most of the surviving buildings at Aï Khanum, even the temple to Zeus, do not look Greek. The construction material was largely mud brick with some added stone for column capitals. The building designs do not follow Greek formats, and unlike Greek buildings with gable roofing systems, these were all flat roofed, reflecting the local tradition. In the Greek settlement at Sirkap at Taxila, the city plan is certainly more densely built up and subdivided than one expects for a Greek planned city. There are few of the expected Greek elements, and only one structure, a temple at nearby Jandial, actually follows a Greek form with Ionic columns. While it is probably best to understand that Greek-inspired forms in the visual arts were always subject to major modifications from the forces of local taste and tradition, there is evidence that some aspects of Greek visual culture did have a long life in Central Asia, even after the fall of the Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms. Three outside forces introduced new Mediterranean Classical forms into Central Asia in the centuries after the disappearance an independent Greek presence. The first rulers of the Arsacid Dynasty of the Parthian Empire were self-consciously philhellenes and patronized the production of classically inspired forms for their use, allowing the Seleucid Greek artisans to flourish in the empire. Under the later Sasanians, classically influenced objects continued to be produced but with major stylistic and functional modifications

(see Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer, artifact 16)). The developments in Iran under the Parthians and Sasanians automatically bled over into Central Asia, especially as artists moved. As the marine traffic along sea lanes between Egypt and India increased during the 1st century BCE and 1st century CE, so too did the quantity of small objects from the Mediterranean workshops that entered Central Asia (see Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure, artifact 24). The influence of Classical culture on the formation of ancient Central Asian civilization can be discussed in three aspects: the retention of Greek forms, the modification and repurposing of Greek forms, and the integration of Greek forms for the creation of something new. Greek-inspired coinage continued to be struck until the 1st century CE with Greek-style portrait images of rulers and carrying at least one inscription in Greek and written with Greek letters. Royal portraits in Hellenistic tradition but using unfired modeled clay over an armature of wood, the technique employed for some of the sculptures at Aï Khanum, was used later at the dynastic shrine at Khalchayan. Retained Greek forms are most often found in luxury goods, objects that were produced for Central Asian elites. The surviving objects are mostly metalwork decorated with figures treated as fully realized corporeal forms moving in space and usually taken from the repertoire of Classical mythology. There are also a few fragments of luxury textiles found repurposed in burials that had possibly been created as wall hangings that use classical themes and figural treatments. These suggest that among the upper stratum of Central Asia, even after the disappearance of a resident Greek population, some elements of the culture were retained. It may be that the elite, even without any Greek ethnic ties, may have found some value in the older images that perhaps suggested pedigree or distinctiveness. It is worth remembering that the nomad elite had often included Greek or Greek-inspired objects among their grave goods from as early as the 6th century BCE (see Sheet Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35). The nomadic elite individuals buried at Tillya Tepe in the 1st century CE were accompanied by Greek-inspired jewelry.

Alphabetical Entries • Persistence of Classicism Among the finds of images of Greek gods, it has been noted that the Greek gods Athena, Aphrodite, Nike, Dionysus, Eros, and Herakles had the longest lives in Central Asia. Athena seems to have always retained her image as a war goddess. She appeared on coins during the earlier Greek period, but later there were small statues and medallions with her image that never changed or were modified. Though she never served as a coin image, the goddess Aphrodite, along with Athena, retained her popularity and her Hellenistic form. These goddesses may have had particular appeal to elites in Central Asia, but it would seem that there was no attempt to integrate them into the larger Central Asian culture. The situation seems quite different for other gods. Nike, as goddess of triumph, was appropriated by Parthians, Sakās, and Kushans. Her standard symbolic gesture of crowning the victor was borrowed, and she was shown on coins crowning the new, nonGreek victors. It was readily comprehensible iconography that worked well for non-Greeks. Dionysus presented a quite different picture. The god and his retinue of satyrs and maenads were associated with wine drinking. Greeks had promoted grape wine production and drinking, though it may have already been well established before the arrival of the Greeks. There does seem to have been a cult of Dionysus that spread widely through Central Asia; there are mentions of shrines to the god in ancient sources. The Dionysiac scenes belong to two different spheres. One group is represented on luxury wares produced as late as the 7th century CE. In these, the emphasis is on the enjoyment of wine drinking, and the compositional arrangement is the most important element showing a main drinking figure and subsidiary figures partaking in the festivities. In the original form, the participants can be easily identified as Dionysus accompanied by satyrs and maenads, but in later versions, the identity of the individuals changes. In at least one instance, a goddess and her retinue replace the Dionysiac family. The activity takes precedence over the original iconography. This change in the meaning of the image also occurs in the second instance for Dionysus. Dionysus, Eros, Herakles, and Tyche all found a home in early the Buddhist art of Gandhāra. In this case, the

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original Greek prototypes were transformed to suit a new need. Dionysiac figures were integrated into Buddhist narrative relief scenes sculpted to decorate a stūpa. They probably served as a visual reference to kama, one of the components of human existence connected with sensual pleasure, as perhaps as a warning to the devotee. The eros figures were worked into sculpted compositions as garland holders, perhaps permanent reminders of the floral garlands that were regularly draped around the stūpas. The sculptors creating these forms for Buddhist shrines may have drawn on the continued existence of the Greek style for the treatment of figures used to decorate luxury objects for elite patrons, but they may have also consulted the new forms coming in with the expanded sea trade. It has even been suggested that migrant artists from the Mediterranean region may have sought work in Gandhāra, as the story of Saint Thomas’s travel to Taxila to ply his skills as a carpenter seems to imply. The search for new images to decorate the expanding Buddhist monastic system drove Gandhāran sculptors to both invent new compositions and borrow and reconfigure older ones. Unlike the situation with the elite patronage of luxury items with Greek forms and themes, the emerging urban classes—merchants, tradespeople, and artisans—commissioned these new Buddhist images. These people had no elite pretensions, and so the use of Greek forms by Gandhāran artists was not tied to some type of statement of elite status. Rather, the themes and style were borrowed because they worked in the new setting. While Gandhāran sculptors looked to Parthian royal portrait prototypes for the static image they employed to create the freestanding statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas (see Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya, artifact 2), they turned to Greek prototypes for the narrative panels. The Greek forms provided a compositional device for creating scenes in which the figures appeared as fully formed corporeal humans interacting in a rational space and conveying the drama of the scene through comprehensible gestures (see Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana, artifact 11). This worked well for reliefs that presented stories with a temporal aspect, and Gandhāran artists modified these Greek models to promote new

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Alphabetical Entries • Shamanism, Ancient Central Asian

aspects of the faith as it took shape in Gandhāra and began to spread north and east. The artists also integrated two Greek divine figures into the emerging Buddhist corpus of lesser divinities. Tyche, the Hellenistic Greek goddess of fortune, with her cornucopia and mural crown, was reconfigured as the Buddhist goddess Hariti, the protector of family and children, and she retained the cornucopia. Herakles, who had appeared on both Greek and later non-Greek coinage, was a popular deity and was embraced as a god by non-Greeks in Central Asia. A shrine to Herakles has been unearthed at Dilberjin in Bactria, and since it dates to the 2nd century CE, the cult clearly survived long after the Greeks had been pushed from the region. It may have been the widespread popularity of this strong man-made divine that suggested to Gandhāran artists that his form could be transmuted into the bodhisattva Vajrapani, the Buddha’s personal bodyguard. The arrival of Greeks with the full panoply of their culture into the demographic and cultural stew of Central Asia added a rich element. Even after the Greeks had ceased to exist as a clearly separate ethnic group defined by language and cultural habits, remnants of their material culture retained value. Artistic contacts with Parthian and Sasanian interpretations of Classical prototypes and the supply of more recent productions from Mediterranean workshops resulting from the increased sea trade provided regular reinvigoration of the Classical forms in their new Central Asian home. However, the movement of the forms from a largely elite interest to a wider distribution among Central Asian society was facilitated by the development of Buddhist art in Gandhāra. The Gandhāran artists reworked older Greek forms in order to find ways of presenting visually the ideas that the emerging Buddhist church wanted to promote in the monastic settings (see Monasticism) that began to proliferate in Central Asia as the faith spread.

SHAMANISM, ANCIENT CENTRAL ASIAN Probably no single definition covers all the varieties of shamanism that have emerged since the last Ice Age. Even today, an attempt to offer a single

description that does justice to the shamanism practiced by peoples in the Amazon, the Arctic, and Mongolia would probably miss the mark. What all who engage in shamanistic rituals accept is that there exists an unseen world of gods, spirits, demons, and ancestors that can only be contacted by the shaman. The shaman possesses natural, superhuman abilities, which have been inherited from an ancestor. To make contact and to transmit the hidden energies, the shaman enters into altered states, what has been described as a “technique of religious ecstasy.” The term itself, “shaman,” comes from the Tungusic Evenki language of eastern Siberia and northeastern China. The 12th–13th century CE Mongolian text, The Secret History of the Mongols, describes a tribal gathering place at the “Branching Tree” a venerated spot suggesting a possible shamanic connection. It also tells of how Temüjin (the future Chinggis Khan) made daily prayers to Mount Burgan by kneeling nine times and offering sprinklings of mare’s milk, an act that seems to have a shamanic origin. Early ethnographers documenting these regions noted the current shamanic practices of the peoples. During the same period, early archaeologists in Central Asia noted the rock carvings, petroglyphs, some of which seemed to represent activities that could be described as shamanic rituals. Over the years, the number of petroglyphs categorized under the heading “shamanic” has increased, and there is a general acceptance of the notion that shamanism formed the religious bedrock in parts of ancient Central Asia, particularly the steppe lands where shamanism has continued to play an important role in the lives of modern Mongolians. Several humanoid figures from the petroglyphs have been identified as representing shamans. Most often, the artist made certain that the shamanic attributes could be easily noted. These included the coat with fringe that might represent feathers, indicating the shaman’s ability to fly while in a trance state, or perhaps serpents referencing the shaman’s access to the underworld. The coat becomes a vehicle for the expression of the tripartite cosmos—the underworld where certain spirits dwell, the world of the living, and the world of the sky where beneficial spirits are found. The figure may also carry spirit containers or

Alphabetical Entries • Silk wear a headdress. The headdresses can take several forms, but a radiate crown is commonly seen. These might be representations of feathers, horns, or antlers. A separate subcategory of radiate headgear has been labeled a solar crown, suggesting some element of sun worship. The crown is worn by a stick figure and is the most elaborate element in the figure’s costume. These have been found in two concentrations, one in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and the other in the Tamgaly Valley in southeast Kazakhstan. While these may indeed represent a shift away from shamanism toward a religion based on the worship of heavenly bodies, it may also show the shaman in an altered state specifically associated with the journey of the dead to the underworld. There is still a question as to how the arrival of Indo-European peoples affected or modified earlier forms of shamanism practiced by others already living in the steppes and Central Asia. The shamanic tripartite cosmic division was also found in the religious beliefs of the early Indo-Iranian peoples. The evidence of rituals involving haoma/soma at the site of Goňur Depe and referenced in the Avesta and in Sanskrit Vedic texts seems to resemble the concepts of altered states of consciousness that are fundamental to shamanic belief. Central Asian shamans probably practiced dispersed shamanism as has been documented for communities in North Asia. No single shaman is responsible for all aspects of the belief system. Rather, there are specialist shamans who together participate in a multifunctional, diverse, and fragmentary form of shamanism in which more than one shaman may be involved in a ritual, each participant performing a specific duty. Modern shamanic practices may reflect those of ancient shamans who perhaps poured libations; fumigated with smoke; lit small butter lamps; daubed surfaces with blood or other liquids; sprinkled liquids; piled stones; sent up scented smoke; made offerings of cooked meat, tea, money, or milk products; circumambulated or did circle dances; bowed, set up ritual trees; tied strips of cloth or ribbons to a sacred object; and made scapegoats to expel evil from within a group. Shamanic elements have also been noted in the later religious traditions of Buddhism in Tibet and

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Islam in both the steppe areas of modern Kazakhstan and the mountainous regions of modern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Moreover, even in the old, settled areas of ancient Sogdiana and Margiana, today’s Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, there are signs of shamanic influences on certain rituals performed by devout Muslims. These traces would suggest that shamanism was widely practiced and deeply embedded in the ancient societies that arose in Central Asia.

SILK Though it was never the driving force in trade that is sometimes suggested and always envisioned by the term “Silk Road,” silk was a special commodity, especially in those places that could not produce it. The qualities that make silk unlike any other fabric are its tensile strength, its ability to hold natural dyes that can give the cloth a rich and saturated hue, its high sheen, and its adaptability to different weaves making it a fabric that can work in hot or cold settings. The silk filament is a protein substance excreted from two spigot-like appendages on the head of the silk moth caterpillar. Several caterpillars can produce the silk filament. When permitted to forage on their own, the caterpillars eat from a variety of leaves, many of which contain tannins. When the caterpillars are ready to spin their cocoons, they begin to excrete the silk filament, which is produced as a single continuous fiber that can be more than a kilometer in length. The tannins from the leaves introduce underlying colors (reds, browns, and tans) to the silk cocoon produced by these caterpillars. To emerge from the cocoon, the adult moth excretes a mild acid that weakens the filament allowing the moth to break through, and though the cocoon had been spun from a single thread, the post-emergent cocoon has several threads. It is possible to collect these cocoons, unravel them, and reconnect the broken fibers to produce a single filament but with nubs where the broken fibers have been rejoined. Because a single filament is quite thin, too thin for use, several filaments must be reeled together and then several reeled filaments gathered, sometimes twisted together, to form a thread that can then be used for weaving or embroidery.

30

Alphabetical Entries • Silk

The type of silk from the cocoons which are spun by caterpillars that have eaten freely and from which the moth has emerged is often referred to as wild silk or tussah silk, and several places in Asia could produce it, including India and possibly parts of Central Asia. The fabric that such silk fibers produced is marked by several features. If undyed, the surface shows the effect of the tannins in the appearance of colors, and even dyeing will not necessarily eradicate the differences in the surface since the dye will be picked up differently depending of the nature of tannins. Similarly, the surface of the fabric is not even because of the nubs formed by joining together broken pieces of the single strand. The nubs give the surface a texture, and they also absorb dye differently than other areas creating an uneven distribution of the color. Such silk still had commercial value in ancient times, as it does today. It could be used in a variety of weaving patterns, and the dyes could still produce rich hues. The Chinese, however, began to experiment with controlling silk production even before the unification under the Qin Dynasty. Later central governments required that taxes be paid in bolts of silk that had to be of uniform quality in terms of surface weave and evenness of color. To achieve this, the Chinese peasants cultivated a single silk moth, the bombyx mori, which they treated like a domesticated animal. The silk moth’s eggs were collected in trays and then hatched. The larva, the caterpillar or silkworm as it is usually called, was fed on a diet of mulberry leaves, which were carefully selected to avoid introducing tannins that would stain the filament. The caterpillars were carefully maintained by making sure that the mulberry leaves were regularly replenished and the setting in which the caterpillars grew was kept quiet and at a constant temperature. Such care maximized the potential for the caterpillars to spin a cocoon with an unblemished single strand filament of silk. Before the moth could emerge, the cocoons were taken and placed either in boiling water or in a pan over heat to kill the moth. The cocoons were then placed in hot water to soften them; the outer glue-like substance was removed, and the single thread unraveled in a continuous process to avoid the breaking of the filament. Several

filaments were then plied together, and these new threads were then used to weave bolts of cloth that had a smooth surface. When dyed, the finished cloth was evenly saturated with the color. There were no blemishes to the silk fabric from either the tannins in leaves or the nubs caused by joining broken filaments. Such a piece of cloth could shine when exposed to light. Chinese silk had no equal for centuries. Tussah silk produced elsewhere in Asia had some commercial value, but Chinese silk was king. Even in India, Chinese silk was the desired fabric. Produced in gauzes and lightweight weaves using plied threads of only a few filaments, the cloth was perfectly suitable for hot, humid conditions. When plied threads of several filaments were woven, they could produce much heavier textiles suitable for clothing in the colder climates of Central Asia and northern China. Moreover, since threads could be dyed, polychrome patterned cloth, what the Chinese called jin, could be manufactured. This type of textile, which began to be produced in the Han Dynasty, could be used to create the magnificent robes and clothing accessories that were placed in the tombs of the Chinese and Central Asians in the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin. Chinese silk fabric began to appear in large quantities in Central Asia during the Han Dynasty, at first probably as payments for the “Heavenly Horses” (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires) obtained from the Fergana Valley but soon after as payments for the Chinese troops garrisoned in some parts of eastern Central Asia. It was probably this abundance of Chinese silk in the Central Asian region that first brought the commodity to the attention of the Roman world. Merchants from Central Asia moved the fabric out of Central Asia, to the west and south to get a higher price for it. Its appeal spread because it fit into several cultural contexts. Often the Han court presented local rulers in Central Asia and the nomad elites with gifts of silk robes usually carrying symbols of rank. In this way, the foreign garments were worked into the local social structure bestowing greater status on the wearer and signaling that certain members of the hierarchy had even higher ranks. Silk cloth became an element in Buddhist rituals. As Buddhism moved

Alphabetical Entries • Texts and Archaeology out of India and north into the Oxus-Indus stretch, the Buddhist clergy easily adopted the new Chinese silk into their liturgical practices, including the decoration of monuments and stūpas. This made silk fabric a perfect gift to donate to a Buddhist monastery. Residents of the Roman Empire could certainly obtain silk on the domestic markets by the end of the 1st century BCE, and the popularity of silk, for which large sums of money were spent, was a cause of concern to Emperor Tiberius according to Tacitus (Annal 2.33). As Lucan described the process by which Cleopatra obtained her silk gown (Pharsalia 10.141), unraveled from a finished textile and then rewoven by Mediterranean artisans, then it would suggest that it was the silk threads, the floss, that was of greatest value to the Roman consumers rather than Chinese finished weaves (see Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread, artifact 21). Little actual silk survives in the context of the Roman world, some fibers from Dura Europos and some textile fragments from Palmyra. At Palmyra, one of the fragments is of a jin textile, a polychrome piece, perhaps indicating that the Parthian world was open to finished Chinese cloth. The popularity of patterned textiles in Palmyra, as shown on the various funerary reliefs used both for clothing and decoration (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3), would have allowed the jin textiles to function quite comfortably in the city and surrounding regions. The desire for silk, however, was strong, and while the pre-Byzantine Roman world never learned the secret for producing either tussah or Chinese silks, the Sasanians did. Shapur I, using the labor of Syrian weavers transported to Ctesiphon, may have established imperial workshops producing high-quality silk fabric with distinctive Sasanian designs. When the Sogdians, working for the Turks, tried to negotiate a monopoly on providing Chinese silk to the Sasanian Empire, the offer was rejected because the Sasanians were producing their own. They may well have learned the craft from one of the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin. Certainly, Khotan gained the knowledge quite early and even had a legend explaining how it had arrived surreptitiously with a Chinese princess. Successive Chinese governments tried to keep the process secret, but

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inevitably, the needed information leaked. According to Procopius (On the Wars), the Byzantine world learned the process during Justinian’s reign when two monks, probably from the Church of the East, brought some silk caterpillars with them hidden in their staffs. However, even with domestic production in the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires, there was still demand for the Chinese product. On many of the Tang period ceramic pack camels, produced as grave goods, among the items being carried are skeins of what must be silk floss. Certainly such floss was used not just for weaving but also for embroidery, as can be seen on the embroidered pillow in the Yingpan Man’s burial.

TEXTS AND ARCHAEOLOGY For the reconstruction of the historical overview of ancient Central Asia, both in the sedentary and nomad regions, it is necessary to turn to the surviving writings of the Greek and Latin writers of the Mediterranean or the Chinese authors. To date, no literary works by Central Asian authors have surfaced in excavations, and the Mediterranean and Chinese sources provide no mention of ancient Central Asian authors or reference lost works. The best that exists are the fragments and texts written by western and eastern travelers who passed through Central Asia (see Travelers, Early). However, Central Asia has provided a rich trove of primary documents. In most cases, the dry conditions that prevail in many parts of Central Asia have permitted these written pages on organic materials to come down to the 21st century (see Funerary Practices). These provide some of the earliest surviving Buddhist texts, important Manichaean textual fragments, a variety of bureaucratic documents that supply economic and administrative information for the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin, and personal letters that offer a glimpse of the political situations at various moments in Central Asia and China. Buddhist texts have been found in several places in Central Asia. The earliest are a group of Gandhāran birch bark scrolls written in Gandhārī Prakrits with Kharoṣṭhī script, which were probably from the Hadda region (Afghanistan), possibly old texts being ceremonially deposited in a monastery.

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Alphabetical Entries • Texts and Archaeology

These are recognized as the oldest Buddhist texts so far found. From Khotan on the southern route around the Täklimakan, excavations have unearthed a number of Buddhist texts including a commissioned work in old Khotanese, an original Buddhist text written in Khotan, The Book of Zambasta. Much of the work derives from Mahāyana teachings, but it is not just a translation. The largest collection of Buddhist texts was found in the Library Cave, Cave 17, at the Mogao Grottoes outside of Dunhuang. Though the Buddhist texts represent the largest corpus of religious texts found in Central Asia, they are by no means the only examples of religious writings to survive. The Manichaean library from Qočo (Khocho, Idiqutsahri) in the Turfan region yielded numerous fragments in several Iranian languages. Manichaean texts in Chinese were among the finds from the Library Cave. A few lines of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred scripture, were found on a paper piece in the Library Cave, testifying to the spread of the faith, perhaps because of Sogdian merchants in the area or fleeing Sasanian courtiers. Another sheet of paper contains an eighteen-line poem written in Hebrew, followed by a selection from the Book of Psalms. The second big category of texts includes nonreligious, bureaucratic documents. These are often collections limited to a short date span, but they provide a window into the daily operations of a specific region in eastern Central Asia. These writings come in a variety of forms. Some survive on paper, which was a Chinese invention that spread to the Tarim Basin. Others were written on specially prepared wooden tablets or slips. Among these are documents that provided a glimpse of life of the residents of the oasis towns, recording gifts made to important individuals, the sale of animals, the purchase and sale of land, the sale of and theft of slaves, tax payments, agricultural concerns, water rights, bride price disputes, and issues of death and inheritance. There are legal documents also, as well as travel passes, contracts of royal orders, and rulings in legal disputes. A group of texts written on wooden slips from the southeastern section of the Tarim Basin supply information of the Tibetan rule of the region from the late 8th to the mid-9th centuries CE, when much

of the eastern portion of the Tarim Basin was incorporated into the Tibetan Empire (7th–mid-9th century CE). A  similar collection of documents from Dunhuang has allowed scholars to reconstruct the political operations and domestic administration of Dunhuang and surrounding areas during the Guiyijuan period (848–1036 CE) when the region operated as a semiautonomous state under the rule of the Zhang and later the Cao families. One of the richest caches of documents came from the graves at Astana in the Turfan oasis. Here paper documents, which no longer had importance, were recycled to be used in clothing items placed in tombs. They range in date from 273 to 769 CE and offer information about the relationship of the oasis with the other important oasis communities around it, discussing embassies sent and received. Also among the documents are grave inventories that not only list items given to the dead but also mention coins and indicate that as early as the 4th century CE, the residents in this ­eastern settlement on the Tarim Basin were using Sasanian silver coins because of the purity of the silver. Some of the same concerns that appear in administrative documents also can be found in the writings of the third category, letters. There are isolated letters that have been found with other document collections like an early 9th-century letter written in New Persian using Hebrew letters by a Persian-speaking Jew and sent to a fellow Jew living in Dandan Uiliq near Khotan, which speaks of a dispute with a landlord. This provides evidence that Jewish merchants operated on the Silk Road network by the 9th century and perhaps had established resident communities in some places. There are some caches of letters. A  mailbag carrying several letters was found in a Han Dynasty watchtower west of Dunhuang. The authors for these wrote in Sogdian, and the letters all seem to date to 313–314 CE, a moment when China was suffering from much internal disorder. The letters reveal the concerns of the authors about their well-being and that of other Sogdians residing in China. They also provide some the earliest evidence for the developing role of the Sogdians as the great merchant entrepreneurs that would be their identity in later centuries. The last period of Sogdian

Alphabetical Entries • Texts and Translations independence is also revealed by a find of some one hundred documents, including letters, from Mount Mugh in modern Tajikistan. These provide an eyewitness account of the Arab conquest of the region and arrival of Islam. They show the efforts of a local ruler, Devashtich (Dēwāštīč) (r. 709–722 CE), to seek out aid from the nearby Turks and Tang Chinese to fend off these new outside forces.

TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS Textual transmission played a major part in the cultural development in Central Asia during the 1st millennium CE, and the movement of texts was facilitated by Silk Roads trade network. The importance of texts, their movements, and their translations can be divided into two categories: those texts that formed the basis of the new proselytizing religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Manichaeism and those texts that were used in the promotion of an imperial Zoroastrian ideology by the late Sasanian court. For several centuries following the Buddha’s life, his teachings and those of his immediate disciples, or sutras, were transmitted orally in the Indo-Aryan languages or Prakrits, including Pāli of India, but by the 1st century BCE, some of the scriptures had been written down. One group of texts, the Pāli canon, formed scriptural basis for the Theravāda tradition, and around these core texts there developed sutra commentaries, which also became part of the textual tradition of the school. Other Buddhist schools that developed during the early period of Buddhism, including the Mahāyāna school, also had a corpus of sutras with commentaries that became the scriptural basis for the school’s teachings and practices. These later scriptural traditions were recorded in Sanskrit, and among these were the sutras that focused on the Bodhisattva construct and the Shastras, treatises authored by contemporary Buddhist philosophers who expounded on, defended, and expanded on certain of the sutras in the corpus. Though early versions of texts from the different schools of Buddhism do survive, the only complete collection of scripture in an Indo-Aryan language to survive completely is the Theravādan Tipit‫ׅ‬aka (triple basket). In addition to the scriptural canon, another group of writings, the

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Vinaya, developed, which discussed issues such as monastic discipline, as well as doctrinal expositions, ritual and liturgical texts, biographies, and some of the jataka narratives. The Buddhist missionaries brought these works with them as they moved into the Kushan Empire (30–375 CE) since the faith, in all its various schools, depended on the scriptural foundation. For the faith to be fully understood, the faithful needed the textual basis. In the southern regions of the Kushan Empire, the missionaries were able to communicate with little difficulty, since Sanskrit was used in Gandhāra, around Taxila, where Buddhism first took root after leaving India. Among the surviving Buddhist texts from Gandhāra is the canon of Dharmaguptaka, another of the early schools of Buddhism. However, as Buddhist missionaries took their message out of the Sanskrit region, they began to encounter new languages in the Tarim Basin, eastern Afghanistan, Bactria, and Sogdiana. Buddhist missionaries could move into oasis towns and avoid time in Bactria or Sogdiana because it was possible to turn east from the north-south road at the western juncture of the two routes around the Täklimakan Desert. As the missionaries moved with the trading caravans into these regions, they also began to make use of the major merchant group controlling much of the traffic, the Sogdians. The Sogdian trade links took them from the Roman and later Byzantine Empires in the West to the Han and later Chinese kingdoms and empires in the East. By the nature of their international commercial enterprises, they were polyglots. Buddhist missionaries could use linguist skills of their Sogdian facilitators, especially when some of the Sogdians themselves became Buddhists. As the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin adopted Buddhism, they too became important centers for the translations of Buddhist texts from the south into Chinese so that they could then be used for the proselytizing of China. Kucha and its cave monastery at Kizil was such a translation site. One of its most famous translators was Kumārajīva (334–413 CE), a Buddhist monk in the Saravāstivādin School who later became a follower of Mahāyāna Buddhism and translated from Sanskrit into Chinese. Kuchean translators added the Chinese character for “po” or “pai,”

34

Alphabetical Entries • Texts and Translations

meaning “white,” to their names. The Tarim Basin oasis monasteries were also the places where monks from China could spend time learning the ancient languages and scripts of India and Gandhāra so that they could read the original texts for themselves. Like Buddhism, Christianity also sits atop a textual foundation. The life of Jesus, along with his own preachings, forms the New Testament. The actions of his disciples as they spread the story, the experiences of the martyrs who defied authorities that stood in the way of the spread of the faith and paid with their lives, and the commentaries and other writings of the early church fathers were the other corpus of early Christian writings. Most of this textual collection was in Greek, and as the evangelization spread eastward, outside of the Greek-speaking coastal band of the Near East, the need for translation became paramount. The Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church initially served Semitic language speakers, of which most spoke Aramaic, and both churches responded by working in Syriac, a related Semitic language. This led to the translation of much of the corpus into Syriac. The city of Edessa came to be seen as the birthplace of Syriac Christianity. It possessed a letter authored by Jesus, a portrait of him from his lifetime, and the relics of the Apostle Thomas. It became the home to a major school of theology, which formed the basis for the dogma of the Church of the East. It was in Edessa that the Syriac languages and scripts used for the translations and preparations of the sacred texts were developed from the Aramaic dialect spoken in the city. By 400 CE, there existed an official Syriac version of the Four gospels, the Peshitta, based on an earlier 2nd century CE Syriac rendering by Tatian. There would be further refinements into western and eastern Syriac reflecting the split between Syrian Christians into those who were followers of the miaphysite Syrian Orthodox Church and those who belonged to the Church of the East. However, in all cases, those who guided the theological developments in the churches maintained their ties with the Greek sources and did not abandon the ancient language of the original Christian writings. As both the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church found themselves operating in the

Sasanian Empire, their hierarchies needed to work in the empire’s language, Middle Persian Pahlavi. Moreover, within the Sasanian Empire, the Georgian subjects represented Chalcedonian Church (the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire), while the Armenians were followers of their own miaphysite church, and both these churches were producing their own texts in their respective languages and unique scripts. Many of these Christian writers working within the confines of the Sasanian Empire also learned Pahlavi and knew Zoroastrian texts. Some male Christian aristocrats spent portions of their youths in other aristocratic households that were Zoroastrian and thus learned about the official state faith of the empire and did so in the Persian language of that faith. Since Christians operated as a minority religion in the Sasanian Empire, it was essential that they understood how to position themselves for the sake of remaining in the good graces of the powerful, non-Christian forces that controlled the empire. On the other hand none of the versions of the faith held a dominant position. There was no official orthodox version of the faith and no way in which one Christian group could persecute another, as was the case in the Byzantine Empire where the Chalcedonian Church harassed the heretical congregations within the borders of the empire. As the Church of the East sent forth missionaries to the East, outside the confines of the Sasanian Empire, there was again the need to translate texts. Among the texts from the Church of the East’s monastery in the oasis at Turfan are fragments of an important east Syriac martyr’s tale, the Martyrdom of Pethion, rendered into Sogdian. Later, as the church took its proselytizing movement into China, it became important to translate the texts into Chinese in order to preach the Christian message of salvation. The son of the chorepiscopus of the Church of the East in China in the late 8th century CE, a monk named Adam or Qing Qing, was a gifted linguist as well as a prolific translator. He was responsible for the text of the great stele erected in Chang-an in which the missionary activity of Bishop Alopen, who first brought Christianity to China in the 7th century CE, is recorded along with the spread of the faith in subsequent decades. The

Alphabetical Entries • Travelers, Early work of Qing Qing, along with other translators and writers from the Church of the East in China, is preserved in a hoard of six scrolls that were recovered from Cave 17 (the Library Cave) at Mogao. These date from before 1036 CE when the cave was sealed closed. They are not translations of Syriac texts into Chinese but rather are new compositions in Chinese that try to explain the tenants of the Christian faith as practiced by the followers of the Church of the East in a way suitable for a Chinese audience. As Manichaean missionaries brought their faith out of its Persian homeland in the 4th century CE, they encountered the already-operating translation systems of the Sogdian regions and the Tarim Basin oasis towns. The Manichaeans were able to establish themselves in Bactria, and Manichaean texts translated into Bactrian have been discovered. It seems that some Sogdian traders operating in the east-west trade of the oasis towns became ardent Manichean followers and served to carry the religion northeast to the Turks, who may have first introduced it to China. The finds of many fragments of Manichaean texts, some with illuminations, from what must have been a Manichaean monastery in the Turfan suggest the setting in which Manichaean texts must have been translated into the languages of Central Asia as well as Chinese for the propagation of the faith. As was the case with the spread of Christianity into China, there was need to make the scriptural core, which developed in a quite different cultural milieu, comprehensible to Central Asian and Chinese audiences. This may have been partially achieved by incorporating certain elements of Buddhism into the practices and teachings. The major force compelling textual translations and reworkings of textual concepts into new languages was the need for the three missionary faiths to be able to promote their religions among peoples whose languages and cultures were quite alien to the cultures in which the faiths had first emerged. However, there was a second pressure for translation, an imperial-governmental need. Beginning with Ardašir I, the founder of the Sasanian Dynasty, successive rulers aimed to collect the world’s knowledge and bring it back to Eranshah, the homeland of the empire, where it was translated into Middle

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Persian Pahlavi. The Dēnkard (The Acts of the Religion)—the definitive collection of Zoroastrian thought that preserved the myths, speculations, and the arguments and rulings of Sasanian religious scholars and that may have been compiled during the reign of Khosrow I  Anūširwān (501–579 CE), and which today exists in a later 9th–10th century CE version—and the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred text, were thought to contain all knowledge. The Sasanian monarchs believed that with Alexander’s conquest and the subsequent chaos, many of these texts were dispersed. It was the responsibility of the Sasanian rulers to reclaim this lost knowledge and reassemble the complete texts of the Avesta as they had been given to Zoroaster by the god Ahuramazda. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to equip a translation service capable to taking the texts from the various sources and then translate them into Pahlavi. Since many of the scientific texts were in Greek, the need for capable translators brought many of the Syriac Christians, who maintain an active knowledge of Greek because of the need for consulting old Greek Christian texts, into service for the project. In this manner, a certain amount of pre-Christian Greek scientific thought along with Indian scientific knowledge was preserved by the Sasanian rulers as part of their attempt to reconsolidate the ancient Avesta.

TRAVELERS, EARLY There is no evidence that anyone in antiquity ever made the trip from the Mediterranean world to China or vice versa, and same holds true for a trip from the Oxus region to the northern reaches of the steppes and into the taiga forests beyond. Clearly, products from the regions were moved all over the Eurasian continent with Central Asia being the major region for redistribution, but the means of transporting items was through traders who worked in much smaller segments of the various routes that together formed the Silk Roads. While are no mentions of long-distance ancient travelers in the surviving ancient written sources, it is clear that some individuals did make long journeys on portions of the trade routes and left records of their travels. Herodotus (c. 484–420 BCE) probably

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Alphabetical Entries • Travelers, Early

did spend time in the Black Sea region from where he was able to formulate some of his ideas about the Scythians based on firsthand observations. How much he ventured beyond the Greek settlements along the Black Sea coast is not clear. For some of his information about tribes beyond the immediate vicinity, he on the work of a fellow Greek, Aristeas, whose poem about his travels among the steppe peoples, the now lost Arimaspeia, described tribes related to the Scythians but living further east. Aristeas’s veracity has been strongly questioned, but if he really did spend time with these nomadic peoples in the 6th century BCE, then his is the earliest account for which there is a record. The next Greek to appear as a possible eyewitness to Central Asian life and who left an account is Megasthenes, Seleukos I Nicator’s (358–281 BCE) ambassador to the Mauryan court in northern India. He wrote up his experiences and observations in the Indika. As with Aristeas’s poem, Megasthenes’s original text has been lost; what survives are snippets and references to the account in the writings of later Greek and Latin authors. Maës Titianus, a Macedonian Syrian merchant, left some type of record of his adventures going from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pamirs along the trading routes through Parthia. Most likely, this was intended for internal use by his merchant trading house, to provide the needed information about the realities of operating as a foreign merchant in the Parthian and the Kushan Empires during the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE. Once again, the original work does not exist, only bits of it in the writings of others. Still extant is work known as the Parthian Stations (Σταθμοί Παρθικοί), written by Isidorus of Charax, who may have come from the Persian Gulf port city of Charax. He presents an itinerary of an overland trade route from Antioch to India through Parthia using caravan stops maintained by the Parthian Empire. It provides distances between stops and is assumed to be a summation of a larger work. Nothing is known about Isidorus, and the only way to date the work is through internal references. It was probably composed in the late 1st century BCE. A similar extant work, whose author is not known, is the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Περίπλους ‘της

‘Έρυθράς θαλάσσσης or Periplus Maris Erythraei or PME). A  certain date cannot be assigned, but there is a general agreement that it must have been written in the middle of the 1st century CE. It offers a firsthand description of the maritime route from the Red Sea to the Indian coast. The author makes short observations about the ports of call and the specific nature of the trade in many of them. It provides a glimpse of the actual goods that were available in the local markets and what the Mediterranean merchant ships brought to offer in exchange. Two more problematic accounts of early travelers exist. Both record trips by men from the Mediterranean world to the Indo-Parthian kingdom and its capital at Taxila during the reign of Gondophares. In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, probably originally a 3rd century Syriac text, Apostle Thomas, who was charged with carrying out his missionary service in India, arrives in Taxila and is commanded by Gondophares to build him a new palace. The text reads much like a Greek romance, and it much debated as to its reliability as a source for information about the Indo-Parthian kingdom of the 1st century CE, especially considering its date of composition. The same is the case for the Life of Apollonius of Tyana written by Philostratus in the early 3rd century CE. In the work, Philostratus claims to be providing a travelogue of the 1st century CE philosopher, Apollonius, of Tyana’s trips around much of the Mediterranean and Asian worlds. While the work presents descriptions of what Apollonius supposedly saw, there are other items on Philostratus’s agenda, and the value of the work as a firsthand record of the Indo-Parthian city must be taken with great caution. The eastern sources are a bit different. Sima Qian (145–85 BCE) finished the Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records or Records of the Grand Historian), a history of China, begun by his father, Sima Tan (140– 110 BCE). Though neither he nor his father traveled in the western regions, the Shiji records the story of Zhang Qian’s (d. 114 BCE) explorations of the Tarim Basin and western Central Asia on behalf of the Han Dynasty emperor Wudi. The Ban family, Ban Biao (3–54 CE), Ban Chao (32–102 CE), Ban Gu (32–92 CE), and Ban Zhao (dates unknown), compiled the Hanshu (History of the Han Dynasty).

Alphabetical Entries • Wool Working and Carpet Making Ban Chao was a general who served as a colonial administrator for the Han Dynasty in Central Asia, which gave him access to a rich variety of primary sources along with his own knowledge of the situation in the region, which informs the text. For their sections on Zhang Qian’s travels, both Sima Qian and Ban Chao probably used a written report produced by Zhang upon his return, and so there was at least one firsthand account of the situation in the Tarim Basin, Sogdiana, and Bactria stored in the Chinese state archives of the Han Dynasty. Several Chinese Buddhist monks made the perilous trip from China to India, and some managed to return and write up their experiences. Faxian (337-422 CE) made the journey at the start of the 5th century CE using the southern route around the Täklimakan Desert and then heading south through the Karakoram Mountains. He spent six years in India along the Ganges River making pilgrimage visits to the sites associated with the Buddha Shakyamuni and then returned to China by sea, providing an account of the sea linkages that bound Southeast Asia to southern China in the period of the Six Dynasties. Two hundred years later, another Buddhist monk, Xuanzang (602–664), made a similar trip to India. In 629 CE, he set out from China using the northern route above the Tarim Basin crossing through the Tian Shan Mountains to Issyk Kul on the southern Kazakh steppes before he turned south and passed through Sogdiana and Bactria. He crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains and then headed onto the plain passing through Taxila. Like Faxian, he spent an extended period on the Ganges. However, he returned via the alternative southern land route around the Täklimakan. The surviving sources that discuss any aspects of the Central Asian trade routes emphasize the eastwest movement with only the trips to India providing a southern extension. None of the ancient writers explored the north-south routes. The Arab explorer, Ahmad ibn Fadlan (879–960 CE), wrote of his journey to the region of the Volga from Baghdad as a member of an embassy sent by the Abbasid Caliphate to the king of the Bulgars in 921 CE. His account or risala offers some insight into the nature of the northern trade routes that had been recently

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expanded by the Vikings who were using the northsouth flow of the rivers, particularly the Volga, to connect Central Asia and the northern lands as far West as Scandinavia.

WOOL WORKING AND CARPET MAKING In the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, the Maikop culture, recognized from the ostentatious burials of a select few that included clothing with gold ornaments, gold and silver staffs, and large quantities of bronze weapons developed in the northern Caucasus. Many of the objects appear to have been manufactured far to the south, in Mesopotamia of the Middle Uruk phase. The wealth of these few individuals must have been the result of a newly formed link between the emerging city elites of Uruk Mesopotamia and the elites of the northern Caucasus. The people of the Maikop culture may have served as the middlemen between the merchants from the south and the peoples of the steppes. One of the items that the southerners may have wanted was a steppe fiber from sheep bred to grow long wool, a wooly sheep. Wool and finished wool textiles were to become important industries for the cities of the south. Among the finds in Maikop settlements are clay bellshaped weights intended to hold the warp threads on a vertical loom, and among the fragments of textiles found in graves are bits of wool textiles. While the southern merchants were mostly after sources of metals, gold, silver, and copper, they were probably also seeking the source of the long-woolen yarn. These sheep most likely had to be sought out on the steppes. Northern sheep from the coldest climates would have produced the thickest wool. The Maikop weavers working on stationary vertical looms may have been producing large pieces of woven wool cloth using the long wool from the steppe sheep to pay the steppe people for the raw wool. Such large pieces of cloth would have been a novelty for the steppe herders who produced fabric using much smaller horizontal looms, but the Maikop fabric may have been in demand, and a good form of payment for the raw wool that the Maikop traders then sent south with Mesopotamian merchants. This early phase provides evidence of international trade

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Alphabetical Entries • Wool Working and Carpet Making

in raw wool and finished cloth that passed through several hands and shows that from quite early the steppes and the settled lands to the south were linked by a trade network that passed through the hands of intermediaries. Wool textiles were to become one of the most important products of the ancient Near East. Since wool is a protein fiber, it absorbs and holds color from dyes much better than linen or cotton. The only rival is silk, which was not available in the region during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The striking quality of the colors that a wool garment might possess is perhaps hinted at in the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors (Genesis 36–37). Once both the steppe peoples and their sedentary neighbors in Central Asia knew the potentials of wool, trade in richly dyed woolen products, particularly carpets, was to become an important feature of the economic activity throughout the region. Woven and knotted carpetmaking techniques must have been learned quite early throughout Central Asia. As steppe life became more and more nomadic in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, the value of carpets as portable flooring that offered good protection against the cold of the winter could not have been missed. A  woven carpet required greater strength to make than a woven fabric for a garment since the wefts had to be thick and beaten tight to form a surface that would stand up to being walked on, but the skill could clearly be learned and passed down from generation to generation. A knotted or pile carpet depends on a woven foundation onto which the knots are tied. The skill set required to produce a knotted carpet is different than that needed for the making of a woven carpet, but both types of carpets can be produced within nomadic societies as is the case today. The knotted carpet is easier to produce on a vertical loom, and probably both city dwellers and herders were using the vertical loom to manufacture woven and knotted carpets. In the Pazyryk kurgans are the oldest surviving remains of carpets (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27), probably 4th century BCE. They are both well executed suggesting that they do not represent the earliest phase in the process of carpet manufacturing. Whether they were created by

the nomad society whose dead are buried at Pazyryk or were the work of urban artisans from elsewhere, possibly in Achaemenid or Seleucid Persia, is still a debated point. If the latter is the case, they provide evidence for the importance of carpets in the economic exchanges of the mid-1st millennium BCE Central Asia. Whatever their origin, they point to the fact that good-quality carpets operated as status markers in nomad society, worthy of inclusion in elite burials. Carpet making appears to have become an important industry in both the urban and the herding societies of Central Asia. A  few fragments of knotted carpets have been found in Loulan, one of the oasis communities in the Tarim Basin. These may offer an idea of the small round carpets on which dance the figures shown performing Central Asian “Sogdian whirl” (huxuan wu) in the great mural paintings of the Buddhist paradises that appear on the walls of some of the Tang Dynasty cave shrines at Mogao outside of Dunhuang in western China. A  small carpet was found in the grave of a young man in­ Yingpan. Some carpet making was an imperial concern in the Sasanian Empire. When the capital of Ctesiphon fell to the Arabs in 637 CE, among the plunder was a carpet from the royal palace, the “Spring of Khosrow,” said to have been 600 square meters. Since Sasanian culture was floor based, carpets must have been important for elite individuals. They appear on some of the silver plates showing figures seated on them. The Sasanian practice was also followed in Sogdiana. The mural paintings that decorate the walls of the elite merchant houses (see Banqueting) often portray figures possibly seated on carpets. The Manichaean illumination of the “Feast of Bēma” shows what seem to be carpets and wall hangings used to create a luxurious space for the Elect. There was also carpet making at the village level and among the nomadic tribes that roamed through the Iranian Plateau. A few examples survive of asymmetrically knotted carpets with shag reverses, which may have provided better insulation. However, even though rather coarse, these are still patterned carpets with a design using at least two colors. Carpet making would have stimulated related industries such as the collection of dyestuffs. Within

Alphabetical Entries • Zoroastrianism a nomadic setting, the responsibilities for the collection of the raw materials; the preparation of the wool by cleaning, spinning, and dyeing; and the manufacturing of the carpet probably all fell to the female members of the family. In urban settings, there may have been carpet workshops such as those today, but the work may also have been done by women in their homes with the other female members of the family in a portion of the house set aside for the loom. Carpet making spawned other enterprises, such as dyeing. Dyers, who might only work in a single color, probably sold the colored wool by weight, as is the case today. Since certain colors could only be obtained from dye sources that were only available in particular places, dyes themselves, as well as the finished carpets, could enter the trade system and be moved over long distances. The other use for wool was in felting, a technique that may have also developed on the steppes, though it seems already to be known in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Anatolian sedentary communities. In felting the raw wool is laid out, sometimes in altering horizontal and vertical layers, then moistened, and agitated. The process causes the wool fibers to lock together to form a tight fabric that can be water repellent. Felt was a basic textile for the steppe nomads and was used as horse decoration (see Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk, artifact 37) and for the walls of yurts that formed the portable living structures for later nomads (see Early-20th-Century Yurt, artifact 13). The nomads may have introduced felt and felt making to the Chinese who began sleeping on felt mattresses in late the Zhou Dynasty, and Khotan, where a Sakā group settled, was known for its embroidered felts that were given as donations to some of the monasteries at Mogao.

ZOROASTRIANISM Zoroastrianism is probably the one religion from Central Asia that can claim a Central Asian origin. Buddhism and Christianity flourished in ancient Central Asia but had origins elsewhere. Even Manichaeism, which was founded by the prophet Mani in Mesopotamia, was still heavily dependent on Christianity from which it diverged. Zoroastrianism

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was first propounded by the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathuštra), whose dates are debated, from as early as the 16th century BCE to as late as the 7th century BCE. His birth place is generally assumed to have been the region around the Aral Sea. What he preached was a monotheistic creed, possibly the oldest, focused on the god Ahuramazda, and his teachings were collected, at an unknown date, in a textual form known as the Avesta. Zoroastrianism is understood to be one of the earliest fully formed manifestations of Indo-European religion. It must have taken shape during the same period that the Indo-European Vedic religion of India was forming. Its basic tenant was dualistic. The Good, embodied by the god Ahuramazda (later Ohrmazd,) fights against the Evil represented by Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman). The followers followed a series of rules that dictated aspects of daily life. They revered fire, exposed corpses on towers to be defleshed by birds, buried the bones in ossuaries (astodans), and consciously did good works. In their rituals, they partook of an intoxicating drink, haoma (soma). The Achaemenid Dynasty which came into being in Iran and established the first Persian Empire (550–330 BCE) chose Zoroastrianism as the court religion and became responsible for promoting the faith throughout the empire with inscriptions and the building of fire altars. However, there is no evidence that the Achaemenid rulers either declared Zoroastrianism the state religion or forbade other competing religions in Persia proper or in the conquered territories that formed the satrapies of the empire. It is not even certain that the rulers themselves were dedicated solely to the faith. Though the belief system was essentially monotheistic, Zoroastrianism proved to be a syncretic structure, which was able to incorporate other deities as the faith spread such as Mithras, Anahita, and Verethraghna, among others. Zoroastrianism survived the destruction of the Achaemenid Dynasty and the fall of the Persian Empire before Alexander the Great. During the centuries of Seleucid and Parthian rule, Zoroastrianism was one of many religions to be found throughout the region. With the advent of the Sasanian royal house (224–651 CE), Zoroastrianism was once again promoted and eventually was declared the state

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Alphabetical Entries • Zoroastrianism

religion of the Sasanian Empire. During the reigns of Shapur I (240–271 CE) and Hormizd I (270–271 CE), the chief priest Kartir set about the process of codifying and unifying the religion, canonizing the Avesta to create a common doctrine and establishing a religious hierarchy tied to the state. He sought to purge the variations in the religion that had arisen over the centuries. The Zoroastrianism that emerged within the confines of heartland of Persia became the orthodox faith, and other versions that continued to persist were deemed heretical. Zoroastrianism flourished as the state religion of Sasanian Iran until the fall of the empire in 651 CE before the onslaught of the Arab-Islamic forces. It also had many followers of the divergent

forms in other places in Central Asia, particularly in the Sogdian region and in the Sogdian merchant colonies to be found from the Black and Caspian Seas to the Chinese capital of Chang-an and elsewhere in China. Even after the Arab conquest and the Islamization of Iran and Sogdiana, pockets of Zoroastrianism continued. To this day, there is a Zoroastrian community in the Iranian city of Yazd and in Pakistan and India where they are known as Parsis. Throughout its long history, particularly when it operated as a state religion, Zoroastrianism reinforced the value of a moral life, provided a foundation for the spread of other monotheistic religions, and appealed to the power of a textual basis for belief and practice.

Artifacts

(Yale University Art Gallery (1933.292))

1 Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos with Portrait of Heliodoros House of the Scribes, L7 Syria, Dura Europos 200–256 CE INTRODUCTION This ceiling tile found in the House of the Scribes (House A) along the west wall in Block L7, the same grouping of buildings containing the synagogue, at Dura Europos, shows the bust of a man named Heliodoros, identified by the inscription as an actuarius. The tile is one of several possible painted portraits that decorated the ceiling of the House of Scribes. It provides a good starting point for our consideration of objects of daily life along the ancient Silk Roads because it introduces us to the complexity of identity in many towns and cities associated with the Silk Road. Heliodoros works in Greek. His name is Greek, and the inscription is written in Greek. Dura Europos had been founded as a Greek military settlement by Macedonians, probably at the order of the Seleukos I Nicator (358–281 BCE), the founder of the Seleucid Empire. Greek was the language of the city even in later centuries when it was under Parthian and Roman control. However, Heliodoros’s profession, actuarius, was that of a Roman fiscal officer who served the Roman military as the distributor of wages. DESCRIPTION This is a bust-length portrait placed within a red circular frame, which may or may not actually represent Heliodoros as he appeared. The closely cropped hair and beard with mustache frame an egg-shaped face with overly large eyes all set in a strongly symmetrical countenance. The main information is provided by the clothing and the inscription. What shows of his garb, a mantle clasped on the left shoulder, probably by a fibula that is not shown, resembles the presentation of figures in full military dress on other artworks 43

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Artifacts • Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos from Dura Europos tying to his position as an actuarius and a collaborator with the Roman occupying forces. Heliodoros presents himself as Greek by the use of Greek for the inscription. His title and his dress and probably the item that he holds in his left hand, which must be a scroll, indicate his profession in the Roman army, which was a major force in the city after 165 CE when the Romans took Dura Europos from the Parthian Empire, the Persian empire that bordered the Roman Empire on the east. It is not clear whether he came with the army or was a Greek resident of the city at the time of the Roman takeover. However, the formal aspects in which the painting is done, the pronounced frontality and the treatment of the eyes, show that the artist worked in the Parthian style. SIGNIFICANCE Heliodoros is a good example of the complicated issues associated with identity in the cities and towns that formed the Silk Road network. Many of these places had mixed populations reflecting their roles as trade centers or military hubs, as was the case at Dura Europos. They also changed hands over the centuries with new peoples arriving with conquest and often remaining for generations or centuries. Dura Europos had been founded in the 290s BCE in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. The rulers of the Seleucid Empire, the Macedonian-Greek-controlled state that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander’s death to govern a large portion of the old Persian Achaemenid Empire, established Dura Europos as a garrison on the Euphrates River, one of many such defensive nodes placed around the frontiers of the new state. The city with its grid street plan and public and private spaces did not emerge until the mid-2nd century BCE. It was an outpost of Greekness, known as Europos, among a non-Greek population. Around 113 BCE, the city fell to a Parthian onslaught, and the city remained a Parthian bulwark against Roman aggression until 160 BCE when the Roman army took the city. It ended its existence in 256 CE when the new Persian empire, the Sasanian Empire, successfully captured the city and then abandoned it to the desert. Dura Europos was not a trade node on the Silk Road. It always operated as a military base for whichever state controlled it, but its position on the Euphrates River and facing the eastern desert meant that its defensive role was partially to foster trade via either the river or the desert caravans. To its east and west, each at about 200 km, lay the great caravan-trade cities of Hatra and Palmyra (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3), and to its north, the equally prosperous trade center of Zeugma. Merchants from Hatra and Palmyra had established branch operations at Dura Europos, and an entertainer from Zeugma traveled south to Dura Europos.

Artifacts • Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos The archaeological evidence shows that in the 3rd century CE, the city was tightly integrated into trade in the regional trade network. The Heliodoros portrait shows the complexity involved in disentangling notions of personal identity in such a city, but its findspot is also interesting. It was one of several portraits in ceiling tiles used in House A or the House of the Scribes located in Block L7. It survives in part because the building was filled by the Roman forces as part of the new defensive structure erected to help secure the western wall against the Sasanian assault. The Block also held the synagogue, the only extant, surviving, painted synagogue from antiquity, also decorated with painted ceiling tiles. The workshop that painted the portrait ceiling tiles for the House of the Scribe may also have painted those for the synagogue. Not too far distant was the early Christian house church. The synagogue and the Christian house church were among several sanctuaries at Dura Europos that served the needs of the various confessional groups in the city, including the officers and men of the Roman army, the foreign merchants, the older Macedonian-Greek populations, and the indigenous residents. The city was small, and the few resident artists worked for numerous clients that cut across ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions. This must have been the case for many professions whose members had to serve the needs of clients from quite different backgrounds. The situation of Dura Europos and the story of Heliodoros were paralleled in many other cities engaged in some manner with the commercial networks that formed the Silk Roads. These were multicultural, multilingual, and multiconfessional places that witnessed several demographic overlays due to conquests during their centuries of existence. Within their confines, homogeneity was rarely found, and there must have existed a higher level of tolerance for diversity than might have been found in similar-sized cities further from the Silk Road linkages. FURTHER INFORMATION Brody, L., and G. Hoffman, eds. Dura Europos, Crossroads of Antiquity. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2011. Chi, J., and S. Heath, eds. Edge of Empires, Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura Europos. New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 2011. Hopkins, C. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Stern, K. B. “Mapping Devotion in Roman Dura Europos: A Reconsideration of the Synagogue Ceiling.” American Journal of Archaeology 114, no. 3 (2010): 473–504.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund 1913 (13.96.17))

2 Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya Ancient Gandhāra (Pakistan) 3rd century CE

INTRODUCTION In early Buddhism, the bodhisattva is an individual at a state of almost perfect enlightenment who forestalls the final step to help others reach the same goal. In the Majjhima Nikāya, Anguttara Nikāya, and Samyutta Nikāya sutras, Gautama Buddha refers to himself as having been a bodhisattva awaiting his final enlightenment to become the Buddha. The episodes in the life of the Buddha before final enlightenment were understood to have taken place when he was a bodhisattva. His acts of compassion to help others were models that could be followed. Moreover, the belief developed that at any given moment, a struggling follower might turn to those in bodhisattva state for assistance. The bodhisattva was a model for those struggling to follow the Buddha’s teachings. The bodhisattva offered an alternative ideal to that of the arhat since the bodhisattva could be appealed to for help. Because the bodhisattva is one who delays enlightenment, the ties are still to the material world represented by the rich clothing and jewelry, both of which must reflect contemporary tastes. The early images of bodhisattvas show them as members of elite Kushan society and may offer us some notion of how elite Kushan men dressed and presented themselves. They are dressed in court finery, embellished with jewelry, and wear their hair in carefully coiffed forms. Even though there is good evidence that both Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism contained the concept of the bodhisattva, it is often assumed that it was in Mahāyāna Buddhism that the full development of the bodhisattva took place. As Buddhism spread north into the Kushan regions of Central Asia, sculptors began to give the bodhisattva a physical form. Whether 47

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Artifacts • Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya these statues were for Theravāda or Mahāyāna monasteries is often impossible to tell, but clearly, Mahāyāna monasteries exploited the form, and it spread east into China as their missionary activity was to lead to the spread of the Mahāyāna school into Han China. As the bodhisattva gained importance, so too did the notion of individual bodhisattvas. Each of these was understood to be a self-sacrificing being, willing to delay the fulfillment of enlightenment to help others to gain a further step in their quest. Among the most represented bodhisattvas were Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future—the bodhisattva waiting in Tushita Heaven to be reborn as the next Buddha and Avalokiteshvara—the bodhisattva of compassion. The Gandhāran sculptors gave form to these beings by using a combination of artistic styles that were available in the Gandhāran region—Hellenic for the youthful, idealized form with emphasis on perfected masculine corporeal elements and Parthian for the strong frontal and static presentation with emphasis on the costume features. Mahāyāna Buddhism provided an opening for laymen to become more deeply engaged in the faith, and bodhisattvas provided a means by which the lay practitioners could approach the process to enlightenment. Two of the major sutras that present the bodhisattva ideal, the Vimalakirti sutra and the Lotus sutra, may have been the work of laymen. It was this willingness to incorporate laymen into the Buddhist structure that probably gave Mahāyāna Buddhism an edge as the creed moved outside of the Indian orbit, and as a part of that the bodhisattva played an important role, a role made easier to present because Gandhāran artists had given a form to the concept. DESCRIPTION This statue of a garbed male figure draped with jewelry across his chest was carved from schist and stands close to life size. He is largely still, but his arms hang down, and the left hand holds a small bottle. His right arm is bent at the elbow, and the lower arm, largely lost, lifts. The artist placed emphasis on his physical form. His chest and the upper portion of his right arm are well modeled and suggest that he should be read as a young and physically powerful man. The mustache further stresses his masculinity. His garb is a dhotī that falls in carefully contrived folds that balance each other on either side of a central unit. The chest is partially nude, but a long scarf, uttariya, falls from the left shoulder and is caught on the right forearm. He wears his hair long but carefully coiffed. Long strands of hair fall over the shoulders, and on the top of the head is a chignon. Woven into the hair is a jeweled headdress with a bow-like feature. The refinement of the hair’s treatment is paralleled by the elegance of the jewelry. The artist has sculpted a broad band or collar that surrounds his neck. This must have represented a type of neck ornament that combined gold work with inset

Artifacts • Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya stones set in square and round cabochons. The artist has given him several necklaces that must have suggested to the viewer necklaces of gold chains. The longest hangs on the diagonal from the left to the right side and passes below the right arm. On it are strung a series of amulet boxes. More impressive is the main necklace that falls symmetrically. Three chains support a large item placed on the figure’s chest. He also wears earrings, bracelets, and armlets. The dress and the jewelry are intended to present the man as a princely figure, a member of the kshatriya or noble caste, to which the Gautama Siddhartha (the future Shakyamuni Buddha) belonged. This was a religious figure but very much presented as an aristocratic Kushan man whose dress and jewelry probably offer some insight into how the Kushan court officials appeared to the general public. The costume elements and jewelry along with the frontal pose and the perfected form with its emphasis on youthful masculinity identify this as the image of a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas were individuals who had reached the point in their progress toward enlightenment that their next stage was Buddhahood. However, they actively chose to delay the final stage in order that they might remain among the rest of humanity to assist others in reaching the various stages of enlightenment. They displayed compassion in their decision. To represent their state, artists showed them as still encumbered with worldly goods in the form of elegant garments and abundant jewelry. Their physical ties to the world into which they were born, shown by recognizable courtly garb and jewelry were a contrast to the image of the Buddha who by reaching enlightenment had dropped all attachments to the world and was shown in unembellished robe with no jewelry and a simple treatment of the hair (see Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding, artifact 47). However, this is not a generic bodhisattva. He holds in his left hand a water flask. This is the attribute of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the Buddha of the future who awaits his coming in Tushita Heaven. His lifted right arm and hand must have been in the position of the abhaya mudra, the gesture of fearlessness intended to suggest reassurance and safety. Other statues similar to this one were sculpted in the workshops of Gandhāra. There was a standardized treatment of bodhisattvas even as there was room for variation. Though they are sculptures in the round, they were clearly intended to be viewed only from the front. They were placed within architectural settings, probably up against walls, in Buddhist monasteries that became a common medium for the presentation of the Buddhist faith, particularly as it moved out of India and into Central Asia (see Monasticism). They would be included in groups with the Buddha in small image shrines, which a devotee would visit in a ritual progress through the monastery’s devotional spaces.

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Artifacts • Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya The dress and the jewelry are clearly artistic conceptions based on real items, and their forms would have been clear when they were colored. The paint has been largely lost, but picking out the details of jewelry and the clothing would have made the figure appear even more distant and more elevated. However, the costume features must bear some connection to reality and probably do offer some idea of how the elites of India and southern Central Asia might have presented themselves during the Kushan period. On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that the images of the Kushan rulers as seen at both Mat and Surkh Kotal look nothing like these figures. Their dress recalls their nomad heritage not in any association with Indian culture. SIGNIFICANCE The Shakyamuni Buddha attracted followers who continued to spread the faith after the Buddha’s death. As their numbers increased, they formed communities, saṇghas, which were the foundation of the most important vehicle for the spread of Buddhism, the monastery. In its earliest form, the faith required that to fully follow the Buddha’s teaching, the believer had to reject all the attractions of the world, to enter a life of aestheticism with no emotional or physical attachments to this world. This demanding version of the faith was to become known as Theravāda Buddhism and spread widely in India. Buddhism found a welcome in the environment of 5th and 4th centuries BCE India, a time of major social upheaval. Buddhism was not the only faith spreading. Another new religion, Jainism, which also had a founder and a foundation narrative, was gaining adherents. The old Vedic religion was in the process of transformation that would in turn develop into the early form of Hinduism. Northern India was urbanizing, and as cities developed, they presented a quite new social environment from that of the rural landscape with its small village societal structure. The cities possessed many new ways of making a living, including increased commercial opportunities, and these operated on a money-based economy rather than barter. The cities were places where desires could flourish and suffering abound, and the Buddha’s message found an audience. Buddhist monasteries began to appear in the cities or nearby. The force that catapulted Buddhism from being just a local Indian religion and onto the world stage was the action of the Mauryan ruler, Ashoka (304–232 BCE). Ashoka’s embrace of Buddhism (see Ashoka Pillar, artifact 31), which happened after he witnessed the suffering caused by the war that he waged against Kalinga, gave Buddhism royal support and allowed it to spread throughout the Mauryan Empire as far north as the southern region of the Oxus-Indus stretch. He helped to promulgate the faith in his edicts

Artifacts • Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya that were carved on rock faces and great columns throughout the empire, and which used Buddhist concepts as devices for governing. According to the Aśokāvadāna, Ashoka had the remains of the Buddha, which had been scattered throughout India, dug up, and then redistributed across the empire to be placed into 84,000 stupas, which, in many cases, would have formed a feature of a monastery. The monasteries were the centers and the commissioners for most new Buddhist art. The earliest Buddhist art did not show the Buddha himself. He was represented by symbols, and the form most favored in these early works was the relief. It was not until sometime around the 1st century CE that the first images of the Buddha were introduced, probably produced in the sculptural workshops at Mathura in north central India and in Gandhāra in northwestern India. It was under the reign of the Kushan kings that Buddhist art reached its first great period of developments. Though several religious forces operated in the Kushan Empire, the Kushan rulers patronized Buddhism. The earliest presentation of the Buddha appears on the reverse of a coin of Kanishka. Monasteries spread throughout the empire, and a school of Buddhist sculpture developed in Gandhāra, the region of the empire in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The images of the bodhisattvas as created by the Gandhāran sculptors may well offer a glimpse of the dress of the aristocratic men of the Kushan court since it was the Kushan dynasty’s favor toward Buddhism that allowed it, in both the Theravāda and the later Mahāyāna forms, to flourish in southern Central Asia and later to move north, west, and east. The Greek stylistic elements seen in the treatment of the bodhisattva’s body are also present in the narrative reliefs with rational spatial arrangements for the figures and clear understandable interactions communicated by gesture among the participants represented (see Stone Lintel with Frieze of the Parinirvana, artifact 11). Greek forms had entered Central Asia with the conquests of Alexander and the subsequent establishment of a Greek kingdom in Bactria. They were reinforced by the philhellene tastes of the Parthian royal court and the extensive maritime trade that developed between the Roman and Kushan Empires in the 1st century CE (see Persistence of Classicism). However, the Gandhāran sculptors were creating new forms, like the bodhisattva that operated in a quite different manner. These images are stiff and formal, presenting a solely frontal access, and in this, they resemble forms of religious art that had taken shape earlier in the Parthian region. They communicate much of their information not through gestures but through the attributes of costume. The gestures are quite limited, and the image communicates its meaning through the princely attributes of dress and jewelry that must reflect contemporary aristocratic Kushan forms.

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Artifacts • Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya These were devotional images. They were created to draw in the believer and to help that individual in his or her quest for enlightenment. The benevolent facial expression and the gesture of the abhaya mudra were intended to reassure the viewer and encourage belief. The monastic setting was designed to permit the activity of meditation, one of the tools used to reach the state of enlightenment, and the statues were devices to aid the individual in the meditation process. The Gandhāran style captured the cosmopolitan nature of Central Asia. The style was effective at giving form to some of the tenants of the faith. The style lasted four hundred years, undergoing several internal stylistic changes. Equally important, it was the style of art that helped transmit Buddhism north into regions of Bactria and eastern Central Asia, the Taklamakan oasis cities, and eventually China. The early examples of Buddhist visual arts from these regions all betray their dependence on Gandhāran forms. Just as the physical forms moved north and east with Buddhist missionary work, particularly Mahāyāna missionaries, so too did the concept of the bodhisattva as a vehicle for both emulation and help in the struggle to attain one’s own enlightenment. FURTHER INFORMATION Behrendt, K. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. Ikeda, D. Buddhism, the First Millennium. Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1977. Samuels, J. “The Bodhisattva Ideal in Theravāda Buddhist Theory and Practice: A Reevaluation of the Bodhisattva-Śrāvaka Opposition.” Philosophy East and West 47, no. 3 (1997): 399–415. Sharma, R. C. The Splendour of Mathurā, Art and Museum. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld (P) Ltd., 1993.

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(Yale University Art Gallery (1931.138))

3 Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene Syria, Palmyra 200–256 CE

INTRODUCTION The two images in this entry, though separated by several centuries, have been put together because they complement each other. The long-sleeved tunic covered by a chlamys (cloak) pinned at the right shoulder and trousers worn by the reclining figure in the banquet image is based on actual clothing somewhat resembling the piece from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Both the surviving clothing and the garb rendered on the relief are the products of weavers and tailors in settled communities, but ultimately the costume derives from steppe nomad dress, where it was the practical clothing for men in a horse-riding culture. DESCRIPTION High-ranking members of Palmyrene society were buried in corporate tombs in which generations of people, one assumes all members of the same extended family, were interred. Over the centuries during which Palmyra flourished, the tombs took several forms, beginning as great towers some distance from the city proper and later as house tombs, temple tombs, and other types of hypogea (underground galleries) close to and even within the confines of the city walls. Inside of these structures were niches into which the bodies of the deceased were deposited. The niches were sealed with stone reliefs, often showing a portrait bust but sometimes portraying the funerary banquet, as seen in this relief. Shown here is a single figure holding a shallow drinking cup in the left hand and reclining with his right hand on his right knee on a richly upholstered couch, attended by a smaller secondary figure. The funerary banquet 55

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Artifacts • Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene

motif was reserved for males and probably represented the individual participating in religious meals that occurred within sanctuaries rather than in tombs, though it could also portray the deceased at his own funerary banquet or banqueting for eternity. The secondary attending figure is dressed like the reclining man in a long-sleeved tunic and trousers. The hem of the tunic is set off with a band of decoration. The reclining individual, the subject of the relief, is similarly garbed but in clothing with more extensive decorative elements on the trousers and tunic’s hem and mid-section. Both figures wear belts. The couch cushions are enriched with bands of horizontal floral decoration. The banquet motif has a long history in the eastern Mediterranean. It can be traced back to the famous Jacket and trousers from Sogdiana, Uzbekistan, 8th century CE. (Clevegarden banquet relief of the land Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund (1996.2)) Assyrian ruler Assurbanipal but was also a popular motif in Etruscan and Greek tomb settings and in funerary art of the eastern Roman Empire. These Palmyrene banquet scenes pose a number of problems for interpretation. The attending figures in most instances seem too richly dressed to be servants or slaves. It is now assumed that these were prominent young men in Palmyra who were participating in religious festivals that involved banqueting, of which that centered around the offering of the first fruits seems the most likely. Since they appear as smaller and younger, perhaps they were the elite youths engaged in one of their privileged roles, serving their elders at the banquet. However, equally puzzling

Artifacts • Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene is the choice of garments for subject and secondary figures. On the busts that more commonly seal the niches, the males are shown in Greek dress of tunic and himation. There are even a few banquet images in which the reclining figure is dressed in Greek style. Clearly, the choice of dressed carried meaning. The tunic or jacket over trousers was the dress of steppe nomads, probably developed in the second millennium BCE to suit a horse-riding people. Here, however, it was worn by sedentary folk. There might be several reasons why men in Palmyra, and probably also in other border towns, like Dura Europos might have elected to wear this guise, at least in certain settings. The Parthians, who had come to control the large sections of the old Persian Achaemenid and later Seleucid Empires, governed the territories east of the Euphrates. They were of nomad origin and, though now a sedentary people, retained their nomadic dress, at least in certain contexts. The same was true further east in the Kushan Empire, where the rulers had themselves portrayed in a similar outfit (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I, artifact 32). It is possible that the individuals shown on these reliefs were residents of Palmyra but with familial connections to the Parthian region. The choice of costume may have merely referenced that Parthian link, which explains why others shown in the same pose dress in Greek fashion. It is also possible that they were Parthians or Parthian subjects resident in Palmyra, merchants perhaps, who maintained their style of dress as a marker of their Parthian identity. The costume, whatever its symbolic associations, was also practical for traveling merchants, which may be why it was the choice for the Sogdians, who had no nomadic roots but who were long-distance traders along the northern Silk Road network, whose commercial interests took them east to China and west to the nomad lands of the steppes. The surviving Sogdian costume reveals just how richly embellished this type of ensemble could become, especially when produced in professional urban weaving workshops. This is sartorial work, carefully crafted of fabric worked from five colors of silk threads with a complex pattern of facing ducks enclosed in pearl roundels and alternating with cross-shaped lotus blossoms also encircled by pearl roundels. The ducks are adorned with pearl necklaces and flying ribbons and carry jeweled necklaces in their beaks, all attributes of imperial Persian Sasanian iconography. This is a child’s jacket that conforms to the upper torso and then flares at the waist. It is lined in Chinese silk damask, and the pants that may belong with it are also of Chinese silk damask. The garments reflect the Sogdian adoption of nomadic style of dress, perhaps for its practicality for the trader’s lifestyle but made by a Sogdian weaving and tailoring workshop for a Sogdian prince and adorned with imperial imagery drawn from Sasanian court art and then lined with imported Chinese silk. In a way the jacket brings together the three aspects

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Artifacts • Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene of Sogdian economic and political life, the commercial and economic and ethnic ties with the steppe nomads, the sedentary Sasanian Persians, and the imperial Tang Chinese. SIGNIFICANCE Just as the Sogdian merchant cities of Central Asia (modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) took form where three different cultural forms met, so too the city of Palmyra occupied a strategic position between the Roman West and the Parthian East. Palmyra was a rich city, sometimes subject to Roman or Parthian power and sometimes independent. Its wealth was result of trade. Palmyrene caravans operated between the southern Mesopotamian cities and Palmyra. The main trade routes were along the Euphrates River, perhaps south by boat and then back north by camel caravan. The Mesopotamian cities allowed Palmyrene merchants to acquire the merchandise that came out by sea from the west Indian ports, which consisted of not only Indian products like spices, gemstones, medicinal plants, exotic woods, and Indian tussah silk but also Chinese goods that were brought to India, including Chinese silk. However, the Parthian capital at Ctesiphon near Seleucia on the Tigris, the old Seleucid capital, was perhaps tied via terrestrial caravan routes through Iran to north and the Central Asian region of Bactria from which it was also possible to access Chinese goods coming west through the northern route of Tarim Basin. Some of these foreign products were then carried north along the Euphrates on Palmyrene camel caravans, which the city sought to protect from desert raiders. It is not agreed whether Palmyra served as a transshipment node from which point goods were redistributed to be sent to other locations, including the Mediterranean coast, or whether the city primarily served to redistribute the products within the immediate hinterland. It is known that communities of Palmyrenes, one assumes merchants, were resident not only in southern Mesopotamia but also at Dura Europos, 200 km distant to the east. Similar communities may have existed in the east Mediterranean ports that were linked to the larger Roman commercial network. It is clear that Chinese polychrome silks reached Palmyra from one of the possible routes described. Fragments of Chinese silk have been found in some of the tombs. The decorative bands on the tunics and trousers of the figures on the relief could well be representations of woven multicolored Chinese silk bands that were attached to a base fabric, probably wool. So too, the bands of decoration of the cushions could be imported woven Chinese silk appliqued to a base fabric. The fact that the finds from Palmyra are fragments of Chinese silk cloth rather than Chinese floss suggests that the Palmyrenes liked finished Chinese textiles and did not feel the need to unravel the cloth to obtain the silk threads or to trade only for the floss. They found their own purposes and uses for the imported textiles by making

Artifacts • Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene them serve as a valued-added item to locally produced cloth, thus giving the finished product higher status. Several centuries later, Sogdian merchant communities were a common feature in several Tang Dynasty Chinese cities that had mercantile economies and operated to connect the Sogdian cities of the Central Asian heartland with the Chinese centers where Central Asian goods could be sold, and Chinese products obtained. In a manner similar to that in Palmyra, the Sogdians used foreign elements to add value to local production. The woven silk jacket is given a status by the inclusion of Sasanian court iconography, the cut of the jacket references the nomad connections, and the lining of Chinese silk gives a visual form to the establish commercial links. FURTHER INFORMATION Browning, I. Palmyra. Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1979. Burgersdijk, D. “Palmyra at the Silk Road: Terrestrial and Maritime Trading Routes from China to the Mediterranean.” Talanta 51 (2019): 246–257. Fowlkes-Childs, B., and M. Seymour, eds. The World between Empires, Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Juliano, A., and J. Lerner, eds. Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., with The Asia Society, 2001. Meyer, J. C., E. H. Seland, and N. Anfinset, eds. Palmyrena: City, Hinterland and Caravan Trade between Orient and Occident: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Athens, December 1–3, 2012. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2016.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1996 (1996.78.1))

4 Adult Man’s Caftan Probably Caucasus Region 8th–10th century CE

INTRODUCTION The caftan, or topcoat, usually worn over tunic and trousers was the standard dress of the nomadic men of Central Asia (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3). There were variations in the style; some were short, more like jerkins or jackets, and others were long. They were tailored so that the portion over the chest was tight fitting with sleeves, and the lower portion was attached at the waist and formed a skirt that allowed for easy movement of the legs. They opened from one of the two sides: from the left if they were of Iranian style and from the right if they were Chinese style. Parthian, Kushan, and Sasanian caftans did not have lapels, while those produced in other parts of Central Asia usually did. Lapels seem to be a significant feature of the caftans reproduced in the wall paintings of the Sogdian region, as seen in the inset image from Afrasiab, and also appear in the portraits of donors in many of the wall paintings from Buddhist shrines in the oases of Xinjiang. It has been suggested that the elaborate double lapels worn by some of the males in the wall paintings of Cave 19 at Kumtura (Xinjiang, China) may have been intended to signify social rank. Caftans were usually worn with a belt. They were intended to be comfortable garments for an equestrian people. The caftan was probably worn by males at all levels of the social structure, and it continued to be worn even after some of the nomadic peoples had entered into a sedentary lifestyle. Kanishka I’s statue from Mat, and the statue from Surkh Kotal (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I, artifact 32) that may also be his portrait, shows the ruler in a heavy caftan over tunic and trousers. The painting of foreign ambassadors arriving at the Sogdian ruler’s palace 61

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Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan at Afrasiab, a detail of which is shown in the inset, portrays several figures wearing richly patterned caftans that must have been representations of the silk polychrome caftans worn at the Sasanian and Sogdian courts. When artists of the Tang period wanted to represent easy-to-identify, non-Chinese westerners, they usually showed them dressed in a caftan.

Detail of riders on a camel from the western wall in the Hall of the Ambassadors at Afrasiab (Samarkand). Uzbekistan, Sogdian, 6th century CE. (CPA Media Pte Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)

Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan This is the way that grooms associated with the laden Bactrian camels are dressed in the Tang ceramic grave statues. The combination of the camel packed and ready to leave with the attending groom was a visual prompt to remind the viewer of the Silk Road trade and the roles played by the western merchants with their caravans that supplied the Chinese with exotic goods and took Chinese items to the West in payment. Afrasiab, a barren hill north of modern Samarkand, was the site of the first city, which flourished from the 6th century BCE to the Mongol destruction in the 13th century CE. In 1965, while cutting a new road to Tashkent through this section of Samarkand, the bulldozer scraped open a major structure from which the painting, a detail of which is shown in the inset, was retrieved. The mural was part of a large, decorated hall, itself a feature of a massive residence located within the third rampart, just below but outside the citadel but within the confines of the early medieval city. Early medieval Samarkand was a major city in the ancient region of Sogdiana. Occupying what today is modern southeast Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Sogdiana had existed since the Achaemenid period when it formed one of the provinces listed on the Behistun inscription of Darius I. The Sogdian language belongs to the Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and the Sogdians were among those Iranian groups that migrated into Central Asia in the Bronze Age settling in a region that had already developed an earlier urban culture. It was incorporated into the Bactrian kingdom during the Greek period. Following the collapse of the Greek kingdom, the Yuezhi occupied the region, and eventually Sogdiana remerged in the region north of ancient Bactria between the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) Rivers. As a distinct territory it never formed a unified whole; instead there existed independent Sogdian city-states with local rulers that were often under the governance of a more powerful and politically unified force such as the Hephthalites and Turks. During the 6th and early 7th centuries CE, Sogdiana was controlled by the Khanate of Western Turks until 658 CE when the Chinese Tang forces defeated Ho-lou, the Turkish khagan (qaghan), becoming the masters of the region. However, the lack of political unity and the political subjugation by other powers did not stop the Sogdians from expanding their cultural and economic influences. They were the most prominent merchants on the trade routes of the Silk Roads throughout the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries CE and had already begun to appear as such by the 4th century CE (see Texts and Archaeology). They established residential enclaves in China, along the northern and southern routes around the Täklimakan Desert and west to the Black Sea region. Their merchant activities took them south through the Oxus-Indus stretch and into northern India. Sogdians were renowned linguists, and they facilitated the translations into various languages of many

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Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan of the Buddhist and even Manichean and Christian texts that arrived in Central Asia (see Texts and Translations). Though most Sogdian merchants, both transient and settled, retained their distinctly local Zoroastrian religious practices, some Sogdians did convert to other new religions entering Central Asia. The wealth acquired through trade made many merchants rich, and the social structure of the individual Sogdian city-states seems very much to have favored merchants. The local rulers, who seem to have been selected by the elite of the specific area, may well have been merchant princes. The Sogdian sites that have been excavated, particularly Pendjikent in Tajikistan, reveal large well-appointed houses that must have belonged to the merchant aristocrats of the city. These structures included a large reception hall, like that unearthed at Afrasiab, with richly painted walls. These mural decorations follow a different compositional format than that which was used for this hall (Hall 1) at Afrasiab, but the basic idea of a richly ornamented interior space used as gathering place for the house and probably intended to be presented to those outside of the immediate family is much the same for the Afrasiab and Pendjikent houses. The actual identification of the house at Afrasiab as a private aristocratic dwelling or a royal palace is debated. The excavator of Pendjikent has noted that the normal placement of royal palaces in Sogdian cities was within the confines of the citadel proper. However, other scholars have pointed out that the house in which Hall 1 belongs in Afrasiab was located within a newly walled section of the city. It might have been a new royal palace provided within its own enclosure. Though it could also have been the family house for King Varkhuman, whose name appears in an inscription on the painting on the western wall, separate from his official palace in the citadel. The determination of whether the paintings decorated a royal palace or a private aristocratic house is important in terms of understanding who might have actually viewed the works. If part of the reception area of a royal palace, then the murals must be understood as some type of political propaganda aimed at a wide audience of local and foreign viewers. If instead, they were the decoration of a reception area of a private, albeit important, aristocratic house, then the viewing audience would have been smaller and the message intended for a more local viewing group. Whatever the reality, the paintings themselves form the most complete and comprehensive program of wall paintings from ancient Central Asia. DESCRIPTION The caftan shown in the photograph is one of the few remaining almost complete garments from ancient or medieval Central Asia. The yoke and sleeves do not survive. What is shown is the modern reconstruction. The coat itself, 142.2 cm in length and 152.4 cm in width, is of fine plain-weave

Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan (tabby) linen. Sewn onto the interior and exterior edges of the coat is an 8 cm wide large-pattern silk band in a compound twill weave (samite). A fragment of lambskin on the interior is all that survives of the fur lining. The caftan probably came down to mid-calf on a tall man. The sides of the skirt portion are slit to make more suitable for riding. The caftan was cut to close at the left side of the body and was held fast with frogs. The caftan was pieced together. Three large linen panels, each composed of three pieces that were stitched together in a distinctive manner, with a large central unit flanked by two smaller units with a gusset-like form that widens progressively toward the bottom. These three panels, two in the front and one in the back, were sewn to each other to form the skirt. The slits are located one either side of the back panel. This arrangement allowed the two front panels to protect the rider’s legs. The silk band was woven as separate pieces joined together and attached both inside and outside along all of the edges including the slits, except for the lapel where only the outward-turned underside is decorated. This saved some of the most precious features of the costume from being wasted in an area that would not be seen. It is assumed that the sleeves were long and had the silk band decoration. When new, the caftan would have been vibrant with color. The linen used for the body had been bleached. It would have set off the silk band for which the weaver had used a dark brown ground with threads of dark blue, yellow, red, and white for the designs. The patterns in the silk band include rosettes and stylized animals enclosed by beaded roundels, and all arranged to form a decorative pattern. When worn with the leggings, which are similarly decorated, the ensemble would have presented the wearer in an elegant version of traditional nomadic garb in Central Asia. Something not unlike what the riders on the camel wear from the painting from Afrasiab. The detail of the painting comes from the western wall of Hall 1, a large room, an 11 square meters, which must have been the principal reception area of an elite dwelling. The house was abandoned around 675 CE, when the city sustained the first attack by the invading Arab armies, and the roof of the room collapsed in the 10th century. Of what remains, the north, south, and west walls are in the best condition. The north and west walls survive to a height of about 2.7  m, the south wall to 2.5  m, and the east wall to between 1 and 2 m. The walls were constructed of raw clay and a low clay bench ran along the base of all four walls. The entrance was in the center of the east wall, which resulted in the west wall being the principal focus of the room. The paintings on the west, south, and north walls have survived intact enough for the compositions to be reconstructed and the basic subject matter identified, even though there is no agreement as to how to interpret the meaning of the scenes. The east wall is too damaged to allow for a meaningful reconstruction of the paintings.

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Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan The three preserved walls depict scenes with groups of figures in different and distinctive garbs placed against a background of deep blue color made from crushed lapis lazuli, a very expensive pigment but obtained from a local source, since the Sogdians probably controlled the lapis lazuli trade. All three scenes focus on human activities, and the figures are arranged in superimposed horizontal rows. Though it is possible to offer reconstructions of the north and south walls, it is the west wall that was the most important. The figures on the camel are dressed in polychrome caftans and are part of a larger group of figures on the lowest register on the south wall that moves from the right to the left. On the west wall is a figure dressed in a white caftan, which has written on the lower portion of the caftan two inscriptions, one of sixteen lines in cursive Sogdian and the other of two lines in cursive Bactrian. The inscriptions present the speaker as the ambassador (dapirpat) of Chagan (Čagania) and reference the reception of ambassadors by King Varkhuman of the Unaš Dynasty. These inscriptions provide the reasoning for referring to the space as the Hall of the Ambassadors and have provided the context for interpreting the three surviving scenes. Though several interpretations have been offered that present opposing readings of specific features in the murals, there is a general agreement that the scene on the west wall shows King Varkhuman along with embassies from several Central Asian kingdoms, which may include the camel riding pair from the south wall, and a delegation from the Tang Chinese emperor. However, the lack of the upper section of the west wall, particularly the middle portion, which was probably the place for the most significant figure, causes major problems for any reading since it is impossible to determine for certain whether King Varkhuman or a divinity occupied the position. Other Sogdian reception rooms in major houses show gods in this position. The painters worked hard to distinguish the groups of figures by providing visual clues about identity from the facial renderings, the hair treatments, the weapons, and above all the costume details. In some cases, the gifts that some individuals carry may have also provided information about the source from which the gift came. Shared features of dress join together different figures into a single grouping. The ambassadors from the surrounding states who have come for this event are all presented in the lowest row. The Turkish guards are distributed across the scenes. The individuals in the inset detail wear caftans of richly pattern cloth with pearl roundels enclosing animals that probably reflect the influence of Sasanian Persia, and they sit atop a similarly depicted textile. These could indicate the presence of Sasanian elites, but more likely, these are representatives of other Sogdian and nearby Central Asian kingdoms, including the Chagan and Chach referred to in the inscription, who emulated Sasanian styles of dress. In the central portion of the lowest row on the west wall are three figures dressed in robes closed with two belts, one for the sword

Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan and the other a ceremonial belt. These could be members of the Chinese delegation, which might be bringing silk, though this is not visually that clear. A possible Tibetan embassy, so identified because the figures wear what appear to be woolen socks and balaclavas and carry yak tails and a feline skin, all pointing to residence in a cold and mountainous climate, stands toward the right side or north end of the lowest row. This group is followed by two figures at the far-right end of the row who have feathered headdresses and have been identified as representatives of the kingdom of Koguryo in Korea. Several groups of figures scattered throughout the composition wear solid color caftans, some with long sleeves that are loose above but that taper to the wrist where they are synched with a high cuff of what seems to be polychrome silk. These may be the costumes of Turkic guards since the wearers also share long black hair and are clean-shaven. There is also variation in the weapons. From the belts of some figures hang short swords suitable for cavalry fighting while others sport longer, heavier, double-edged swords. Some individuals hold long mallets that have been recognized to be chowgan or polo mallets. SIGNIFICANCE The caftan has a long history of representation in Central Asia. The Sogdian tribute bears from the reliefs of the apadana at Persepolis (ca. 500 BCE) wear caftans (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs). It probably served as an identifying marker, a signifier of nomadic lifestyle or nomadic heritage for those who wore it. It must have served that purpose for the Kushan kings, such as Kanishka I, who are shown in the dress on their coinage and sculpted portraits, long after the Kushan Empire had abandoned its earlier Yuezhi nomadic lifestyle. Parthians and Sasanians probably wore caftans as a statement of nomadic origins, while the Hephthalites and Turks may have modified their nomadic dress to reflect the influence of the Sasanian court nomadic dress style. Sogdian merchants could also have been responsible for carrying the style of dress throughout the regions in which they operated. The find of the Yingpan man, possibly a wealthy Sogdian merchant who died in Xinjiang and was buried in a beautifully worked caftan, may testify to the fact that the Sogdian merchants wore the garment outside of their homeland. The caftan was spread further west by Germanic peoples who moved through Central Asia during the 2nd–4th century CE. Because the caftan was widely worn in Central Asia by both nomadic peoples and those who retained a nomadic identity despite being settled and by both men and women, it had the potential to serve as a vehicle for the transmission of design motifs and weaving technology through the region. This was particularly the case when the need was for fancy caftans, such as the surviving example from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the painted polychrome examples from the inset photograph. Trimming a

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Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan jacket with fur can be traced back to the Scythian period, and silk bands became the preferred material as embellishing the seams, edges, and cuffs as Chinese silk and silk products began to enter Central Asia in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3). Silk arrived from China as a commodity of exchange or as tribute under the guise of gifts. The Metropolitan Museum caftan is finely worked in both the weaving of the body and the silk bands, but it cannot compare with the caftans presented in some of the wall paintings from Sogdian palatial sites and Buddhist caves in Xinjiang. These representations seem to suggest that the caftans are of richly worked woven fabric, perhaps even brocades. The patterns shown, often animals encircled by pearl roundels, as on the Metropolitan Museum band, cover the whole body of the caftan, as on the caftans of the camel riders. These are designs that owe their origin to Sasanian court garments but that appear to have spread throughout the eastern part of Central Asia and were picked up by many peoples. To produce such patterns in woven cloth required the use of a drawloom, making it most likely that these fabrics were manufactured in sedentary settings in workshops. The techniques for weaving these patterns may well have developed in Central Asia where weft-faced tabby and twills (samite) were the tradition as opposed to China where warp-faced tabbies were the most common weaves. It is clear that several sedentary locations in Central Asia began to produce silk and silk textiles, and by the time of the Sasanian Empire, Central Asian woven silks, particularly those from the Sasanian region, and perhaps from the royal looms, were highly prized. In Turfan, a town in eastern Xinjiang, which was an interface point for Central Asia and China, it seems that Central Asian and Chinese weavers were working side by side from 7th to 9th century CE. The Metropolitan Museum caftan may well have been found in the Caucasus but was probably not woven there. Finds of textile fragments that had been manufactured further east in Central Asia, even a patchwork caftan, have been found at the site of Moščevaja Balka in the northwestern Caucasus. There was a northern direct trade route from the Sogdian realm into the Byzantine regions, perhaps first developed by Justinian in the mid-6th century CE, which connected Central Asian trade to Constantinople via the Caspian and Black Seas. This was a way to avoid the Sasanian Empire (226–651 CE) with its high taxes. It had probably fallen into disuse during the 7th century but may have been reopened in the 8th century as the Arab conquest of the Near East including Iran had destabilized the area for a time and made the more difficult Caucasus route once again viable. The linkages were via the Aral Sea, the Transcaspian steppes, and the northern Caucasus, regions largely controlled by the empire of the Khazars, a people of Turkic stock who had embraced Judaism and who encouraged international trade.

Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan This could be the reason that a Central Asian merchant with his elaborate caftan was moving through the region. The caftan is missing its sleeves and yoke. These could be just losses caused by time, but one of the interesting features of the finds at Moščevaja Balka is that they are almost completely fragments of larger textiles. The evidence seems to suggest that on this trade route, it was a common practice to pay for services rendered to a merchant caravan by local people, such as guides, carriers, and pack animals, as well as tolls and bribes by offering pieces of expensive textiles, particularly silks. The fabric units could then be cut down to be used for the trim of locally made garments. Foreign, exotic textiles were used as a substitute currency, especially among the rural peoples with whom the caravans had to do business to succeed. Among the special features of the wall paintings from the Hall of the Ambassadors is the interest displayed in accurate or recognizable portrayals of some of the diverse peoples that formed the Central Asian community of the mid-7th century. Clearly the painters were instructed to make visually clear who these people were, or to the contemporary viewer, who they are. Though for the modern interpreter identifying for certain to which Central Asian group any figure belongs is fraught with problems, the fact remains that in the mid-7th century any elite Sogdian who might have had reason to view the paintings would have easily distinguished the peoples represented by the visual clues. It seems reasonable to see Sogdians, Turks, Chaganians, Chinese, Koreans, and possibly Sasanian Persians among those present. The affiliations are made obvious through dress, hair, and weaponry, as well as facial treatment. There is evidence that painted walls with such representations of different nationalities could be found in other Sogdian settings, the practice might be traced all the way back to the carved reliefs that decorate the lower walls of the apadana at Persepolis (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs). However, something about these paintings seems to indicate that the portrayal is of an actual event. The inscription, which some have argued is not contemporary with the paintings, does mention a specific king, Varkhuman, Vargoman. Varkhuman is known from Chinese chronicles as the ruler who directed an embassy to the Tang court in 665 CE, probably requesting help against the impending Arab threat. Varkhuman was the ruler of Samarkand and was proclaimed ikhshid or sovereign over all of Sogdiana at the instigation of the Tang emperor Gaozong (649–683 CE), probably with the approval of the ruler of the Khanate of the Western Turks. Sogdiana had been subject to the Western Turkic Empire since the 6th century CE and continued to have tributary obligations even after the defeat of the Khanate by the Tang emperor Gaozong in 658–659 CE. Scholars have read the specific political meaning of the scene differently. The lack of the central unit at the top

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Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan makes all readings questionable. It could be the enthronement of Varkhuman himself as the ikhshid or the initiation of the Mishe and Buzhen, earlier Khanate leaders, who served as the Tang emperor’s protector-generals in Central Asia and promoted Tang interests in the region or the arrival of the embassy from Chagan with a bride for Varkhuman. While there is no agreement as to the political event being recorded, there is a general agreement as to the moment when the event is taking place, the New Year or Nowruz festival. Nowruz was an important festival in the Zoroastrian calendar and celebrated throughout the Iranian parts of Central Asia. It was a time of gift giving. The Sasanian emperor gave gifts of his garments to his retainers. No doubt, local rulers did something similar but also received gifts both from subjects and from neighboring kingdoms, which would explain the importance of designating the various embassies shown. Their presence signifies the importance of the ruler. Some have argued that the Chinese delegation may not have a gift to present, though some see the delegation carrying silk. As the superior political and military force, the Chinese expected to receive something to take back to the emperor as tribute. During the Nowruz festivities, aristocrats engaged in polo matches, which explains the chowgan carried by some figures. The game’s popularity had spread by this time from Iranian regions to much of Central Asia and even to Tang China (see Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exterior, artifact 17). FURTHER INFORMATION Antonini, C. S. “The Paintings in the Palace of Asfrasiab (Samarkand).” Revista degli Studi Orientali 63, no. 1/3 (1989): 109–144. Arzhantsesva, I., and O. Ineratkina. “Afrasiab Wall-Paintings Revisited: New Discoveries Twenty-five Years Old.” In Royal Naurūz in Samarkand: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Venice on the Pre-Islamic Painting at Afrasiab. Revisita degli Studi Orientali, New Series 78, supplement 1, M. Compareti and E. de la Vaissiere, eds., 1–26. Rome: La Sapienza, Universita di Roma, Dipartimento di Studi Orientali, 2006. Azarpay, G. “The Afrasiab Murals: A  Pictorial Narrative Reconsidered.” Silk Road 12 (2014): 49–56. Compareti, M., and S. Cristoforetti. “Proposal for a New Interpretation of the Northern Wall of the ‘Hall of the Ambassadors’ at Afrasyab.” In Central Asia from the Achaemenids to the Timruds: Archaeology, History, Ethology, Culture. Materials of an International Scientific Conference Dedicated to the Centenary of Aleksandr Markovich Belenitsky, St. Petersburg, November 2–5, 2004, 215–220. St. Petersburg: Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, State Hermitage Oriental Department of St. Petersburg State University, 2005.

Artifacts • Adult Man’s Caftan Grenet, F. “The 7th-century ‘Ambassadors’ Painting’ at Samarkand.” In Mural Paintings of the Silk Road, Cultural Exchanges between East and West: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, January 2006, K. Yamauchi, Y. Taniguchi, and T. Uno, eds., 9–19. Tokyo: Archetype Publications, 2007. Knauer, E. “A Man’s Caftan and Leggings from the North Caucasus of the Eighth to Tenth Century: A Genealogical Study.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001): 125–154. Knutson, S. A. “Archaeology and the Silk Road Model.” World Archaeology 52, no. 4 (2021): 619–638. DOI:  10.1080/00438243.2021.1940268. Marshak, B. I. Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2002. Marshak, B. I. “Remarks on the Murals of the Ambassadors Hall.” In Royal Naurūz in Samarkand: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Venice on the Pre-Islamic Painting at Afrasiab. Revisita degli Studi Orientali, New Series 78, supplement 1, M. Compareti and E. de la Vaissiere, eds., 75–85. Rome: La Sapienza, Universita di Roma, Dipartimento di Studi Orientali, 2006. Marshak, B. I., and N. N. Negmatov. “Sogdiana.” In History of the Civilizations of Central Asia. Volume III: The Crossroads of Civilizations: A. D. 250–750, B. A. Litvinsky, Zhang Guang-da, and R. Shabani Samghabadi, eds., 233–280. Paris: UNESCO, 1996. Pugachenkova, G., and Ī. V. Rtveladze. “Afrāsīāib i., The Archaeological Site.” Encyclopaedia Iranica I/6, 576–578. Updated at http://www.iranica online.org/articles/afrasiab-the-ruined-site Shang, A. “Woven Motifs in Turfan Silks: Chinese or Iranian?” Orientations 80, no. 4 (1999): 45–52. Yarshater, E. “Afrasiab.” Encyclopaedia Iranica I/6, 570–576. Updated online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/afrasiab-turanian-king Yatsenko, S. “The Late Sogdian Costume (the 5th–8th cc. AD).” Ērān ud Anērān. Webfestschrift Marshak 2003. Transoxiana. www.transoxiana .org/Eran?Articles/yatsenko.html.

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(ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy Stock Photo)

5 Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique Showing Aspects of Scythian Life Kul Oba kurgan, Crimea, near Kerch (excavated in 1830) 4th century BCE INTRODUCTION Both the images in this entry provide versions of nomadic male dress. The gold vase comes from the 4th century BCE, the period of richest finds from the Scythian kurgans in the Pontic region north of the Black Sea. The elite of the nomadic Scythian pastoralist society wanted to sequester impressive material goods with them in their kurgan tombs. Though native Scythian artists produced “Animal Style” objects in precious materials (see Animal Style), some individuals also wanted objects in Greek style included among the grave goods, like this vase. It could have been produced in one of the independent Greek cities along the north coast of the Black Sea, cities that had started life as Greek colonies, apoikiai, in the late 7th century BCE, such as Olbia or Chersonesos. It is just as likely to have been made in a Greek workshop in Pantikapaion (modern Kerch), the capital of the multiethnic Bosporan kingdom. However, this vase could also have come from the tomb of a Bosporan noble tomb in eastern Crimea (Krym) who had Scythian connections. The careful execution and the treatment of the figures indicate that the artist wanted to represent the Scythian subject matter in a manner that was respectful of the Scythians being shown and not as a rendering intended to stress the exotic or the otherness of the figures as is found on other objects with Scythian subject matter made for Greeks.

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Though the stylistic treatments of the individual scenic compositions and the figures are clearly Greek, the actual scenes themselves and the details of the dress of the figures show that the focus is Scythian. All the figures wear nomadic clothing and are engaged in activities associated with men’s lives on the steppes. Greek artisans worked for Scythian elites producing items that had no role to play in the Greek communities but followed Greek stylistic conventions. Since Greek artists were concerned with capturing aspects of the reality of the forms that they represented, this vase probably provides us with a good idea of how the Scythians actually dressed. Moreover, since this piece Terracotta Parthian rider. Syria, Dura Europos, 1st–3rd century CE. (Yale must have been manufacUniversity Art Gallery (1935.58)) tured as a commission for a Scythian, perhaps as a grave good, the representations had to satisfy the Scythian patron’s own sense of self. This makes the vase quite different from images of Scythians produced by Greek artists in places like Athens that were intended to appeal to the Greek interest in the other and the exotic. Here the emphasis is on masculine activities, scenes of males interacting. The imagery downplays the ferocity that often seems to highlight the Greek notion of Scythian warriors. That these are warriors is made clear by the fact that all the figures are armed with their composite bows carried in the gorytos hanging from the belt. The figures do not wear armor, though body armor has been found in some elite Scythian graves (see Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius from Dura Europos, artifact 39). This might indicate that the image requested by the patron was intended to stress a more heroic aspect of Scythian warriors rather than the reality of how they actually went into battle, or perhaps the images were not so much

Artifacts • Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique narratives of warfare but of a warrior’s downtime. Three of the four scenes portray paired figures and seem to place emphasis on interpersonal interactions, suggesting that within the Scythian elite warrior society, the intimate relations between men were of importance. The dress shown follows the norm for what is expected of nomadic men, trousers and jacket, both tailored and designed to facilitate riding, as can be seen in the accompanying inset figure of a Parthian rider. Parthians were a later people who emerged from the steppes to become the masters of much of the Seleucid Empire. The decorative aspects of the garments shown on the figures might suggest that elite nomad men wore clothing embroidered or trimmed with applied metal plaques as normal garb. The remains of the metal plaques have been found in burials (see Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments, artifact 8). However, it needs to be noted that such foil appliques would not have withstood hard use. To date, no samples of Scythian embroidery survive. DESCRIPTION This gold vase with ring base, 13 cm high, is decorated with four repoussé scenes, arranged around the belly of the vase, three scenes with paired figures, and one with a single figure. The episodes show figures stringing a reflex composite bow, examining a sore tooth, bandaging a wounded leg, and sitting to discuss a matter while still armed. All the figures are bearded, and where visible, the hair is long. The dress for each figure consists of a thigh-length, close-fitting tailored jacket worn over a pair of tight trousers with some type of boot-like footwear. Some of the trousers are decorated, which was probably intended to suggest embroidery or perhaps small metal plaques sewn to the fabric. Whether the images form some type of narrative cannot be determined. The artist has rendered the figures as visually similar enough to one another so that this could be a series of episodes in a story involving the same two characters, possibly a Scythian heroic tale. It has been suggested that the artist has rendered the Scythian origin myth as told by the Greeks of the Black Sea and recorded by Herodotus (4.9), as opposed to the story that Herodotus claims that the Scythians told themselves (4.5). The figures would then include the three sons of the snake-legged goddess and Herakles. According to the story, before anyone of the three could assume the throne, he had to string Herakles’s bow. Two of the sons, Agathyrsus and Gelonus, failed. Only the youngest son, Scythes, succeeded. If such is a correct reading, then the main focus of the vase must be on the figure of Scythes in the act of stringing the bow. To his right follow the images of his brothers’ failed attempts and resulting injuries, but there is no explanation for the two figures seated in conversation. This gold vase is probably the best-known image from the Scythian realm that has been read as a narrative, but it is not unique. A 4th century

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Artifacts • Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique BCE gold helmet found in kurgan 2 at the Perederijewa Moglia necropolis in the Donetsk region of Ukraine is similarly decorated with repoussé figures identified by dress as Scythian warriors and arranged in dual pairs. This must have been a ceremonial helmet, and the composition has been recognized as a historical narrative recounting the return of older Scythian veterans to their homeland, following time spent in the Near East. They were blocked by the new sons of the abandoned wives, an episode recounted in Herodotus (4.2). A 4th century BCE gold comb from a kurgan burial at Solokha in the lower Dnieper region of southern Ukraine is decorated along the top with three figures that have been identified by some as the Scythian king Octamasadas on horseback with his halfbrother Orikos fighting his other half-brother Scylas for the throne (Herodotus 4.77–80). The small terracotta piece is much humbler and comes from the excavations of Dura Europos, the frontier city between Roman and Parthian territories. It does show that the nomadic garb of the Scythians continued to be worn later by subsequent steppe peoples, even after they had assumed a sedentary lifestyle. The horse man is dressed in trousers and a belted tunic. Incisions made in the wet clay are probably intended to suggest the decorative elements of the clothing. He also carries a gorytos for his composite bow, but it hangs from the horse’s equipment and is lacking the bow itself. It cannot be said for certain that the steppe nomads invented trousers, but it seems quite plausible that over the centuries, their persistent use by nomads across the steppes spread the form to both China and the Roman West where trousers began to be worn by the 4th century CE. SIGNIFICANCE The north coast of the Black Sea was one of the places where a fully developed sedentary culture regularly interacted with an equally developed nomadic culture. The Aegean Greeks had begun to colonize the Black Sea in the second half of the 7th century BCE at the time that the Cimmerians, the first warrior-based nomadic steppe society, had already emerged on the scene to devastate parts of the Asia Minor. These Greek colonies were established in locations that permitted good trade opportunities with the interior, usually near to the river access points. They were also placed to take advantage of hinterland to form the chora, the agricultural base on which the colony would need to depend for its day-to-day survival. The north coast provided the Greek settlers with access to the regions known as the wooded steppe land as well as to the true steppes, the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea. Over the course of the 6th and 5th century BCE, the Scythians emerged as the masters of the steppes, exploiting the agricultural and pastoral communities of the wooded steppes. With

Artifacts • Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique their warrior-based ethos, the Scythians turned from pastoral nomads into a feared military force that wreaked havoc on much of the surrounding sedentary regions (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires). However, the Greek colonies learned to live with their Scythian warrior neighbors, engaging them in trade offering wine and manufactured objects, and eventually high-quality items, like this vase, made especially for the Scythians. The Scythians gained what they needed for the trade either from their herds or the steppes—hides and furs—or from the exploitation of the communities in the wooded steppe land—wheat honey, wax, and slaves. They also sold their services to the Greeks, not only in the Black Sea area but also as far as the Aegean itself. Traders from the Greek colonies may well have moved up the rivers of Ukraine and Russia, perhaps as far as the southern foothills of the Urals. Isolated finds point to some connections between the Greek settlements and these distant steppe regions. It may have been because of this extensive network of branching trade routes that some Greeks in Olbia were knowledgeable enough about the various pastoral peoples to the east to supply Herodotus with the information that he details. The origin of the gold itself used for the vase poses a problem. There are no natural gold sources in the Scythian realm or in Ukraine. Gold had to be accessed from the Caucasus or possibly further east in Kazakhstan and the Altai Mountains or to the west in Transylvania. Whatever the source, gold was a commodity that must have moved around the region, sometimes as plunder but also as a trade item or as payment, perhaps to hold the Scythians at bay. The gold was then placed into the hands of artisans, both Greek and Scythian, to form the works that ended up in kurgan burials of Scythian and Bosporan elites. The Greek cities of the Black Sea region did have to worry about the possibility of armed conflict with their Scythian neighbors, and the Scythians had to be concerned about aggressive Greek actions, as when Alexander the Great advanced into the region. Earlier the Achaemenid Persians had pursued a forceful policy toward the Scythians with negative results for the Persians. Warfare was always a threat to both sides. This was often the case with Silk Road cities. Many of these towns existed at points of interface between two different groups, and they could be the prize of conquest. This was true for the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin or the cities along the Mesopotamian frontier between the Roman Empire and Parthian and Sasanian Empires. People living in places like Dura Europos knew that their situation could change, as it had, from Greek to Parthian to Roman to Sasanian, and these changes were most commonly not peaceful. The Parthian rider may reflect the period when the city was Parthian controlled or was a reminder to the inhabitants during the Roman period that the Parthians were nearby.

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Artifacts • Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique FURTHER INFORMATION Bäbler, B. “Dio Chrysostom’s Construction of Olbia.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 145–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Baumer, C. The History of Central Asia. Vol. 1: The Age of the Steppe Warriors. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Braund, D. “Greater Olbia: Ethnic, Religious, Economic, and Political Interactions in the Region of Olbia, c. 600–100 BC.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 37–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Brody, L., and G. Hoffman, eds. Dura Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2011. Buyskikh, S. B. “Contacts between Greeks and Non-Greeks on the Lower Bug in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BC.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 23–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Carter, J. C., ed. Crimean Chersonesos: City, Chora, Museum, and Environs. Austin: Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesos, 2003. Farkas, A. ed. From the Land of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the U.S.S.R. 3000 B.C.–100 B.C. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975. Gavrilyuk, N. A. “Social and Economic Issues in the Development of Steppe Scythia.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 135–145. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Jettmar, K. Art of the Steppes. New York: Greystone Press, 1967. Leypunskaya, N. A. “Olbian—Scythian Trade: Exchange Issues in the Sixth to Fourth Centuries BC.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 121–134. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Reeder, E., ed. Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2000. Rusyayeva, A. S. “Religious Interactions between Olbia and Scythia.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 93–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.1673))

6 Gold Belt End Vrap Treasure, Albania Avar, 8th century CE

INTRODUCTION In Central Asia, two different traditions of belt wearing met, that of the sedentary peoples and that of the nomads. Belts were already ornamental features of the dress in Mesopotamia by the 3rd millennium BCE where they occur in the royal burials at Ur, and by the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, belts formed part of the grave goods for some of the peoples in the Caucasus. Nomadic burials in the steppe areas began to contain remnants of belts in the Late Bronze Age. While both sedentary and nomadic peoples wore belts, they played a more important role in nomadic societies. Usually made of leather or cloth, fastened with buckles of metal or precious stone, and often ornamented with metal or precious stone plaques sometimes used to join leather strips, belts were standard wear for nomad men and women by the Iron Age if not earlier. They were practical dress items. Where men wore tunics over trousers, they served to hold up the trousers and cinch the tunic. In those regions where the dress was tunics, caftans, and robes, they effectively secured closed caftans and robes and gave the tunics more shape. They not only were essential clothing elements in nomad steppe cultures but also played significant roles in many of the sedentary cultures. Belts had other practical functions. From them could be suspended different necessities, sword, dagger, and tools. However, the belt was also one of the essential objects of wearable art that allowed an individual to announce social status along with clan or tribal affiliation. In a society that regularly moved, everything needed to be portable; those personal possessions that stated one’s wealth and importance within the community had to be small 81

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Artifacts • Gold Belt End and easy to transport. Jewelry served the function perfectly, and belts ornamented with plaques and buckles in precious materials provided the wearer with the visual statement of his or her significance.

DESCRIPTION The main gold belt end shown here is from a treasure or hoard of valuable portable items found at Vrap in Albania and known as the “Vrap Treasure.” There were several belt fittings found in the treasure, though not all from a single belt. This piece is cast gold in an open work pattern, the product of skilled goldsmith. The end is 12.7 × 3 × 0.5 cm and weighs 148 grams, a substantial piece. The Avars were one of the groups of Central Asian Gold belt buckle. Probably Mongolia, Xiongnu, 3rd–2nd century BCE. (Met- nomadic peoples that were ropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.1672)) pushed west and eventually came up against the border of the Byzantine Empire. As a warrior-based society, they posed a threat to the empire, and so the Byzantine emperor Justinian negotiated with them in the 6th century to keep the empire safe. However, after subjugating several smaller tribes, the Avars turned their attention to Constantinople and tried to seize the capital. Their power remained problematic to the sedentary people of Europe until Charlemagne finally defeated them. Because of the threat that they posed, Byzantine and other rulers often paid them off, which is what probably resulted in the abundance of gold found in the Vrap Treasure. Following the normal nomadic practice, precious metals became bold pieces of portable art to be worn by the ruling elite of Avar society. The end piece was probably attached to a leather belt that also held other gold plaques and from the belt must have hung a sword and dagger.

Artifacts • Gold Belt End The belt end piece is decorated with a pattern formed of gold wire with spirals and leaf-like forms. This is not in the “Animal Style” most commonly encountered on Central Asian nomadic jewelry, but it still reflects the nomadic taste for opulence in terms of material. Though the piece most likely was made by a native craftsman in service to the warrior chief of the Avar band, it has been suggested that this could be the work of a provincial Byzantine artist, probably made for an Avar patron, a practice that can be traced back to the Greek-produced gold work for Scythian patrons of the 5th–3rd century BCE in the Black Sea region (see Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique Showing Aspects of Scythian Life, artifact 5). The inset belt buckle comes from further east and from much earlier. The Xiongnu were the dominant force on the Mongolian and eastern Steppes in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE having formed an empire in response to the emergence of a united China under the Qin Dynasty in the late 3rd century BCE. The eastern steppes and Mongolia had been absorbing influences from the western Scythian, Sakā, and Sarmatian nomads since the mid-6th century BCE when the Achaemenid Persian Empire had begun to push into the western steppes; the pressures from the migration of western steppes peoples had only increased with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire and the subsequent formation of the Hellenistic kingdoms, all of which pressed the nomadic peoples. This migration of western nomads to the east brought the Scythian animal style (see Animal Style) of decoration for the objects of personal adornment to the far eastern regions, and the Xiongnu belt buckle shows this influence. The gold belt buckle portrays to facing ibexes being attacked by felines arranged in a heraldic composition. It was probably a work intended for masculine wear. This is a cast-gold buckle, a piece of high-status personal ornamentation, probably owned by a Xiongnu elite warrior. Though the piece entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum without information on any type of findspot, and is identified by stylistic features, it must have been a part of grave paraphernalia of a high-ranking Xiongnu warrior, placed into his kurgan upon his burial. SIGNIFICANCE Buckles, belt ends, and decorative plaques from belts have been found in archaeological contexts throughout the nomadic steppe lands from areas north of the Great Wall in China west to the Black Sea and into southeastern Europe. Because belts were such fundamental parts of nomad clothing, and because they were small and easy to move from place to place through gift giving, trade, or warfare, they served as vectors for the spread of artistic motifs throughout the nomadic region. Scythian, Sakā, and Sarmatian movements to the east and later Germanic and Slavic migrations to the west

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Artifacts • Gold Belt End moved steppe nomad cultural elements to northern China and to Europe (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires). In Han China and later in the 4th century CE Europe, some men began to wear tunics and trousers with belts in imitation of nomad dress. Among the Scythians and Sakās and the later Sarmatians, those who were of highest status wore belts with gold plaques attached to a backing. The Golden Warrior was buried with a wide belt with thirteen individual gold plaques with the repeated image of a reclining stag-chimera (see Golden Warrior [Reconstructed Costume], artifact 34). The Huns (possibly a Xiongnu branch), who occupied the Central Asian stage from the 4th to the 5th century CE, wore broad belts with decorative bronze buckles. Turkic warriors, who became a major nomad force in the 6th–12th century CE, wore belts that defined noble and non-noble social positions, gold plaques for the nobles, and bronze plaques for the non-nobles. While the belts and their decoration had the practical purposes of holding up or closing clothes and identifying the wearer by clan or tribal affiliation and social status, they may also have had a magical role. Belts can fasten in a couple of ways. The ends can just be tied together, and this would seem to have the common practice in ancient China based on the evidence of representations of figures with belts. The nomadic belt buckle designed to secure fixed outward pointing tongues is almost identical to the buckles used for fastening bridle fittings, and the two types may have developed together in the horse- riding culture of the nomads. Most commonly, the buckles were of cast bronze making them strong enough to hold the ends. An alternative to the buckle was the belt hook. The hook can be metal, jade, or bone. It is club-shaped with an upturned hook at one end and a button attached to the underside at the other end. The belt hook developed in the setting of sedentary Chinese civilization and spread north into the nearby nomadic region. The hook-type fastener rarely appears in areas without some direct contact with China, though there are some examples of belt hooks from Scythian contexts that look to be of independent western invention. Unlike a buckle that was intended to hold tight the ends of the belt and therefore needed to be sturdy, the plaques decorating a belt had no function other than symbolic. So long as a belt was not subject to rough wearing, the plaques could be made from less durable materials such as gold and jade. To produce the gold pieces, the piece of gold sheet would be beaten on a wood mold to raise the decoration, repoussé technique. Jade had much greater value in China than elsewhere, and there are Chinese examples of jade belt plaques. To make these, the jade could be cut through to create an openwork form or treated as a relief carving, and details would be incised on the surface with a sharp tool. In the nomadic regions, it was also the practice to cast plaques in bronze and then gild them to raise their appearance and value,

Artifacts • Gold Belt End though in some instances, the appearance of gilt pieces announces the work as that of a non-nomad craftsman since not all of the nomadic metalsmiths knew how to gild bronze. Most commonly, metal plaques had loops soldered to the reverse to allow them to be sewn to the belt backing material. The artisans who produced the decorative buckles and plaques that gave the belts their individual quality and served as badges of social position included both indigenous and foreign experts. From as early as the Bronze Age, nomadic craftsmen had provided portable objects to nomadic patrons, but nomadic communities in contact with sedentary centers, particularly in northern China and in the area of the Greek colonies of the Black Sea, also used foreign craftsmen to manufacture the belts. It is certainly possible that this Xiongnu buckle was made by a Chinese artisan living close to the border region with the steppes. Whether indigenous or foreign, these artisans most often worked the decorative features in the “Animal Style” (see Animal Style) that was favored by the nomadic peoples. Because the belts were lightweight, portable, and important within the nomad culture, they must have provided a vehicle for the transmission of the changing features of the “Animal Style” across the steppes over its long period of popularity. The subject for many buckles and plaques for nomad belts is a rendering of a feline predator or a stag (or the mythical stag-chimera) sometimes alone, and other times in pairs or in combat but treated as a decorative pattern rather than as a realistic representation, and these are motifs found in other types of nomadic portable art. However, the buckles and plaques were not always treated as pure ornament; some look to be narrative scenes. There are images of camel riders, of human-animal combat, and of a figure resting under a tree and accompanied by a horse. FURTHER INFORMATION Adams, N. Bright Lights in Dark Ages: The Thaw Collection of Early Medieval Ornaments. New York; London: The Morgan Library and Museum and D Giles Limited, 2014. Bunker, E., C. B. Chatwin, and A. Farkas. “Animal Style”: Art from East to West. New York: Asia Society Gallery, 1970. Gonosová, A., and C. Kondoleon. Art of Late Rome and Byzantium in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1994. Reeder, E., ed. Scythian Gold. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000. So, J., and E. Bunker. Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sacker Gallery, 1995.

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(Prokudin-Gorski photograph collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-ppmsc-04412))

7 Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery in Front of Her Yurt Russian Empire 1904–1915 INTRODUCTION Although the two objects pictured in this entry are separated by almost two millennia and represent women who followed two distinctly different lifestyles, one nomadic and the other sedentary, they do share in common certain important features that marked many of the women who lived in areas joined together by the networks of the Silk Roads. The Turkmens arrived in western Central Asia in the 10th century CE and first appear in the written record in the work of the Palestinian Arab historian al-Muqaddasi. They were one of the many Turkic peoples who began to move out of the Altai Mountains in the mid-1st millennium CE and eventually took control over much of the steppe lands and some of the settled lands of eastern and western Central Asia, eventually extending to the Anatolian Peninsula, modern Turkey. Even though the Turkic peoples were ethnically and linguistically different from the earlier Iranian and IndoEuropean peoples who had established a nomadic lifestyle on the steppes, the Turks adapted to the nomadic ways. The 20th-century dress of this woman looks astonishing close to that which we now think, based on recent archaeological finds, formed the normal wear of Scythian and Sarmatian women in the late 1st millennium BCE and early 1st millennium CE. Palmyra was an important city in eastern Syria. It existed on a major trade route that ran from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea at Antioch. Its wealthy residents were merchants. This funerary relief commemorates the

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daughter of Zabdidol, who was most likely a wealthy merchant from Palmyra. The slab, which includes her name as ’Alayyat (see Funerary Relief with Ban­ quet Scene, artifact 3), would have sealed the small compartment within a family tomb in which her remains were placed. Since she is recorded by her association with her father, it is probably safe to assume that she was unmarried at the time of her death. In both the photograph of the Turkmen woman and the relief of the Palmyrene woman, the aspects of costume and jewelry serve to identify them. Dress could serve to communicate a person’s ethnic, social status, religious, clan, geographic associations. In Funerary relief of a woman from Palmyra. Syria, 150–200 CE. (Metropoli- both these representations, tan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1902 (02.29.5)) the jewelry is an important feature, probably reflecting the wealth of the family from which the woman came. In many instances, a woman’s jewelry was her insurance against poverty should she lose her husband or father. DESCRIPTION The woman in the photograph stands in front of a yurt, the mobile felt houses that developed among the nomad societies on the steppes (see Early-20thYurt, artifact 13). She wears a long-sleeved dress and tall headdress usually accompanied by a veil. The fabric of the dress, either a woven or a printed ikat, reflects later developments. Ikat fabrics do not appear among the finds from ancient Central Asia. An ancient nomad woman would probably have worn a similar garment, though of single color, probably of plain-weave wool or hemp, based on the archaeological finds. It was “tunic-shaped,” most likely a closed garment made by folding a single length of cloth in

Artifacts • Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery half so that there are no shoulder seams and cutting a hole for the head in the center. The sleeves could then be sewn to the body of the garment. Her headdress is tall cylinder from which drapes a veil. A woman’s status within the community could be announced by her jewelry. The woman in the photograph wears several metal appliques attached to a backing that cover her chest and some type of metallic covering on her headdress. The finds from ancient western steppe nomad kurgans show that women’s costume included similar types of metallic decoration in the form of gold plaques, which were appliqued to the dress at the collar, the yoke, the cuffs, and the hem (see Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments, artifact 8). Similarly, the headdress was embellished with appliqued gold plaques, and so too were the shoes. In addition, women with the wealth possessed jewelry in the form of finger rings, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and necklaces. Many of these jewelry pieces were made by Greek or Greek trained nomad artisans and exhibit Greek subject matter and Greek style, but they were made for the nomad elite market, often being larger and heavier than their Greek prototypes. For Turkmens, the jewelry can possess magic qualities, which may have also been true for the Scythians. The abundance of the gold in the elite woman’s costume may also have been her guarantee of personal wealth should she lose her husband. The woman represented on the relief from Palmyra is somewhat stereotypical for such funerary monuments, but there is some individuality accorded to ’Alayyat in the treatment of physiognomy and the specifics of her costume. She wears a draped garment, probably a Greek himation, which gathers at the left shoulder and is held in place with a large brooch, which looks to be an animal head representation from which hangs a second feature. Without surviving paint, it is impossible to know if the carving is intended to suggest a gold piece or not. The earrings are pendant type in dumbbell shape, possibly intended to suggest two beads or pearls joined by a rod. Her head is covered with a long veil that she grasps with the upraised right hand. On her left side, the veil wraps around her arm, and she holds its end to her breast with the left hand. The veil rests on top of a turban-like headdress that is accentuated by a band of relief carving on her forehead than probably represented by a gold diadem. The Aramaic inscription above her left shoulder records her identity in association with her father, “’Alayyat, daughter of Zabdibol.” SIGNIFICANCE Modern nomad women do ride horseback and engage in physical activity. Whether this modern costume and its ancient prototype would have been suitable for horseback activities is difficult to determine, but there is no doubt that ancient nomad women of all statuses were physically active and worked hard. Certainly, the thin nature of the gold plaques found in the

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Artifacts • Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery burials and possibly similar to what is shown in the photograph would not be worn in settings in which they could easily be damaged. The reality of ancient nomad women’s lives may not be fully revealed by the finds from burials. It has been suggested that in some of the nomad groups, women may have participated in raiding parties and perhaps in warfare. In one version of the death of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Dynasty, Herodotus records that Cyrus was killed in a battle with the Massagetae, a nomadic group related to the Scythians, led by their queen, Tomyris (1.214). Some recent osteological finds from archaeological excavations of Scythian burials have been interpreted as the remains of young female warriors, perhaps the real Amazons of Greek mythology. For ancient nomads the portable wealth shown by the jewelry buried with high-ranking women could be obtained in several ways, through trade with sedentary groups, through extortion or protection paid by the same sedentary groups to the neighboring nomads, by plunder, and through services rendered or protection provided to trading parties passing through the nomad territory. The accumulated riches in many of the kurgans erected by nomad chiefs and other nomad elites indicate that these communities had access to large quantities of valuable materials, and elite nomad women wore some of the family’s wealth as decorative features of their clothing. Palmyra’s richest residents made their wealth through long-distance trade. The city stood in the inface zone between the Roman Empire in the West and the Parthian Empire in the East and was subject to influences from north. However, it was a city with a distinct identity of its own. As active participants in the trade, Palmyrene merchants maintained their own camel caravans, which could collect goods from the southern Euphrates and transport them north to Palmyra and west to Antioch. Palmyrene communities existed in southern Mesopotamia and north in Dura Europos. These resident foreigners probably facilitated the movement of goods from the Parthian realm into the Palmyrene territory and then to outlying places like Dura Europos or major Mediterranean centers like Antioch or moved Mediterranean objects from the coast to the Parthian realm from where they headed east. The findings of Chinese-woven polychrome silk fragments in some of the Palmyrene tombs indicate that the indirect trade linkage reached deep into East Asia. Whether these Chinese items had come via the terrestrial routes through the Tarim Basin and Bactria to Parthian lands and finally to the capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris from where they moved to the ports on the Euphrates or had come from further south from a port on the Persian Gulf where ships deposited goods acquired in northwest India that had arrived via the southern route around the Täklimakan Desert through the Kushan Empire cannot be determined. Following the normal ways in which material passed along the Silk Road networks, the Palmyrene merchants would not have encountered objects from China before the southern ports,

Artifacts • Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery until they had been deposited and reshipped out of several trading nodes. There is no evidence that merchants and caravans were crossing the entire network from east to west. The wealth of the Palmyrene family engaged in such trade could be displayed through the jewelry that its women wore, which might even be a foreign product like these possible pearl earrings, and with which they were shown on their funerary monuments. Clothing and personal adornment were the ways in which individuals and groups made their identities known along the Silk Roads. Such identity markers played an important role in settings where heterogenous populations gathered, as in trade nodes. Even in a setting where peoples’ societal and environmental adaptations might have been quite similar, as on the steppes or in the desert cities, there may have been strong senses of distinctiveness that led to pronounced visual advertisements of group associations through clothing and decoration. This can be seen in the rich variety of dress and jewelry that feature in the 19th-century ethnographic collections of materials from steppe nomads and populations in the Central Asian cities. A similar situation probably existed in the ancient communities. FURTHER INFORMATION Aruz, J., ed. Palmyra: Mirage of the Desert. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. Davis-Kimball, J. Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Dien, A. “Palmyra as a Caravan City.” Silk Road Newsletter (2004): 21–28. Fowlkes-Child, B., and M. Seymour. The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Lobachëva, N. P. “Clothing and Personal Adornment.” In Nomads of Eurasia, V. N. Basilov, ed., 111–126. Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1989. Matthews, J. “The Tax Law of Palmyra: Evidence for the Economic History of a City in the Roman East.” Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 157–180.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1924 (24.97.51))

8 Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments North Black Sea—Pontic Region Scythian, 5th century BCE

INTRODUCTION The development of nomad cultures that could exploit the grasslands of the Eurasian steppes employing long-distance pastoral herding strategies began in the 5th millennium BCE with the domestication of the horse, first as a food source and then, by the 4th millennium, as a vehicle for mobility. By the late 4th millennium, horse riding nomads managing herds of cattle or sheep followed by their families in carts had come to dominate the western and eastern steppes. The contacts between the developing sedentary cultures of south of the steppes and the nomads living off the steppes appear to have been peaceful, though probably limited to the interface zone at the border between the two regions. The situation changed dramatically in the early centuries of the 1st millennium BCE and the emergence of the Iron Age cultures in both regions. A new type of nomadic culture emerged, one based on the use of the horse as a weapon and of Indo-European origin. Nomad warriors, superb horsemen, and skilled archers using the recurve, composite bow came out of the eastern steppes, probably from the Altai Mountains, and began to attack the sedentary peoples to the south. The first group known in the historical sources are the Cimmerians who did great damage on the Anatolian Peninsula and to the Phrygian and Lydian kingdoms. The Scythians, a far more formidable force who came to control the Pontic steppe lands of the northern region of the Black Sea, succeeded the Cimmerians in the west and the Sakās, a related people who came to control the eastern steppes. This new nomadic society was warrior based and hierarchically structured. Often referred to in the literature as “predatory nomads,” these societies 93

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Artifacts • Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments were loosely affiliated, linguistically and culturally related, peoples. The nomadic communities had developed into a highly complex hierarchical structure with warrior chiefs at the top supported by layers of warriors whose primary obligations were to follow their chief into battle to secure pasturage for the herds or booty from sedentary peoples that could then be redistributed as gifts from the paramount chief to his subordinates among the warrior elite. Supporting the warrior bands were artisans responsible for producing high-value objects of personal adornment along with weapons that provided the wearer with a statement of status within the group and farmers who augmented the herding economic strategy. Objects like the gold foil ornaments shown here were a way of clearly stating that the wearer was a person of high status. These objects could have been gifts from a warrior chief to a lower-ranking warrior to then be presented to that warrior’s wife, but eventually objects of status were interred in the elite graves, most commonly associated with mounds, kurgans, raised on the flat steppes, and a visual reminder of the nomad presence in the area. DESCRIPTION These are light weight gold foil pieces. They were probably worked against convex molds to raise the repoussé forms of griffins. They are survivors of a much larger number of repeated griffin images all raised from one or two molds that produced the gold foil decorations for a garment. The loops on the back indicate that they were intended to be sewn onto the garment to probably highlight the cuffs, the hem of a long sheath like dress worn by women (see Photograph of a Turkmen Woman in Her Finery in Front of Her Yurt, artifact 7). Similar types of foil ornaments were attached in bands to high, vertical tower-like headdresses worn by women or at the edges of the attached veils. The headdress and garment may not have marked a status difference among the women within a nomad community, but the use of gold and the fact that these were made of lightweight, easily damaged foil must have served to make clear that the wearer was a woman of high social position. Her husband, father, son, or brother had earned the right to possess these items and to have a female relative display them as a statement of his rank within the community. When a woman wore a complete ensemble of gold foil ornaments on the main garment and on the headdress, she must have been dazzling to behold, reflecting the sun’s rays. SIGNIFICANCE These are repeated griffins marching in a steady rhythm. The griffin is a composite animal with a feline body, usually a lion and the head and wings of a bird, most commonly an eagle, probably created in eastern Mediterranean in the 3rd millennium BCE where it can be found in Iranian, Near Eastern, Minoan, and Mycenaean contexts (see Bronze Throne Leg with

Artifacts • Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments Griffin, artifact 12). Already in the 8th century BCE, the griffin (γρύψ) was used by Greek metalsmiths to decorate the rims of cauldrons and appears among the repertoire of mythological animals on Orientalizing and Archaic painted pots. Herodotus (4.13.1) reports, based on a lost poem of Aristeas, that there were “gold guarding griffins” in the far north of the Scythian realms, beyond the land of the Issedones, where also dwelt the one-eyed Arimaspi. Assuming that Aristeas is indeed relating a story that he was told within the Scythian territory and that Herodotus thought that it was worth reporting based on his firsthand knowledge of the Scythian Pontic region, it might be reasonable to conclude that the Scythians, themselves, imported the griffin tale and made it their own, spreading it among the other, neighboring nomad groups. It is also possible that both the story and the visual form were introduced to the Scythian and nomad Pontic region by Greek artists. Scythian elite patronized Greek artists working at the Greek and mixed Greek and native settlements on the north coast of the Black Sea. There is some evidence for Greek artists working within the Scythian communities themselves. In either situation, the motif and the associated story could have become a part of the Scythian world. On the other hand, the stately and static treatment of these griffins on the gold foil plaques recalls the style of some Achaemenid Persian court art, like the procession of delegates to the imperial ceremonies on the apadana at Persepolis. Achaemenid rulers made use of Scythian mercenaries, and it is equally possible that the griffin, which had also entered the repertoire of Near Eastern and Persian art, where it appears in Persian jewelry and on some of the capitals of the columns at Persepolis, could have come north via a Persian conduit. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, D. W. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Jettmar, K. Art of the Steppes. New York: Greystone Press, 1967. Reeder, E., ed. Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2000.

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(Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of Dr. Samuel Eilenberg (1989.146.2))

9 Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment Gandhāra, Swat Valley, Pakistan Kushan, 2nd–4th century CE INTRODUCTION The sedentary areas through which some of the ancient Silk Roads passed were heavily urbanized. From the Mediterranean coast to the Indus River Valley and from the oases of the Tarim Basin to the shores of the Persian Gulf, cities and towns were regular features of the landscape. Cities, and the elites within them, were what sustained and stimulated the trade networks that formed the Silk Roads. The cities provided the markets for exotic wares that the elites purchased, and the urban workshops supplied the new items to be carried elsewhere. The cities varied in their forms because of the long history of urbanization (see City Planning). Some had foundations dating back to the 3rd millennium when cities first emerged on the Eurasian continent, while others were products of the great city-building campaigns initiated by rulers. There were a variety of urban forms, some being more organic and others showing careful layouts in their initial planning. The Parthian, Roman, Kushan, and Sasanian periods witnessed a flourishing urban culture with a variety of local developments in the Near East, the Iranian Plateau, Gandhāra, Sogdiana, and the Tarim Basin. Within the cities, the buyers of expensive foreign objects that longdistance traders carried, and which gained value as they moved ever further from their place of origin, came from the economic, political, and religious elites of the cities. Their homes were often the destination for some of the exotic items obtained through the merchants of the Silk Roads. Archaeological work throughout the center of the Eurasian continent has revealed that the elite town houses reflect the adaptations to the different climatic regimes and environments, but most of the houses share in common a focus on the 97

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Artifacts • Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment interior space, which is where the expenditure was to be seen. The houses can be classified into two groupings: those dominated by a courtyard or courtyards around which are arranged the rooms and those with a main central hall space that serves as the focal point around which the other rooms are dispersed. In most instances, elite houses were at least two stories with the ground story often providing for servants’ quarters and storage space. The neighborhoods were tightly packed, and even elite houses shared common walls. Stone masonry both cut and fitted and rubble, mud-pise and mud-brick forms, wood, and wattle-and-daub were the typical construction techniques and were appropriate adaptations to the different climate regimes of the vast center portion of the Eurasian continent. Wood, stucco, and stone were used to accent features. DESCRIPTION This fragment of a larger relief is part of a narrative cycle featuring one of the stories of Buddha. It shows a two-story interior, the second story defined as a balcony. The paint that covered the relief and picked out the details has long disappeared, but it is still possible to see selected features that interested the artist. The image references an elite house in Gandhāra in modern Pakistan, possibly the type of elite house to be found at Taxila. Gandhāra had been part of the Achaemenid Empire, though the Persian influence was limited. It was for a time under the control of the Indian Mauryan Empire and was also part of the Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Indo-Parthian kingdoms. The elite domestic architecture reflected both Indian and Hellenic influences. The development of Buddhist art in Gandhāra occurred under the Kushan Empire, and the interior shown must reference that of an elite Gandhāran house in the Kushan period between the 1st and the 4th century CE. Much of the domestic architecture revealed by the excavations at Sirkap, the portion of Taxila founded during the Greek occupation and that flourished through the Indo-Parthian period, is in stone rubble packed with mud mortar in the earlier phases and cut and fitted stone in diaper masonry in the later phases. This style of building probably persisted into the Kushan era. The appearance of the interior offers a view of the private space of an elite house. The balcony overlooking an interior courtyard with its rich ornamentation may have been made of schist, the common building material at Taxila, though it could also have been in wood, but none survives from the site. Worked wood interior fittings are known from the oasis site of Niya in the eastern Tarim Basin, which was a region that received influences from Gandhāra. Surviving finds included columns and decorated capitals. The supports for the balcony on the relief could have been in wood, though the finds of stone columns and capitals from Buddhist sanctuaries in Gandhāra suggest that it was probably the material. The columns shown on the second

Artifacts • Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment story could have been in wood, and the arches that define the segments of the second story might have been wood, which would have been lighter and easier to support. The images of furniture on Gandhāran reliefs suggest that there was a well-developed carpentry tradition in the Gandhāran region, though nothing has survived. However, whether this was a sophisticated enough tradition to have been able to either steam and bend wood, piece wood, or train trees to produce curved branches for the arches of the arcade of the balcony cannot be determined from what survives. Sophisticated carpentry skills appear as early as the 7th century BCE in Phrygian Asia Minor, testified to from the furniture finds from Gordion, but whether these skills were still known and could have reached Gandhāra, perhaps through Parthian intermediaries, cannot be determined. The arcade itself is a recurring motif in Gandhāran reliefs that show the Buddha or stories of his life and may have ultimately been a simple iconographic device, probably borrowed from Indian traditions, with no association to real domestic architecture in Gandhāra. The setting details in the narrative scenes appear rooted in visual reality and would seem to indicate that artists were working with their own visual environment as the models. From the balustrade of the balcony are textile hangings, which are a reminder of how important textiles were as decorations. Gandhāra appears to have been a fabric-producing region, and many reliefs feature textiles. Gandhāran weavers appear to have used borrowed as well as local motifs in their products. Textiles as bolts of cloth and as finished products were commonly traded items on the Silk Roads. Whether these images represent cotton, wool, or silk fabrics cannot be determined. Silk was available, both in the local tussah form or as Chinese imports. Reliefs, like the one shown here, were part of narrative cycles that featured the stories of the life and enlightenment of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni. These were important products from the early Gandhāran sculpture workshops and were used to decorate the horizontal bands on the stūpas in the Buddhist monasteries to be found in Taxila, the surrounding area, and the Swat Valley. Too little of the relief survives to be certain of which story is being told, but these were a repeating repertoire of narrative images, intended to provide a visual aid for those who were circumambulating the stūpa. These were placed low enough to be legible to the faithful. SIGNIFICANCE Gandhāra was the area to which Buddhism spread in the 1st century BCE and found a hospitable reception, tolerated by Indo- Greek and IndoParthian rulers and later patronized by the Kushan kings. Numerous monasteries were built in the region, some under royal protection and others at the behest of elite families, many probably with ties to the merchant class. Gandhāran merchants, probably along with other Buddhist merchants from

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Artifacts • Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment northwest India, established trade connections north into the Tarim Basin via the southern route along the Täklimakan and into western China. Buddhism followed this route as it extended into Central Asia and China during the first centuries of the Common Era. The wealthy of the Kushan centers patronized Buddhism and commissioned the artworks that decorated the monasteries, and so it is reasonable to assume that the interior of a rich house used in a relief might well reflect the reality that the commissioners knew, though it has been suggested that Gandhāran sculptors also drew from Indian prototypes that were reflecting life further south. As was the case throughout the Eurasian continent through which the Silk Roads passed, these wealthy were the main purchasers of the exotic and expensive items being brought via the Silk Roads to their cities or regions. Like all ancient long-distance trade, the products carried needed to be easily transported and have value that would increase over distance. Long-distance trade did not move common commodities; it moved high-status goods, items of value because of their rarity, their high-quality workmanship, or their exotic nature. FURTHER INFORMATION Brancaccio, P. “Gateway to the Buddha, Figures under Arches in Early Gandharan Art.” In Gandhāran Buddhism, Archaeology, Art, Texts, P. Brancaccio and K. Behrendt, eds., 210–224. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. Marshall, J. Taxila: An Illustrated Account of the Archaeological Excavations Carried Out at Taxila under the Orders of the Government of India between the Years 1913 and 1934. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Proser, A. Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara. New York: Asia Society, 2011. Simpson, E. The Furniture from Tumulus MM: The Gordion Wood Objects, vol. 1. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. Srinivasan, D. M. “Local Crafts in Early Gandharan Art.” In Gandhāran Buddhism, Archaeology, Art, Texts, P. Brancaccio and K. Behrendt, eds., 243–269. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund 1932 (32.150.1))

10 Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes from a Window Ctesiphon, Ma’aridh II, Iraq Sasanian, 6th century CE INTRODUCTION Both public and private architecture found at urban sites in the regions through which the Silk Roads passed was often decorated with architecture embellishments. The peoples in the Parthian and later Sasanian Empires made use of stucco ornaments, such as shown here. Carved stone and worked wood, as is shown in the Gandhāran reliefs (see Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment, artifact 9), were also commonly employed in areas where both materials were available. Based on the finds from the site of Niya in the eastern Täklimakan Desert, decorated wood elements were features of buildings in the region. Wall and ceiling paintings appear in certain areas. The painted tiles decorated the ceiling of a home in Dura Europos (see Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos with Portrait of Heliodoros, artifact 1), and similar painted ceiling tiles embellished the synagogue. In the same site, the Christian baptistry and several of the temples contained wall paintings. Wall paintings were an important aspect of the treatment of the interiors of the main halls in Sogdian elite and even middle-class houses. The repertoire of motifs for decoration varied from place to place. The unification of much of the center of the Eurasian continent under the Achaemenid Persian Empire provided for the dispersal of certain Mesopotamian and Near Eastern motifs over a wide area. The arrival of Greek settlers with their Greek cultural sensibilities introduced new decorative items into the kit available to the decorator including the Greek orders, acanthus leaf patterns, and figural forms. These Greek elements survived the end of Greek 103

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Artifacts • Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes

presence and became part of the general repertoire of forms available. They appear as columns with capitals that recall ionic and Corinthian prototypes or Greek mythological figures that emerge as decorations on silver vessels. In a similar way, Indian motifs carried north by merchants and Buddhist missionaries appeared in the oasis towns of the Täklimakan Desert and in the painted decorations of Sogdian houses. The Parthian and Sasanian elites favored molded stucco ornamentation. Some could be purely geometric, and others figural. These reliefs were used to close off windows to prying eyes and to embellish wall surfaces. The great arch that survives from an iwan in the Sasanian palace (Taq Kisra, Taq Kasra) at CtesiStucco window screen. Qasr-I Abu Nasr, Iran, Sasanian, 6th–7th century phon, the Parthian and later CE. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1932 (32.150.1)) Sasanian capital in southern Iraq, may have been decorated with stucco plaques. Some were found near the palace remains, and other Sasanian palaces shown the remains of stucco decoration. DESCRIPTION These two stucco elements decorated windows, and both were intended to allow for airflow into the building while providing privacy for those within the structure. The roundel comes from Ctesiphon but not from the palace. It protected a window opening in a private elite house in the section of the site labeled Ma’aridh II. It is decorated on only one side with palmettes forming a spoke pattern emerging from a beaded circle and surrounded by a second beaded circle. Though the stucco relief fell from some height and was found in several pieces, it was possible to reconstruct it. It most likely

Artifacts • Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes was positioned with the decorated side facing out. The motif itself can also be found in Syria, indicating the wide distribution of patterns that spread throughout the Sasanian and earlier Parthian Empires that encompassed so much of the center of Asia. The house from which the window cover came was composed of a mix of square and oblong rooms—some service spaces and others living quarters, and a few public areas, one of which served as the main hall. The window cover probably came from the main hall, which was also embellished with horseshoe archways, a barrel vault, like in the main palace, and other stucco reliefs. The window screen was found in the excavations of Qasr-I Abu Nasr, a site not far from Shiraz. Qasr-I Abu Nasr was a fortified site that included a citadel in the east, a lower town, and in the west a ceremonial area that may have included a Christian monastery, probably belonging to the Church of the East, the main Christian community in the Sasanian Empire (see Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Including Crosses, artifact 46). The screen was found in the western ruins, in a distinct space, an octagonal room that was probably domed. The screen itself is highly decorated as an architectural statement with two flanking columns holding up a crenelated horizontal bar. This element must have served to increase the visual splendor of the already special space. The mold-made repeated relief sculpted stuccoes set against the mudbrick superstructures would have automatically given visual interest to the buildings, and this would have been increased by the application of colors. The stucco relief decorations were painted with blue, green, gold, and red. Moreover, the reliefs were arranged in complex geometrical systems using rotational symmetry and repeated patterns in linear networks. The motifs could be primarily ornamental like these examples, which use floral and geometrical forms or figural with royal personages, royal hunt scenes, and select animals, which resemble those that are also found on silver plates. SIGNIFICANCE These two Sasanian stucco reliefs hint at the ways in which buildings in major centers and even secondary centers within the regions touched by the Silk Roads could be enlivened. The building materials throughout most of the regions were humble, and even where stone was abundant, it was not a prestige material. Important structures, public or private, had to be given status by added decoration. For those living in the Parthian and Sasanian realms, one way to do this was using stucco decoration. However, mosaics and wall paintings were also common features for the interior treatments. It is also worth noting the specific motifs on both the window cover and the screen. As has been stated, the palmette pattern cover resembles decorative forms known from Syria. The Sasanian kings controlled Syria at

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Artifacts • Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes various points, and even when the region was not under Sasanian rule, Syrian peoples interacted with their neighbors in the Sasanian territories. The Christian communities in the Sasanian Empire included those belonging to the Church of the East as well as those from the Syrian Orthodox Church, and important Christian centers of learning were located in the Sasanian Empire, and major Christian pilgrimage sites were found in the eastern Syrian Desert. The spread of visual motifs could well have accompanied the general movement of peoples back and forth through the area, independent of official borders. Trade between the Sasanian Empire and the Roman and later Byzantine Empires was carefully controlled by both sides, but it did take place. Motifs easily moved from one locale to another, especially motifs that did not carry obvious iconographic meanings. The similarity between some of the figural stuccos and the decorations on the silver plates most probably produced in royal metalworking ateliers and used as diplomatic gifts, suggests that there was a shared repertoire of certain motifs that could be used in a variety of media and settings. FURTHER INFORMATION Dimand, M. S. “Sasanian Wall Decoration in Stucco.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 26, no. 8 (1931): 193–195. Fino, E. V. “Ctesiphon.” In Discovering the Art of Ancient Near East: Archaeological Excavations Supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1931–2010, Y. Rakic and J. Aruz, eds., 12–14. New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010. Haji, S. R. M., and M. E. Chehri. “Animal Figures of Sasanian Stucco in Tepe Hissar.” Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences 2, no. 2 (2013): 32–45. Kharazmi, M., R. Afhami, and M. Tavossi. “A Study of Practical Geometry in Sassanid Stucco Ornament in Ancient Persia.” Nexus Network Journal 14 (August 2012). DOI: 10.10071s00004-M 012–0106–8. Whitcomb, D. S. Before the Roses and Nightingales: Excavations at Qasr-I Abu Nasr, Old Shiraz. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985.

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(Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Manheim (69.125.8))

11 Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana Swat Valley, Pakistan Kushan, 3rd century CE

INTRODUCTION Within the region of Gandhāra (modern Pakistan) under the rule of the Kushan emperors, artists began to create a new form of Buddhist art, one that favored images of the historical Buddha (Shakyamuni), often placed within scenes from his life story. This image is one such narrative that could have been placed on the stūpa along the drum with other scenes from the Buddha’s life or in the hamika, a square block above the drum with four reliefs, for the faithful to contemplate as they circumambulated. Even though the artists probably borrowed some of the visual conventions from earlier prototypes further south in India at Sanchi, the fact remains that for these images to have power for the faithful viewer, the details represented must have somewhat resembled the world that they knew. These scenes from the Buddha’s life provide information about the interior architectural treatment of elite houses and the furnishings (see Representation of Architecture from a Relief Fragment, artifact 9). Even though the Buddha had given away all his worldly possessions and entered the state of Nirvana in a grove of sala trees, the sculptor has chosen to place the Buddha on a bed with coverings, probably responding to the textual tradition that as he became ill from his last meal, his disciple Ānanda had a resting place prepared in the grove, suggested by the leafy elements that descend from the upper frame of the scene. DESCRIPTION The relief shows the scene of the Buddha’s death or passage to Nirvana, the Parinirvana. Surrounding the reclining Buddha are his disciples, most 109

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Artifacts • Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana showing their grief, but with Subhadra remaining calm because he understands the nature of the transition. This relief may have belonged in the harmika enclosure on top of a stūpa, the mound that held the relics of the Buddha. The depiction places emphasis on the secondary elements, the bed and the bed coverings. The furnishings of elite houses throughout the regions of the Silk Roads can be divided into two types: that which facilitated a life at ground level and that which raised the individual above the ground. The image shown here follows the second form. The bed form may well have been introduced as a significant piece of furniture into the region by the Macedonian and Greek colonists who followed in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. For these people the bed and couch were interchangeable and referred to as κλίνη (kline). The form served for reclining at banquets and for sleeping. Within a dining setting, there could be up to ten couches in a space. Those individuals with the wealth could order kline inlayed with tortoise shell, decorated with ivory attachments, and with feet shod in bronze in the shape of animal hooves or paws. Greek kline makers were a separate category of craftspeople from chair makers, but all furniture makers worked with forms that had been inherited from earlier designs in Egypt where the lathe had been used to turn wood since the New Kingdom. Moreover, the finds of preserved furniture from an 8th-century tomb at Gordion in modern Turkey show that furniture making had achieved a high level of sophistication in the region before the Greek craftspeople even began to create distinct forms of their own. The details of the bed in the relief suggest that the legs had been turned on a lathe to acquire the round sculpted shapes. It may be assumed that the feet are encased in metal, because the bed appears to be that of a wealthy individual. The slight indentations at the point where the legs meet with the horizontal member that forms the bed frame may be an attempt to suggest that the bed is decorated with inlays. Within Macedonian funerary traditions, it has been suggested that wooden beds were reserved for individuals who were to be cremated. Whether that tradition was somehow informing this image is impossible to determine. Macedonian and even Greek influences in the form of such cultural practices seem to be too distant in time to have still be playing a role as Gandhāran art took shape, and cremation was a well-established funerary practice in non-Buddhist India. However, since the Buddha was to be cremated, placing the body on a wooden bed might have been a means of making a visual reference to the next stage in the story. SIGNIFICANCE The major source for the story of the Buddha’s final days is the Mahāparinibbāna sutta, the longest sutta of the Pāli canon of Theravāda Buddhism.

Artifacts • Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana The artist of the relief has interpreted the event freely, placing the reclining Buddha on bed or a version of a Greek-style kline within a grove of trees. The image may well speak of residual Greek-style living patterns that could still be found among the elite Buddhists of Gandhāra and northwest India. It may also reveal the variety of versions of the story that circulated in Gandhāra in which by the 3rd century CE, several Buddhist schools were flourishing. The patterned textile that falls from the bed could well reflect the Gandhāran textile making traditions but considering the significance of both the event and the personage, it could have been intended to represent a more high-status fabric. By the start of the common era, Chinese silks could already be found in Indian ports. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st century CE text that records information about voyaging from the Mediterranean to the ports of India over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, makes clear that both native Indian silk and more expensive and finer Chinese silk were available from Indian merchants. Just as the bed might reference surviving cultural artifacts from an earlier age, the textile might indicate the current trade patterns. Furniture probably did not travel over the terrestrial or maritime Silk Roads, being far too cumbersome an item. The components needed for high-status furniture, exotic woods, added elements like bronze feet and ivory inlays, and fine textiles used for coverings did make the trip. By the time that this relief was carved, the Kushan Empire’s trade networks extended deep into India, to the eastern Mediterranean of the Roman Empire via terrestrial and maritime routes, and to the borders of China. Trading caravans headed west probably via Arachosia in Afghanistan and into the old heartland of the Seleucid and Achaemenid Persian Empires at Babylon, Seleucia on the Tigris, and Ctesiphon, all in southern Mesopotamia and now under the control of the Parthian or Sasanian Empires, from which goods were probably moved upriver on caravans following the Euphrates and then crossed into the frontier region of Palmyra or to the Roman center at Zeugma. Goods could come the other way as well. Other routes went north into Bactria and Sogdiana where they may have interfaced with the nomad regions of the steppes. Another road headed northeast to meet with the route along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin along the Täklimakan Desert. Here in the desert oasis communities, Indian and possibly Sogdian merchants encountered Chinese merchants and troops as well as older residents of these lands. Buddhist missionaries accompanied the trading caravans and established the faith in Bactria (northeastern Afghanistan), Sogdiana, and the Tarim Basin, from where it spread into China proper. The style of Gandhāran art was to be found in the oasis settlements of the southern Tarim Basin and in the trade routes that moved northwest to Bactria and Sogdiana through eastern Afghanistan.

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Artifacts • Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana FURTHER INFORMATION Andrianou, D. “Chairs, Bed, and Tables: Evidence for Furnished Interiors in Hellenistic Greece.” Hesperia 75, no. 2 (2006): 219–266. Marshall, J. Taxila: An Illustrated Account of the Archaeological Excavations Carried Out at Taxila under the Orders of the Government of India between the Years 1913 and 1934. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Proser, A. Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara. New York: Asia Society, 2011. Salomon, R. “How Gandharan Manuscripts Change Buddhist History.” Lion’s Roar, Buddhist Wisdom for Our Times. January 20, 2020. https:// www.lionsroar.com/how-the-gandharan-manuscripts-change-buddhisthistory/ Simpson, E. The Furniture from Tumulus MM: The Gordion Wood Objects, vol. 1. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. Srinivasan, D. M. “Local Crafts in Early Gandharan Art.” In Gandhāran Buddhism, Archaeology, Art, Texts, P. Brancaccio and K. Behrendt, eds., 243–269. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1971 (1971.143))

12 Bronze Throne Leg with Griffin Western Iran Sasanian, 7th–8th century CE

INTRODUCTION The raised furniture-based lifestyle was probably introduced in Iran, Central Asia, and the northern part of India by the Macedonians and Greeks who established themselves in the lands conquered by Alexander. These regions had traditionally followed a floor-based living style in which floor coverings and lower furniture played the key roles. In such a setting, status was recognized by the height at which one was allowed to sit vis-à-vis the others in a room, with the lowest in status required to stand. Carpets and cushions with low tables and stools formed the furnishing in such a setting. Already by the time of the Achaemenid kings, carpets had emerged as an important feature in this style of living, and royal workshops were probably producing high-quality carpets for imperial settings, which may be reflected in the surviving example of a carpet from the period from an elite nomad tomb at Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27). Whether carpets continued to be important products during the centuries of Greek domination is not known, but considering that the Pazyryk carpet already shows a high degree of carpet-making skill, it seems reasonable to assume that the tradition was well enough established that it survived the arrival of the furniture-based culture of the Macedonians and Greeks. Carpets were probably an important item of trade in the Parthian and Sasanian periods. According to the Iranian historian Al-Tabari who recorded the fall of the Sassanian Empire two centuries after the event, the Sasanian king Khosrow Parvi II commissioned a massive carpet with a garden motif, woven from silk, with threads of gold and silver and incorporating gemstones, for the palace at Ctesiphon, which was too large to be carried as the court abandoned the city. 115

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Artifacts • Bronze Throne Leg with Griffin The throne to which this bronze leg attached was most likely a platform structure, such as can be seen in reliefs shown on some of the Sasanian silver plates and in later Persian miniatures. The important personage while seated was raised above the others in attendance but not placed overlooking everyone else. DESCRIPTION This is one of what have been a pair of cast-bronze legs. It was hollow cast around a clay core. The leg itself is in the form of a griffin, a mythical animal that combines the head and wings of an eagle with the legs and paws of a lion. The leg and its mate must have been attached to a wide platform that would have provided the seat for a throne that would have lacked a back. Such thrones can be seen on several silver plates decorated with repoussé relief designs that show enthroned Sasanian monarchs. These plates were probably made to serve as diplomatic gifts, since they have been most commonly found in the archaeological contexts of elite nomad tombs, kurgans, on the northern steppes (see Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting, artifact 33). In the representations, the legs of the platforms are clearly delineated, suggesting that they carried importance in themselves. Though by the time that this leg was made, bronze was no longer a prestige material, but its use for the leg did indicate the significance of the piece of furniture to which it was attached. Bronze casting was still a difficult technique, and the material gave increased status to furnishings, since it marked the piece as distinctly different from the more commonly used wood. The sculpted nature of the leg would have attracted attention to it, and when placed as a pair, the two would have forced the viewer to assume that the object so decorated carried symbolic meaning. The griffin was a well-known western motif, having entered the repertoire of Greek forms by the 8th century BCE and perhaps earlier in the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. The griffin on this leg could be evidence of residual Greek cultural survival in the Sasanian period. It could also show the strong Iranian influence. The griffin had been a motif in Iranian art from as early as the 3rd millennium BCE and was a well-developed feature of Levantine and Anatolian art in the mid-2nd century BCE from which it could well have spread to the Aegean. Herodotus (3.114) placed the griffins quite far north, possibly onto the steppes. Using as his source the lost work by Aristeas, he reported that the griffins dwelt beyond the one-eyed Arimaspi and guarded gold, a story referenced by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound (826–829). Pliny (7.2), following Herodotus, told that griffins fought with the Arimaspi to protect the gold. Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana (3.48) reported that the griffins lived in India and were sacred to the sun. The ancient literary sources make clear that griffins were thought to be a distant creature associated with gold.

Artifacts • Bronze Throne Leg with Griffin At the time that this leg was produced, the griffin had probably assumed a more specific royal affiliation through its composite parts. The lion had long been associated with kingship in several of the ancient cultures in the area. The eagle was both a regal symbol and a solar element. By combining the griffin’s own associations with protection of wealth with the lion’s regal connections and the eagle’s solar elements, the griffin throne leg probably carried the meanings of royal ascension and apotheosis. The individual seated on such a platform was seen to be in a superhuman position, capable of protecting and defending the realm. SIGNIFICANCE Thrones of a chair form were known to the Achaemenid rulers, some of whom are shown seated in such thrones in the relief carvings from Persepolis. In these images, the other figures all are shown standing. These thrones appear as props for a theatrical-like display of imperial majesty, which suited the particular purpose of Persepolis. The same may apply to the felted image of an enthroned goddess receiving a mounted warrior found among the Pazyryk, kurgan 5 materials, which might indicate that the nomadic elites also knew the visual power of a chair-like throne in a society that largely lived close to the ground. The surviving images of the later Sasanian kings portray the monarchs on platform thrones. The platform thrones provided for the monarch to be separated from those in attendance while also in a position to interact. The use of sculpted legs like this griffin example would have provided the iconographic rhetoric needed to indicate the occupant’s semidivine status even if he was only raised a bit higher than others around him. The platform throne also placed the seated individual within the realm of the carpet. The famous lost throne, Takt-e Tāqdis, commissioned by Khosrow II and described in Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings (Shahnameh) and by al-Tha’alibi was somehow enmeshed in four separate, jeweled carpets that were changed daily. Pile rugs, which were already being produced in the late Achaemenid period as evidenced from the Pazyryk carpet, offered both visual delight and sensory experience to those who sat or reclined on or just above them and, based on al-Tabari’s story of the “Spring of Khosrow” carpet were important elements in court life. This lifestyle could be found not only throughout the Sasanian territories but also in the neighboring Sogdian lands where the wall paintings from Pendjikent show figures seated on carpets. FURTHER INFORMATION Abouali, L., Jianlin Ni, and J. Kaner. “A Study of the Interior Furniture and Decorative Motifs of Achaemenid and Sassanid.” American Journal of Art and Design 4, no. 4 (2019): 48–57. Canepa, M. P. The Two Eyes of the Earth, Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

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Artifacts • Bronze Throne Leg with Griffin Dalley, S. “Ancient Assyrian Textiles and the Origins of Carpet Design.” Iran 29 (1991): 117–135. Ettinghausen, R. “Islamic Art.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 33, no. 1 (1975). Grabar, O. Sasanian Silver: Late Antique and Early Medieval Arts of Luxury from Iran. Ann Arbor: 1967. Spuhler, F. Pre-Islamic Carpets and Textiles from Eastern Lands. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014.

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(Sergei Ivanovich Borisov’s Color Photo Cards of the Altai Mountains, Library of Congress (2018683807))

13 Early-20th-Century Yurt Russian Central Asia Early 20th century

INTRODUCTION The yurt or ger is the domed, round, felt-covered portable structure that serves as a house for Central Asian nomads from Kazakhstan to Mongolia and is probably the most iconic image associated with the Central Asian steppe nomads. “Yurt” is the Turkic word also used by the Russians, and ger is the Mongolian word for the structure, and both words mean “home.” The image shown here is an early-20th-century photograph of a nomad family individual in front of three yurts. By the 20th century, the yurt had developed into the quintessential portable dwelling for the peoples of the steppe, and several versions exist that respond to differing climatic and societal uses among the different nomad groups. It is not clear from the archaeological record when the yurt was invented. Herodotus (4.46, 114, 124) records that Scythians were already living in carts perhaps draped with felt as protection against the elements. Among the burials of the Yamnaya culture of the Early Bronze Age (3100–2200 BCE) on the Kuban steppes of the north Caucasus, the remains of carts have been found. These must have been used in the funerary processions and then disassembled at the site to be deposited with the bodies. There is some evidence for a reed mat covered by felt having been used as a sun protection over the interior of the cart where the passengers would sit. This could be what Herodotus is referencing rather than the earliest formation of the yurt, but they could have been the prototype for the later yurt. The introduction of the cart into the steppes allowed the Yamnaya people to adopt a true nomadic lifestyle. They were able to harness the domesticated horse to the cart, move out onto the grasslands, and develop a mobile lifestyle, 121

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Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt directing their larger herds around the steppes and following them in carts with their few household objects, some of which appear in burials. Finds of felt attached to the walls of the burial chambers in several kurgans from the Sakā period at Pazyryk and later in the Xiongnu kurgan-chambers at Noin Ula might be an attempt to imitate the felt walls of a cart but for eternity. At the Boyar ridge on the north bank of the Sukhaya Tes River in the Yenisey Basin of Siberia are two groups of pictographs carved into the rock walls. The group known as the Lesser Pictographs is considered to be the older, dated to at least the 1st century BCE, and possibly earlier. The pictographs appear to form a scene that has been interpreted to represent a human figure, reindeer, and dogs, set in a village with log structures and domed forms, possibly yurts. The image is not undeniably that of yurts, but the presence of what do seem to be log structures and the findings of permanent villages in the region of Xiongnu in Mongolia, which date to the same period, do indicate that the nomadic Central Asians were building permanent structures and so may have been distinguishing between permanent and temporary in the image. This notion seems to be further supported by the high quality of carpentry seen in the construction of the grave chambers in kurgans. If the Lesser Pictograph scene from Boyar ridge does represent a 1st century BCE village, and if the elements identified as yurts truly are yurts, then it is possible that the dome-shaped, felted, portable house had become a fixture of nomadic life by the 1st century BCE. Moreover, the practice of mixing yurts among permanent structures, quite commonly seen today in villages and even cities in Mongolia, was established quite early. However, the one scene remains unique for the moment, and the elements identified as yurts are not without question. At present, it is generally accepted that the yurt was an invention of the Old Turkic period (6th–8th centuries CE). DESCRIPTION The word “yurt” comes from the Russian yurta and is used to describe the demountable nomadic dwelling, which Mongolians call a ger. The word probably entered Russian from Tartar, a Turkic language, in which the word actually referred to camp, place, country, or region, though in Tartar it seems to have a more limited use for a house or estate. Whatever the origin of the word, the yurt must be considered one of the most elegant architectural solutions ever invented. It serves perfectly the needs of a mobile lifestyle. It is easy to assemble and to disassemble, can be packed on a cart or carried by two to three camels or three to four horses to be transported, and, when reassembled, provides excellent protection against the summer heat and the winter cold. When the parts are properly reconstructed and the wings of the frame are lashed together, the structure is solid, and by the nature of being round, when the yurt is staked to the ground, it resists

Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt the steppe winds. Over the centuries the yurt form has been changed by various groups to meet specific needs, and today it is possible to distinguish different nomadic peoples by the style of their yurts, but the basic structure remains common to all. The yurt consists of three parts: the top part or roof ring; the middle part, the rafters; and the bottom part, the walls. The round collapsible frame that forms the walls or the base for the structure is bentwood latticework, usually of willow. The frame is divided into discrete units of equal size, wings, which are lashed together with wool tapes and positioned to form the circle. The size of the yurt will be determined by the number of wings. Nomadic elite can have yurts of 12, 18, or more wings, and for special occasions, two yurts can be joined to share a common entryway. The more common-size yurt is six wings. The poles that are the rafters fit into holes in the lattice frame and into holes on the roof ring. When assembled, the skeleton of the yurt looks like a mountain. The modern yurt is fitted with a wood door, but this is a recent innovation. Traditionally, the door opening was covered by a felt carpet. The covering for the yurt is wool processed as felt (see Wool Working and Carpet Making), which in the photograph is underneath the woven covering. There is possible evidence for felt production already in Neolithic Çatal Hüyük in southern Turkey, though the earliest example of preserved felt is from the Early Bronze Age site of Beycesultan in Anatolia. However, it was in the hands of nomadic herdsmen and their women folk that the full potential of felt was realized, and it may have been in the steppe lands among the first true steppe nomad herders that felting was discovered. The felt pads needed to form the yurt’s walls must be at least 3 cm in thickness and about 2 m or more in length. The felting process takes advantage of a naturally occurring mechanical feature of some sheep wool fibers, which, when agitated while moist, will lock together in a permanent manner to form a non-woven textile because the wetness combined with agitation causes the tiny scales on the shaft of the wool fiber to stick out and grab each other. These felt pads are then tied to the frame and the rafters. The thick felt walls can be complemented by interior hangings of felt and other textiles, which together form an insulating air pocket. This is not the practice today among all the nomadic groups that still employ the yurt, but it is common for Kazakh yurts to be decorated with hanging textiles on the interior that might maintain a more ancient custom. The felt pads covering the rafters are left unattached at the top of the roof ring to allow for an opening that can be covered by adjusting the felt pad when necessary. The hearth or the modern stove is placed beneath the opening. Based on the evidence of modern nomadic felting techniques used by Kyrgyz and Kazakh felters to manufacture the large felt pads, it is possible to suggest how the ancient felters would have processed the wool. The

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Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt carded wool of lesser quality was pulled apart and was laid out on a reed mat, until the desired thickness was reached. Water was poured over the wool, and hand agitation helped the wool to absorb the water. Today mild soap is used to assist the process. This shocks the wool, causing the fibers to begin to respond and cling to each other. Today, when making the walls for a yurt, the Kyrgyz felt makers lay out a layer of white wool, then a layer of dark wool, and then another layer of white wool. When the mat is wet, the felt maker can easily see uneven places in the white layers that need to receive more wool. White fleeces are still limited today among the sheep herded by nomads, and the situation would have been even more the case in antiquity since white fleece is rare in primitive breeds. In contemporary Kyrgyz society, white wool has iconographic associations, and so using the dark layer in between the two white layers allows for the limited supply to go further. Whether such was the case in ancient contexts is not known, but if so, then there would have been two reasons to have followed the same practice of using a dark layer of wool between two layers of light or white wool. The wet mat is then rolled up into a bolt, and the bolt rolled back and forth across the floor to knead the wool fibers and encourage them to join more tightly together. The bolt can also be pulled behind a horse along the rough steppe ground to encourage the felting process. The final product in both cases is a tough textile, water resistant. The felting process captures tiny air pockets between the matted fibers making the finished textile an excellent insulator. The modern Kazakhs attach meanings to the yurt and its parts giving the entire structure an iconographic value. It symbolizes the entire family’s estate. The red color that dominates the decorations on the yurt’s exterior and the interior textiles represents fertility. The mountain shape of the structure is not ignored. The roof ring is the summit pointing towards heaven, and the person living under the ring is thereby favored by heaven. The rafters of the yurt have been seen by some to represent the domed sky. Humans occupy the place beneath the sky, the middle level, and it is here that the life cycle plays out. The level below the yurt is connected, through the hearth, to the kingdom of the dead. The process of erecting the yurt is symbolically charged. The wings are set in place, one at a time, proceeding in a clockwise manner. The yurt is gendered. In contemporary Kazakh culture, the bride’s family must prepare the yurt for the newlyweds, while the groom must bring the doorframe and half the felt pads for the walls and the roof. The men hoist the roof ring, while the women do the rest of the work. Once the family is established, the chores of assembling and disassembling the yurt fall to the women. Women make the textiles used to construct and decorate the yurt. The pole used to hoist the roof ring is a masculine element, and the right side of the yurt interior is the male side, while the left side is the female

Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt side, and certain activities and rituals are restricted to one side or the other. The center position, opposite the entrance, is the most respected spot in the yurt. It is raised, and here is stored most of the important items within the household. SIGNIFICANCE The yurt, and its probable earlier prototypes, allowed for the nomadic peoples of Central Asia to comfortably colonize much of the steppe lands. The process that formed the yurt clearly began long before the yurt assumed the form by which we know it today, but the continuing evolution and improving of the structure testify to just how important it was and remains. Clearly the steppe nomads did know how to build permanent structures in wood as has been shown by recent archaeological discoveries of settlements in the nomad regions, but the yurt remained the dwelling type of most importance. A ceremonial yurt, requiring some two years to make, was sent as a gift for the coronation of Nicholas I as Czar by the Kazakh sultan Jangir Bukeev. It is interesting that the image of the yurt appears on a relief carving that decorated the funerary couch of a Sogdian merchant resident in China, now in the collection of the Miho Museum in Japan. The Sogdians had established a presence in China during the first centuries of the Common Era. From their homeland in Central Asia, they had established settlements along the trade route that ran along the northern rim of the Täklimakan Desert, at Gaochang, Toyok, and Hami and along the southern route at Khotan. In China proper, they had communities in Dunhuang and in the capitals of Luoyang and Chang-an. Although they were restricted by law in China, they nonetheless achieved some status in Chinese society, even moving into Chinese court circles as is evidenced by An Lushan, a Sogdian general in service to the Tang emperor who led a rebellion against him. Within their own communities, they lived by their own laws and were controlled by a local headman, a Sabao, who had Chinese official rank. They were merchants, shopkeepers, and artists. Their presence in Tang China is recorded by Tang period writers, and a group of letters written by Sogdian merchants in China and intended for delivery in Sogdiana has survived. They continued to practice a version of Zoroastrianism that required the exposure of the bodies of the dead rather than burial or cremation. The relief panel from which the image of the yurt comes was part of a large stone funerary couch on which the body of the deceased could have been laid to avoid the contamination of the earth. This would have been a compromise between Chinese funerary conventions and the requirements of Zoroastrian practice, which demand that the body be exposed to be defleshed by animals and birds. Several of these couches have been unearthed in graves of elite Sogdians in China.

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Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt The image on the Miho couch relief must represent an ideal landscape, an artistic creation of a hunting scene as requested and perhaps described by the patron, probably the soon-to be-deceased. It was very likely a mental image not based on reality in so far as the deceased may have never been to the Sogdian heartland much less onto the nomadic steppes that seem to be represented or at least had spent only a short period there. His life was lived with the émigré Sogdian merchant community in China. However, the inclusion of the yurt is interesting. It does suggest that there was cultural exchange of more than just products between the sedentary Sogdians of Central Asia and the nomadic peoples to their north. This may not be so surprising since Sogdiana was under Turkish domination by the mid-6th century, and local Sogdian kings were vassals, at least until the Tang Chinese destruction of the Western Turkic Empire in the next century. It also seems that Sogdians had established a merchant colony in the nomadic heartland of the Semirech’ye region. The Sogdian elite quite clearly saw the yurt as a viable hunting pavilion, something that would work for them, and that is what we see. The panel seems to show two simultaneous events: in the upper scene, long-haired Turkic servants attend an individual seated inside the yurt proper, and in the lower scene, hunters are riding down game. The setting must be the Kazakh steppes over which the Turks had taken control from the Hephthalites. Hunt scenes were common motifs for the decoration of walls of the houses of the well-to-do in the Sogdian city of Pendjikent and perhaps are best understood as images of the pleasures that the elite could enjoy, which might well explain the presence of the scene on the couch and the inclusion of the yurt within it. For the Sogdians resident in China, the yurt had come to suggest the nomad life of the steppes. FURTHER INFORMATION Alimbiai, N. “Society and Culture of the Nomads of Central Asia through Time.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 152–163. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Anthony, D. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Basilov, V., V. D’yakonova, V. D’yachenko, and V. Kurylë. “Yurts, Rugs, and Felts.” In Nomads of Eurasia, V. Basilov, ed., 97–110. Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, 1989. Burkett, M. E. The Art of the Felt Maker. Kendal, England: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 1979. Burkett, M. E. “An Early Date for the Origin of Felt.” Anatolian Studies 27 (1977): 111–115.

Artifacts • Early-20th-Century Yurt Ishjamats, N. “Nomads in Eastern Central Asia.” In History of Civilizations of Central Asia. Vol. 2: The Developments of Sedentary and Nomadic Civilizations 700 B.C. to A.D. 250, J. Harmatta, B. N. Puri, and G. F. Etemadi, eds., 151–169. Paris: UNESCO, 1994. Lerner, J. “The Merchant Empire of the Sogdians.” In Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia, 4th–7th Century, A. Juliano and J. Lerner, eds., 220–229. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002. Luo Feng. “Sogdians in Northwest China.” In Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia, 4th–7th Century, A. Juliano and J. Learner, eds., 238–269. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002. Marshak, B. “The Sogdians in Their Homeland.” In Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia, 4th–7th Century, A. Juliano and J. Learner, eds., 230–237. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002. Martynov, A. The Ancient Art of Northern Asia. Translated and edited by Demitri and Edith Shimkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Robinson, D., and C. Ekarius. The Fleece  & Fiber Sourcebook. North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, LLC, 2011. Tokabai, Akhmet. “The Yurt: Symbol of the Kazakh Worldview.” In Of Gold and Grass, Nomads of Kazakhstan, C. Chang and K. Guroff, eds., 75–84. Bethesda: The Foundation for International Arts  & Education, 2006.

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(Artokoloro/Alamy Stock Photo)

14 Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot Ordos Region possibly 2nd–1st century CE possibly

INTRODUCTION The bronze cauldron pictured here has no provenance. There is no certainty about its findspot or date. Based on its stylistic features, it is most likely from Ordos Desert steppe of modern China, which in the late 1st millennium BCE and early 1st millennium CE had a nomadic population. If this is a correct identification, then the cauldron probably comes from a looted tomb. It resembles other cauldrons from good archaeological contexts from Mongolia and from the Ordos region, which belong to a period when the area was under strong Xiongnu presence. The Xiongnu controlled much of modern Mongolia and at times the Ordos Desert from the early 2nd century BCE until the middle of the 2nd century CE. Though the Xiongnu left no written records, the Chinese court historians of the Han Dynasty did write about them since they could pose a serious threat to China’s northern border, and much Chinese diplomatic work went into keeping the border secure. The Xiongnu appear to have operated as single unit, and according to the history that can be reconstructed from the Chinese accounts, there was a clear founder, Modun, who became the supreme ruler (Chanyu) and whose successors can be identified and listed in a chronology. The burial practices, so far as can be determined from the archaeological finds, indicate a hierarchically stratified society in which the elites were buried in a distinct tomb type and with abundant and rich gifts. The Xiongnu probably first took shape as a confederation of related nomadic tribes. The most recent DNA analyses of excavated skeletal remains indicate that they were of Asian origin and share the same gene pool as contemporary Mongols, though finds of some skull types with a 129

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Artifacts • Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot more European morphology suggest that there was some racial diversity in the Xiongnu population. The mix in the population may well have been the result of the conquest and assimilation of the nomadic groups that shared Mongolia with Xiongnu. Modun and his son succeeded in creating an amalgamation of several different tribal entities and in forcing the largest group, the Yuezhi, to abandon the land and move to the southwest where they would later reemerge as the Kushan Empire. The new Xiongnu territory extended from the Great Wall of China in the south to the southern area of Lake Baikal in the north and from east of modern Almaty in Kazakhstan to the headwaters of the Lena and Vitim Rivers in eastern Mongolia. This was a large area incorporating older nomadic regions like the Altai and Tian Shan Mountains. Within the territory, there emerged a state apparatus with a hierarchy of positions for governance and a concomitant reduction in the role of tribal structure, which was replaced by a concept of the state. It was in such a social setting that the tomb in which the cauldron was likely placed was constructed and the burial ritual performed. The Ordos region, a vast desert plateau with areas of rich grassland, among the best pasturage in the Asian steppes, located in the great loop formed by the bend of the Yellow River, had attracted nomads during the 1st millennium BCE, probably including some of Europoid origin. During the centuries between the 6th and the 2nd centuries BCE, a kind of cultural homogeneity took shape that is termed the Ordos culture, identified from the material finds including high-quality bronze pieces often associated with chariots and later gold and silver work. The bronzes were cast with piece molds, a technique associated with Chinese bronze casting, and it is possible that these bronzes were actually made for the Ordos nomads by Chinese artisans. The richness of the area attracted the emerging Xiongnu who took control of the region by the mid-2nd century BCE and established a southern Xiongnu presence. This was a middle zone in which the nomad culture of the Xiongnu was in regular contact with the sedentary culture of northern China. At various times, the Han Dynasty maintained a loose control over the region. The richer burials reveal a mix of foreign, Chinese objects, along with locally produced, nomad goods, including steppe iron and bronze cauldrons and imported Chinese bronze cauldrons. This object comes from the tradition of steppe bronze cauldrons. Bronze cauldrons are widely dispersed through the steppes, though they are not commonly found in the forest steppe of the west or in the Kazakhstan steppe. They are found further east in Mongolia and feature prominently in the funerary finds from elite Xiongnu tombs of the 1st century BCE–1st century CE. For the nomadic steppe peoples, the cauldron was an important piece of ritual and practical furniture, used for the preparation of boiled meats from the animals ritually slaughtered and for the making and serving of

Artifacts • Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot certain beverages. Smaller cauldrons could serve for the normal preparation of cooked food, but even within the family domain, cauldrons were gathering places for the family group and as such were venerated objects. The large size of some cauldrons testifies to their importance in cultures that favored easily portable items. Big, heavy bronze and iron cauldrons were high-status goods requiring skilled metal workers for their manufacture and were therefore appropriate objects for burial in aristocratic nomad kurgans and barrows. They also recalled the communal aspects of nomadic life. This cauldron probably served for the preparation and serving of the funerary meal shared by the members of the community who had also worked to dig and build the tomb for the high-ranking deceased individual. DESCRIPTION This is an ovoid-shaped cauldron with a stand. It was probably cast in two parts, the bronze cauldron body itself and the stand, and then soldered together to form a single unit. The body has a wide open mouth, which tapers into a more constricted bottom, which sits in the stand. Cauldrons come either with a flat bottom and no stand or with an attached stand. The former type was probably designed for use while on the move. The latter type seems to have been intended for more ceremonial purposes. Examples of both types are found in elite Xiongnu burials. This bronze cauldron was probably part of a group of bronze objects in the tomb that might have included platters and spouted pots. SIGNIFICANCE Great funerary ceremonies do seem to have been an important feature of Iron Age nomadic life. Burials often took place in the summer season when it would have been easier for large numbers of people to come together to both participate in the funerary rituals and construct the tomb itself. The description that Herodotus (4.71–76) provides of preparation of the body of a deceased Scythian ruler seems to have been confirmed by the findings of bodies in the Pazyryk kurgans in the Altai Mountains. These funerary activities must have served to restate the social hierarchy, but at the same time being collective actions, they would have helped to reinforce the social bonds between people. The tomb, placed as it was among other elite tombs and existing in its own special space in the landscape, helped to keep alive the memories of those buried there and of their contributions to the group. The Xiongnu elite tombs follow a form somewhat different from that of the nomadic peoples further west. They consist of two parts: the tomb pit along with its fill and the burial chamber itself. The pit was dug as an upside-down pyramid and could reach to a depth of over 18 m. At the bottom of the pit was constructed the burial chamber of logs into which was placed the coffin also of wood. Once the pit was filled, a stone platform was constructed,

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Artifacts • Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot which was approached from the south side by an entrance road, or dromos, thus effectively giving the tomb a north-south orientation. Some of these aboveground stone structures were covered over with mounded earth, up to more than 3 m high, effectively forming a kurgan. Some of the stone platforms show evidence of having been built on top to form chambers that may have been used for making sacrifices. The objects to be interred with the deceased were placed in spaces between the coffin and the burial chamber walls and in the fill that sealed the pit. On the north side of the wooden chamber, the direction in which the deceased’s head was positioned, would go ceramic and lacquer items. On the east and west sides would be placed the cauldrons along with other cooking vessels as well as jade items, weapons, and horse tack—bits and bridles. Animal bones and other items, including a chariot in one instance, were placed in the fill. Clearly the bronze cauldrons were important enough to be included among funerary gifts. They are found not only here in Xiongnu settings but throughout the nomadic steppes, and bronze cauldrons have been found in burials from the late Maikop period at the end of the 4th millennium in the north Caucasus steppes. In Xiongnu burials, the cauldrons, such as the one shown here, are often intact, but not always. The ritual destruction of certain funerary items, like platters, pots, and mirrors, is assumed to have been done to release the spirit of the object and must have been important for items used in a ritual manner and perhaps regarded as somehow charged by the process. Many of the cauldrons seem not to have functioned in this way. Some of the Xiongnu examples contained animal bones, which might well suggest that their purpose was for the preparation for the final funerary feast. Herodotus mentions the importance of cauldrons for the preparation of ceremonial meals among the Scythians (4.61) and notes that a funerary meal was a practice among the Scythians, at least for burial of ordinary folk (4.73). A gigantic cauldron stood at the Scythian religious center at Exampaeus that had been made on the orders of King Ariantas who required that each Scythian provide a bronze arrowhead to be melted down for its manufacture (4.81). Part of the social importance of a large cauldron had to be its role in providing communal eating. People gathered around a large cauldron, and it was a means of reinvigorating social ties. The cauldron also forces a reconsideration of the standard view of nomadic life as one without sedentary aspects. In the past few decades of archaeological work, it has become quite clear that not all members of nomadic groups were constantly moving. Permanent and semipermanent settlements have been excavated across the steppes reaching back in time to the Bronze Age. The Xiongnu sites include both fortresses and at least two towns (Ivolga in Buryatia and Boroo in Tuv) in which the inhabitants lived in houses and were engaged in agricultural activities and ceramic production. That some of these

Artifacts • Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot towns were also centers for metallurgy seems quite likely. Clear evidence for mining of copper ores goes back to the Bronze Age in Kazakhstan and must have continued to be a significant activity throughout the steppe region into the Iron Age. Herodotus states that the cauldrons were made in country (4.61). The manufacture of metal goods and pottery on an industrial scale suggests a class of artisans engaged in the enterprise. The actual metalsmiths would have been trained and formed a specialized population who were perhaps supported for their work. The miners, it has been suggested, were more likely poorer members of the nomadic society who could be hired seasonally to work the mines. In an increasingly stratified society, as seems to emerge in the Iron Age world, where wealth was a marker of status, there would have been those less successful who needed to be supported or exploited. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, David. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Aruz, Joan, Ann Farkas, Andrei Alekseev, and Elena Korolkova, eds. The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. Brosseder, U. “Xiongnu Terrace Tombs and Their Interpretation as Elite Burials.” In Current Archaeological Research in Mongolia: Papers from the First International Conference on “Archaeological Research in Mongolia” Held in Ulaanbaatar, August 19th–23rd, 2007, J. Bremmann, H. Parzinger, E. Pohl, and D. Tseveendorzh, eds., 247–280. Bonn Contributions to Asian Archaeology, vol. 4. Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2009. Bunker, E. Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes: The Eugene V. Thaw and Other Notable New York Collections. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002. Eregzen, G. Treasures of the Xiongnu. Ulaanbaatar: Institute of Archaeology Mongolia Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Mongolia, 2011. Frachetti, Michael. Pastoral Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Kwanten, Luc. Imperial Nomads: A  History of Central Asia, 500–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. Miller, B. “The Southern Xiongnu in Northern China: Navigating and Negotiating the Middle Ground.” In Complexity of Interaction along the Eurasian Steppe Zone in the First Millennium CE, J. Bremmann and M. Schmauder, eds., 127–198. Bonn Contributions to Asian Archaeology, vol 6. Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2015.

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Artifacts • Bronze Cauldron on a High Rounded Foot Psarras, S.-K. “Xiongnu Culture: Identification and Dating.” Central Asiatic Journal 39, no. 1 (1995): 102–136. Romashko, V., and S. Skorÿï. “Aristocratic Burial-Mound Bliznets-2 on West Bank of Dnieper above the Rapids.” Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 17, no. 2 (2011): 169–224. Rubinson, Karen. “Burial Practices and Social Roles of Iron Age Mobile Pastoralists.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, Sören Stark, Karen Rubinson, Zainolla Samahev, and Jennifer Chiu, eds., 76–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Samashev. Zainolla. “The Berel Kurgans: Some Results of Investigation.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, Sören Stark, Karen Rubinson, Zainolla Samahev, and Jennifer Chiu, eds., 50–61. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Topal, D. “Going to Pot: Bronze Cauldrons on the Western Fringe of Scythian Culture.” Peuce 18 (2020): 111–136.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund (1980.15))

15 Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket Gandhāra, probably Butkara in the Swat Valley, Pakistan 1st–4th century CE

INTRODUCTION Music along with instruments and dance moved along the Silk Roads. Solo musicians appear to have emerged as a feature of nomad life, perhaps associated with the development of nomad epics in which the storyteller could use an instrument for accompaniment. Though these epics have only survived in the post-Islamic phase of nomad culture, they may have already gained importance in the pre-Islamic phase, considering the importance of the national epics to the Turkic peoples. Whether epic and even music played any roles among the earlier Iranian nomads of the steppes cannot be determined from the ancient literary testimonia and the archaeological finds. However, music was an important aspect of the cultural life in Sasanian Persia, Sogdian Central Asia, and Tang China. In all cases, sedentary cultures encouraged the growth of ensemble playing. Both Christian and Buddhist religious traditions incorporated music. The two musicians shown here probably decorated a hall within one of the many Buddhist monasteries in the Swat Valley of the Gandhāran region, where Buddhism first successfully spread out of India beginning in the Kushan period, and Buddhist missionaries brought their musical studies with them into Central Asia, the Tarim Basin, and China proper. As Christian missionaries of the Church of the East carried their message into Central Asia and China, they too introduced musical forms that had first emerged in the eastern Mediterranean and Syria. The Manichean preachers may have also used music. These two figures are musicians within the emerging Buddhist canon. In his 4th century CE translation of the Amitābha Sūtra, the Sogdian Buddhist 137

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Artifacts • Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket monk Kumārajīva writes of the constant sound of celestial music that is heard in paradise and mentions rows of jeweled trees and jeweled nets, which, when moved by a breeze, emit the sound of hundreds of thousands of musical instruments played simultaneously. The music brings pleasure to the listener and immediate thoughts of the Buddha. As is shown by these figures, music was a standard aspect of Buddhist rituals of all types. Probably these figures were placed high up so that they were understood to be the celestial musicians. DESCRIPTION The two musicians are carved on a piece of schist, the standard sculptural and building material in the Gandhāran region, that rises to form a volute behind the pair’s heads. The figures occupy the front with acanthus foliage behind and on the side. The piece is a fragment from a vault, suggesting that it was placed quite high, probably where a vault began, which might suggest a large lecture hall setting in which these figures would occupy the position of celestial musicians. The most common form of Buddhist architecture in Gandhāra was the monastery composed of several different architectural units including lecture halls, meditation rooms, stūpas, and monks’ cells. The two figures are standing atop a lotus pedestal and are clearly intended to be read as a pair. The left-side bearded male is dressed in a tunic reaching to his ankles covered with a cloak. The young female is similarly garbed, though the tunic is floor length. The carving of the outer garments depicts folds, which suggest heavy cloaks strongly recalling the Greek himation. The male’s head is covered by a cap or hood, and the female figure sports a hairstyle that seems to be a chignon and wears heavy earrings. The artist is most interested in the portrayal of the instruments, the sitarlike form held by the man and the clapper percussion instrument, similar to a modern kartal, still used in some parts of India, in the hands of the woman. These are carefully delineated and would have been much more apparent with the paint, which has not survived. SIGNIFICANCE Music traveled with missionaries and merchants, allowing for the various traditions to mix. These figures are probably best understood to represent the heavenly musicians who play for the Buddha. In Central Asia and China, these musicians would take painted form and decorate the upper borders of a room. In Tang Dynasty China, the paintings of the Pure Land or Western Paradise of the Amitabha Buddha feature orchestras placed in palace-like structures surrounding the Buddha and his attendants. Music was clearly understood to be a fundamental feature of the paradise. The Pure Land images in several of the Tang period caves at Mogao reproduce a kind of court architecture. These are palaces with different

Artifacts • Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket pavilions situated in garden settings with large terraces. It is also known that Central Asian musical forms influenced Tang court music. Central Asian musicians entertained in the Chinese capital. It was during this first period of the Tang Dynasty that Buddhism reached its most influential stage in China, and Buddhism was practiced within the imperial court. The image of the Western Paradise with its palace-like structures and orchestra and dancers may well offer an idea of the imperial court in Chang-an. Just as is the case with these sculpted musicians from a Gandharan monastery, the musicians in the Pure Land Paradises are shown playing a variety of instruments, several of which are clearly depicted. There is something that looks like a pipa, a Chinese four-stringed, short-necked, pear-shaped lute usually played in an upright vertical position. Other musicians play pan-pipes, flutes, harps, and narrow-waist drums. Not all these instruments were of western origin, but several were. These Gandhāran musicians could be playing music of Indian inspiration or of surviving Western—Greek—origin. The fact that the dress for each suggests a Greek survival might indicate that the music also contained some Hellenistic elements, but the instruments are best understood to be Indian. It is certainly possible that the early Buddhist religious music borrowed from Indian and perhaps Indo-Greek and Indo-Parthian court forms. Music was an important feature of court life in Sasanian Persia. The Sasanian Middle-Persian text, King Khosrow and the Page (Xusrō ud Rēdag), presents a picture of the good life and identifies a number of musicians who would be seen in the court setting: the harp player (čang-srāy), the longnecked lute player (win-kannār-srāy), the Pan flute player (sūr-pīk-srāy), the lyre or harp player (barbud-srāy), and the hand drum player (dumbalagsrāy). Moreover, Persian aristocrats were expected to be able to play a musical instrument. Some of the Sasanian silver plates that seem to depict scenes from the court show musicians. As the most powerful and influential regional culture, the Sasanian court influenced what happened in the courts of the smaller Central Asian kingdoms with which it had contact. Small terracotta, mold-made statuettes of musicians playing different types of flutes and lutes, the harp, the drum, and cymbals have been unearthed at Sogdian sites. There is a small, terracotta figure of a monkey playing a lute excavated from the ruins of the oasis town of Khotan, which may point to a rich musical heritage in the area as early as the 2nd century CE, perhaps reflecting the influence from Gandhāra, which was strong in Khotan. In the more recent past, following the Islamization of the sedentary regions of Central Asia, small vocal and instrumental ensembles became standard features of urban life. These ensembles regularly performed at social events that commemorate important life-cycle events, such as weddings, births, and circumcisions. This may well have been the case during the pre-Islamic centuries of life in Central Asia. The term bagshy/bakhshi/

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Artifacts • Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket baqsy, which refers to a Turkmen bard or a Kazakh shaman, both of whom sing and perform instrumental music on a dutar, a two-string lute, may have its origins in the Chinese word bόshì—a Buddhist religious teacher, or the Sanskrit bhikshu—teacher, probably in the Buddhist sense. If either of these is correct, then it suggests an early association of Buddhism in Central Asia with music making, which could have moved east with the spread of the religion. The Tang court music was much indebted to Central Asia from where several instruments and musical forms derived. Western forms had begun to enter China during the previous Sui Dynasty, perhaps the result of the resident Sogdian communities. However, the new Tang Dynasty, according to the Grand Astrologer Fu Yi, was expected to establish its own calendar, colors for court dress, code of laws, names for bureaucratic offices, rituals, and associated music, which might explain how the western elements became part of the court setting. The emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756 CE) ordered the reorganization of court music to accommodate instruments and musical forms from Kucha in particular. Musicians from Kucha seem to have introduced new rhythms and sounds, and dancers from the oasis kingdom participated in New Year festivals. The musicians represented in the paintings of the Western Paradise are the same as mentioned in the Sasanian text. Sasanian court music or its imitation was probably to be heard in the courts of the smaller Central Asian kingdoms and from there was incorporated into the music used in Buddhist rituals as they developed in Central Asia. When Kumārajīva’s future father arrived from India at the Central Asian Buddhist kingdom of Kucha, as a wandering Buddhist monk, he was asked by the king of Kucha to stay in the kingdom to become the “Teacher of the Nation.” Already there was a close integration of the ruler and his court with the Buddhist religious communities moving north from Gandhāra. Influences would have passed back and forth, and a similar arrangement had developed by the early Tang period in Chang-an. Several of the instruments themselves are indebted to Central Asian prototypes. The pipa was probably derived from the Persian pear-shaped lute (barbat), which also influenced the development of the Arab oud. The narrow-waisted or hourglass-shaped drum has a long history in China but appears to have been pushed to the fringes by the 1st millennium BCE. The form may well have migrated quite far west during the 2nd millennium BCE, to the Hittite region of Beycesultan in Anatolia where remains have been found in the archeological record, and then slowly moved east again. It was, perhaps, reintroduced into China as an instrument in Buddhist orchestras, as shown here, during the Sui and Tang periods. Though fiddles do not appear in the paintings, they were a Central Asian Turkic and Mongolian

Artifacts • Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket nomad instrument, easy to make and lightweight, which eventually spread far west to become the Arab rebab and later the medieval European rebec and the many varieties of viols. Drums were a feature of Central Asian sedentary music making, and an important component in the masked dances, and the dances and drum type may have developed in Kashgar. These dances were known from the Buddhist center at Kucha on the northern Täklimakan Silk Route. The poet Bai Juyi (772–846 CE), in his poem “Western Liang Arts,” described a troop of masked dancers performing a version of the lion dance with two participants, one in the mask of the lion and the other in the mask of a foreign barbarian, a Tartar. Eventually, these masked dances spread to China and over to Japan. Foreign (hujen or non-Han people), probably Western, musicians and dancers were popular in Tang China. Tang sources record that some came as official diplomatic gifts from the kingdoms of Kucha and Samarkand to the court at Chang-an where their music and dance became part of Tang court music. Others, however, came as independent agents as can be seen in the numerous glazed terracotta grave statues, which portray them. Sometimes the musicians are shown on the backs of Bactrian camels—one assumes traveling to China to perform. Such might even have been the case in Japan where Central Asians may have performed in the Buddhist rituals associated with the eye-opening ceremony of Buddha of the Todai-ji in Nara. Sogdian and Sasanian communities resident in China seem to have patronized their own musicians as can be seen in the group of five musicians sculpted from granite that were placed in the tomb of a high-ranking Sogdian merchant in Tianshui during the Sui Dynasty. FURTHER INFORMATION Bijl, A. and B. Boelens, eds. Expedition Silk Road, Journey to the West. Treasures from the Hermitage. Amsterdam: Hermitage Amsterdam, 2014. Canapa, M. P. The Two Eyes of the Earth, Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sassanian Persia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Clark, M. Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2005. Czuma, S. Kushan Sculpture: Images of Early India. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1985. Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Hayashi, R. The Silk Road and the Shoso-in. The Heibonsha Survey of Japanese Art. New York: Tuttle, 1975.

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Artifacts • Two Musicians on an Architectural Bracket Jenyns, S. “Japanese Gigaku Mask from the Tempyô Period (A.D. 710– 794).” British Museum Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1955): 50–53. Jinshi Fan, and Hai, Willow Weilan, eds. Dunhuang: Buddhist Art at the Gateway of the Silk Road. New York: Dunhuang Academy and China Institute Gallery, 2013. Juliano, A. Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2012. Juliano, A., and J. Lerner. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Asia Society, 2002. Lawergren, B. “Waisted Drums in Ancient China and Eurasia.” In Nomads, Traders and Holy Men Along China’s Silk Road, A. Juliano and J. Lerner, eds., 115–120. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. Levin, T., S. Daukeyeva, and E. Köchümkulova, eds. The Music of Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Mallory, J. P., and V. H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Mierse, W. E. The Significance of the Central Asian Objects in the Shōsōin for Understanding the International Art Trade in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. Sino-Platonic Papers 267 (March). Philadelphia: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Whitfield, R., S. Whitfield, and N. Agnew. Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Dillon Gift and Rogers Fund, 1967 (67.10)

16 Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer Iran Sasanian, 6th–7th century CE

INTRODUCTION Dance was an important performance art form among many of the sedentary communities on the Silk Roads. It had developed as a court art in the Indian kingdoms by the middle of the 1st millennium BCE and is mentioned in the Natyashastra, a Sanskrit text of 500 BCE—500 CE attributed to Bharata Muni. It was also an important feature of Iranian life. Dancing images appear on painted vases as early as the 4th millennium BCE. By the time of Sasanians, it was a feature of court life, a required skill of the nobility. As an aspect of elite life, it may have passed to the Sogdians, a related Iranian people who shared many cultural traits with their Sasanian neighbors. Dance had an equally long history in China where a character for dance has been identified on the oracle bones. Central Asian dancing forms began to influence Chinese dance by the Six Dynasties (220–589 CE) and became extremely popular during the early Tang Dynasty (618–690 CE). The two objects presented here, which were made to hold liquid, are decorated with active figures, probably intended to suggest dancing. The role of dance in the Iranian and later Turkic nomad cultures of the steppes is difficult to determine. What have been interpreted by some as ritual dances, maybe performed by shamans, have been seen in the Bronze Age petroglyphs at Tamgaly Gorge in Kazakhstan. Ecstatic dancing is known to be a feature of some shamanistic practices. Contemporary nomads in Mongolia and Kazakhstan have developed dance traditions, but these may be the result of Soviet efforts to create a public performance–based folk culture through the regions of the Central Asian republics; whether these draw on older, even ancient forms has not been determined. It might be 145

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Artifacts • Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer noted that the performance of the nomad epics, like the Manas of the Kyrgyz, can require a fair amount of physical gesturing used to heighten the drama of the scene, which might suggest a kind of dance form, though it is not clear that the epic tradition dates to the ancient and early medieval periods in the steppes.

DESCRIPTION The Sasanian silver ewer is an example of a commonly encountered type from the late Sasanian period. The body is ovoid shaped with an added neck and spout, a flaring conical foot, and an attached handle with an onager head at each end. The vessel has a detachable lid held on by a twisted circlet of wire and is decorated with a female figure holding a bird and a grapevine stalk. Silver female Dancing figures on a ceramic ewer. China, Tang Dynasty, 9th century CE. figures decorate the ovoid (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts, 1986 body, set off by the gilding (1986.113)) that surrounds them. They may be intended to represent the same figure in different movements or different dancers. Each one stands beneath an arch decorated with rosettes and supported by low columns or pilasters. They each hold something: a heartshaped flower, a grapevine, a leafy branch, an ewer from which a panther feline drinks, a bird, a long-stemmed flower, a bucket, and a mirror. Their garments are long-sleeved and tight-fitting with a second garment encircling the body below the thighs. The clothing is rendered as transparent enough to reveal aspects of the body, giving them an erotic aspect. There are several surviving ewers similarly decorated with four female dancing figures sometimes placed within an arcade and sometimes not. In this example, the dancing figures, references to grapes, the inclusion of the

Artifacts • Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer feline, possibly a panther, and the purpose of the vessel to hold wine all suggest that there is an invocation of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. Even though the Sasanians were an Iranian people, they conquered an empire from the Parthians, who had kept alive many Greek elements that had been part of the Greek culture of the Seleucid Empire. Moreover, the Sasanians maintained diplomatic, economic, and military associations with the Greek Byzantine Empire in which older, pre-Christian features still survived. The dancing figures could recall Dionysus’s followers, the maenads, but it has also been suggested that this is the Iranian Zoroastrian goddess Anahita or her priestesses. The consistent presence of four female figures with different attributes has also led some to suggest that the figures are personifications of the seasons, a well-known late antique motif in Mediterranean contexts. They could be referencing specifically Sasanian seasonal festivals, and since this is a wine container with possible Dionysiac elements, there may be a specific festival intended, Nowruz, the New Year celebrated in the spring. Sasanian silver vessels were common diplomatic gifts and appear in the tombs of elite steppe nomads as well as in the funerary goods in elite Chinese tombs. The Tang stoneware vessel with white slip and applied decoration all covered in straw glaze is known as Changsha ware. The white underslip helped the glaze to adhere and increased its brightness. The mold-made applied decorative elements appear to capture the movements of a figure or different figures, and the kinetic representation may well be of the Sogdian whirling dance. The face or faces appear to be non-Chinese and so must represent a foreigner who was recognizable to the Chinese of the Tang period, and one of the most ubiquitous foreigners present was the Sogdian. Sogdian merchants passed through China, but they were also resident within China proper and in the western regions of the Tarim Basin (see Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, artifact 50). Sogdian communities had begun to take shape within the Chinese sphere early in the 1st millennium CE, and by the early Tang, they were an important presence serving in a variety of roles besides as merchants. They appear regularly as subjects of Tang ceramic funerary sculptures, and this vessel might indicate that they were also to be found as the subject matter for objects of more common use. SIGNIFICANCE The dancing figures on the stoneware jug shown with their scarves flying around them may well be shown performing the “Sogdian whirl” (huxuan wu), a dance well known in China. A small gilt bronze statuette of the Tang period captures a Central Asian man, identified by physiognomy and dress, in mid-movement with the hem of his garment fluttering as his leg kicks out. A verse from a poem by the Tang poet Liu Yanshi describes an Iranian dancing boy, and as already noted, female dancers figure prominently on some Sasanian gilt silver ewers.

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Artifacts • Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer Sasanian gilt silver spread throughout the Central Asian region and into China. The female figures on this ewer and other similar depictions on other ewers may have represented a Sasanian notion of female erotic beauty. Their costumes reveal their sexual aspects, though whether the images represent real dress or artistic fancy cannot be determined. In the Sasanian text, the Xusrō ud Rēdak (King Khosrow and the Page) (62–63), the musicians performing at a banquet include a beautiful female harpist from the harem. In the palace built by Shapur I at Bishapur, mosaics depict female musicians and dancers, and later, Khosrow Parviz II is shown accompanied by female harp orchestras on two hunting reliefs from Taq-ī Bustan. Clearly female performers, perhaps both instrumentalists and dancers, were a feature of Sasanian court life. The Changsha workshops were located on the south end of Dongting Lake and, in the 9th century, came to supersede the Yuezhou ceramic workshops on the northeast side of the lake, which had flourished during the early Tang period. The An Lushan rebellion (755–763 CE) caused an exodus of ceramicists from northern centers who fled south increasing the production at Changsha. The discovery of the rich hoard of ceramics from the Belitung shipwreck found in the Java Sea shows that Changsha pottery made up a fair amount of the ceramic production produced for the emerging maritime international trade. The formation of the Abbasid Caliphate had resulted in the movement of the center of the Islamic world from Damascus and the Mediterranean to Baghdad and Mesopotamia/Iran. This shift served to reactivate the old trade routes through southern Mesopotamia and encouraged again the sea routes into the Persian Gulf. The Belitung ship was an Arab dhow engaged in trade along the coasts of southern Iran, western and eastern India, Southeast Asia, and southern and eastern China. However, the network was larger, extending to the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the Red Sea and Egypt, and the east coast of Africa, at least to Zanzibar. The ship was probably on a return voyage from China with a load of high-status foreign goods including pottery, all carefully packed, and spices, when it was wrecked in the Java Sea. The personal objects identified from the wreck indicate that the crew was international. Among the intrinsically valuable objects is an octagonal gold cup decorated with repoussé figures of Central Asian musicians, indicating that even here on the southern maritime routes, the presence of Central Asian influences can be found. FURTHER INFORMATION Bijl, A. and B. Boelens, eds. Expedition Silk Road, Journey to the West. Treasures from the Hermitage. Amsterdam: Hermitage Amsterdam, 2014. Clark, M. Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2005.

Artifacts • Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Harper, P. O. The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian Empire. New York: The Asia Society, 1978. Hayashi, R. The Silk Road and the Shoso-in. The Heibonsha Survey of Japanese Art. New York: Tuttle, 1975. Jenyns, S. “Japanese Gigaku Mask from the Tempyô Period (A.D. 710– 794).” British Museum Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1955): 50–53. Jinshi, Fan, and Hai, Willow Weilan, eds. Dunhuang: Buddhist Art at the Gateway of the Silk Road. New York: Dunhuang Academy and China Institute Gallery, 2013. Juliano, A. Unearthed, Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2012. Juliano, A., and J. Lerner. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Asia Society, 2002. Krahl, R., J. Guy, J. Wilson, and J. Raby, eds. Shipwrecked, Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds. Washington, D.C.; Singapore: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and National Heritage Board and Singapore Tourism Board, 2010. Levin, T. S. Daukeyeva, S. Daukeyeva, and E. Köchümkulova, eds. The Music of Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Whitfield, R., S. Whitfield, and N. Agnew. Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000.

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(Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Arthur M. Sackler (S1987.105))

17 Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exterior Sasanian Persian or Sogdian 7th century CE INTRODUCTION Games, both board games and games of physical prowess, were important features of Central Asian culture. As shown on this bowl, the games formed part of the life of the aristocratic strata of sedentary societies but were also an essential part of the life of the nomad groups. We can probably assume that wagering was a standard feature. Such an activity may be hinted at in the scene of the wrestlers who seem to be part of the entertainment for what appears to be the representation of the ceremonies associated with a marriage contract. Next to the wrestlers is a scene of two individuals playing a board game, very likely backgammon. DESCRIPTION The small, silver, hemispherical bowl is decorated only on the exterior with five repoussé scenes set against the gilt ground. The scenes were raised by hammering, and details were carved into the surface. Each scene is independent of the others and is confined to a space defined by two framing columns holding up an arch. What must be the main scene that defines the context for the others shows a couple seated on a low couch and holding between them a wreath. This is most likely a commemorative bowl celebrating a marriage contract between the figures seated on the couch and depicting the activities that must have accompanied the important event, two of which refer to competitive games—a pair of wrestlers with a possibly defeated contestant placed below them and two figures engaged in playing a board game. The two scenes of contest are placed opposite the seated couple and so balance the larger composition of the exterior. The figures are dressed in costumes 151

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Artifacts • Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exterior that resemble those of the courtiers shown in the Sasanian royal reliefs at Taq-ī Bustan, which helps to identify the setting as that of a gathering of Sasanian nobles. Two of the nobles play the board game. The wrestlers may be present as entertainment and as the focus for gambling. SIGNIFICANCE Athletic competitions, as rendered in the scene of wrestlers, must have been a feature of Greek life in Bactrian cities like Aï Khanum where a gymnasium has been excavated. The Greek arrival must have raised the profile of certain types of sporting activities that had come to be an essential feature of urban, male Greek life during the previous four centuries: wrestling, boxing, and running. The Greek concept of the ideal male body as something to display in athletic competitions probably spread throughout the Central Asian territory under Greek cultural domination. However, wrestling was also a feature of the already-existing cultures of Central Asia. In the Bhāgavata Purāna (canto 10: chapter 44), a Hindu text dating to the second half of the 1st millennium CE but probably having older material, Lord Krishna engages in a wrestling match with Canura and Mushtika and Sala sent by King Kamsa to kill him. The subject is found in some of the reliefs from Gandhāra and Mathura. In the oldest finds of wrestling images from the Mesopotamian city of Khafaja in Iraq, ca. 3000 BCE, the wrestlers seem to be engaged in some type of religious activity; this could have played some part in the development of wrestling in ancient Iranian society as well. The Greek wrestling tradition probably integrated into these older practices of competitive wrestling throughout parts of Central Asia. Central Asian societies had their own athletic competitions and games. The nomadic cultures of the steppes were dependent on the horse. Though neither ancient records nor images exist showing competition, it must be assumed that horse racing had emerged as a major competitive sport in the nomadic regions. Today horse racing is one of the three competitions of the Mongolian Naadam or Nadamu festival, along with wrestling and archery. Sasanian nobles were expected to ride well and engage in horse racing and jousting. Sasanian kings are regularly portrayed as mounted. At Taq-ī Bustan, one king is depicted as mounted in full armor, and another king is shown jousting at Naqsh-i Rustam. Certainly, hunting on horseback was a fundamental activity for Central Asian men and is a subject on nomadic belt buckles. In Sasanian noble society, both men and women hunted, and the king-of-kings is portrayed hunting on horseback on silver plates that were produced in court workshops and sent to north to nomadic rulers. Whether such scenes of hunting should be seen as sport in the form of entertainment or rather are better understood to carry iconographic meanings about rulership and control over the forces of chaos is not always clear.

Artifacts • Gilt Silver Bowl with Scenes Arranged on the Exterior Polo emerged as the most widely distributed sport in Central Asia being enjoyed by the aristocracy of Sasanian Persia, Tang China, where women also participated, and Tempyô Japan. It developed in Central Asia from an earlier chase game, buzkashi, which is still played in parts of Central Asia and the steppes, in which two opposing groups of horsemen competed for the carcass of a sheep or goat. In due time a more refined game of riding skill emerged in which the carcass was replaced by a ball moved down the field by being hit with a mallet controlled by a horseman (see Adult Man’s Caftan). The game still possessed inherent danger to the participants, which is why it ceased to be played by royalty in China. Board games were also a feature of the life of the aristocrats in Central Asia. Chess was introduced from India at the Sasanian court of Khosrow I, Anushirvan (531–579 CE). It was from the study of chess that a Sasanian sage, Wuzurgmihr, invented the game of backgammon (nard). At least that is the story as it appears in a Middle Persian text of the 6th or early 7th century CE, On the Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon (Wizarism Catrang ud Nihism New Ardaxsir), and is later recounted in Ferdowsi (940–1020 CE) in the Shahnameh. The Arab conquest of Sasanian Persian spread chess to Europe. An earlier version of backgammon may have already existed in the Byzantine world. FURTHER INFORMATION Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Gunter, A., and P. Jett. Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, 1992. Mackenzie, C. “Games as Signifiers of Cultural Identity in Asia: Weiqi and Polo.” Orientations 35, no. 6 (2004): 48–60. Matsunami, K. “Sumo Wrestling along the Silk Road.” In The Silk Roads and Sports: The Silk Roads, Nara International Symposium ’95, 21–23. Nara: The Nara International Foundation Commemorating the Silk Road Exposition, Research Center for Silk Roadology, 1997. Miyashita, S. “Sports of the Ancient Orient.” In The Silk Roads and Sports: The Silk Roads, Nara International Symposium ’95, 43–48. Nara: The Nara International Foundation Commemorating the Silk Road Exposition, Research Center for Silk Roadology, 1997.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund (1988.67))

18 Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration From Central Asia or Tibet 8th century CE INTRODUCTION Gilt silver vessels used for drinking were highly prized objects from royal Sasanian workshops. They were important diplomatic gifts and often found a place in the treasures entombed in the kurgans of the rulers of the nomad steppe groups and the tombs of Chinese nobles even before the Tang Dynasty. Chinese nobles had developed a taste for Iranian luxury objects as early as the later 1st millennium BCE. While the Sasanian court may have used such objects for diplomatic purposes more than for trade, the objects probably did move as trade items once they entered into the economic networks of China, Central Asia, and the steppes, and the major player engaged in this transshipment was the Sogdian merchant. By the 3rd century CE, the Sogdians had emerged as the dominant international treaders with permanent communities found throughout the Tarim Basin oasis sites, China proper, and even to the west along the Black Sea. They carried goods from Persia, Bactria, India, Gandhāra, the steppes, and China along a series of trade routes that connected this vast area. They also became producers of luxury silver goods and fine textiles, creating works influenced by Sasanian Persian and Bactrian types, and which may have passed as examples of these other traditions. This set of three silver vessels was probably produced in a Sogdian workshop and, though the findspot is unknown, was probably deposited as funerary gifts. DESCRIPTION The set consists of a pear-shaped ewer or vase, a beaker, and a rhyton. They are all embellished with relief decoration set off by the gilt foil placed in 155

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Artifacts • Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration the backgrounds. The rhyton tapers to a three-dimensional, animal-headed finial that serves as the spout for drinking. The beaker’s embellishment was made using a technique that produced an unusually thick metal body for the cup that was then enhanced by chiseling the decorative elements on the exterior. The mouth was set off with a band of beading, and a handle ring was welded to the piece. The main motif is lions among foliage. The lions have a Chinese appearance, suggesting that the artist was aware of these forms. A similar cup was found in Kyrgyzstan. The pear-shaped vase or ewer has a long narrow neck that widens into a circle at the mouth. The shape recalls both an Indian flask (kundika) and a Chinese ceramic vase form (meiping—plum vase), again suggesting that the artist was aware of these foreign forms. The exterior is treated to repoussé techniques to raise a design of lion-dragons, birds, and a semi-man-bird figure, all intertwined in grape foliage. The dragon form has a Chinese quality. The rhyton was a drinking vessel. It would be lifted high to allow the liquid to exit through the bottom spout and into the drinker’s open mouth. It was an old form by the time this version was made, having been a particularly popular drinking vessel in the Achaemenid Persian Empire of the mid-1st millennium BCE, from where it passed to Greek use. It may have still been popular in Sogdian elite settings. There is a relief from a Sogdian mortuary couch made for a member of a Sogdian community resident in China in the period of the Qi Dynasty (550–577 CE) and now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (12.589), which shows a Sogdian drinker using a rhyton as he banquets with a group in a grape arbor. This rhyton was made from a single sheet of silver seamed on the inside curve. The repoussé exterior elements consist of a winged-lion and a bird in the upper, wider section and two lions in the lower narrow region, all enmeshed in a floral creeper. The mouth is decorated with an incised floral band and welded beading. Several separate pieces comprise the animal spout (topknot, ears, eyes, and snout) that were welded together and then attached to the body of the rhyton. Once again, the lion forms show Chinese influence, but the bird on the rhyton and on the vase resembles the garuda, a mythical bird-like creature from Hinduism which was incorporated into Buddhism. On the underside of the beaker is an inscription in Tibetan, perhaps the earliest example of the Tibetan script that was invented during the reign of Songtsen Gampo (627–650 CE). The inscription states that the beaker was a possession of a high-born Chinese princess. SIGNIFICANCE The overall quality of the craftsmanship of the pieces is high, and the surface treatment is confidently handled. The combination of forms and motifs that owe their origins to other artistic traditions would suggest a workshop

Artifacts • Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration where these artistic currents could come together, and Sogdiana is a reasonable choice. By the 7th century CE, the Sogdian trade network reached far south to India, east into China, and west to the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Though the Sogdian merchants were barred from operating in the Sasanian Empire, they interacted with Sasanian traders at Merv, the northern outpost of Sasanian presence. The Sogdian diaspora communities appear to have maintained connections with the homeland, at least based on the contents of Sogdian letters that have been found. Sogdian merchants moved luxury goods around their vast network. The discovery of the skeletal remains of a merchant who died while traveling through the Mongolian steppe and still in possession of valuable silver objects would indicate that some merchants operated alone and carried precious items on their person. Most Sogdian operations within the Täklimakan region, China, and Mongolia may have been at this modest scale, especially since the distance between oasis towns on the northern route of the Tarim Basin was not that great. The large camel caravan trade, well established as the stereotypical view of the trade, may have been limited to more western regions where the distance between safe stopping places was longer. Chinese silk was the major item, but this was augmented with Sasanian and Sogdian patterned silks, which appear to have found markets in both China and the far West, and silver objects from both Sasanian and Sogdian workshops. Whether the Sogdian products were being passed off as Sasanian or were actually recognized as Sogdian is not at all clear. The Sogdian trade routes extended into Tibet. It is possible that these three items were part of a set that was carried into Tibet by a Sogdian trader. In the 7th century CE, Tibet was experiencing the formation of the first powerful Tibetan kingdom under the leadership of Songtsen Gampo, who was also credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet and patronizing the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa, the oldest Buddhist establishment in Tibet. The monastery possesses a large gilt silver vessel decorated with figures dancing, perhaps the “Sogdian Whirl,” and with motifs resembling those on these three vessels. The Jokhang piece also seems to be a product of a Sogdian workshop or of a Tibetan studio conversant with Sogdian and other Central Asian motifs, indicating that these types of objects were entering into Tibet. By 670 CE, Tibetan forces of Songtsen Gampo’s kingdom were in control of the southern route of the Tarim Basin and the oases of Kashgar, Kucha, Gaochang and Turfan on the northern route, which would have provided easy access to Sogdian goods. Songtsen Gampo used marital alliances to secure his position against strong neighbors and married a Nepalese princess, Bhrikuti, and a Chinese princess, Wen-cheng. The Tibetan inscription clearly associates the beaker with a Chinese princess, possibly Wen-cheng. The presence of three carefully inscribed concentric rings beneath the inscription and on the rhyton

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Artifacts • Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration underneath the spout may be the collector’s marks and seems to link two of the pieces more forcefully. They could well have been objects that the princess brought with her, in which case they probably entered Tibet from China, where they may have been acquired from Sogdian merchants through the market structure. The ultimate destination for these objects is not known, since no findspot is recorded. It is possible that they were looted from a tomb and then sold on the art market. It is also possible that they were robbed from a monastic context. The surviving Sogdian vase in the Jokhang monastery must have entered the monastery as a devotional gift. High-status objects, often items of intrinsic value within Central Asia like silver vessels, could be gifted to a monastery by a wealthy devotee in hopes of earning merit. Silver and gold can be worked into the Buddhist system of the sapta-ratna, the seven treasures codified in Mahāvastu. These were the seven substances that were thought to be appropriate to present to the Buddha, and two of them were gold (suvaṇa) and silver (rūpya). These three objects might have been purchased from Sogdian traders in China or in Tibet or have been diplomatic gifts to Songtsen Gampo who then presented them to his Chinese wife or were made in a Tibetan workshop that produced vessels in Sogdian style. Ultimately, they may have been deposited in a tomb to be robbed at a later date or were donated to a Buddhist monastery and somehow later entered the art market. What they do show is the complexity of the stories lying behind many of the objects that moved along the Silk Roads in the last decades before the Arab advances in the 7th and 8th centuries CE. FURTHER INFORMATION Czuma, S. “Tibetan Silver Vessels.” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 4 (1993): 131–135. Heller, A. “The Silver Jug of the Lhasa Jokhang: Some Observations on Silver Objects and Costumes from the Tibetan Empire (7th–9th Century).” www.asianart.com/articles/heller/. Accessed July 20, 2021. Liu, X. Ancient India and Ancient China, Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1–600. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund (1999.318))

19 Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE) Bactria 3rd century BCE INTRODUCTION Coinage had been invented in Lydia (modern Turkey) in the 7th century BCE and then spread through the Greek world (see Coinage). By the 6th century BCE, it had become a major feature of economy of the Mediterranean, and with the Persian conquest of the Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean, it had also been introduced to Central Asia. Under the rule of the Achaemenid Empire, the eastern satrapies may have made some use of coinage, and it also possibly penetrated into India south of the Indus River, where a native Indian coinage was developing. However, it was the introduction of Greek culture in a large way into the region after Alexander the Great’s campaigns that coinage became a feature of the economic and political lives of the area. The kings of the independent Greek kingdom of Bactria struck some of the finest coinage to be minted during the Hellenistic period, and they used it to celebrate their identities as Greek monarchs and their dynastic positions, to pay their troops, and to stimulate the economy of the kingdom. Ancient Greek coins, usually in silver and occasionally in gold, intrinsically valuable metals, were produced with standardized sizes and weights. A valid coin made for much easier economic transactions than the alternative system of barter. A good coin had a set weight and known quantity of the valuable metal and therefore carried a recognized and accepted value for any transaction. There were several weight standards than operated in the ancient world, but certain ones were more often employed, which allowed coins on that standard to circulate over wider areas. Though coinage made for much greater ease in commercial interactions, the variety of standards and coin types required that money changers be 161

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available in big cities to take the foreign coins being brought into the city and exchange them for the local coinage. Coins were used in the marketplace and also to pay troops and pay taxes. Coinage certainly facilitated the economic spread and development of the trade networks of the Silk Roads. Coins could be used to pay for services and tariffs and sometimes bribes in local communities as well as to purchase goods to be resold later at new locations. As always with coinage, one had to be vigilant not to be taken in by forgeries. Even more dangerous for the user of coinage was the hidden devaluation that often occurred. Because the coins were struck in metals of intrinsic value, if the local Gold coin of Kanishka I. Kushan, 2nd century CE. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, 1898 (2013.43)) issuer were to be short of precious metal, then tricks might be employed to make a coin with a greater amount of lead still appear to be of silver. Sometimes, a ruler publicly altered the amount of silver or gold in the coinage, thus officially devaluing it. Much to the regret of the subjects, the taxes often still had to be paid in the older, more intrinsically valuable coinage. Such changes in the value of the coins could result in people hoarding the older and better coinage, placing even more strain on the economic structure of the kingdom or empire. DESCRIPTION The obverse (head) of the tetradrachm of Demetrios I features the head of Demetrios facing to his left and wearing an elephant scalp headdress. The features of the face and the details of the headdress are carefully picked out, providing what was probably an excellent likeness of the king. The reverse (tail) shows the standing nude figure of Herakles, easily identified by his

Artifacts • Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE) club, crowning himself. Often these reverse types were based on existing and well-known cult statues; such might have been the case for this image. The reverse is further elaborated with the inscription that identifies the coin as “Basileos Demetriou” “of King Demetrios.” The coins struck from the royal mints of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom have become justly famous for the high artistic quality of the rendering of the obverse and reverse types. This coin of Demetrios I is no exception. The head of the king must be treated as a portrait that captures much of the physiognomy of the sitter. The Bactrian diemakers, who cut the images into the dies used to strike the coins, seem to have been told to create images that captured the reality of the sitter’s actual facial features. At the same time, the obverse and reverse types were intended to convey more subtle political statements. Demetrios extended the kingdom south into India and converted to Buddhism, the first Graeco-Bactrian ruler to do so. His conquests included northwest India (modern Pakistan), including the Gandhāran region and the city of Taxila. He celebrates his achievement by donning an elephant scalp headdress that references India, already known for elephants, and the coins of Alexander wearing an elephant scalp issued by Ptolemy I  of Egypt. The portrait type also intentionally recalled the coins of Alexander the Great that featured the conqueror wearing the headdress of lion pelt with lion’s head, a homage to Herakles, who is the subject of the reverse type on Demetrios’s coin. Demetrios I’s father, Euthydemus, had taken power in Graeco-Bactria from Diodotos II between 230 and 220 BCE. Diodotos II’s father, Diodotos I, had established the kingdom. Diodotos I  was the satrap (governor) of Bactria/Sogdiana, serving the Seleucid emperor, Antiochus II, when he rebelled in the 250s and declared himself the king of his satrapy. He was succeeded by his son, Diodotos II, who was killed by one of his satraps. Both father and son chose to issue Greek-style coins, and initially, Diodotos I had continued to place Antiochus’s name on the first coins continuing to maintain the fiction that the kingdom was still part of the Seleucid Empire. Demetrios followed the pattern established by his predecessors and then began to make more nuanced statements. The coin in the inset image was struck several centuries later by a ruler of the Kushan Empire (30–373 CE), Kanishka I, probably around 130 CE, though the dates for Kanishka I remain a point of debate. The coin shows that what the Graeco-Bactrian kings had so well fostered during their rule, the spread and use of coinage, continued to propagate even after the fall of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom (ca. 145 BCE) in the Indo-Greek kingdoms that had emerged in the territory conquered by Demetrios I. During the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, coinage remained an important element in the political propaganda of the various rulers in the region and performed its role to ease and encourage economic transactions. The obverse and reverse types pull on the models from Graeco-Bactrian coins with the ruler shown on the

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Artifacts • Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE) obverse and a deity on the reverse. This gold coin shows a standing king, Kanishka I. His body faces forward, but his head turns to right toward the small fire altar at which he offers a sacrifice. He is dressed in typical nomad garb of trousers and long jacket or caftan. He holds a spear and sports a diadem, marking his regal status. Encircling him along the rim of the coin is an inscription in Bactrian, the Iranian language used in the Kushan kingdom, which was written with a modified Greek alphabet, “King-of-Kings Kanishka Kushan.” The reverse shows a standing draped figure in frontal pose with head turned to the left. The figure’s head is enclosed by a nimbus, and there are several attributes that should help to identify the figure, a trident, a deerskin, a drum (damaru), and a waterpot. These are normally associated with the Indian god Shiva, who was probably worshipped in the region, even as newer religions like Buddhism and Jainism were entering and finding positive responses. However, the inscription on the reverse identifies the figure as Oesho who seems to be a local variant of the Iranian wind god (see Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper Standing before God Shiva/ Oesho, artifact 41). SIGNIFICANCE Diodotos’s use of coinage as political propaganda and as the vehicle for economic exchange initiated practices that would continue through the rest of the history of parts of Central Asia into modern times. For Diodotos I and the succeeding Greek kings of Bactria, as shown here with the coin of Demetrios I, the quality of the artistry for the obverse and reverse dies would be of importance, and the images or types present some of finest examples of Greek art to have been produced in Central Asia. The locations for specific mints have not been found, though it is generally assumed that the Greek city, now known by its modern site name of Aï Khanum in northern Afghanistan, must have had a mint that struck some of the coins. Later, Taxila became known as having an important mint. Whether the die-cutters were artists trained in the great Hellenistic mints of the eastern Mediterranean or were local artists who learned their craft in the Bactrian mints cannot be determined, but they clearly understood the need to produce images that provided faithful portrait representations of the specific rulers for the obverses and continued the more classically idealized treatments for the Greek gods shown on the reverses. These artists kept alive and perhaps developed Greek art forms in the far East. How long after they were struck these coins continued to remain in circulation has not been determined, and so it is hard to say how much the images might have informed later artistic developments in the visual arts. Coins that presented the ruler in profile or fully frontal head or bust or later as a standing or seated figure and with reverses that portrayed deities remained

Artifacts • Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE) the standard coin types for the coinage produced in western Central Asia until the arrival of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries CE. The inscriptions that accompanied the images changed over time. Initially they were in Greek, but in time the Greek alphabet was used to record other Central Asian languages. Eventually, the indigenous Kharoṣṭhī script became the common form for coinage inscriptions during Kanishka I’s rule. He also shifted the title from the Graeco-Bactrian formula of “king-of-kings” to the Persian Shahanshah. The Kushan kingdom emerged from one of the nomadic Yuezhi tribes that invaded Central Asia in the middle 2nd century BCE and probably ended the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. These nomads settled down, and one branch emerged as the Kushans who by the 1st century CE had conquered the region from Bactria south to northern India. The Kushan Empire was to be a major force between Parthian and Sasanian Persia and China. They facilitated the trade networks that brought goods to the ports of northwest India, and it was during the Kushan period that the maritime trade with the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent. Perhaps to facilitate that trade, the Kushan mints struck coinage in both gold and base metals using the Roman weight standard. The presentation of the Kushan rulers, as here with Kanishka I, is always in the nomad dress of trousers and caftan, a break with the Greek tradition, and must be intended to be a constant reminder to the viewer of the Kushan Dynasty’s nomadic heritage. The same garments were used for the life-sized statues of rulers in the official Kushan dynastic cult centers (see Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I, artifact 32). The confusing treatment of the reverse figure that combines the attributes of the Indian god Shiva with an inscribed reference to the Iranian wind god must be intentional, ­probably indicating that a syncretism was in the process of happening. Just as the Graeco-Bactrian coinage influenced what came after for several ­centuries, the Kushan coinage informed the later Kushan-Sasanian coinage, the Samatata coinage of Bengal, and the early coinage of the Gupta Dynasty. While the coinage in the western regions of Central Asia functioned primarily as a vehicle for economic transactions that included payments for products and for services, the emphasis placed on the images of rulers and gods for the obverse and reverse types allowed the coins to also serve as political propaganda. Because the mints that struck these coins were governmentally regulated, the images revealed who was officially ruling at any given moment in any particular region and showed the changing nature of official religious devotion. In a similar vein, the changing languages and scripts used for the inscriptions on the coins testify to the complex nature of the social fabric of ancient Central Asian lands.

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Artifacts • Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I (222–180 BCE) FURTHER INFORMATION Boardman, J. The Greeks in Asia. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Bracey, R. “Kushan Dynasty iv. Coinage of the Kushans.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition, 2016. http:/www.iranicaonline.org/articles /kushan-dynasty-04. Accessed February 7, 2022 Cribb, J. “Money as a Marker of Cultural Continuity and Change in Central Asia.” In After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam, J. Cribb and G. Hermann, eds., 333–375. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007. Cribb, J. “Numismatic Perspectives on Chronology in the Crossroads of Asia.” In Gandharan Art in Context, East-West Exchanges at the Crossroads of Asia, R. Allchin, B. Allchin, N. Keirtman, and E. Errington, eds., 215–230. New Delhi: Arun K. Verma, Regency Publications for the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge, 1997. Errington, E., J. Cribb, and M. Claringbull, eds. The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cambridge: The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992. Holt, F. Lost World of the Golden King. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Jenkins, G. K. Ancient Greek Coins: The World of Numismatics. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of James C. Y. Watt, 2013 (2013.43))

20 Bronze Coin with Square Hole China Northern Song Dynasty, 1102–1106 CE

INTRODUCTION There were two major forces that affected the development of coinage in ancient Central Asia, the Greek and Roman Mediterranean world, and Chinese Han and later Tang Dynasties (see Coinage). The coinage from western Central Asia issued by the Bactrian kingdom, the later Indo-Greek kingdoms, the Indo-Parthians, the Kushans, and the Sasanians all responded in some way to Greek and later Roman coinage. The coins were struck of precious metals, most commonly silver, and carried images of rulers on the obverse and most commonly deities or religious references on the reverse. In the eastern Central Asia region, Chinese coinage was equally important. The oasis kingdoms and cities that existed along the fringes of the Täklimakan Desert and the territory of Gansu Province (Xinjiang Province and Gansu Province in modern China) were active participants in the Silk Road transactions. They knew and used the coinage coming from the western Central Asian regions, but they were also regularly in contact with China. During the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and later Tang Dynasties (618–907 CE), they were under direct Chinese rule. Chinese coins of the Western Han period (206 BCE–25 CE) were the first to enter the region of eastern Central Asia and were probably being used for everyday life. There was an increase in the quantity and distribution of Han Dynasty coinage during the period of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE) when military garrisons and neighboring farming communities were established, and the troops were paid with coins. Unlike their Greek counterparts, the Chinese coins were produced in bronze, a metal of far less intrinsic value. The value of these coins was more fiduciary. There had 169

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Artifacts • Bronze Coin with Square Hole to be trust in the Chinese imperial state to redeem the coins for the value indicated on them. They probably never circulated any further west than the presence of the Chinese state could be detected. This is unlike the case for the Mediterranean coinage and of the Greek-inspired coinage of the western Central Asian kingdoms, which is often found in Chinese tombs. This suggests that so long as the coin was valid, not a forgery or a devalued coin, it could be used on its own merits to purchase goods or pay for services or be exchanged for local coinage of equal value even in China itself. While the Han and later Tang governments held political hegemony in eastern Central Asia, the local governments still had some degree of autonomy and several issued imitation coinages modeled on Chinese prototypes. The primary source documents that survive from the region show that it was a common practice to record quantities in qian (or quan), which served as the unit of account. The qian was the wuzhu coin of the Han Dynasty. Salaries for soldiers serving in the western garrison were reckoned in qian. However, the active movement of foreigners through the region resulting from the dynamic economic forces of the Silk Road that drew Central Asian, Indian, and Mediterranean products and merchants to China meant that western coins both from Central Asia and from the Mediterranean entered the oasis communities. Kingdoms, like Khotan, also minted coins with inscriptions in Chinese on one side and Kharoṣṭhī on the other (30–150 CE), suggesting the cosmopolitan nature of the economic life of these oasis centers. DESCRIPTION The coin shown here comes from a later dynasty, the Northern Song (960– 1127 CE), but the format is the same as those that were produced earlier in the Han and Tang Dynasties and that circulated in Central Asia either as Chinese coins or as imitations issued by local rulers in the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, testifying to how much the local economies had come to depend on coinage for day-to-day transactions and to the cultural prominence of China. The coin was cast as a round disk of standard size with a central square hole and with an inscription of four characters, chong ning tong bao, roughly translating to “circulating treasures of the Chongning era,” the name given to the year 1102–1106 CE by Huizong (1101–1125 CE), the last emperor of the Northern Song. Central Asian documents mention payments, sometimes in thousands of coins, which would have necessitated bundling them into recognized units for ease of accounting, which probably explains the presence of the square hole through which a cord could be run to allow for many coins to be grouped together. The difficulty of transporting and making payments of large quantities of coinage resulted in the use of a substitute, bolts of silk cloth. Earlier Chinese coins, similar to the one shown here, have

Artifacts • Bronze Coin with Square Hole been found in the ruins of Buddhist monasteries in the Täklimakan region. In some cases, these were strung together in massive quantities, indicating that Buddhist monasteries worked with coinage, probably received as offerings or as payment for services. SIGNIFICANCE Chinese coinage operated like its western equivalent in that it was minted to be used as payment for goods and services, and surviving records from throughout the oasis sites reveal that Chinese coins were shipped from the capital to pay the salaries of Chinese officials and soldiers stationed in the west during the Han and Tang periods of direct rule. Prices for specific goods are translated in coinage equivalents, and so it is clear that the Chinese coinage functioned as one element in the economic life of the oasis region. Moreover, Chinese coinage did penetrate further to the west when official gift giving was required, and along with bolts of silk cloth and other Chinese products, the Chinese emperor sent strings of Chinese coins. However, there were two major differences between Chinese coinage and Western or Western-influenced coinage. First, Chinese coinage consisted exclusively of bronze coins, which had no intrinsic value. Western coinage included denominations struck in gold and silver, metals of intrinsic value in Western cultural contexts. The coinage was arranged in a standard weight system that permitted easy exchange: so many silver to purchase a gold, so many bronze to purchase a silver. The main problem for Western coinage was the regular practice of devaluing the coin by substituting base metal for the precious metal and rendering the coin of less value. The Chinese coinage was never tied to an intrinsic value structure. The value for the coin was that the Chinese government would accept it as payment. Second, Chinese coinage was cast, mold made, not struck. It was designed with a square hole in the middle to facilitate the grouping together of several coins to form strings, which could operate as a unit and made for easier movement of the coinage. There was no imagery on either the obverse or the reverse, only inscriptions of two or four characters. These two features made the coinage difficult to use outside of an area either under direct Chinese rule or within the sphere of Chinese economic influence. Chinese bronze coins when they entered the western region of Central Asia had no way to be worked into the existing monetary system. It was perhaps for this reason and because it was so difficult to make large payments with bronze coins that when the Chinese engaged in aggressive military action, fielding armies and garrisoning troops in Western and Central Asian locales, the court used silk, flooding the local markets with large quantities of the textile, thus facilitating the trade in silk that the Sogdian merchants exploited so successfully. Silk bolts were often preferred in the setting of the oasis region. During periods of internal chaos, as after the

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Artifacts • Bronze Coin with Square Hole collapse of the Han Dynasty, more and more exchanges took place with silk rather than with coinage. Though the imitation Chinese coinage issued by the oasis kingdoms of eastern Central Asia was, like its prototype, lacking in intrinsic value, it did have potential political value that petty rulers did not miss. Since these local bronze imitation Chinese coins could not circulate widely, they were perfect tools for communicating local political ideologies. At Gaochang City in the Turfan area, the Qu family minted coins around 620 CE, the Gaochang jili (“Gaochang, auspicious, advantage”) coins, that celebrate the restoration of the Qu clan to the throne of the kingdom. The written documents that survive because of the dry climate and record activities of daily life in the oasis communities, along with the coin finds, allow for a much more nuanced view of the roles of hard currency in the economic life of ancient Central Asia. Coins were not the only accepted currency in the oasis cities, and sometimes may not have even been the preferred currency. The contracts, pawn slips, lists of salaries, prices, fines, loans, and credit slips show that coins were but one option for economic exchange. Western coinage in gold or silver could be collected and hoarded during periods of trouble, a hedge against economic or political collapse when the metals could be used a bullion, though the surviving records do not mention gold or silver by weight until the early 5th century CE, and by the late 5th century, they are commonly listed as coins. Carpets, other textiles including bolts of silk, animals, hides, and grains were equally valued and could be used as payment. It may have been that several different media of exchange and units of account operated in eastern Central Asia both at the same time and certainly at different times. It may also have been the case that what was used in the setting of a city might be quite different from what was used in nomadic encampment outside of the city proper or even in a trading caravan. The values assigned to products would probably have reflected immediate needs and contexts, and this must have impacted coinage. It may have usually been possible to use gold and silver coins from the West, even if only as bullion, but not so bronze coins from China or as imitations during periods when China was weak and the coinage did not have much buying potential. FURTHER INFORMATION Hansen, V. Silk Road: A  New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Liu, X. Ancient India and Ancient China Trade and Regional Exchanges AD 1–600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Wang, H. “How Much for a Camel? A New Understanding of Money on the Silk Road before AD 800.” In The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War

Artifacts • Bronze Coin with Square Hole and Faith, S. Whitfield and U. Sims-Williams, eds., 24–33 and 142–145. Chicago: Serindia Publications, Inc. Wang, H. “Money in Eastern Central Asia before AD 800.” In After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam, J. Cribb and G. Hermann, eds., 399–409. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007. Wang, H. Money on the Silk Road: The Evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800. London: British Museum Press, 2004.

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(Yale University Art Gallery (1933.486))

21 Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread Dura Europos, Syria 200–256 CE

INTRODUCTION Though the ancient and medieval trade in luxury objects across the Eurasian continent has come to be known by the shorthand reference as Silk Road trade, scholars in the field know that such a specific trade never existed. There was no Silk Road but rather many different routes that bound together the parts of the continent both on land and sea. Silk was but one item, and its abundance fluctuated. That being said, the fact does remain that silk was an important commodity, and these two finds from the excavations of the site of Dura Europos in Syria testify to the fact that silk did move along the routes. Several different moth species produce caterpillars that spin cocoons of silk thread (see Silk). There may have been ancient Mediterranean sources of native silk from two species of moth as well as sea silk harvested from the pinna nobilis bivalve mollusk. However, none of these possible local versions competed with the silk from India and China. Both Indian and Chinese silk were being produced on a large enough scale to allow for international trade by the 1st century BCE. The silk from each region was quite different. Indian silk was a wild product called tussah silk, spun by caterpillars of several moths of the genus saturniidae. The moths lay their eggs on any suitable leaf that affects the color and texture of silk filament. Indians collected the silk filaments from the cocoons after the moth emerged. The filament is discontinuous, and several must be joined together to produce a long-enough thread for weaving. The woven fabric is uneven in texture and takes dyes at different rates, resulting in surface color variation. The Chinese establish a system to produce finished silk textiles of even quality by 175

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Undyed silk knotted wisp. Dura Europos, Syria, 200–256 CE. (Yale University Art Gallery (1933.521))

controlling all aspects of the process. Only the silk produced by the caterpillar of the bombyx mori moth—a flightless domesticated moth dependent on human cultivation for its survival, raised under quite specific conditions, fed only on mulberry leaves, and killed before it could damage the cocoon filament by exiting—was used. The resulting filament was a continuous strand of even white color that was reeled with several filaments to produce thread, which, when woven, produced a fabric of even surface quality and which took dye equally in all areas. The Han government required that taxes be paid in bolts of highquality white silk. By the 2nd century BCE this silk was used as payment to northern barbarians to purchase horses from the far West and as salaries for soldiers in the armies engaged in western campaigns (see Bronze Coin with Square Hole, artifact 20). The Chinese production of silk floss and textiles operated on a large, pseudo-industrial scale by the 1st century CE. The quality was maintained by carefully rearing bombyx mori caterpillars and feeding them a diet of mulberry leaves, which resulted in a cocoon of somewhat even filament size and white color. The controlled Chinese silk was strikingly different to that which was available on the domestic market in India. The presence of terms for Chinese silk as distinct from wild Indian silk by the 2nd or 1st century BCE would indicate that Chinese silk was available and known in India. The author of the 1st century CE Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which describes the maritime trade between the ports of northwestern India and Alexandria, indicates that both Indian and Chinese silks were available for purchase in the markets of the west Indian ports.

Artifacts • Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread India and China were major textile producers in the ancient world. India and the southern oasis communities along the Tarim Basin, which had established economic and cultural links to India, raised and processed cotton. There are fragments of a cotton cloth with Indian Buddhist designs found in the ruins near Niya, a southern oasis settlement dating to the later Han period. Gaochang outside of Turfan is included on 6th century CE Chinese tribute lists for the manufacture of cotton cloth, suggesting that cotton fabric was being brought into China. Chinese silk found a market in India among the local aristocracy. This happened as the trade networks formed between India and China in the Han period. Coral, pearls, and probably incense were all Indian products that entered the trade. Coastal markets of northwest India participated in supplying the Roman Mediterranean world with both domestic goods, like locally crafted textiles, ivory, coral, exotic woods, and spices like pepper, and exotic goods, including Chinese silk cloth and floss. DESCRIPTION The main image is of a fragment of a decorated textile. The fragment is too small to determine how the piece would have functioned, though as a part of clothing is a reasonable suggestion. This a taquete, a compound weave using Z-spun discontinuous undyed silk thread and decorated with red thread. The geometric pattern is a known Chinese Han Dynasty–style design. A taquete (taqueté) is a variation of a plain weave structure in which interlaced weft threads pass over or under widely spaced warp threads. What is produced is sturdy fabric, which is weft-faced, meaning that the pattern is carried by the weft threads. In a compound taquete structure, two weft threads, one for the background and the other for the pattern, cover the inner warp threads, which manipulate the design formation and intersect with the binding warp, which is a plain or tabby weave and serves to provide the structure to the fabric. The importance of compound weaves is that they render a strong fabric. There remains a debate about how developed compound, weft-faced weaves with wool had become in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean prior to the arrival of Chinese warp-faced compound woven fabrics. No archaeological evidence has been found dating earlier than the 4th–6th century CE. It has been suggested that the presence of patterned textiles in wall paintings, reliefs, and sculptures probably reflects the practices of painting or stamping cloth with a pattern or using embroidery, applique, or tapestry weave. For the moment, the Dura Europos piece is the earliest example of compound weaving from a Western context. There is no consensus among textile scholars that the weft-faced compound weaves in Western contexts developed from the Chinese warp-faced compound weaves. However, finds in the Tarim Basin indicate that eastern

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Artifacts • Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread Central Asian weavers were producing weft-faced compound cloth in both wool and silk by the 2nd century CE. Since this fragment from Dura Europos is a weft-faced compound weave made using Z-spun discontinuous thread, it might have been produced in a Central Asian workshop. Chinese weavers favored continuous spun thread. Central Asian weavers in the Tarim Basin were familiar enough with Chinese designs to use a Han-style motif. The insert image is a wisp or a twisted bunch of knotted silk. This too is undyed. It is possible that this might have been a piece of silk cloth that was being unraveled to access the silk threads for the purpose of reweaving them. SIGNIFICANCE Silk was only one item carried over the silk roads and was often not the main item, but it was an important commodity. Though there were several sources of silk throughout the Eurasian continent, once Chinese silk began to appear in quantity in the later 2nd century BCE, it came to be the preferred product. If one can trust the 2nd century CE historian Lucius Annaeus Florus, the Romans may have first encountered silk in a grand display of banners when the Parthians were lined up against Crassus in the Battle of Carrhae, 53 BCE (XLVI [III.11.8]), though it should be mentioned that neither Plutarch in his Life of Crassus (24:1–5) nor Cassius Dio in his Roman History (40:21–22) made any mention of silk banners. Yet, a mid-1st century BCE date for the appearance in the Western sphere is not unreasonable. The Parthians must have been trading with the Chinese to obtain silk, which they then used for their own needs. They served as the middlemen to the west, controlling the flow of Chinese silk into the Mediterranean market. The Han Dynasty began to flood Central Asia with silk bolts to purchase fleet horses from the Yuezhi and the people of the Fergana Valley to allow the Chinese cavalry to fight against the Xiongnu to the north of China in Mongolia. Already in the Qin Dynasty, the Chinese court had engaged in trade for horses with the Yuezhi, a powerful nomadic group in Mongolia who were also skilled traders. The Yuezhi were forced west by the growing power of the Xiongnu, another nomad group in the east. The Yuezhi migrated west, probably following the steppe trade route above the Tarim Basin through the Dzungarian Gate north of the Tian Shan Mountains. They eventually took over Bactria from the Greeks, and it was in their new location that the Han Dynasty envoy Zhang Qian sought them in 138 BCE in order to try to form an alliance against the Xiongnu. Though the Yuezhi refused the alliance, they probably began to provide horses along with the peoples of the Fergana Valley, whose horses, the “Heavenly Horses,” were reputed to sweat blood because of their speed. To pay for the horses, the Han Court sent bolts of high-quality silk fabric. Among those who benefited from this

Artifacts • Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread abundance of silk were the Parthians who moved the silk into their empire and west to the Mediterranean. The two examples of silk from Dura Europos could have entered the Roman territory through Parthian trade routes. It is not at all clear how much Roman-controlled trade moved over the terrestrial routes to the east. Already under the Achaemenid rulers, routes for commerce as well as for military movements and administrative purposes had been established in the east, particularly to join northern India to the Achaemenid seats of power in southern Iran and Mesopotamia. These had continued to operate into the Seleucid period, though the formation of the Bactrian kingdom and the eventual expansion of Bactrian Greek power south to India may have changed the nature of the communications between the Seleucid center of Ctesiphon in southern Mesopotamia and northern India. Certainly, the subsequent political shifts in northwest India that resulted in the formation of the Greco-Indian kingdoms, the Indo-Scythian or Sakā kingdom, and the Indo-Parthian kingdom would have altered relations between west and east. However, by the 1st century BCE, much of the former Seleucid Empire was under Parthian control, and the Parthian Empire bordered Bactria, now under Yuezhi hegemony. Parthian merchants could have easily moved the silk from Bactria down to the ports in northwest India, which facilitated the maritime commercial exchange between India, Central Asia, and the Roman Mediterranean. On the other hand, the Parthians must have maintained the old terrestrial trade routes that moved goods from the Bactrian area southwest into southern Mesopotamia. These routes had first emerged in the late 4th millennium BCE to facilitate the trade in lapis lazuli. Whether Roman traders could break into this Parthian-controlled land trade is not at all certain, though the story of the merchant Maes Titianus who made a journey from the Roman territory to somewhere in Central Asia near the Pamirs, and whose information was used by Ptolemy in the Geography (i.ii.7), does suggest that some Roman traders in the 1st century CE were able to work in the Parthian territory. It is just as likely that the silk entered through a different route. It may have been acquired at an Indian port and then was shipped to the mouth of the Euphrates River at the end of the Persian Gulf from where it was then sent upriver, probably in a camel or donkey caravan. At the point of the Euphrates nearest to the desert city of Palmyra, it was off-loaded and transferred to camel caravan for transit to Palmyra. While Dura Europos was not technically on any of the known routes that formed the complex network of Silk Roads, it was connected to Palmyra. The silk may have come to Dura via a Palmyrene merchant. By the mid-1st century CE, silk was common enough in Roman contexts to concern the Senate, which under Tiberius ruled to prohibit men from wearing silk garments (Tacitus, Annals, 2.33). But silk continued to enter

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Artifacts • Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread the empire, and eventually a vocabulary developed to describe different types of silk fabric: serica for something that looked like silk or was made of silk, holoserica for something made completely of silk, and subserica for cloth made of silk mixed with another fiber. When Lucan describes the silk gown worn by Cleopatra in her seduction of Caesar (Pharsalia, 10.136), he speaks of Sidonian woven fabric, which Egyptian weavers had loosened and then reworked. The Sidonian reference indicates that in this Levantine city, silk was woven into fabric. Since there was no domestic silk production in the region during the Roman Empire, the Sidonian weavers had to weave imported silk either obtained as floss or from unraveled silk textiles. This may well have been the common practice in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, to deconstruct the foreign silk cloth to obtain the silk threads for reweaving. It is worth noting that among the Tang Dynasty terracotta camels shown laden with objects that reference the Silk Road trade, some are shown carrying floss rather than just finished textiles. The spun thread may have been as valued as the finished products. The find of the twisted knot of silk at Dura could be from an unraveled textile or a trade item of its own. The find of a fragment of a Chinese polychrome textile (jin) in a tomb at Palmyra indicates that the finished Chinese silk products did have a market in the West (see Funerary Relief with Banquet Scene, artifact 3). This is corroborated by the other textile fragment from Dura Europos shown here. This was part of a larger piece of fabric that clearly was used as woven and not unraveled for the silk threads. The geometric design indicates Han Dynasty influence, but the weaving structure, a weft-faced taquete, is not common for Han Dynasty Chinese weavers who produce warp-faced taquetes. However, by the 3rd century CE, silk weaving, and even silk production, was already a feature in some of the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin. These towns were often the site of Han Chinese garrisons or hosted Chinese officials, and so there was regular commerce and cultural exchange between China and the Tarim Basin oasis settlements. Chinese silk had been used for payments to garrisoned troops and to local communities for providing services since the middle of the 1st century BCE and continued to be employed in these ways into the 3rd century CE. The local weavers became familiar with the Chinese pattens and produced local versions but using weft-faced weaves, not warp-faced. The Dura Europos fragment is quite possibly a product of an eastern Central Asian workshop. FURTHER INFORMATION Hansen. V. The Silk Road: A New History with Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hildebrandt, B. “Silk Production and Trade in the Roman Empire.” In Silk, Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in

Artifacts • Silk Taquete with Patterned Thread Antiquity, B. Hildebrandt and C. Gillis, eds. 34–50. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2017. Liu, X. The Silk Road in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Matthews, K. “The Imperial Wardrobe of Ancient Rome.” Expedition 12, no. 3 (1970): 2–13. Mierse, W. E. “Indian Silk in the Roman Marketplace.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology 9 (2013): 210–222. Millar, F. “Caravan Cities: The Roman Near East and Long-Distance Trade by Land.” In Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman, M. Austin, J. Harries, and C. Smith, eds. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, supplement 71, 119–137. 1998. Sheng, A. “Textile Finds along the Silk Road.” In The Glory of the Silk Road, Art from Ancient China, Li Jian, ed., 42–48. Dayton, OH: The Dayton Art Institute, 2003. Textile Research Center. “Exhibition 2019—Out of Asia 2.” Leiden. The taqueté “family” of weaves. https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/ index.php/out-of-asia Thomas, T. K. “Perspectives on the Wide World of Luxury in Later Antiquity: Silk and Other Exotic Textiles Found in Syria and Egypt.” In Silk, Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity, B. Hildebrandt and C. Gillis, eds. 51–81. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2017. Thorley, J. “The Development of Trade between the Roman Empire and the East under Augustus.” Greece & Rome 16, second series, no. 2 (1969): 209–223.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund (1982.284))

22 Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed in Roundels Found in burial in Egypt, probably Sogdian manufacture 8th–9th century CE INTRODUCTION These two fragments pose a series of interpretive problems. The pieces present two facing horsemen arranged in bilateral symmetry within a roundel. Another version of the motif presents four horse-riding hunters placed in a quadripartite formation and circled by a roundel. All the variations must ultimately emerge from the same prototype, a figure within a roundel. Among the repertoire of stucco ornamentation that was used to enhance important Sasanian buildings was the image of an animal encircled by a roundel. The king as hunter was established as a standard image on the tondi of Sasanian silver plates by the 4th century (see Siler Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting, artifact 33). Representations of Sasanian textiles as preserved in late Sasanian imperial reliefs from Taq-ī Bustan show court figures dressed in costumes with animals placed within roundels. Several figures from the Sogdian Hall of Ambassadors’ painting at Afrasiab (Samarkand) are dressed in caftans decorated with animals inside roundels (see Adult Man’s Caftan). Hunting images have a long history in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. The king hunting was an important part of royal iconography, showing the power of the ruler as a representative of order combating and defeating the forces of chaos. This iconography must lie behind the images in the tondi of Sasanian silver plates, but how that was translated to textiles is more difficult to determine since none of the representations of clothing from the reliefs and paintings show hunters. However, the hunter motif, 183

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Artifacts • Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed both in paired form, as shown here, or in a quadripartite form, became a popular textile motif, most likely used for clothing, as indicated by the fact that these roundels were found sewn to a tunic as part of a funerary assemblage in Egypt. DESCRIPTION The fragments were acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art at different times, but their similarity of image and weaving structure with the same number of repeating warps suggests that they were made by the same loom, though the actual size of the two roundels does not match, indicating that the loom was not equipped with a reed that would have maintained even spacing of the warps. Both pieces show two facing hunters on horseback wielding a lance to attack a lion below, which is also harassed by a dog. The design is of mirrored images. Each pair of hunters, prey, and dog is encircled by a floral roundel. Between the roundels are palmette trees, and where two roundels meet is a small rosette medallion. These two pieces are silk samite weaves, meaning that they are weftfaced compound twill. The weft threads are unspun, polychrome and carry the pattern. The warp threads are tan and Z-spun. The twill weave results in a pattern of diagonal parallel ribs created by passing the weft threads over two or more warp threads and then repeating the pattern one warp thread over. The samite weave produces a heavy, luxurious silk fabric. The two roundels were not found in their original context. They were both fragments of a larger piece and had been sewn as ornaments (segmenta) to the tunic of a deceased who was buried in an Egyptian grave where they were preserved because of the dryness. A consideration of representations of Sasanian and Sogdian elite clothing as preserved in Sasanian reliefs at Taq-ī Bustan and in the Hall of the Ambassadors at Afrasiab (Samarkand) (see Adult Man’s Caftan) which show court figures dressed in caftans similarly decorated with figures encircled within roundels, suggests that these must represent woven patterns. Most likely these two roundels had begun as part of the design of a polychrome patterned silk caftan. This seems to be confirmed by the surviving textiles from the Caucasus site of Moščevaja Balka in which only caftans and coats have the roundel encircling a figure or figures. SIGNIFICANCE The motif of the hunters on horseback enclosed within a roundel in several variations was widely spread by the 8th century CE, operating in Byzantine, Sasanian, Sogdian, Chinese, and even Japanese contexts. According to the early Arab historian Al-Masudi, in his Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (Daha bwa-Ma’ādin al-Jawhar), Shapur I (215–270 CE) took an active interest in the development of the silk manufacturing within the

Artifacts • Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed Sasanian Empire establishing an important Sasanian art form that lasted for the duration of the empire. By controlling the movement of Chinese and Central Asian silk over their territory, the Sasanian monarchs both limited the Mediterranean’s access to foreign silk and were able to promote their own silk products. Sasanian silks were of high quality and caught the attention of the late Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus (23.6.84) who noted the caftans of many colors. The Chinese were also captivated by Sassanian silks. The appearance of silk samite textiles in 7th-century Chinese contexts points to influences arriving from western sources. There are woven examples of the hunter motif that are thought to be translations of the Persian form done by Tang weavers. Most likely, a Sasanian textile, possibly a garment or even a silver plate, from a royal workshop at Ctesiphon, is the ultimate source for hunter on the two textiles. The hunter motif was revived in Sasanian royal iconography after Shapur II. The execution of the motif in these two fragments has been judged to be stiff and angular, probably not the work of a Sasanian artist but possibly that of a Sogdian weaver. The Sasanian weavings with figures in roundels inspired Sogdian, Chinese, and Byzantine weavers. The international nature of the motif made it subject to changing influences when being produced outside of the Sasanian realm where the image carried iconographic meaning. The designer for these pieces used floral motifs in the roundels rather than the more common pearl roundel favored by Sogdian weavers. The floral roundel is associated with Byzantine weavings rather than with Sasanian or Sogdian. However, Sogdian artisans were open to a variety of different cultural forces because of their wide-ranging trade networks that carried them and their products to China, the Black Sea, and Sasanian Iran. The royal hunter motif, which had such a long history in the Near East, had also become established in Roman imperial settings. The lost monument of the emperor Hadrian, the tondi of which now decorate the Arch on Constantine in Rome, featured Hadrian hunting. By the early 7th century CE, Sasanian royal iconography had gained meaning in Byzantine settings, and the royal hunter, modeled on the Sassanian prototype, had entered the repertoire of imperial Byzantine silk production. Woven silks with paired hunter images on either side of an axis have been found in European churches where the fabrics were originally used to wrap relics. These fragmentary textiles are mostly of Middle Byzantine manufacture but also include some that may be Sasanian or Sogdian. They most commonly entered Western Europe through diplomatic channels during the Ottonian period. The standard means were Byzantine-Ottonian royal exchanges, particularly marriages, which brought silks from the Byzantine royal treasury to the Ottonian court. The Middle Byzantine rulers needed alliances with the Ottonian kings to fend off Arab and Norman aggression, and the silks,

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Artifacts • Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed along with the marriageable Byzantine princesses, were part of what Byzantines could offer. These two pieces were not found in a Western European church; they come from Egypt and are fragments from something larger. It is quite likely that they arrived in Egypt in this fragmentary state and were then sewn to a new backing. Among the finds from Moščevaja Balka in the Caucasus are many silk fragments used to decorate other garments. It seems merchants, probably Sogdian merchants, employed some of their hoard of silk textiles as payment for services by local peoples by allowing a full garment or a bolt of fine silk cloth to be chopped down into smaller units. Silk being used as currency was common in Chinese and Central Asian contexts and may have been introduced into more westerly regions as Sogdians extended their trade network to the Black Sea in the 7th century CE. A Sogdian court caftan in the possession of a Sogdian merchant, who may have in fact been a high-ranking notable in Sogdiana, was cut up in order to make payments for local services on a trading venture. This would have resulted in isolating a single or a group of roundel units from the larger garment. Sogdian merchants certainly supplied the Byzantine court with finished silk cloth of Chinese, Sasanian, and Sogdian manufacture, but with the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Arab expansion, the trade routes through Iran and Mesopotamia that had been closed to the Sogdians while the Sassanian Empire held sway must have opened, at least for a short period. This might explain how two Sogdian silk woven roundels with versions of a Sassanian royal motif ended up in an Egyptian grave. The Sogdian merchant carried them into the old Sassanian realm and then introduced them into the Mediterranean trade networks. They were possibly the surviving fragments of a caftan that had been cut down to provide currency to pay for the trade mission but still retained the cache of being exotic and foreign in the setting of the eastern Mediterranean market. FURTHER INFORMATION Ackerman, P. “An Unpublished Sasanian Silk.” Bulletin of the Iranian Institute 6, nos. 1–4; 7, no. 1 (1946): 42–50. Canepa, M. P. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Compareti, M. “The Role of the Sogdian Colonies in the Diffusion of the Pearl Roundel Patterns.” In Erān ud Anērān. Studies Presented to Boris Il’ič Maršk on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, M. Compareti, P. Raffetta, and G. Scarcia, eds., 149–174. Venice: Liberia Editrice Cafoscarina, 2006.

Artifacts • Two Fragments of a Silk Samite with Hunters Enclosed Mierse, W. E. The Significance of the Central Asian Objects in the Shōsōin for Understanding the International Art Trade in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. Sino-Platonic Papers 267 (March). Philadelphia: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Mierse, W. E. “Traces of a Central Asian Textile on the Walls of an Early Medieval Spanish Church.” Ancient West & East 16: 249–270. Mutheius, A. Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving. London: Pindar Press, 1995. Watt, J. Y., and A. Wardwell. When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997.

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23 Still Life with Peaches and Glass of Water Herculaneum, House of the Stags (Casa dei cervi) 1st century CE INTRODUCTION This still life with peaches decorated one of the rooms in the Casa dei cervi (House of Stags) from Herculaneum, one of the most luxurious villas found within the walls of the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Peaches were a rare-enough commodity that, when painted on the wall, reminded the viewer of the wealth of the owner of the house who could both afford the fruit and have it represented. Peaches, prunus persica, had probably been introduced to Italy at the end of the 1st century BCE or the beginning of the 1st century CE. Pliny (Natural History 23.67), Columella (Res rustica 5.19), and Martial (13.46) all write of peaches, though Pliny knows them as Persian apples (mala persica). The gourmet, Apicius, provides recipes for peaches (De re coquinaria 4.2.34). Peaches were being grown in Persia, hence their association with the region, by the middle of the 1st millennium BCE and had first arrived in the Greek world after Alexander’s conquests, perhaps one of the trophy items brought back to Greece. Roman horticulturalists seem to have grafted the new species of prunus on apricot and plum trees, and by this means the cultivation of the fruit spread through Italy and into the western provinces, appearing in Gaul in the 1st century CE. The House of the Stags was an impressive private structure. It had been extensively remodeled after the earthquake of 69 CE and reveals some of the most innovative of new architectural forms including an emphasis on the view out to the sea. Obviously, the owner, who is still disputed, was an individual who possessed wealth and was interested in taking artistic risks with this townhouse. It is into this context that the still life with a glass 189

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Artifacts • Still Life with Peaches and Glass of Water and peaches must be placed. The subject matter may well reflect the still exotic nature of the fruit, which might have made it a suitable image for the decoration of a house that had few paintings and unexpected architectural features. DESCRIPTION This is a small painting, a Roman wall fresco. It was probably part of a much larger composition since such still lifes were most commonly placed as visual points of interest in bigger compositions. The painting was cut from the wall, which makes determining its original location uncertain. It is a Pompeiian 4th style painting and so can be dated to sometime between 66 and 79 CE. The painter was interested in stressing the glass juxtaposed with the two peaches. The glass is shown as semitransparent. Glass vessels were relatively inexpensive in the Roman world of the 1st century CE, and the vessel is intended to serve a contrast with the two peaches placed on the two shelves, which were probably still an example of conspicuous consumption. One of the peaches is partially sliced open to reveal the pit, which is probably intended to suggest the sensory aspect of the item, an exotic food, expensive to obtain, and with no lasting value since to enjoy it, it must be eaten. SIGNIFICANCE Peaches were probably not sent from Persia or elsewhere in Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Their privileged position in the still life shows that even in the 1st century CE, they held an exotic allure, but the speed with which Roman gardeners learned how to propagate them and send forth the plants themselves to other parts of the empire would indicate that there was no need to try to import them. However, they do represent a whole class of items that did travel on the Silk Roads from India to the north, from China to the West, from the Mediterranean to the East, and from Central Asia itself in all directions—food stuffs, spices, perfumes, and incense, all commodities of great importance but that leave little or no trace in the archaeological record. While peaches may have come to be a Mediterranean cultivar, such was not the case in China where the golden peaches of Samarkand were twice sent as formal gifts to the Tang court in the 7th century CE, peaches as large as goose eggs with a color like gold. Eventually, these too were planted in the imperial gardens at Chang-an, or so Wang Pu records in his institutional history, the Tang huiyao. It would seem that during the Tang Empire, foreign fruits and vegetables were to be found throughout the empire, sent sometimes as tribute to the capital and other times arriving as exotic imports.

Artifacts • Still Life with Peaches and Glass of Water These foreign delicacies could require inventive means of transport to prevent spoiling. Watermelons from Khorezm (Chorasmia), an oasis area on the Amu Darya River delta, were sent to Chang-an packed in snow inside leaden containers, and grapes from the Western regions may have been carried east in a similar manner. The Han explorer and envoy to the West, Zhang Qian, whose travels are described in The Grand Scribe’s Records of Sima Qian (90 BCE), perhaps first introduced the Han court to grapes. Dates from Persia had a place at the Tang court table. They were appreciated for their sweet flavor and as a medicine. The peepul fig tree, the bodhi tree of Buddhism, was introduced to China before Tang times, but at least twice, sacred fig trees were sent to Tang emperors by Indian rulers, once in 641 CE and again in 647 CE by the ruler of Magadha, which was the homeland of the trees. These were, of course, appropriate gifts in the Buddhist context of the early Tang Empire. A second tree associated with the Buddha, the sal tree, also found a place in the Tang court. Two hundred cuttings were sent as a gift from the Fergana region in the west to the imperial court in the 8th century CE. It is unlikely that fresh fruits and living plants formed a major part of the trade carried on along the Silk Roads between Central Asia and the Mediterranean; if such exchanges did occur, they are not recorded in the literary sources or the archaeological record. However, white mulberries must have come to Central Asia from China along with the silkworm since it is their preferred food. Dried plant materials in the forms of spices, medicines, incense, and dyes were in demand in the West and were supplied by eastern sources. By far, the most significant spice that Romans imported from India was pepper, and according to Dioscurides (I.18), the complier of the one surviving ancient pharmacopeia, India provided the finest kalamus for use in treatments (see also Pliny Natural History 12.104). Most likely, these products came via the maritime trade through the western ports of India across the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea and from Red Sea ports to the Nile River and Alexandria. There was also the possibility that some ships put into the ports along the Persian Gulf and where the cargo was off-loaded to smaller river vessels to be taken by caravans up the Euphrates to be transshipped through Palmyra to the eastern Mediterranean cities. In Palmyra the seaborne commodities would become part of the land-based trade network. Trade in seaborne commodities was also important to China, though it seems to have not begun in earnest until the Tang period. The Chinese did not supply the ships; instead Persians and later Arab merchants carried goods on ships built in the Gulf region to the ports in southern China, Yangzhou, Ningbo, and Guangzhou. When the Arab forces conquered the Gulf in the early 7th century CE, the city of al-Ubulla was already known as the port of Bahrain, Oman, and China. As these sailors headed east, they stopped along

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Artifacts • Still Life with Peaches and Glass of Water the way to pick up items, often raw materials and many of them perishable, for the markets of the Tang Empire. From Arabia, they brought incense; from India, pepper, ivory, and cotton cloth; from Sri Lanka, pearls, gemstones, and spices. The wreck of one vessel, a Perso-Arab ship probably constructed at the port on the coast of Oman, has been excavated in the Strait of Malacca, the Belitung shipwreck. The captains of the ships that sailed the Arabian Sea to India during the Hellenistic and later Roman and Byzantine periods and those who later sailed to the east through the Indonesian archipelago and into the South China Sea had to plan their voyages around the seasonal variation in the winds caused by the northeast-southwest monsoons. During and even before the Tang Dynasty, Buddhist pilgrims from China used the sea route as is evidenced by Faxian’s story of his return to China. FURTHER INFORMATION Batmanglij, N. Silk Road Cooking: A  Vegetarian Journey. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2002. Clarke, J. The Houses of Roman Italy: 100 B.C.–A.D. 250, Ritual, Space, and Decoration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Jashemski, W., and F. G. Meyer, eds. The Natural History of Pompeii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Krahl, R., J. Guy, J. K. Wilson, and J. Raby, eds. Shipwrecked, Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2010. Mierse, W. E. “Indian Silk in the Roman Marketplace.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology 9 (2013): 210–222. Raschke, M. “New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East.” In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.9.2., H. Temporini, ed., 604–1378. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1975. Sadori, L., E. Allevato, G. Bosi, G. Caneva, E. Castiglioni, A. Celant, G. di Pasquale, M. Giardini, M. Mazzanti, R. Rinaldi, M. Rottoli, and F. Susanna. “The Introduction and Diffusion of the Peach in Ancient Italy.” In Plants and Culture: Seeds of the Cultural Heritage of Europe, J.-P. Morel and A. M. Mercuri, eds., 45–61. Centro Europeo per I Beni Culturali Ravello: Edipuglia, 2009. Schafer, E. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Tomber, R. Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper. London: Duckworth, 2008. Wallace-Hadrill, A. Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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(Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo)

24 Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure Pompeii 1st century CE INTRODUCTION The small ivory statue seen in the photograph was found in the ruins of a house on the Via dell’Abbondanza, a major commercial artery through Pompeii. The statuette served as a decorative element for a small table. It is generally agreed that an Indian workshop produced the statue that somehow ended up in Pompeii. It had to have been carved before 79 CE when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The actual source of the piece and the reason for its final resting place in the Italian port of Pompeii on the Bay of Naples remain unanswered questions. The style of treatment has led some scholars to suggest that the piece was sculpted in the Indian city of Mathura in the Ganges region. Others see closer stylistic resemblances to sculptural works created during the Satavahana Dynasty of central and southern India (1st century BCE–2nd century CE) and particularly to ivory statues found at Bhokardan (Bhogavardhana). Mathura was a major center for artistic production during the Kushan period and was one of the dynasty’s administrative cities. However, Mathura was not a port city and had little direct commerce with the seaborne trade that supplied the Roman Empire with Indian products. Among the objects found in cache of luxury arts, both indigenous and foreign, in two storerooms (rooms 10 and 13) in the ruins of the ancient city of Kapisa (modern Begram) in Afghanistan were three ivory female statuettes (from room 10), two of which look quite similar to this piece. The general female form is emphasized in the same manner with large breasts and wide hips. They all move and are active. The faces and heads are clearly important. There are some significant differences. The three statues are 195

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Artifacts • Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure almost twice the size of the Pompeiian statuette. All three of these females are garbed, though the breasts for all three are shown, and for one, the pubic area is stressed. Two of the figures wear jewelry but nowhere near as much as the Pompeiian woman. Moreover, these three women are alone with no evidence for attendant figures, stand atop makaras, mythical beasts, and may be representations of Ganga, the River Ganges. The Begram ivories testify to the existence of such statue types from the Indian region though not from India itself, but it is clear that the Pompeiian piece did not belong with these three. However, it is certainly possible that the same workshop produced all four. Just like for the Pompeiian find, Satavahana dynastic Indian art centers at Jaggayyapeta and Amaravati have been proposed as possible origin sources for the Begram ivory ladies. However, it also has been suggested that the ivory statues were possibly the product of a workshop in Kapisa with artisans of Indian origin or trained in Indian forms, which could also apply to the Pompeiian piece. Kapisa was an important Kushan center by the end of the 1st century CE, the summer residence of the Kushan emperor Kanishka. It still was remembered when the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuan Zang (602–664 CE) passed through the region and mentioned it. As a royal Kushan center, it would have needed a workshop to service the desires of the elites in the city. However, the collection of items found with the ivory ladies at Kapisa spans almost three centuries of eastern and western artistic styles. Some objects date from as early as the 1st century CE, and others from as late as the late 3rd and possibly even the 4th centuries CE. The ivory ladies, along with their Pompeiian sister, are among the oldest works, dating to the first half of the 1st century CE. These pieces might have either entered the region of Kapisa through trade or have been made in the center before the region became part of the Kushan Empire in the second half of the 1st century CE. In this earlier period, Kapisa was the capital of the state of Kapisa and was ruled by Indo-Sakā (1st century BCE) or Indo-Parthian (1st century CE) dynasties. There are objects from the Begram cache of luxury finds that stylistically connect to finds from the Indo-Sakā stratum at Taxila in Gandhāra and with some objects from the Tillya Tepe burials. Kapisa was a trade node. One of the land routes from Syria ended at Kapisa where it split into two, one route headed south to the Indian subcontinent, and the other headed east to the Gandhāran region and to the administrative center at Taxila. Obviously, the routes went the other way as well. This would explain the connections to Tillya Tepe and to Taxila before the regions were joined by conquest under the Kushans. It was an appropriate spot in which to collect potentially valuable trade items, explaining the presence of both Asian and Mediterranean objects in the two storerooms. Whether these were the holdings of a later Kushan royal treasure house or the storehouse of a wealthy merchant in the city who profited from the

Artifacts • Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure east-west connections is debated. However, Kapisa must also have had ties with the north Indian port at Barbarikon, which provided sea access for Taxila and the Oxus-Indus stretch to the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and ultimately the port of Alexandria and the Mediterranean. The finds of glass from Roman workshops in the storerooms testify to the arrival of Mediterranean goods at Kapisa. One of the glass beakers is decorated with the image of the lighthouse at Alexandria, the Pharos, and so most likely came from Alexandria itself. Kapisa was integrated to the sea lanes as well as the land network of trade. Mediterranean merchants had begun to exploit the sea routes to India during the late Hellenistic period. The founding of the city of Alexandria on the coast of Egypt at one of the branches of the Nile delta allowed for the easy movement of goods coming up the Nile into the Mediterranean trade network or coming from that network into the heartland of Egypt. Egypt also offered connections to the Indian Ocean trade via ports established on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. So long as Mediterranean-based sailors did not understand the monsoon winds, almost all the sailing was in the hands of the locals who lived along the coasts of the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. This situation would have driven up costs and probably limited the amount of goods that moved between Central Asia, India, and the Mediterranean because of the uncertainties and increased costs that such uncertainties generate. Sometime, probably in the 1st century BCE, western sailors did learn how to work with the monsoons, though the specifics recorded in ancient accounts by Strabo (2.3.4–6), Theophrastus (Research on Plants, 9.7.2), Diodorus Siculus (2.55.2; 2.60.1–4), Pliny (Natural History 6.84–85; 12.30; 12.135; 13.18), and in the Periplus Maris Erythraei (57) seem highly questionable and contradict one another. Whatever the realities of how and by whom the secrets of the exploiting the monsoon winds were first revealed to Mediterranean sailors, by the 1st century CE, they were clearly engaged in long-distance mercantile exchanges, offering an alternative means of shipping goods between the far East and the far West. The Periplus Maris Erythraei provides a firsthand account by a sea captain of the nature of the trade in the Indian Ocean during the mid-1st century CE, providing information on commodities, port, and practical matters. Contemporary Tamil poetry from southern India supplies a somewhat romanticized view of the delights brought about with this international trade as seen from the local perspective. The Pompeiian ivory lady may have arrived in the Bay of Naples via shipment through Alexandria, the receiving port for items brought by sea from India. Ivory decorative features for furniture were common in elite Roman settings. They were attached to couches (kline) and tables, as was the case with this piece. They provided a display of conspicuous consumption but were also often examples of high-quality artistic production. These

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Artifacts • Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure ivory elements were most commonly manufactured in western workshops using African ivory, though Indian ivory must also have been equally suitable when it was available. Exactly how this ivory statuette arrived is not clear. It could have come by itself or as a group of similar statuettes, all to be attached to a piece of furniture when they reached their final destination. If this is how they were shipped, then it is possible that they came overland on a camel caravan. However, if the piece was sent as a part of a piece of furniture, even one to be reassembled at the final destination, then it seems much more likely that it was moved by sea. What is not at all clear is how common it was for such foreign artworks to ultimately become features in the interior decoration of Roman homes. This ivory is one of a kind. Nothing like it has been found elsewhere in the excavations of the Bay of Naples sites destroyed by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE or elsewhere in the empire. It is normally assumed that most silk fabrics that actually made it to the Roman ports on the Mediterranean were unraveled and rewoven. The tastes of the Roman period elite do not seem to have favored the far Eastern exotic. DESCRIPTION This small statue made of a single piece of ivory stands 0.25 m tall. The statue is flat when looked at from the sides. The front view is the most informative. It shows a nude female figure with pronounced breasts, wide hips, and fully exposed pubic area. She is provided with a profusion of jewelry: a headdress, earrings, a necklace across her breast that extends around to fall onto her back, bracelets on her arms and on her legs, and a jeweled belt. Her large head is slightly out of proportion with the rest of her slender body, but it helps to accent the overly large eyes. The head is turned slightly to the left and is supported by her right arm that wraps behind the head. With her left hand, she reaches up to touch something held by the right hand. The positioning of the arms places emphasis on the head and on the large earrings that she wears. Her legs are stiffly crossed, contrasting with the more active sense for the top half of the statue. Standing to the height of her hips are two nude female attendant figures that flank her. They look out, and each raises one hand to hold up an object. These figures place emphasis on the larger figure’s hips and pubic area, because of the placement of their heads and the objects that they hold. SIGNIFICANCE The use of carved ivory pieces, plaques, and sculptures, to ornament wooden furniture and thereby increase the visual opulence and value of the item, has a long history in the Mediterranean region. During the Hellenistic period, couches richly inlayed with ivory were a feature of elite settings, and these kinds of luxury furnishings continued to be produced in the Roman period.

Artifacts • Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure Pompeii has yielded some examples. This imported Indian ivory belongs in the context of an elite display of wealth, with intrinsically valuable material given added value through artistic manipulation. What is unusual is that the statuette and not just the material is from a foreign source. Since there is little evidence that elites of the Roman period collected exotic foreign objects to decorate their domestic spaces, this piece stands out as an oddity. While Syrians, who staffed the ships and the camel caravans, probably did much of the actual hands-on portion for the trade between the Mediterranean and Central Asia and India, there is evidence that Italian merchant families were also engaged in the trade. An amphora handle stamped with the name M. LiviCaustriSurus was recovered from Mathura in India, and the name was also found on an amphora pulled from the Grand Ribaud shipwreck off the coast of France and dated to the 1st century BCE. The amphora, a Dressel 2–4 type, had been manufactured in either Pompeii or Sorrento. This was a mercantile Italian family engaged in long-distance transactions in which their product, perhaps Campanian wine, was moved around the Mediterranean and eventually to India. Whether any members of the family itself were physically traveling with the goods cannot be determined from this evidence. There is, however, an interesting inscription from a rock shelter in the Hammamat Valley of eastern Egypt that offers some information. The Hammamat Valley provided a resting place on the camel route between Coptos and Myos Hormos. When items were moving between the Mediterranean and India via the sea-lanes, Alexandria became either the starting or the ending point for the Indian trade route. Objects entered or left Alexandria by means of the Nile, but the Nile does not connect directly with the Red Sea. At the port of Coptos on the Nile, items had to be either off-loaded from boats to camels for the trip to the coast or loaded onto boats after arriving from the coast. One of the Red Sea ports in use since the Hellenistic period was at Myos Hormos. It took about seven days of land travel through the eastern desert of Egypt to traverse the distance from Coptos to Myos Hormos, and one of the stopping points was in the Hammamat Valley. The inscription found here records the name of a member of a merchant family, well known from other inscriptions around the Mediterranean, the Piticii. A member of the family must have been traveling with the merchandise. While no names of specific merchants or merchant families have survived in ancient Indian contexts, we do know that there were foreigners resident in India. Megasthenes, Seleukos I Nikator’s (358–281 BCE) ambassador, spent time in the court of Chandragupta at Pataliputra. There are later references in ancient Indian literary sources to the ships of the Yavana in the coastal ports. The term Yavana is debated, but it is agreed that it refers either to Greeks (Ionians) specifically or to westerners more generally. It is

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Artifacts • Ivory Statuette of a Partially Nude Female Figure certainly possible that some of the Italian merchant families sent a member of the family to represent their interests in these distant ports. Such might explain the Indian ivory statuette from Pompeii. There is little evidence to support the notion that a trader would have carried back a finished piece of Indian sculpture, in hopes that it would sell somewhere in a Mediterranean marketplace since there appears to have been no market for such exotica in the Mediterranean. However, an Italian representative of a Pompeiian mercantile family or a member of the family itself, who had been living in an Indian port for some time, might have wished to bring back a souvenir of the years spent abroad. This Indian statue, or perhaps the whole table, might have fit the bill and served as a reminder of the time in India. FURTHER INFORMATION Cambon, P. “Begram: Alexandria of the Caucasus, Capital of the Kushan Empire.” In Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., 145–161. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008. Coarelli, F., ed. Pompeii. New York: Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2006. D’Ancona, M. L. “An Indian Statuette from Pompeii.” Artibus Asiae 13, no. 3 (1950): 166–180. Doumeyrou, A. “An Ivory Fulcrum Medallion.” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 17 (1989): 5–14. Huntington, S. L. The Art of Ancient India; Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. New York: Weather Hill, 1985. Mehendale, S. “Begram: Along Ancient Central Asian and Indian Trade Routes.” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 1/2: Inde-Asie central: routes du commerce et des idées (1996): 47–64. Mehendale, S. “The Begram Ivory and Bone Carvings: Some Observations on Provenance and Chronology.” Topoi 11, no. 1 (2001): 485–514. Mierse, W. E. “Indian Silk in the Roman Marketplace.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology 9 (2013): 210–222. Parker, G. The Making of Roman India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1959 (59.34))

25 Faceted Glass Bowl Iran, Sasanian 6th–7th centuries CE

INTRODUCTION The faceted glass bowl or cup represents a large category of trade objects. Glass items were being produced in Chinese and Japanese workshops as early as the 2nd century BCE, but the chemical composition of eastern glass contained a high percentage of barium lead unlike the western glass, which was of soda lime base. The shapes, colors, and uses of Asian glass were limited to small opaque pieces, and exports of western glass, particularly bigger pieces of transparent blown glass, found a welcome reception in eastern contexts. Roman glass first entered China during the Han period in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. The Chinese records show two terms for glass: liu-li, describing the small opaque items of Chinese manufacture, and pol-li, which came to refer to imported transparent glass. By the 6th century CE, Mediterranean glass was augmented with Sasanian products. These Sasanian forms continued to be made and exported to the East into the early Islamic period. Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian blown glass vessels have been found in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts. A similar glass cup was placed into the treasure house of the Tōdai-ji temple in Nara, Japan, in the middle of the 8th century CE. Sasanian glass factories produced large numbers of faceted vessels. The colored molten glass was blown into a mold, and the facets were wheel-cut, and then the vessel polished. The placement of the facets was in four or five rows around the surface. Pieces like this one traveled to the East in a caravan as a commodity to be sold. Because such pieces of western glass were precious in Chinese and Korean settings, merchants found markets in Sui or Tang China and in Silla Korea. 203

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Artifacts • Faceted Glass Bowl DESCRIPTION The cup or bowl is hemispherical, produced by being blown into a mold while in molten state. The thick-walled glass has lost most of its surface color but was light yellowish green. The iridescence is the result of weathering. Four rows of oblong and round facets were added by wheel-cutting the surface, and the wheel was also used to polish the cup. SIGNIFICANCE Items traveled along the Silk Roads in several ways: personal possessions, diplomatic gifts, and as commercial objects for sale. Western-made glass most commonly must have moved from its place of origin to the East in the last category. There was nothing about glass that made it valuable in Mediterranean or Persian contexts. Colored glass vessels were manufactured in several places in the late antique Roman world and were widely used for a variety of mundane purposes. Sassanian glass production was more limited, but still the final product was not deemed of great importance. However, the rarity of translucent blown glass in Chinese and Korean settings gave the individual objects great potential value on those markets and made the difficulty of transporting glass overland on the Silk Roads worth the effort of merchants. In China, by the 8th century CE, foreign glass objects had become visual signifiers of wealth. In elite settings, glass vessels were associated with grape wine drinking, which was a Western pastime that found a home with some high-ranking Chinese. Most western glass coming into China must have come over the caravan route of the Silk Roads that passed over the northern rim of the Täklimakan Desert, allowing for both Mediterranean and Sasanian Persian and later early Islamic Iranian glassworks to appear in the western market at Chang-an. The transmission of western glass to the Korean kingdom of Silla may have been quite different. The Korean kingdom was actually affiliated with the nomadic peoples of the eastern steppes. The royal tombs of Silla show strong parallels to elite burials in the steppes. The presence of foreign glass in the Korean tombs could well be the result of some type of gifting relationship between the rulers of Silla and the steppe nomad leaders. Since western glass had acquired high-status associations in China, it is not surprising that it would have held similar meaning to the nomadic elite living to the north of China. In the Xiongnu nomadic polity (209 BCE–150 CE) imported glass operated in a “prestige good economy.” The Xiongnu elite maintained long-distance relationships in order to be assured of easy access to the items rather than depend on casual commercial exchanges. Such a “prestige good economy” probably linked the nomadic confederations north of China with those nearer to the Korean Peninsula, the Murong

Artifacts • Faceted Glass Bowl Xianbei and the Tuoba Xianbei, who in turn interacted with the Silla kingdom. Glass functioned within Buddhist contexts. In the Mahāvastu (The Great Event), an early Sanskrit Buddhist text, the sapta-ratna lists seven items considered appropriate precious substances to associate with the Buddha: suvaṇa (gold), rūpya (silver), vaiḍūryā (lapis lazuli), muktā (pearl), lohitikā (red precious stone or red coral), musāragalva (ammonite, agate, or coral), and sphāṭika (crystal or quartz). Glass may have substituted for sphāṭika (crystal or quartz). At Kushan Buddhist sites, glass beads have been found in abundance. Some of the glass containers that appear in representations of rituals in paintings from the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang could have been stand-ins for sphāṭika, as in Cave 217 where a bodhisattva treats as an offering a transparent plate with blue decoration, possibly representing a Sasanian faceted or a Roman blue blob plate. In a tomb from Geumnyeongchong, Korea, was found a transparent cup with blue blobs, indicating that this style of western glass produced in the 4th century CE made its way east. A painted version of a glass faceted cup from the Mogao Caves might reproduce a Sasanian faceted cup that could function in Buddhist ritual settings. Roman, Sasanian, and probably Byzantine glass vessels seem to have been easily worked into Buddhist rituals as part of the sapta-ratna. FURTHER INFORMATION An Jiayao. “The Art of Glass along the Silk Road.” In China, Dawn of a Golden Age, 200–750 AD, J. Watt, An Jiayao, A. Howard, B. Marshak, S. Bai, and Z. Feng, eds., 57–66. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. An Jiayao. “When Glass Was Treasured in China.” In Nomads, Traders and Holy Men along China’s Silk Road, A. Juliano and J. Lerner, eds., 79–94. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. Fleming, S. Roman Glass: Reflections on Cultural Change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Hayashi, R. The Silk Road and the Shoso-in. The Heibonsha Survey of Japanese Art. New York: Tuttle, 1975. Juliano, A., and J. Lerner, eds. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia, 4th–7th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Laing, F. J. “A Report on Western Asian Glassware in the Far East.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 5 (1991): 109–121. Mierse, W. E. The Significance of the Central Asian Objects in the Shōsōin for Understanding the International Art Trade in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. Sino-Platonic Papers 267 (March). Philadelphia: Department

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Artifacts • Faceted Glass Bowl of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Soyoung, Lee, and D. Leidy, eds. Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. Whitehouse, D. Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass. Corning: Corning Museum of Glass, 2005. Xinru, Liu. Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1–600. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 2001 Benefit Fund, 2002 (2002.478))

26 Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China Eastern Central Asia (China, Xinjiang Autonomous Region) 7th–9th centuries CE

INTRODUCTION Both these vessels are tied to the spread of metalworking from west to east. Gold working first emerged in the western region of the Black Sea. The knowledge of the technical aspects of the craft were carried west by Indo-European migrations from the Caucasus to Siberia and the Altai Mountains, eventually entering China during the Shang Dynasty (1600– 1046 BCE). By the time that this gold cup was created, gold working was a well-developed art form in China, but this piece may not have been made by a Chinese artist. It possesses a number of elements that point to manufacture by a Central Asian artist, perhaps a Sogdian, but probably for the Chinese market. It may also have been made by an artist familiar with the emerging Tibetan forms, since features can be matched with pieces from China but made during the Tibetan occupation. Chinese artists had been casting small-scale silver objects since the Han Dynasty, and so Chinese artists were familiar with silver, but Sasanian silversmiths had developed the richest repertoire of silver luxury objects; many, like this piece, were gilded for added value. While produced in Iran, many in the imperial workshops, the finds from good archaeological contexts have all been discovered outside of the Sasanian territory, suggesting that they functioned as diplomatic gifts and as marketable products outside of the Sassanian Empire proper. What links these two objects, besides their probable Central Asian place of manufacture, is that they were both made as precious containers for grape wine. Wine drinking has a long history on the Eurasian continent. The southern Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and northwest Iran can 209

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all lay claim to being the homeland of wine making. Wine was being consumed along the eastern Mediterranean in the early 2nd millennium BCE, and the Assyrians of the 9th–7th centuries BCE were drinking wine. Clearly, wine was a feature of Achaemenid feasting, and probably it was from their control of much of the western part of Central Asia and northwest India that wine was first introduced to the regions, but the Greek conquest Sassanian lobed gilt silver bowl. Iran, 4th–6th centuries CE. (Cleveland must have brought wine Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund (1963.478)) drinking as a cultural feature to prominence through the territories that they controlled. These two vessels testify to the elevation of the act of wine drinking. They are both precious objects whose value has been increased by the added decoration. Their fine state of preservation suggests that they were included in graves as appropriate gifts for the deceased. Within Chinese contexts, gold had acquired, like jade, a special value because of its incorruptibility that made it a suitable visual metaphor for eternity. During the Han Dynasty, gold thread was used to sew the jade plaques to each other that formed the jade mortuary suits for high-ranking Chinese dead. DESCRIPTION The gold vessel consists of three parts: a bell-shaped goblet, a slender stem, and a flaring foot. The decoration is repoussé raised by hammering the sheet of gold against a wooden matrix. The interior of the goblet is lined by a separate sheet of thin gold. On the exterior a ring-matting pattern forms the background decoration against which are raised the various decorative features. Pearl borders encircle the top of the rim and the edge of the foot. Four ibexes circle the flaring portion of the foot. The upper portion of the goblet is lined with twelve rectangular boxes into which are placed the animals of the Chinese zodiac: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog, and boar. The tendrils of grapevines are shaped into oblong units around the body of the goblet, and into each space is placed a dragon.

Artifacts • Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China The shape of the vessel and the ring-matting background can be matched to other contemporary Tang Chinese pieces, but the motif of the interlinked grapevines with curling leaves resembles Sogdian work. The zodiac animals are Chinese, but the ibex and the rendering of the dragon forms recall nomadic forms. Taken as a whole, the vessel, its decoration, and its technical treatment seem similar to some metalwork from northwest China produced during the Tibetan occupation. The precious vessel is a hybrid work, giving a visual form to the complex mixing of cultural forms and forces, particularly in the western regions of the Tang Empire. The elliptical bowl is formed from eight lobes of silver. The bowl sits atop a much smaller elliptical foot. It is ornamented with a raised exterior decoration of four nude female musicians placed flanking the two lobes that define the secondary axis of the vessel. Grapevine tendrils intertwining animals dominate the remaining areas of the exterior, and a single nude male figure drinking from an animal-shaped rhyton occupies one of the two lobes marking the main axis. The decorative elements are rendered in silver and set off with gilt. The interior of the bowl is an alternating silver and gold pattern. The boat or elliptical lobed shape is a common type of Sasanian wine-drinking vessel and may owe its origin to earlier Chinese influences. It became a common form in the mid-5th to the early 6th century CE. A few examples have been found in southern Iranian contexts, but like most Sassanian silver objects, the majority come from non-Sasanian settings. Though the type is recognized as Sassanian, there are Sogdian variations. The decoration on this vessel of a wine-drinking figure and four music-making nude females who recall the maenads who followed Dionysus and may now be understood to be versions of the Iranian goddess Anahita all surrounded by grapevines announces the vessel’s wine-drinking purpose. SIGNIFICANCE Even though by the 6th century CE, gold and silver working technologies were widely known; Sasanian products, particularly in silver, were desirable. Sasanian rulers probably used Sasanian silver objects as diplomatic gifts, which is why they show up in many non-Sasanian contexts. However, they also had a marketable value. Sasanian merchants may well have carried them east to China and north to the steppes to trade for Chinese silk and furs, but it was very likely Sogdian traders with their extensive trade network that stretched from coastal China to the Black Sea who did the most extensive movement of these items. They also capitalized on the desire for the Sasanian works to create their own versions. The silver bowl shown here is most likely a Sasanian original, the gold cup, with its mixed hybrid decoration very possibly made by a Sogdian workshop, probably for the long-distance trade.

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Artifacts • Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China It has also been suggested that the gold cup was produced during the Tibetan occupation of eastern Central Asia (see Gilt Silver Objects with Figural and Vegetal Decoration, artifact 18). The Tibetan expansion began in the 7th century CE under the leadership of Songtsen Gampo, the 33rd king of the Yarlung Dynasty. By the 670 CE, the Tibetans controlled the Tarim Basin, having defeated the Chinese garrisons. They lost most of this territory by 690 CE to a Chinese advance but were able to reassert Tibetan rule in the mid-8th century, as the Tang Dynasty suffered the An Lushan rebellion and was unable to protect its Western interests. The end of the 8th century saw the Tibetan Empire at its greatest extent stretching west to Afghanistan, east to the outskirts of the Tang capital at Chang-an, south to northwestern India, and north to the northern route above the Täklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin. The Tibetan advances and the anti-Sogdian sentiments that developed in China in the wake of An Lushan rebellion put the Sogdian merchants in a difficult position and probably required that they develop their trade connections with Tibet, which had already formed earlier in the 6th century CE as Sogdian merchants sought a way to enter China bypassing the Gansu corridor. They expanded a southern connector from Khotan on the southern route around the Täklimakan to the Qaidam Basin in modern Qinghai Province, then to Kokonor/Qinghai Lake, and then to Lanzhou. This alternative track took the merchants through Tibetan regions and probably established a Tibetan interest in Sogdian merchandise, like the Sasanian royal textile that has been found in a Tibetan tomb at Dulan. By the 760s, the Tibetans occupied the Tarim Basin and oversaw the two main commercial routes around the Täklimakan Desert that the Sogdian traders plied. The Sogdians did begin to establish stronger associations with the powerful nomadic group in the region north of the Tarim Basin, the Uyghurs, but as merchants intent on profit, they must have also worked to exploit potentials of the Tibetan occupation, including crafting hybrid objects that reference a number of different cultural sources and may have found buyers among the Tibetan elite. Both the gold cup and the silver bowl operated in a specific societal context. These vessels were banquet tableware and reflected the Sasanian Persian aristocratic lifestyle. They were intrinsically valuable, the perfect visual signifiers of elite status in nomadic societies and in Tibet. The increasing engagement between the pre-Tang Chinese rulers and the Western nomadic peoples may have served to introduce these foreign products into elite Chinese contexts. Some Tang emperors, controlling large areas of eastern Central Asia that bordered on the nomadic steppes, adopted some of the practices of the steppe chiefs, probably to forge better relationships with non-Han Chinese subjects. Banqueting, already a feature of Chinese court life, now included these foreign drinking vessels, which Chinese metalworking shops began imitating.

Artifacts • Sogdian-Style Gold Stem Cup from China FURTHER INFORMATION Gunter, A. C., and P. Jett, Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1992. Mierse, W. E. The Significance of the Central Asian Objects in the Shōsōin for Understanding the International Art Trade in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. Sino-Platonic Papers 267 (March). Philadelphia: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2017. Leidy, D. P. “Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 2001–2002.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 60, no. 2 (2002): 53. Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

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(Album/Alamy Stock Photo)

27 Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk Kazakhstan (now in Hermitage Museum) 5th–3rd centuries BCE

INTRODUCTION Kurgan 5 at Pazyryk held the mummified remains of an elite couple, perhaps a nomad chieftain and his wife, and was among the richest unearthed at the site. In the space to the north of the log burial chamber, in the same space that held the remains of nine sacrificed horses and a disassembled cart, were also found a felt carpet and the pile rug shown here. The unique set of circumstances that occurred in many of the kurgans in the Altai Mountains explains the preservation of the textiles. Robbers entered many of these kurgans, including 5 at Pazyryk, not long after being finished. The robbers had broken in through the top and thereby opened the grave chamber. Rainwater collected in it during the spring and summer months and then was frozen during the harsh winters. In due time enough water collected and froze that the chamber never defrosted during the warmer months, and the resulting environment was perfect for the preservation of organic materials. This rug is not the earliest example of pile carpet making; an earlier, 6th century BCE example in more fragmentary condition was found in kurgan 2 at Bash-Adar. However, unlike the piece from Pazyryk, which is a large work of textile art, the Bash-Adar piece had been used as a saddle cloth. That they were included in high-status elite burials indicates that the textiles were considered important items suitable for grave goods. The findspot for the Pazyryk rug, outside of the chamber proper, is a bit confusing, perhaps the result of the disturbance caused by tomb robbers who were looking for only certain types of objects and moved other items to find them. The date for kurgan 5 and for the carpet itself has been refined over the past couple of decades. Dendrochronological analysis indicates a possible 215

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Artifacts • Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk date of ca. 250 BCE for the timber structure in the kurgan, and radiocarbon analysis of the carpet provides a date of 383–200 BCE. DESCRIPTION The slightly elongated pile carpet is 1.89  m by 2  m. It is designed as a series of five concentric rectangles, each containing a repeated motif, which together enclose a central field of twenty-four square medallions arranged in nine rows by four columns. The carpet is constructed entirely of Z-spun wool (warp, weft, and pile). The general pattern is for three rows of plain weave to alternate with a row of knots that form the pile. The knots are tied symmetrically around two warp threads to form a Turkish or ghiördes knot, and there are 36 symmetrical knots per square centimeter giving a total of 1,250,000 knots for the entire rug. The excavator estimated that to make a carpet of this medium fineness would have required an individual working alone about eighteen months to complete. When finished, the carpet was sheared to even the pile. The carpet had been damaged in only one corner, and so it is possible to fully appreciate the carpet’s decorative motifs. The twenty-four squares of the central field form a repeated pattern of a four-rayed star surrounding a cross-shaped ornament of four flowers, a motif sometimes referred to as a Lydian-style rosette. The first repeated pattern to form a border rectangle is a square framing a winged griffin with head turned to look back, followed by another border rectangle with a repeated form of spotted or fallow deer grazing and headed in a clockwise manner. A star form with four rays arranged on the diagonals and floral elements decorating the crosspiece elements is the decoration of the next rectangle. This is followed by a wider band that contains a counterclockwise alternating pattern of either a mounted rider or a groom walking alongside a horse with a saddle cloth (shabrack) and hidden by the horse’s body. The final rectangle repeats the griffin motif from the first rectangle but in a larger format and facing the opposite direction. The borders that form the concentric rectangles are the same for each one, rectangular strips between two lines. The yarn for the carpet had been dyed a variety of colors, and so the final effect is of polychromy though dominated by soft tones of red, blue, green, yellow, and orange. The red has become rusty, and the other colors seem somewhat muted, perhaps the effect of oxidation. The red used may well be from the Polish cochineal (margarodes polonicus) rather than the more common madder root. The carpet was not made for the grave since it shows signs of considerable wear. SIGNIFICANCE Since its discovery, the pile carpet from Pazyryk kurgan 5 has posed a number of problems for scholars. It is a sophisticated work with a complex and

Artifacts • Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk well-managed pattern and a demandingly difficult technique of execution. It is clearly the product of a workshop that stood atop a long tradition of carpet making, and this seems even more the case for the pile saddle cover fragment from Bash-Adar, which is an even finer piece, but from where? The motifs, particularly the horsemen, have struck most viewers as being closest to Achaemenid imperial art from Persepolis, particularly the long friezes that decorate the apadana (see Persepolis Apadana Reliefs). The motif does not match exactly, but the repetition of figures presented in a procession matches the compositional device used at Persepolis. Moreover, the treatment of the tails of the horses, which are tied into a knot, also seems to reference the treatment of horses on the Persepolis reliefs. So too, the star and floral elements can be seen to recall Assyrian and Achaemenid prototypes. However, the newest dating evidence could also suggest a workshop operating during the Seleucid or Graeco-Bactrian periods that was still using older Achaemenid motifs. On the other hand, the solution of how to work the composition of the friezes around the corners of the rectangles has convinced some scholars that the carpet was the product of a tribal workshop rather than an urban one and was perhaps the work of nomadic weavers who were aware of these motifs from the south. This could also be reflected in the use of the Polish cochineal rather than the more common madder root for the red. In either case, the carpet raises some interesting points. If it was the work of an urban workshop from somewhere in the Achaemenid or Seleucid realm, then it must have entered the Sakā community, whose burials are found at Pazyryk, through trade, plunder, or diplomacy. High-quality textiles were certainly an important feature of the trade on the Silk Roads. Xenophon (Cyropaedia 5.5.7; 8.8.16) mentions carpets in the Achaemenid court setting, which might suggest Persian rug workshops. As symbols of status, it would have made sense for a Sakā chieftain to have desired such an object. It is certainly possible that the carpet was even commissioned, which might be the reason that the deer are so prominent, a suitable animal for the steppe regions. The emphasis on the mounted and led horses might have been an Achaemenid motif that worked perfectly well in a nomad setting. It is well known that artists working in the Greek cities of the Black Sea produced pieces on commission for high-ranking Scythians (see Vase with Four Scenes in Repoussé Technique Showing Aspects of Scythian Life, artifact 5). The desire for such a piece could have resulted in it being plundered from a settlement somewhere within the frontier area where settled peoples had reason to fear Sakā incursions. The carpet would have been an expensive item within the house of some elite resident in a city that fell to a Sakā raid and was either captured by the chieftain himself or presented to him after the event as his share of the plunder. The carpet could also have been sent

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Artifacts • Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk north from the Achaemenid, Seleucid, or Graeco-Bactrian courts or from a satrapal court with the intention of bribing the Sakā chieftain to keep his cavalry away from settled areas or as possible partial payment for services rendered as a mercenaries. If it arrived as a payment or gift or was a commissioned piece, then it would seem to have served the owner for some time since it shows wear. That the carpet could have been the product of a Sakā weaving workshop is equally intriguing. The overall high quality of the piece would indicate that the maker was skilled with many years of experience and that there must have been a long tradition of knotted rug making that lies behind it (see Wool Working and Carpet Making). Large-scale sheep herding on the steppes began in earnest in the late 4th millennium BCE, and these were most likely sheep bred for wool rather than meat. Wool sheep appear in the osteological record for the Near East about 3400 BCE and possibly earlier in the middle Volga region. The new breed could have been introduced into the steppe area from either region, though the development of trading connections with the Uruk culture of Mesopotamia that seems to have been the catalyst for the emergence of the Maikop culture of the northern Caucasus might suggest that the Near Eastern source was the stronger. Woven wool first appears as clothing in the archeological record about 3000–2800 BCE. Maikop traders seem to have moved out onto the steppes where their graves have been found among the graves of the local peoples. Some of these graves contain clay loom weights, and clay loom weights have been found in the remains of Maikop settlements, suggesting that these resident aliens were actively weaving the wool on vertical looms on-site from the sheep being raised by the local herders. It has been suggested that these Maikop weavers were turning the raw material into finished, large pieces of woven cloth produced on large, vertical looms as payment to the herders for the raw material, much of which may have been sent back to the Maikop heartland. These big textiles would have been a novelty for a people who could only produce strips of cloth on horizontal looms. If such a scenario represents something of what did happen, then it is reasonable to assume that large-scale weaving of sheep’s wool entered the steppes by the end of the 4th or the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE. Certainly, the nomadic lifestyle can accommodate large-scale weaving as can be demonstrated from the evidence of more contemporary weaving and carpet-making traditions among Central Asian nomadic peoples. However, it is still most common to use the horizontal loom and stitch together strips of finished cloth since the size of the finished piece is determined by how far the weaver can stretch forward from a sitting position. The Pazyryk carpet was most likely made on a vertical loom, which suggests a more sedentary setting, one in which the loom could be fixed in place more permanently. The discovery of the remains of ancient permanent or semipermanent

Artifacts • Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk settlements within the nomadic regions of the steppes has changed the perception of ancient nomadic lifestyle. It now seems clear that some portion of the population was resident in log houses for part of the year in villages and engaged in agricultural work and in manufacturing pottery, metal works, and textiles. Some of the nomad population, the farmers and the artisans, may have resided year-round in such villages. It could well have been in such a Sakā village that the workshop that produced the Pazyryk carpet was located. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, D. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Barber, E. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Deny, W. How to Read Islamic Carpets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Harris, N. Rugs and Carpets of the Orient. London: Hamlyn, 1977. Harvey, J. Traditional Textiles of Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. Hiebert, F. “Pazyryk Chronology and Early Horse Nomads Reconsidered.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 6 (1992): 117–129. Jettmar, K. Art of the Steppes. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1967. Lerner, J. “Some So-called Achaemenid Objects from Pazyryk.” Source: Notes in the History of Art 10, no. 4 (1991): 8–15. Rageth, J. “Radiocarbon Dating of Textiles.” Orientations 35, no. 4 (2004): 57–62. Rudenko, S. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund 1947 (47.100.19))

28 Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch Eastern Germanic First half 5th century CE INTRODUCTION The object shown here is an example of high-value jewelry made for members of the aristocracy that emerged after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. During the 3rd century CE, the east European frontier of the Roman Empire began to experience demographic pressure as the barbarian tribes on the outside pushed to enter the protection of the empire because of forces pushing them from the east. Great forces in the eastern steppes were setting in motion massive migratory movements to the west through the steppe lands that would last well into the early Medieval period. By the late 5th century CE, the barbarian presence in Europe had become so strong that the Western Roman empire disappeared, replaced by a constellation of ever-changing barbarian kingdoms with populations that included the residual populations of the Roman provinces and the newcomers who were ethnically and linguistically different. These barbarians included Germanic peoples, many of whom had long lived just outside the empire’s boundaries, more recently arrived Germanic people, the Goths, and Iranian nomadic groups. The process of fighting and of moving westward had given all these peoples a shared warrior-based structure, with the highest-ranking members forming a warrior aristocracy surrounding a chief or king. One of the privileges of being an aristocrat was access to high-status goods that gave visual testimony to one’s rank, and jewelry served that purpose. Both aristocratic men and women possessed large pieces of well-worked jewelry that announced the wearer’s wealth through the materials used and the high quality of techniques employed. The pieces had practical functions, which 221

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Artifacts • Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch befitted objects made for people who were never secure in their immediate setting. The need to be always able to move made portable wealth that also functioned paramount. This object secured parts of clothing. The bow brooch or fibula should have been part of pair, for which only one is known, which was made for a high-ranking woman and used to secure either the two parts of a dress at the shoulder or to attach a mantle to the lower garment at the shoulders. The two matched brooches would have been joined by a chain. Because the movement across the steppes forced these migrating peoples through the Pontic region of the northern Black Sea, they all became acquainted with the rich polychrome jewelry tradition of the area. The Pontic steppes and the northern coast of the Black Sea had developed a rich hybrid culture beginning in the 6th century BCE as the nomadic Scythians took control of the territory and engaged with the Greek colonists who were simultaneously settling along the north coast of the Black Sea. By the 1st century CE, the Scythians had been replaced by another Iranian nomadic group, the Sarmatians, as the dominant nomadic people, and more than one Sarmatian tribe operated in the region. They continued to patronize the Greek artisans, who were now producing especially for Sarmatian aristocrats local versions of Hellenistic Greek forms influenced also by Greco-Roman developments and Sarmatian artisans who could work in Greek and nomad styles. A key stylistic feature of the jewelry from the Pontic land was polychromies, achieved by ornamenting gold with gemstones, colored glass, and enamel that appears as early as the early 4th century BCE and continued to be a feature of the some of the workshops into the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This work shows not only the influence of the Pontic region but also the influence of late Roman aristocratic taste on the Germanic warrior nobility. The use of polychrome jewelry as a status indicator probably began among the late Roman nobility, and from associations with Germanic warrior nobles, passed into that societal context. These bejeweled objects continued to function as signifiers of rank as well as portable wealth among the Germanic nobility well into the early Medieval period. DESCRIPTION The bow brooch or fibula is a large piece, 16.7 cm long. Silver sheet metal was used to form the headplate, bow, and footplate. The entire surface was covered in gold sheet, attached to the silver by bending it over the edges. Beaded wire of two different sizes was soldered to outline the full edge of the brooch. The artisan also attached with solder other worked gold wires and gold granules with plain gold collars. The jeweler placed round garnets using cabochon settings, probably a Sarmatian technique, on the centers of the head and foot plates and surrounded them symmetrically with more

Artifacts • Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch shaped garnets in cabochon settings. When newly created and worn with its mate, the piece would have made an impression on any viewer. SIGNIFICANCE For a warrior society, which had developed a nomadic sensibility, portable objects made of intrinsically valuable materials that could be easily displayed on the person as signs of status functioned best. This brooch or fibula when accompanied by its mate and the joining chain would have been an impressive ensemble worn by a high-ranking aristocratic woman in the new barbarian societies of Europe. The stylistic similarities in these paired bow brooches found across barbarian Europe indicate that while the actual groups were distinct, they shared an aristocratic culture with a common mode of display found in all of them and, at least initially, tied them to the Late Roman nobility. The fondness for gold set with precious and semiprecious gemstones testifies to the fact that all of the barbarian groups that entered Europe during the final centuries during which the Roman Empire controlled Western Europe and in the centuries following the collapse of Roman power in the West spent time in the Pontic region where this style of jewelry first developed and where they developed a taste for the forms. It was here that the trade networks extending out from the Pontic region joined the area south to India through the Kushan and later Sasanian territory from which came many of the gemstones. Later the European barbarian kingdoms probably established their own trade links through the Byzantine Empire to obtain gemstones. Since the Late Roman and Byzantine imperial courts favored this type of jewelry with precious metal enriched with gemstones, they could provide the raw materials and even the jewelry itself, made as diplomatic gifts and rewards for services rendered by barbarian aristocrats. FURTHER INFORMATION Adams, N. Bright Lights in the Dark Ages: The Thaw Collection of Early Medieval Ornaments. New York; London: The Morgan Library and D Giles Limited, 2014. Brown, K. R., D. Kidd, and C. T. Little, eds. From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period on the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2000. Khrupunov, I., and F.-A. Stylegar, eds. Inter Ambo Maria: Contacts between Scandinavia and the Crimea in the Roman Period. Kristiansand– Simferopol: “DOLYA” Publishing House, 2011. Kramer, E., I. Stoumann, and A. Greg, eds. Kings of the North Sea, AD 250–850. New Castle Tyne: Tyne and Wear Museums, 2000.

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Artifacts • Silver with Gold Sheet Overlay and Garnets Bow Brooch Mordvintseva, V. “Barbarians of the North Pontic Region and Their Contacts with Centres of Antique Civilization from the 3rd Century BCE to the mid-3rd Century CE (According to the Research of the Elite Burials).” In Mobility in Research on the Black Sea Region, A. Rubel, ed., 381–432. Cluj-Napoca: Pontica et Mediterranea VI, 2016. Nees, L. Early Medieval Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pinar, J., E. Padró, and T. Juáez, “New Data on the Role of Mediterranean Metalwork Workshops in Barbarian Aristocratic Culture: Concerning Two Ancient, Scarcely Known Finds from 5th Century Hispania.” Archeologie barbarů 21 (2006): 581–588. Tonkova, M. “Jewellery Fashion of the Western Pontic Colonies in the Hellenistic Times (from the Territory of Bulgaria).” In Honorem Henrieta Todovova, M. Stefanovich and C. Angelova, eds., 279–295. Sofia: Prae, 2007. Treister, M. “Eastern Jewellery in Sarmatian Burials and Eastern Elements in the Jewellery Production of the Northern Pontic Area in the 1st Century AD.” Iranica Antiqua 39 (2004): 295–319. Treister, M. Y. “Further Thoughts about Necklaces with Butterfly-Shaped Pendants from North Pontic Area.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 55/56 (1997/1998): 49–62. Webster, L., and M. Brown, eds. The Transformation of the Roman World AD 400–900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving, 2015 (2015.500.7.5))

29 Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider China Mid- to late 6th century CE Northern Wei (386–534) or Northern Qi (550–577)

INTRODUCTION During the Northern Wei (386–534 CE), the Northern Qi (550–577), the Sui (581–618), and the Tang Dynasties (618–907 CE) in China, it was common practice to bury the dead with grave offerings, a practice with a long history in China. Among the objects quite often placed as grave gifts were ceramic statues. The statues are of humans and animals, and of the animal types, horses and the two-humped Bactrian camels are the two most regularly found. The camels are shown in their role as baggage carriers for merchant caravans. The Bactrian camel as a subject for ceramic grave statues varies in surface treatment in the different dynasties. Some are bisque and have no applied colored glazes, and others are colorfully glazed. The camel can be shown alone and in a somewhat passive pose, or as is the case here, functioning as a beast of burden with a person. The Tang ceramic camels are commonly painted and glazed, often with yellow, green, and brown applied in a manner that allows the colors to blend with one another to form a distinctive style of glazed ceramic known as sancai ware (see Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze and with an Applique of a Steppe Warrior in the Pose of the Parthian Shot, artifact 38). The Tang statues tend to be more complex compositions than their predecessors. The camel, as in this statue, is usually loaded, ready to begin to work, often also carrying people and in many instances presented as responding by the movement of the raised head and open mouth, sometimes appearing ready to start and in others expressing discomfort with the pack. These ceramic grave statues were not expensive to produce and so can be found in even modest burials or in large quantity in the elite burials. The 227

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Artifacts • Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider camels are often shown carrying riders, sometimes groups of musicians, and in other instances, they are accompanied by another figure, the statue of a groom. More often than not, the human figures either riding or attending to the camel have distinctly non-Han Chinese features and are usually identified as westerners, which seems to place the Bactrian camels as elements associated with the West, the world outside of China proper. When the camels are clearly carrying pack loads, it would seem that the idea is to suggest the Silk Road. The camels were the pack animal used by merchants, most commonly Sogdian by origin, who either brought Western goods to the Chinese markets or carried Chinese products to the West to trade. These statues spoke visually of China’s expansive international trade connections that reached a height in the Tang Dynasty. DESCRIPTION The camel shown is 53 cm long and 48 cm tall, which is about the standard size for these grave gifts. The camel is reclining with the four legs tucked underneath the body, either being goaded to rise or about to be allowed to rest and be unburdened. Whatever the situation, the camel’s twisted neck and responsive face indicate a degree of displeasure, not unusual for camels in reality. The representation of the pack shows just how a camel needed to be properly loaded to work most efficiently in a caravan. Over the humps has been placed a protective blanket. A frame consisting of curved slats of wood is attached on either side of the humps to form the foundation for the cargo bags that hang on either side. Balance is essential if the camel is to be able to walk comfortably at a steady pace. On the other hand, the merchant needs to be certain that the camel is carrying the maximum possible if the trip is to be worth the cost of transiting the commodities. The sacks are clearly full, almost to the breaking point, and more goods are on the camel’s back between the two bags and are protected by a covering textile, probably something like a heavy rug. The items that the camel driver will need hang for the outside of the bags, a flask, a knife sheath, and arrow case, and even a rabbit. A small monkey, maybe a pet, plays atop the packs. The driver sits on the load with his knees bent under him and his legs behind. He is dressed in trousers and short jacket and probably wears boots. His head appears covered with a cap. He seems to point forward with his fingers. His costume and his facial features identify him as non-Han Chinese, which is the common portrayal for camel drivers and grooms in Chinese funerary ceramic camel groups. SIGNIFICANCE The ceramic camels represent the most striking portrayals of the animal that made life in much of Central Asia possible and also allowed for the commercial exploitation of the region through the complex network of

Artifacts • Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider trade routes known collectively as the Silk Roads. As early as the 4th century BCE, Bactrian camels are featured on belt buckles, which were part of impressive belts worn by nomads on China’s northern frontier in the 1st millennium BCE. Images of the Bactrian camel can be found among the petroglyphs carved by the nomadic herders in southern Siberia in the 1st millennium CE. Within China proper, the earliest image of a Bactrian camel is a bronze lamp found in the Warring States Chu tomb 2 at Wangshan (475–221 BCE), Jiangling Xian, Hubei Province, and by the time of the Western Wei Dynasty (535–57 CE), they are represented in painted earthen ware as fully laden. The Bactrian camel also appears in the images further West. The twohumped camel is represented on two 9th century BCE Assyrian monuments, the bronze gates of Balawat and the Black Obelisk. There is a Bactrian camel on a gold plaque from the Oxus Treasure, and a contingent of Bactrian camels are shown with one of the groups on the apadana reliefs at Persepolis (see the Persepolis Apadana Reliefs). There are several 5th–4th century BCE Sarmatian metal ornaments from the Filippovka kurgans in the Russian steppes that feature Bactrian camels, either alone or in combat with another camel. In the Annals of the Warring States (475–221 BCE), there is mention of the domestic camels in service at the Zhao, Dai, and Yan courts, and during the Han Dynasty, large herds of camels were maintained in Gansu Province. According to Assyrian sources, Assur-bel-kala (1074–1057 BCE) sent merchants to acquire female Bactrian camels, and Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE) brought back seven Bactrian camels as booty from a campaign. Herodotus refers to camels in the trains of the Persian armies (1.81; 7.88.125), though he is not clear as to whether these are the two-humped Bactrian camels or the one-humped dromedary. The name, Bactrian camel, was first applied to the two-humped camel by Aristotle (Historia animalium 2.1 [498b 9] and [499a 15–17]). Pliny continues the discussion with his description of two different camels, the Bactrian and the Arabian (8.67–68). It is not clear where Aristotle got this name, and the archaeological evidence does not support the notion that the camel originated in the region of Bactria. It is generally agreed that the two-humped camel developed from an earlier form of smaller two-humped camel, the camelus ferus, which had a range extending west from the great bend in the Yellow River through northwest China, Mongolia to central Kazakhstan, and usually at an altitude of 1500–2000 m. This camel is represented in the rock carvings from Chojt-Zenker Cave in Mongolia. It was small, lithe, with slender legs and narrow feet and two low, pointed, cone-shaped humps. There are two competing theories for the origin of the domesticated Bactrian camel. It may have been in the process of capturing Przewalski’s horse foals that ancient horse breeders in Mongolia began to also capture

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Artifacts • Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider camelus ferus calves. These then were raised and in time domesticated to serve as draught and pack animals. From these original domestication sites in Mongolia, the Bactrian camel then spread west. The alternative theory locates the domestication sites in the borderlands between modern Turkmenistan and northeast Iran. The new breed was then dispersed both east and west from this more central region in Eurasia. Whatever the origin location for the new Bactrian camel, there is general agreement that the event occurred sometime late in the 3rd millennium BCE and that the new domesticated camel type was being widely exploited by the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. The rapid speed with which the domesticated two-humped camel became a feature of life in Central and East Asia can be explained by its adaptations to the environments of the regions. There are several types of Bactrian camel, but they share bodies that are stockier and legs that are shorter than their dromedary cousins. The coat is also darker and thicker, which allows them to operate comfortably in cold and snowy conditions. They stand, on average, 1.5–2.4 m and are 1.68–1.63  m long with an average weight for males of 460 kg. The forward hump is located over the withers and the back hump over the loins. Both humps store fat. They have a life expectancy of 30–40 years and an active work life that begins about 4 years and continues to about 25. They have a stoic and passive personality and, if handled properly, will work steadily. They can drink brackish water, though they prefer clean water and can subsist on plants that most other animals refuse. Though best when watered every 24 hours, they can be trained to go without water for longer periods, though when such is required, they do need downtime for recovery. They were the perfect animal for use in trading caravans. They can carry loads of up to 130 kg over long distances and average 50 km a day. For short single hops, they can carry loads of 270 kg. They can adjust to variations in climate. Though most comfortable in colder conditions, they can tolerate heat for short periods. They could cross the Central Asian mountains, deserts, and steppes during the winter months when the rivers froze making movements somewhat easier, and the deserts were more comfortable for human travel. This meant that caravan traffic in and out of China’s western gate and movement of goods throughout much of the Central Asian region were winter business. During the summers, the camels were moved to the steppes to graze and rest. There are records of large caravans. The history of the Zhou Dynasty (557–581 CE) composed about 629 CE, before the reunification of China under the Sui, describes a caravan of six hundred camels carrying 10,000 bolts of polychrome silk and accompanied by 240 merchants, all going to Wuwei in Gansu. Strabo (11.5.8) describes large caravans arranged by Armenian and Median middlemen traveling from India north to the steppes carrying gemstones among other goods, which

Artifacts • Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider then probably needed to pay for protection to the Sarmatians of the Aorsi tribe, to travel safely in the southern steppes. Far more common were probably small caravans of only a few men and animals, and this seems to be what is represented in the tomb ceramics where a statue grouping usually consists of a single camel and a groom, always represented as non-Chinese, probably Central Asian. The Bactrian camels’ value to the settled communities of China and Central Asia lay in their role as beasts of burden, but for the nomads who probably first domesticated them and then included them in the livestock holdings, they supplied much more than just service as pack animals. They provide a rich milk that can also be used to make a kind of yogurt and cheese. The hair from the undercoat can be processed into yarn and woven into warm clothing, and the hair can also be plied into rope. The hide can be used for a variety of fine leather crafts, and the meat is good for eating. The domestication of the Bactrian camel allowed for the development of long-distance trade throughout the Central Asian region. The camels made it possible to move much larger quantities of finished and raw Chinese goods into the Western markets and to bring back to China the finished and raw commodities of the West. However, the Bactrian camel also allowed the nomadic peoples of the steppe areas to expand their areas of operation and move into the much more difficult environments of the Altai and Tian Shan Mountains. FURTHER INFORMATION Aruz, J., A. Farkas, A. Alekseev, and E. Korolkova, eds. The Golden Deer of Russia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. Bulliet, R. The Camel and the Wheel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Dorman, A. E. “The Camel in Health and Disease: 2. Aspects of the Husbandry and Management of the Genus Camelus.” British Veterinary Journal 140, no. 6 (1984): 616–633. Hansen, V. Silk Road: A  New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hong Kong Museum of Art and Overseas Exhibition Department, Cultural Bureau of Shaanxi. Treasures of Chang’an, Capital of the Silk Road. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1993. Knauer, E. The Camel’s Load in Life and Death: Iconography and Ideology of Pottery Figurines from Han to Tang and Their Relevance to Trade along the Silk Routes. Zurich: Akanthus Crescens, 1998. Martynov, A. The Ancient Art of Northern Asia. Translated by D. and E. Shimkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

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Artifacts • Ceramic Bactrian Camel with Rider Potts, D. “Bactrian Camels and Bactrian Dromedary Hybrids.” Silk Road Foundation Newsletter 3, no. 1 (2005): 49–58. http://www.silkroadfoun dation.org/newsletter/vol3num1/7_bactrian.php Robinson, A. E. “The Camel in Antiquity.” Sudan Notes and Records 19, no. 1 (1936): 47–69. So, J. F., and E. Bunker. Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier. Washington, D.C.: Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund (1985.73))

30 Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession of HorseDrawn Chariots China, Jiaxiang District, Shandong ca. 100 CE (Eastern Han Dynasty) INTRODUCTION The images shown here represent the spread of the major technological invention of the Bronze Age, the chariot. The chariot first appeared in the western steppes, perhaps a natural line of development from the domestication of the horse and the introduction of the wheeled cart that were essential to the movement of peoples out onto the steppes and the formation of nomad society. The earliest archaeological evidence for the chariot is from the walled Sintashta sites of the Ural-Tobal steppes, dated to between 2100 and 1800 BCE. These earliest chariots were designed for speed with two wheels of spoke type and evidencing fine carpentry skills and bentwood technology. The cars consisted of few wooden struts, keeping the weight to a minimum. These were powerful engines of war, and the defensive nature of the Sintashta sites indicates that war was a feature of steppe life. However, they may have also functioned in funerary rites since they were interred in tombs. Clearly the chariot was a sign of status, perhaps signifying a political position within the group, and perhaps designating some larger, pan-group associations with other nomadic units in the region. It eventually appeared as the subject matter in pictographs from the mountains of the edge of the eastern steppes. It could also have an early association with gods of the sun, since chariots play this role in Indo-Europeans’ religions (Surya in India and Mithras in the Vedas and the Avesta and Helios in the West). These two images represent the wide and rapid spread of the chariot technology to both the east and the west. The chariot had entered China by the 235

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13th century BCE, during the Shang Dynasty, and probably was introduced via the northern border regions. The chariot was already in use in the ancient Near East by about 2000 BCE and played an important role in the development of Middle Bronze Age siege warfare by serving to patrol areas under siege and block easy access. It is possible that the light, horsedrawn chariot with spoked wheels was invented independently in the Near East, but the evidence does suggest that it arrived on the scene at the same time as the appearance of IndoEuropean speakers who probably brought it with them in their migration down from the Caucasus region where the Sintashta culture must have been known. Terracotta krater with painted chariot decoration. Argolid, Greece, 1375–1350 BCE (Late Helladic IIIA:1). (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The By the time that the two Cesnola Collection, Purchased by Subscription, 1874–76 (74.51.964)) objects shown were produced, the chariot had become a regular feature of elite military culture in both China and in the West. The chariot may well have ceased to function for military purposes in the Aegean by the time that the krater was made and painted in the Late Bronze Age, and the same is very likely true for the procession of notables in chariots on the Chinese frieze fragment from the Han Dynasty. However, the chariot must have conveyed meanings of prestige, status, and wealth. Both objects have funerary associations, suggesting that the parade of elites was tied to the proper rites accorded a deceased member of the Mycenaean or Han Chinese aristocracy. DESCRIPTION The sculpted lintel is from the aristocratic family tomb of the Han Dynasty. The artist presents chariots in procession moving through a forested landscape inhabited by animals. There is an upper border of swirling clouds,

Artifacts • Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession probably intended to suggest the heaven or the remote land of immortals. The relief subject and carving resemble those known from the Eastern Han Wu family shrines. The large terracotta vase or krater was decorated with a scene of chariots in procession. These were common ceramic objects made in the workshops of the Argolid and traded to the south and east, particularly to Cyprus, where many have been found. These were very likely containers for mixing water with wine, and the wine may have been more important in the trade than the painted vases themselves. However, the scene of chariots in a line was quite popular and formed a subgroup of Mycenaean vase painting. It has been suggested that the cultural function for these vases was in funerary rituals, in which they may have been containers holding the remains of the deceased who can be assumed to be somehow represented in one of the chariots. SIGNIFICANCE All the evidence indicates that the chariot was created by western steppe people. It was a development from the cart that probably arrived in the western Pontic steppe region in the 4th millennium with the emergence of the Maikop culture in the nearby Caucasus. The invention of the wheel for transport, which may have developed out of the potter’s wheel, appeared simultaneously in several areas of western Eurasia about 3600 BCE. Carts required a complex system of load bearing and moving parts that needed to be properly designed to work together. Carpenter’s skills were those that had to be honed to create wagons since the elements had to be planed and chiseled to operate. Around 3000 BCE, wagons began to appear in kurgans erected in southwestern Russia and Ukraine. On the steppes, the wagons allowed for the movement of herding communities away for their earlier homes in the river valleys that abutted the fringes of the grasslands and onto the steppes proper. The wagons could carry the heavy and bulky items, food, water, and shelter, which were necessary to permit herders to live completely on the grasslands. In the early 3rd millennium, a climatic cooling on the western steppes brought increased droughts that caused the forests to retreat, the marshlands to dwindle, and the grasslands to expand, which would have encouraged this new lifestyle that allowed for greater ease in finding food for the herds of cattle and sheep. The first evidence for the use of chariot has been found in a series of burials at the site of Sintashta. The burials were located in five funerary complexes outside of the settlement proper. One of the complexes consisted of forty rectangular pit burials with no evidence of kurgans above. The earliest remains of chariots were found in seven of these pit burials dated to 2100–1800 BCE. The site to which the funerary complexes belong was a fortified compound designed with defense as a primary concern, and it is one of several found in the area. Inside the houses is evidence for

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Artifacts • Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession metallurgical activity. These were metallurgical industrial centers exploiting the region’s copper sources, and they were probably in trade contact with the urban area of Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex to the south and the east. The evidence from other burials elsewhere in the area indicates that this was a time of heighted conflict, real warfare rather than just raiding, which resulted in large-scale forces being fielded. It is in this setting that new kinds of weaponry were needed and the chariot was probably born. From all the sites associated with Sintashta, a total of sixteen graves have been excavated that show evidence of a chariot. The wheels of the chariots were placed into special slots dug into the grave floors. Even though the wheels themselves have rotted away, they have left a stain in the slot, which recorded the impression of spoked wheels of bentwood with diameters of between 1 and 1.2 m and ten to twelve square-sectioned spokes. Chariots are two-wheeled vehicles designed to carry one or more persons on a platform arranged above or attached to the axle. For these chariots, the axles must have been placed beneath the platform, though neither the axle nor the platform survives. There is no uniformity to the distance between the two wheels, which ranges from 1.2 to 1.5 m. This would have made the chariot platform large enough to carry two people. Later chariots as known from Egypt and the Near East were employed as mobile perches for archers that necessitated a two-person crew, but these early steppe chariots probably were used by warriors whose weapon of choice was the javelin. If such was the case, then the chariot needed only to accommodate one individual who could drive with one hand and hurl the javelin with the other. Moreover, the chariot could carry several javelins. Along with the chariot, a new type of bridle cheek piece was invented, designed to place more stress on the corners of the horse’s mouth and thereby prompt a faster response from the horse when the driver pulled the reins on the opposite side, allowing for more precise maneuvers. All the buried chariots were interred with weapons reinforcing their role as tools of war. A specific set of circumstances led to the invention of the chariot. As the wealth of certain settled communities grew from their exploitation of and trade in the copper resources, they became objects of aggression and needed to protect themselves as well as engage in attacks on others. This was the probable catalyst for the creation of the new war machine. However, only a few of the graves contain them, which means they were also status objects. They required skilled craftsmen to make and as such automatically were expensive and in limited supply. Moreover, handling them effectively required training and practice. The chariot placed the driver physically above those on foot and advertised his athletic skill as well as his status and wealth. The material riches that accompany the individuals buried with chariots testify to their social significance within these steppe

Artifacts • Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession communities. They must have been the most elite warriors, the leaders of the communities, whose positions allowed for them to be sequestered with much wealth of intrinsic value and also highly useful items, the products of skilled labor, like chariots and state-of-the-art weaponry and horses sacrificed at the time of the funerary rituals. The chariot spread across the steppes to the east and west and south to become an essential piece of Middle Bronze Age military equipment in the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and eventually China. It also carried a status component. In the early stories of the Indo-European cultures that emerge in Central Asia and the Aegean, the Avesta and the Rig Veda, and the Iliad of Homer, the chariot plays a fundamental role, often associated with specific deities or as an essential feature of the heroic panoply, including in funerary rituals. It represents one of the greatest of the technological inventions to occur in the steppes and then to successfully penetrate to all corners of the Eurasian continent, indicating just how tied together the trade and cultural networks were already by the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. By the time that both these images of chariots were made, the vehicle was no longer used for combat. The Mycenaeans were, no doubt, aware of how chariots functioned in full-scale battles like those of the New Kingdom Egyptians and the Hittites in which large numbers of chariots were employed. The Mycenaeans appear to have fought with chariots early on but may have changed to other tactics, retiring the chariot to use as a transport vehicle. This is how the Iliad presents them, though it was composed at least four centuries later. Similarly, the Chinese used the chariot as a major fighting vehicle in the 1st millennium BCE, but by the time of the Han Dynasty, it had become a status symbol, an important element to distinguish rank. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, D. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Baumer, C. The History of Central Asia. Vol. 1: The Age of the Steppe Warriors. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Frachetti, M. Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Littauer, M. A. “The Military Use of the Chariot in the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age.” American Journal of Archaeology 76, no. 2 (1972): 145–157. Moorey, P. R. S. “The Emergence of the Light, Horse-Drawn Chariot in the Near East c. 2000–1500 B.C.” World Archaeology 18, no. 2 (1986): 196–215.

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Artifacts • Stone Frieze Fragment Showing Procession Rawson, J. “China and the Steppe: Reception and Resistance.” Antiquity 91, no. 356 (2017): 375–388. Shaughnessy, E. “Historical Perspective on the Introduction of the Chariot into China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48, no. 1 (1988): 189–237. Wu Hsiao-yu. Chariots in Early China, Origins, Cultural Interaction and Identity. Oxford: BAR International Series, 2013.

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(Album/British Library/Alamy Stock Photo)

31 Ashoka Pillar Lauriya Nandangarh, India Mauryan, ca. 255–235 BCE

INTRODUCTION The pillar shown here was one of several commissioned by Emperor Ashoka (ca. 272 (268)–235 BCE), the third ruler of the Mauryan Dynasty of northern India. In the 13th year of his reign, Ashoka battled with the kingdom of Kalinga (Orissa) on the east coast, the last remaining independent kingdom in the region not under Mauryan suzerainty. The war was vicious, and the victory came at a high cost of life, particularly to the Kalingans, which left Ashoka with great remorse. It led him to promulgate a series of edicts recorded on rock faces and on great pillars erected throughout the empire in which he expounded his concept of Dhamma (Prakrit form of the Sanskrit word Dharma) that would guide his governance and become a new element in political and social theory. In its widest meaning, the Dhamma for Ashoka meant ruling with an awareness of universal law or righteousness. Within this construct, Ashoka emphasized tolerance of human, social, and religious diversity within the realms that he governed along with humane consideration of slaves and servants, respect for authority, and generosity toward family, friends, and even acquaintances, a concern for all living beings and an opposition to the taking of life. Because Ashoka formally converted to Buddhism following the war with Kalinga, it is sometimes assumed that the edicts were a product of that conversion and reflect his Buddhist beliefs. However, only a small portion of the corpus of inscriptions seems to describe Ashoka’s personal engagement with Buddhism as a lay convert. In these he does address himself to aspects of the faith directly. More abundant are the inscriptions that were intended as governing edicts to be proclaimed among his subjects. In these he not only 243

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Artifacts • Ashoka Pillar declares his adherence to Buddhism but also seems to promote the concept of Dhamma not as something to be gained through piety brought about by religious belief but rather as an ethic by which to govern and thereby reduce conflict and intolerance within the governed. However, the Buddhist quality to these expressions of the Dhamma cannot be ignored. The edicts themselves have been categorized into three types, major and minor rock inscriptions and the pillar inscriptions, of which the image shown is one example. The inscriptions on rock faces began to appear early in Ashoka’s reign. The pillar or column inscriptions are products of his later years. Rock face inscriptions were placed throughout the empire, but, for the most part, the inscribed pillars were set within the limited area of the Ganges Plain, the heartland of the empire. The logistics involved in erecting these probably dictated their limited placement. They are all carved from sandstone quarried at Chunar near Varanasi (Benares). There is archaeological evidence for the process. Rectangular blocks were first removed from the parent stone and then were shaped into cylinders using chisels. These cylinders were then rolled down the slopes of the quarry and moved to the banks of the Ganges for transport by river to their respective sites. The capitals were probably also roughed out at the quarry and then given final form on-site before being placed atop the column shaft. DESCRIPTION The monument at Lauriya Nandangarh is considered the best surviving standing example of Ashoka’s pillar edicts. The column and its capital with lion statue were carved from sandstone. While each of the columns has its own features, they share in common that they are monolithic shafts. Most are like this one, tapering from base to top. They vary in height from 12 to 14 m and from 1 to 1.25 in diameters at the base. This one is 12 m. The column bases were buried to a depth of 3 m, and where the soil is alluvial deposition, they rest on a square stone slab. In other cases, the base can sit directly on the bare rock or on a stone fill. The lower portion of the shafts was left untrimmed. The upper portion of the shaft was polished to a smooth, shiny, mirror-like finish known as Mauryan polish. The polish, the lotus bell-shaped capitals, and the animal statues may well owe their origins to émigré Achaemenid court sculptors who had fled to northern India following Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire. Lauriya Nandangarh was located on the old trade route that linked the eastern Gangetic Plain to western Asia. These elements resemble those known from Persepolis. The capital is attached to the column by means of a copper bolt that fits into the shaft and the capital equally. The lowest section of the capital was bell-shaped, some squatter than others. Atop the bell sits a round abacus with some type of sculpted decoration, in this case geese. The main feature of the capital rests on top of the abacus, an animal sculpture,

Artifacts • Ashoka Pillar most commonly a seated lion. However, there are also examples of a bull; an elephant; a grouping of four addorsed, seated lions; and possibly one horse known only from the image of a column on a relief. There survives evidence for fifteen columns, of which ten have Ashokan inscriptions. More will probably appear with increased archaeological work in the region. Most of the columns have been found near Buddhist pilgrimage sites (Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Sravasti), which would reinforce the notion of their Buddhist context. The inscription of six edicts on the column from Lauriya Nandangarh, carved over the polished surface, follows a formula found on several of the columns. It speaks of morality and defines sins; provides categories of officials; lists animals, birds, and fish that need to be conserved; warns against the needless destruction of forests; and promotes the honoring of all sects. The Ashokan inscriptions represent the largest body of early writings so far found in ancient India. The rock-faced inscriptions were placed widely around the empire, which under Ashoka spread from the Gangetic valley northwest to the Indus Valley and the southeast portion of Afghanistan and east to Kashmir, the southern portion of the Oxus-Indus stretch of Central Asia. The southern extent, including the east and west coasts of the subcontinent, reached to Karnataka where Ashokan edicts have been found at Sannathi. This was a sizeable territorial empire by ancient standards, which incorporated several different peoples with distinctly different cultural histories, religions, and languages. For the edicts in the Ganges Plain and south, the inscriptions are in the vernacular Magadha, a form of Prakrit, one of the ancient Indian languages, and are written using Brāhmi script. On the other hand, in the northwestern areas of the Oxus-Indus stretch, the edicts are written in Aramaic or Greek scripts in those respective languages or are in Prakrit but written in Kharoṣṭhī, a script developed from Aramaic script. The mix of forms for the inscriptions in the Oxus-Indus region reflects the historical, cultural, and demographic realities of that area of the empire. SIGNIFICANCE Pillars are recorded by both Faxian (400 CE) and Xuanzang (629–645 CE), the Buddhist pilgrims who traveled from China to India and left a record of their travels (see Travelers, Early). The fact they noted the columns is perhaps an indication of how Ashoka had entered into Buddhist legend. He was seen as a Buddhist monarch and a wise ruler who sought to spread the Dhamma and Buddhism itself. He became in the Buddhist tradition a chakkavatii (chakravartin), a universal monarch who sees that the wheel of the law is properly turned. This concept was probably joined to an older notion of the pillar as the manifestation of the World Axis, which had already taken form in earlier Vedic belief systems.

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Artifacts • Ashoka Pillar There can be no doubt that Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism was followed by actions in which the Buddhist sensibilities informed his governing policies. The minor rock edicts that urge the non-killing of animals (III, IV, IX) along with the animal sculptures that top the pillars reflect his growing concern with the well-being of all creatures, not just humans. He also moved to spread Buddhism and became a patron of the faith. This would be a pattern by which Buddhism would spread beyond the boundaries of northern India and enter in Central Asia and eventually China, Korea, and Japan. By means of converting or at least engaging local rulers in a positive manner, Buddhist missionaries found powerful patrons who allowed the faith to flourish up until the mid-8th century CE. Moreover, Ashoka does seem to have taken a more hands-on approach to the internal fissures of the faith. It was in his capital of Pataliputra that the Buddhist sangha held the Third Buddhist Council at which the older Therāvada sect formally separated itself from the other new sects and announced itself as the true teaching. Whether Ashoka supported this view, as is sometimes claimed, is not clear from the surviving sources, and the inscriptions make no mention of it. However, one inscription does speak of the need to banish dissenting monks and nuns from the community. The patronage of the most powerful monarch of the day gave an impetus to the spread and the development of Buddhism and assisted it in widening its expansion. Ashoka’s conversion was, no doubt, motivated by his own personal experiences. His inscriptions would seem to attest to this fact, but the context of social realities of the empire that he had to govern should not be ignored as also playing a major role, not in the least making him see the potential of Buddhism as an aid for good governance. The Mauryan Dynasty came to power in the late 4th century BCE in the wake of the power vacuum that emerged with the death of Alexander the Great. Alexander’s march into Central Asia and in the Oxus-Indus stretch had completely upset the preexisting structure. The area had been under Achaemenid rule, and the system seems to have been efficient enough so that Alexander and his successor, Seleukos I Nikator, left much of the administrative apparatus in place. But Alexander and Seleukos did represent a change. Unlike the Achaemenid rulers of the previous century, these were men of action, skilled generals and warriors, who resurrected a sense of extraordinary personal achievement that had not been witnessed in Central Asia since the late 6th century when Cyrus the Great forged the Achaemenid Empire. Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the dynasty, may have even met Alexander during his youth. Certainly, he seems to have been emboldened to establish himself and his family by active warfare, which saw him overthrow the kings of the local Nanda kingdom in the Ganges Valley and then move west to battle with Seleukos, from whom he would wrest southern Afghanistan and Indus

Artifacts • Ashoka Pillar Valley and move into the Oxus-Indus stretch. The next two rulers would continue the expansion of the empire until it held a massive territory with an equally impressive variety of peoples and cultures. It was an empire, like that of the earlier Achaemenids and contemporary Seleucids, and was to be the prototype for all the successive empires of Central Asia, a heterogeneous mixture of peoples with quite different cultural histories; levels of technological, economic, and social development; religious beliefs and practices; and languages. To govern these empires, rulers needed to find the right tools. Already in Chandragupta’s time, there is evidence for a massive work outlining the best ways in which to govern so that a kingdom is prosperous and its people content under the rule. The work, the Arthashastra, is attributed to Chandragupta’s chief minister, Kautilya. The study of good governance was clearly seen to be of value. There is good reason for this concern. The world that Mauryan emperors controlled was in the process of massive internal change. While the wealth of the realm depended on agriculture and good care of the land and the water resources, this agricultural base now supported major urban centers that were found not only in the Gangetic Plain but also in the Indus-Oxus stretch. These cities were home to an emerging urban population, people who made their living by providing commodities and services among which were artisans, merchants, long-distance traders, and religious personnel like monks and nuns. Coinage had become much more important in India during this period as more and more transactions were paid for with currency, including salaries for certain government officials. The promulgation of the Ashoka’s edicts probably reflects this new society. They were placed where people were likely to be or to be headed, and the practice must have been for them to be read aloud for the benefit of all, since literacy was still not widespread in 3rd century BCE India. The expansion of the economic system was certainly one of the social forces affecting the developments of another, equally important social change: the spread of competing religions. The urban spaces with the mixture of peoples and the anonymity that must have been found within them offered a perfect setting for religions that challenged the older, traditional Vedic religion of India that had come into being much earlier, during and following the upheavals of the Indo-Aryan invasions of the Bronze Age. The new faiths of Buddhism and Jainism offered an escape from the confines of the caste system and had particular appeal to the emerging merchant and commercial groups. These were often families who had money but were restricted by caste affiliation. The tolerance for diversity preached by Buddhism and the nonviolence adhered to by Jains offered a means of living in the tight spaces and heterogeneous human settings found in this urban environment. Ashoka was pulling on valuable religious messages for

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Artifacts • Ashoka Pillar guiding his subjects in how to live together and prosper in this changing environment. This too would be an important legacy for his successors, who would rule the Oxus-Indus region over the coming centuries. FURTHER INFORMATION Allchin, F. F. “Mauryan Architecture and Art.” In The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, F. R. Allchin, ed., 222–273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Allchin, F. F. “The Mauryan State and Empire.” In The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, F. R. Allchin, ed., 187–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Chakrabarti, D. K. Archaeological Geography of the Ganga Plain: The Lower and Middle Ganga. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Chakrabarti, D. K. India: An Archaeological History, Paleolithic Beginnings to Early Historic Foundations. 2nd edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Huntington, S. The Art of Ancient India, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. New York; Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1985. Kautilya. The Arthashastra. Translated and edited by L. N. Rangarajan. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992. Singh, A. K. “Ashoka’s Perception of Nature and Man: A Study in Art and Attitude.” Proceedings of the Indian Congress, 2004 65 (2004): 131–138. Thapar, R. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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(India Picture/Alamy Stock Photo)

32 Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King, Kanishka I Mathura Museum 2nd century CE INTRODUCTION It is most common to identify the Kushans as an Iranian-speaking nomadic people of Indo-Iranian origin who entered the Central Asian story in the 2nd century BCE. The Kushan Dynasty emerged from the people known in the Chinese sources as the Yuezhi who had conquered Bactria in the 2nd century BCE. The Yuezhi are recorded in Chinese sources from the 2nd century BCE and are described as nomadic herders moving through the northwest Gansu corridor region between Dunhuang and Qilian Mountains along the southeast fringe of the Gobi Desert. Sometime about 165 BCE, they were forced out of their territory and driven westward by the power of the nomadic Xiongnu. The Yuezhi split into two groups, one settling in the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau. This group came to be known as the Great Yuezhi in the Chinese sources. The second group, the Lesser Yuezhi in the Chinese writings, headed west and, by about 135 BCE, entered and conquered Bactria and absorbed the Greek culture in the region. It is as a result of this merging of the Yuezhi with the Greeks, the former adopted the Greek alphabet and possibly also the Middle-Iranian language of the area, that a new people emerged. The Yuezhi do not appear as a unified force until a century later when about 35 BCE, Kujula Kadaphises, the chief of one group, brought the four other Yuezhi units under his control and gave his group’s name to the new entity, the Kushan nation. The Chinese sources describe the Yuezhi as having red hair and blue eyes, and the portraits of the Kushan rulers that appear on the coinage suggest a Caucasoid people. However, it cannot be ruled out that among the Yuezhi, there may well have been people of Mongoloid extraction.

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Artifacts • Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King By the end of the 1st century CE, the Kushan Empire controlled a territory that extended from Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan south to northern India and the Gangetic Plain. Within their orbits coexisted three strongly different cultural traditions: the Indian, the Iranian, and the Greek. Kushan rulers were adept at using the different cultural idioms for their purposes and often made the three work together on a single project. The chronology of Kushan rulers is not yet agreed upon, and so exact dates for monuments identified only by the rulers’ names do not have universally recognized building dates. During his reign, Vima II Kadaphises established a dynastic sanctuary at Mat outside the southern capital at Mathura, and his son Kanishka I built a dynastic sanctuary at Surkh Kotal (Chashma-I Shir or Sar-I Chashma, modern Afghanistan). An inscription at the site written in the Kushan language and using Greek cursive letters recounts that this acropolis was the Kanishka-Nikator sanctuary—the bagolaggo, a Bactrian term meaning place of the gods. This was the ancient region of Baghlān, documented in both Chinese and Arabic sources. With the exception of the massive complex of Surkh Kotal, nothing else of monumental character from the Kushan period has been found in the area that suggests that the construction of the monument must have been a major investment from the royal treasury and perhaps signifies the significance of the complex. The sanctuary at Mat consisted of large rectangular plinth. At one end stood a cylindrical structure that may have been the royal shrine, following a formal design known elsewhere in India of round sanctuaries placed atop rectangular platforms. The whole was approached by a ramp, and the complex was adorned with images of Kushan rulers including Kanishka, Vima Kadaphises, and probably Huvishka. The design did not aim for drama but probably stressed symbolic associations of the parts. The sanctuary at Surkh Kotal was a symmetrically aligned construction consisting of the six terraces cut into a hillside that rose 55 m or over 160 feet from the valley floor terminating in a top terrace that held the cult area. A  brick and cut stone stairway ran up the center of the complex to end at the temple and linked the terraces to one another. The cult space was set off with a major temple building set within a U-shaped courtyard defined by walls on the south, west, and north sides, allowing the temple to open out to the valley below and to be the visual focus of the terraces that led up to it. Within the sanctuary were numerous statues, including the image of the ruling king, his ancestors, gods, and a central cult statue. The statue of a ruler was found together with two other statues on the upper terrace in the corridor formed between the outer walls and the temple proper. Other statues of stucco stood in niches in the complex. The Surkh Kotal sanctuary was clearly placed in the neighborhood of the northern Kushan capital at Kapisa (Begram), Kanishka’s royal city. Surkh

Artifacts • Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King Kotal must have functioned for very specific ceremonies and festivals when the royal court abandoned the capital and decamped in the more remote site to engage in some type of dynastic rituals, which featured processions up the stairs and activities on the terraces. Portraits of rulers have been found at both sanctuaries. Though quite different in architectural formats, the sanctuaries must have functioned in a similar manner to stress royal lineage connections from one Kushan ruler to another and the dynasty’s divine associations, and to provide a place for rituals to assure the continued well-being of the dynasty. DESCRIPTION The statue shown here comes from the dynastic sanctuary at Mat outside of the Kushan capital at Mathura and has an inscription identifying the figure as Kanishka I. A similar statue was found at Surkh Kotal though without inscription. Both statues are more relief than sculpture in the round and were intended to be viewed only from the front. They have splayed feet, placing emphasis on the middle of the figure, and the presentations are in a hieratic manner with the lost heads probably facing forwards and the bodies arranged in a more or less bilaterally symmetrical manner. Both were painted, but little pigment remains. The artist for the Mat statue placed much attention on the mace and the great sword that the king holds which is framed by his long and open caftan, suggesting that these items carried important symbolic meanings. Other than the weapons, the artist does not stress the costume elements other than to represent a modestly decorated tunic and trousers under the caftan. The sculptor for the Surkh Kotal statue focused on costume details, portraying an elegantly clad male figure wearing a heavy caftan, over an ornately worked tunic with two vertical bands of pearls that form a rinceau vine pattern worn over blousing shalwars that tuck into the boots. There is no emphasis on the weapons in the Surkh Kotal statue. The difference in treatments might suggest that the nature of the rituals at the two sanctuaries was somewhat different in terms of what they stressed. Moreover, the design features of the two sanctuaries were different. The architect for the Mat sanctuary worked in an Indian idiom for the structural elements and avoided the theatrical qualities found at Surkh Kotal. Surkh Kotal was constructed by a Greek architect, Palamedes, who used Greek as well as Iranian forms to create a dramatically arranged composition. The dress for both statues, while different in details, is similar enough to suggest that it represents some type of formal court attire. Kanishka used similar representations on some of his coinage, and it was also found on one of the obverse types for his predecessor, Vima II Kadphises. The dress with its trousers and long caftan over a tunic must be intended to recall the nomadic costume of the Yuezhi or suggest the more general Central

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Artifacts • Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King Asian nomadic male dress. It continued to be worn into the Sasanian period from which time two surviving riding caftans or topcoats have survived (see Adult Man’s Caftan, artifact 4). It was clearly intended to stand in contrast to the Greek-style dress of some of the unbaked clay statues that decorated portions of the sanctuary at Surkh Kotal. The rulers of this culturally diverse empire with its strong ties to Greek, Iranian, and Indian sedentary civilizations made certain that they appeared in garb that referenced their nomadic heritage. SIGNIFICANCE It was most likely under Kanishka’s rule that the Kushan Empire reached its greatest extent, and the sanctuaries at Surkh Kotal and Mat were established as a means of honoring the dynasty that had brought the empire to this point. These were both dynastic sanctuaries in which the images of the rulers must have been interspersed with divine images, though the latter have not survived in good-enough condition to be recognized with any certainty. What Kanishka and probably his father, Vima II Kadphises, established in Kushan territory was not new. The specifics of the two sanctuaries are distinct and are a product of the specific needs and available resources of the Kushan kings, but the idea of creating such grand visual statements of dynastic authority for rulers appears much earlier in Central Asia. There is no agreement that anything from the architectural and sculptural output of the Achaemenid period can identified as a prototype for what is constructed at Surkh Kotal and Mat, but the Greek king Antiochus III (r. 223–187 BCE) introduced the concept into the emerging Seleucid kingdom that came into being after the disintegration of Alexander the Great’s empire. He included his wife, Laodice, as a member of the dynastic cult. These earliest dynastic shrines do not survive and are known primarily from inscriptions, but they must have been a prevalent feature throughout the Seleucid kingdom. The Parthian rulers of the Arsacid Dynasty saw fit to develop the concept in the great palace constructions at Old Nisa where both architectural and sculptural fragments of the dynastic sanctuary survive. Similar shrines within royal compounds are known at a number of sites that served as residences for vassal kings to the Arsacids. At Khalchayan in northern Bactria, a local dynast under Kushan control built a grand reception hall decorated with life-size figural sculpture in the late 1st century BCE. Another dynastic sanctuary, perhaps honoring a local Iranian dynasty within the sphere of Parthian hegemony, appears at Shami, which, like Surkh Kotal, mixed art styles, in this case Greek (Hellenistic) and Iranian sculptural forms. The most significant find, an over-life-sized bronze statue, presents a male ­figure in a frontal pose wearing Parthian dress, trousers and a short jacket or ­kaftan. At Toprak Kala in Khorezm, in the delta of the Amu Darya or the

Artifacts • Lower Half of a Portrait of a Kushan King ancient Oxus River south of the Aral Sea, a member of the local ruling dynasty, which remained independent of the Parthians, erected a large hall within the palace and decorated it with polychrome stucco statues, very likely ancestral images of the dynasty. The independent trading city of Hatra (93 miles southwest of Mosul) was ruled by an Arab aristocracy, and in the region of the Parthian-style palace were found a large group of statues of local princes (probably ancestors) and gods. These statues show the same mixing of style, Greek, Roman, Iranian, and even Indian. The pose of some of the figures resembles the splay-footed position of the Kanishka portraits from Surkh Kotal and Mat, and the regal dress also resembles that worn by Kanishka. The most impressive of these forerunners to Kushan dynastic sanctuaries were the hierothēsia (hierothēsion) built by the ruler of the small kingdom of Commagene in the highlands of southeastern Anatolia, Antiochus I Theos (r. 69–36 BCE). While inscriptions record that several were constructed throughout the kingdom, the remains of one at Nemrud Dağ still survive. Here the king ordered colossal statues that mix Greek and Iranian styles to intentionally refer to the Macedonian and Persian origins that the dynasty claimed. The practice of constructing such dynastic sanctuaries continued into the Sasanian period but with some important changes. The new dynastic shrines were much less ostentatious, focused on the sacred fire and were devoid of cult statues. None of the previous shrines were allowed to continue, and local vassal rulers were not permitted to erect such dynastic sanctuaries. In all cases, these dynastic sanctuaries from their Seleucid beginnings until the Sasanian finish were intended to serve as vehicles for celebrating the ruling dynasty and at the same time bind together the divergent peoples of the empire or the kingdom. During their most expansive period under the Parthian and Kushan rulers, the various artistic styles used to render the images, and the clothing draped on the rulers provided visual clues about the nature of the cultural forces that were recognized as being fundamental to the success of the dynasty. FURTHER INFORMATION Canepa, M. “Dynastic Sanctuaries and the Transformation of Iranian Kingship between Alexander and Islam.” In Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis, S. Babaie and T. Grigor, eds., 65–118. London: I. B. Taurus, 2015. Colledge, M. Parthian Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Rosenfeld, J. The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1993.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund (1962.150))

33 Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting Iran Sassanian, 6th–7th centuries CE INTRODUCTION From the 3rd century CE until the mid-7th century CE, the Sasanian Empire controlled Iran and at times expanded east to include much of Central Asia and into the west to the southern Caucasus and Syria. The Sasanian rulers considered themselves heirs to the Achaemenids and incorporated some of the earlier imperial iconography into their visual propaganda, including the royal hunting motif, which can be traced back to pre-Achaemenid Mesopotamia. Large gilt silver plates with the scene of a Sasanian monarch, recognized by his crown, attacking prey first appeared in the early 4th century CE. The representation became a standard image on plates under Shapur II (309–379 CE) and continued to be produced until the empire’s collapse in the 7th century CE and even into the early Islamic period. The plate shown here was probably produced in the royal workshop, though there are plates that appear to have been manufactured in provincial ateliers, one being in the Bactrian region during the period when the Sasanian Empire had taken control of parts of the Kushan Empire to the east. These nonroyal products, which use royal iconography, may have been commissioned by powerful local Sasanian governors who were either empowered to use imperial iconography or felt strong enough to do so. These precious objects formed part of the paraphernalia of international and domestic diplomacy in the first half of the 1st millennium CE. The Roman emperors used similar kinds of luxury objects, and the Sasanian plates owe their shape to Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine prototypes. The picture plate itself was developed in the West and was picked up by Sasanian metalsmiths. It is possible that there are Parthian intermediaries, 257

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Artifacts • Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting but Parthian metalwork remains little known. These luxury metal objects along with silk textiles and ivory pieces formed a group of precious but portable items that could be carried in a diplomatic entourage and then presented as appropriate gifts to the Roman and later Byzantine emperors or to lesser kings on the borders of the Sasanian territory. Silver plates were important enough to receive mention in the description of Aurelians’s rule (270–275 CE) in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (5.5.5–6). The image of the king hunting could be interpreted in a number of ways. In its most basic message, it presented the ruler as the bringer of order over the chaos of the natural world, which is probably how it had been read in its earlier Mesopotamian and Achaemenid manifestations where the motif was largely confined to domestic consumption in sculpture or on seals. Represented on precious diplomatic presentation gifts and intended for a foreign audience, the message may have been more subtle but more menacing. The most common image, as shown here on this plate, portrayed the king as mounted controlling his horse—the symbol of raw and potentially untamed power—using his legs and knees, while he turns backward to aim his bow and arrow at a pursuing animal, a pose known as the “Parthian shot.” This was a potent reminder of the frightening aspect of the Iranian and steppe warriors who had successfully employed this technique against Roman armies more than once (see Phoenix-Headed Ewer with ThreeColor Sancai Glaze and with an Applique of a Steppe Warrior in the Pose of the Parthian Shot, artifact 38). The image’s message was clear; the Sasanian king was not afraid to wield violence in the hunt or in the battle. DESCRIPTION The silver plate consists of a concave form that contains the scene of a mounted and crowned figure positioned in a “Parthian shot” aiming at a rearing lion behind him, while his horse, caught in flying gallop with all four feet off the ground, bounds above a lion below, best read as dead. The plate rests on a ring foot soldered to the bottom. Contained within the ring is a Pahlavi (Middle Persian) inscription rendered in pointillé technique that includes a name and the plate’s weight in drahms, “Gugāy, 32 [stér] and 1 drahm.” The name cannot be identified with any surviving sources, and there is no evidence that the inscription belongs to the plate at the time of its manufacture. The plate consists of the dish itself, which was hammered from sheet metal from a single ingot of silver. The areas of low relief were created by removing silver from the top layer to form the outline and the three-dimensional aspects. There are sixteen high relief sections that were cast separately probably using lost wax technique and inserted onto the plate’s interior. These include the emperor, most of the horse, and the lions. The pieces

Artifacts • Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting were attached to the plate by means of flanges into which the separate element was inserted and then the flange crimped down. The minor details were engraved to the surfaces of the high and low reliefs. As was common for such objects, the portions of the relief areas were gilded with a mercury amalgam gilding. This was applied as a liquid, and when the plate was subjected to high heat, the mercury escaped as a gas leaving behind the gilding firmly attached to the surface. Among the known Sasanian plates with royal hunter images, there are six others that strongly resemble this one. They cover the reigns of rulers over a span of three hundred years, Hormizd II, Shapur II, Shapur III, Peroz I, and Kavad I or Khosrow I. These must have all been produced in the same workshop, which had a long duration of operation. The stylistic changes in the treatments of aspects of the plates follow patterns seen in other media and reveal the different hands that crafted these works over the three centuries. The identification of individual monarchs is dependent on the crown worn. Kings assumed their specific crown upon rising to the throne and were portrayed with it on their coinage. It is possible to associate a royal portrayal on a plate with the portrait of a king on his coinage through the similarity of the crowns. This is a vehicle that has been used to identify each of the rulers represented on the plates listed above. The crown worn by the hunter on the plate shown here is associated with Hormizd II (303–309 CE). However, there are discrepancies with aspects of the representation of the costume and weapons that make an early 4th century CE date impossible. Details of the royal dress, the saddle, bow shape, and the position of the bowstring hand do not appear in other Sasanian monuments until the 5th century CE. These are archaistic in this image, suggesting that the plate was made later but referenced the earlier ruler. One possible reason could be that the 5th-century king Hormizd III (457–459 CE) had adopted the crown style of his earlier namesake, a not uncommon practice among Sasanian monarchs, and so was both having himself portrayed on the plate and invoking an earlier ruler. The reason for such a reference could have been Hormizd III’s need to reinforce his legitimacy in a battle for the throne with his brother Peroz I. The message may well have been hammered home by the inclusion of the lions as the quarry, since they were a standard symbol of royalty and are rarely represented on these plates. SIGNIFICANCE These silver plates first began to appear as archaeological finds in Russia in the 18th century, most coming from unspecified sites in the southern Urals. It is these plates from the steppes that can be found in many European and American collections. In the later 20th century, plates began to show up with Iranian provenances, though not found in scientific excavations. At

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Artifacts • Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting least one plate, probably a provincial version, comes from a good Chinese provenance, the tomb of Feng Hetu (438–501 CE), a Xianbei nomad who served the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen as colonel of a garrison cavalry, as a regional magistrate, and was ennobled as the Count of Changguo. As diplomatic gifts they functioned in foreign courts, while within the domestic sphere they helped shore up local alliances, which may have been the purpose of the plate shown, if indeed it was made for Hormizd III while invoking his predecessor. The fact that the early finds were made in the southern Urals would suggest that many of these plates were ending up in the hands of steppe nomad chiefs in whose possession they were buried. These may have been the intended recipients. The Sasanian kings were regularly confronting nomad incursions from the steppes. As early as 356/357 CE, Shapur II was fighting on the eastern frontier with the Xionites, a Hunnic people driven into Sasanian territory by the expansion of nomadic Xianbei to the north and the east. A century later, the Sasanian king, Peroz I, was defeated in one battle (474 CE) and killed (484 CE) in another with the Hephthalites, another Hunnic subgroup, who took over control of Sogdiana from the Sasanians by 509 CE. As a measure of protection against the Hephthalite expansion, Peroz I probably began the construction of the Gorgan Wall in northeastern Iran, a massive and well-planned defensive structure. Further to the west, the Sasanians had to contend with the Huns, an Altaic nomad group who, in the 370s, moved into the region of the lower Don River around the Sea of Azov, defeating the resident Alans, a subgroup of the Sarmatians, whose territory extended into the northern Caucasus. During the course of the next two decades, the Huns pushed into eastern Europe and south through Syria into the western Sasanian Empire. Having to content with belligerent eastern and northern nomad neighbors, who were in the process of internal shifts due to migratory pressures, might well have led the Sasanian rulers to attempt to curb infiltrations from the steppe using diplomacy and diplomatic gifts. These silver vessels with their royal hunting motif would certainly have had immediate resonance within the nomad culture, which valued hunting, though not, perhaps in the same symbolic way as elite Romans and Sasanians. It is not clear how these vessels really functioned practically, if at all, but they could have been part of ensembles of drinking vessels for the consumption of wine. Wine drinking was a feature of Sasanian court life and would have extended out to the provincial courts of governors, where it is argued a version of the hunter plates may have been manufactured, such as that from the tomb of Feng Hetu, which while maintaining the royal hunter motif offers a distinctly different presentation of the hunter. Likewise, wine drinking was a pastime of the elite stratum of nomad societies on the steppes and as rulers of northern China.

Artifacts • Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting It is quite possible that some of these official royal hunter plates were sent with diplomatic trains to the smaller courts of kingdoms on the fringe of the Sasanian Empire from which they were then repurposed as gifts to nomad chiefs who threatened these border areas, like Bactria and Sogdiana in the east and Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the west. Some may have been taken by Sasanian embassies all the way into the steppe lands proper as a means of bribing nomad warlords who might otherwise breach the frontier defenses. It is also likely that some of these silver plates from royal workshops entered into the steppe trade networks that linked the nomad tribes and the elites of those tribes in an exchange system that moved objects across the steppes. Along with plates from the royal workshops moved the plates produced in the provincial centers and possibly some made in Sasanian style by Sogdian metalsmiths. These counterfeit plates show figures that sport crowns that cannot be matched to known royal headgear or bastardized motifs that recall the royal prototype but in a form that is clearly derivative or misunderstood. These objects were made solely for economic exchange and traded on their intrinsic value from the silver and their visual references to the high culture of the Sasanian imperial court. Such objects seem to have found a receptive audience among the nomad elites that came to govern northern China during the 150 years of the Northern Dynasties (439–589 CE). Sogdian merchants carried real Sasanian and imitation Sasanian silverwork across the northern portion of the Central Asia and the steppes from China to the Black Sea and even into Mongolia. FURTHER INFORMATION Baumer, C. The History of Central Asia: The Age of the Silk Roads. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Canepa, M. P. The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Roman and Sasanian Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Demange, F., ed. Glass, Gilding, & Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224–642). New York: Asia Society, 2007. Gibbons, D. F., K. Ruhl, and D. G. Shepherd. “Techniques of Silversmithing in the Hormizd II Plate.” Ars Orientalis 11 (1979): 163–179. Gunter, A., and P. Jett. Ancient Iranian Metalwork in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992. Hai, W. W., ed. Art in a Time of Chaos: Masterworks from Six Dynasties China, 3rd–6th Centuries. New York: China Institute Gallery, 2016. Harper, P. O. The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian Empire. New York: The Asia Society, 1978.

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Artifacts • Silver Plate with the Image of Hormizd II Hunting Juliano, A., and J. Lerner. Monks and Merchants, Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Asia Society, 2002. Shepherd, D. “Sasanian Art in Cleveland.” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 51, no. 4 (1964): 66–92. Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Translated by James Ward. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005.

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(Vasca/Alamy Stock Photo)

34 Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) Issyk Kurgan, Republic of Kazakhstan 5th century BCE or 3rd–2nd centuries BCE INTRODUCTION In 1969, in the Semirech’ye (Seven Rivers) region of Kazakhstan, about 40 miles east of Almaty, an undisturbed royal kurgan was excavated, the Issyk Kurgan. This was an area that was under the control of one of the Sakā tribes during the Late Iron Age. Almost 3 m inside the mound was a large wooden chamber ca. 4 m by 6 m constructed of fir logs. Inside the chamber, the log sarcophagus had partly rotted to reveal the crushed remains of a skeleton covered with gold ornaments, many in their original positions. When cleaned and restored, the finds revealed the remains of a slightly built youth, 16–18 years of age, of Caucasoid origin with some Mongoloid features, who had been laid to rest wearing high boots, trousers, and a jacket or short caftan, all of which had been decorated with attached gold plaques. A headdress, probably of felt or leather, had been ornamented with small wood sculptures covered in gold foil and with other gold elements. Though this is the richest single find made to date, other royal kurgans show evidence that the occupants had also been similarly richly attired even down to the headdress. Which specific Sakā tribe made this burial is not known, but the Tigrahauda have been suggested, a group that seems to have controlled the region from the Syr Darya (Jaxartes River) to the Amu Darya (Oxus River) and into the Altai Mountains. Herodotus describes the Sakā-Tigrahauda as ortokaribantii, those who wear pointed hats. In the inscription that accompanies his tomb relief at Naqsh-i Rustam, the Achaemenid ruler Darius I mentions the Sakā-Tigrahauda, and some scholars think that among the personages shown in the tomb relief is one who wears a pointed hat. At Behistun on 265

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Artifacts • Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) another of Darius I’s inscriptions and reliefs, there is clearly a figure in a tall, pointed hat labeled as Skunkha-Sakā. According to the excavator of the Issyk Kurgan, “tigrahauda” means tiger-arrow, and the term was used to describe the Sakā who wore “arrow like hats,” and the headdress of the youth in the Issyk Kurgan did incorporate arrow-shaped decorations. In addition to the gold costume, the youth was provided with several bronze mirrors, a silver bowl with an inscription—the oldest found to date that uses the indigenous “Issyk” script, which was based on SogdianAramaic and Turkic alphabetic scripts, and ceramic vessels. DESCRIPTION The youth was buried wearing a gold headdress, about 25 inches tall; gold earrings and torque; a short cloth tunic to which were attached 2400 arrowshaped gold plaques 7/8 inches in length that was cinched with a belt of gold plaques; and narrow leather trousers that fit into high boots also covered with triangular gold plaques. Many of the gold pieces had been carefully worked. Along the collar, lapels, bottoms of the sleeves, and bottom of the jacket had been sewn stamped plaques of frontally facing tigers’ heads. The headdress is cone-shaped widening at the bottom and buckling under the chin. Granulated gold and turquoise beads comprise the earrings. The finials of the gold torque have been identified as the heads of boars or tigers or snow leopards. Sixteen cast-gold plaques form the belt from the right side of which hangs a long iron dagger placed into a red sheath decorated with gold plaques. Thirteen of the plaques are decorated with the profile view of a bearded deer, some winged and some with griffin heads extending from the coils on their shoulders. The other three plaques carry the image of a moose with upturned legs. Altogether, some four thousand pieces of gold, some of foil, some cast (in the lost-wax technique), and some stamped, comprise the decorative elements of the warrior’s costume and jewelry. A portion of the gold ornaments on the boots along with both feet and a lower leg was robbed from the site shortly after the discovery was made. The layered composition of the headdress is designed to be read vertically from bottom to top. The frame was of wood over which was stretched either felt or leather onto which were attached the gold elements. The lower level with its jagged decorative band might have been intended to suggest a mountain landscape above which two birds appear to fly by being suspended on tall rods. Next are two horses facing inward, and above them, two winged horses for which only the heads and front quarters are shown joined back-to-back and facing outward. These horses sport ibex horns. The animal images were arranged symmetrically on either side of the vertical axis defined by the front of the headdress. Above these bands of decoration rose the vertical accents, four arrow-like forms set within feathers or leaves placed on either side of two central plaques. Other animals decorate the

Artifacts • Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) neck flap and back of the headdress including felines with twisted bodies and winged felines, perhaps snow leopards. SIGNIFICANCE In the Iron Age, the nomad groups of the steppe lands of Central Asia emerged as major organized fighting forces that could cause problems for the settled societies to their south or could provide mercenary services to the dominant political forces of the region—the Assyrian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian Empires. They formed cavalry forces that became feared because of their use of the short, recurved, reflex composite bow, which was easy to carry and use from a mounted position and which shot cast-bronze socketed arrowheads of standard weights and sizes (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires and Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35). The nomadic cavalry was a fast-moving and deadly killing machine. This new type of military structure resulted in a societal change as well. Now anonymous soldiers obeyed higher-ranking members of the group. The change is also reflected off the field of battle as markers of status now appear in the cemeteries. The graveyards gave a visual statement of the societal gradations within a nomadic tribe, like the Sakā. These Iron Age graveyards were often located in the same places where earlier Bronze Age cemeteries had been developed. The cemeteries were permanent sites in the nomadic landscape, places where dispersed members of the nomadic tribal group came together for the ritual associated with burial, and for important burials, like that of the youth in the Issyk Kurgan, to also build the monument itself. In the landscape, the large royal kurgans dwarfed those around them. A royal kurgan could contain over 80,000 cubic meters of earth and stone and then be surrounded by a stone wall requiring over 500 tons of rocks and boulders. The earth, the stones, and the logs for the interior chamber had to be collected, moved, and arranged to form the kurgan. It has been estimated that a royal kurgan took ten thousand times more human labor to construct than a small kurgan. The arrangement of the cemetery gave a visual message of social hierarchy within the tribe that erected it. The use of clothing and objects of adornment as means of distinguishing the importance of buried individuals can already be seen in Neolithic burials of Samara culture of the Volga region, but by the Iron Age, this practice had reached new heights for Central Asian nomadic society. The Issyk youth was unique neither in the wealth of material with which he was interred nor the specific way in which that wealth was displayed as costume and jewelry. While no other tomb has been found with such an abundance of valuable objects remaining, traces in plundered royal kurgans show that individuals were similarly laid to rest with decorated apparel and similar headdresses. All the animal images found in the Issyk Kurgan are in the “animal style” (see Animal Style) associated with the nomadic tribes of the Central Asian

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Artifacts • Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) steppes. The “animal style” had a long historical trajectory beginning perhaps in the Late Bronze Age and continuing to be developed and manipulated by various Central Asian nomadic groups throughout much of the Iron Age. The artists responsible for the pieces in the Issyk Kurgan were probably native. Metalworking had appeared in the steppe region during the early 3rd millennium BCE and with it mining. By the Late Bronze Age, there may have existed a complex system of mining and metallurgical sites that were integrated into the nomadic world that may have operated in some way into the Iron Age. The pieces from the Issyk Kurgan exhibit some distinctive local traits, such as a preference for depicting the mountain and steppe animals in a somewhat more realistic fashion than was the case for “animal style” art produced elsewhere in Central Asia. On the other hand, some of the motifs, like lions, winged animals, and griffins may have been borrowed from Iranian sources. How the gold was obtained from which these objects were made has not been determined, but its quantity suggests that wealth of the highest-ranking members of the Sakā tribe. They may have gained the gold by plunder or extortion of the settled peoples to the south or as payment for mercenary services or through the control of a gold source. Alternatively, they may have gained the gold by working with merchants engaged in the emerging East-West Silk Road trade, providing guides and escorts through the steppe lands. The headdress is the most interesting element of the costume ensemble in terms of possessing a possible iconographic message. One interpretation favors a Mithraic reading with strong Indo-Iranian elements as can be decoded from the sacred Avestan and Vedic texts of the Iranian and Indian worlds. In this reading, the horses are associated with fire and solar deities. The shape of the headdress and the arrangement of the parts in bilateral symmetry assert the cosmic axis, the “tree of life,” a concept borrowed from Near Eastern cosmology. The headdress and all the “animal style” images found on the costume decorations were elements of the paraphernalia of the warrior theocracy that governed the Sakā society. An alternative reading stresses the possible funerary associations of the imagery on the headdress and argues that it was a specifically funerary object. In this reading the emphasis is on the juxtaposing of predator and prey animal figures and their twisted treatments, suggesting predation. This is a common motif in “animal style” pieces and tattoos. When this is combined with the bird and tree elements, the meaning can shift to suggest transformation. The bird takes the meat from its prey back to the nest to feed its young providing for the birth of the next generation. The predatory images take on a notion of death and rebirth in a new form, a metamorphosis. The headdress becomes a statement for the concept of the flight of the soul to another realm and works as a piece of specialized funerary art. While the identification of the individual buried in the Issyk Kurgan as a young male Sakā warrior has been widely accepted, a quite different

Artifacts • Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) identification has also been proposed. The slight build of the figure and the small bones have led some to conclude that it was female. This alternative identification can be reinforced by a reconsideration of the other burial objects. The gold and turquoise earrings and the set of carnelian and white beads are not items commonly found in male nomad burials. The headdress itself can be read as a fertility icon. The birds placed within a mountain landscape setting with “trees of life” sprouting from it can reference fertility just as easily as rebirth. The arrow forms that frame the central unit of the headdress are two barded, while actual nomad arrows of the time were trilobed. This could indicate that these are not arrows set in among feathers but rather leaves, part of floral motifs such as have been found on a contemporary (5th C. BCE) felt carpet from a Sakā burial at Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains. Perhaps the arrow-like forms should be seen as cattails or even another version of the “tree of life”—fertility symbols. If the gold warrior is indeed a female and not a male, it would be an unusual burial but not unique in the nomadic steppe region. On the Ukok Plateau in the Ak-Alakha kurgan 1 burial have been found the bodies of a male 45–50  years old and a female about 17  years of age. The male skeleton shows that the man suffered from severe arthritis that must have limited him. It may be this situation that resulted in the female who accompanied him being dressed as a male, but she seems, at least in death, to have been assigned a masculine role. The interpretation of the figure as a Gold Woman wearing attributes of fertility in her headdress and encumbered with weaponry provides some credence to the notion of female warriors among the Sakā. Herodotus wrote of the Issedones, the last Scythian group for which he claimed to have somewhat reliable information, that men and women had equal authority (4.27), and he recounted stories about the Amazons, the women warriors, but placed them to the east of the Black Sea, where they engaged the Scythians in battle. It was from this encounter that Amazons and Scythian youths married and moved further east to produce a new nomadic group, the Sauromatians, whose women continued to follow the Amazon ways contrary to the ways of Scythian women (4.110–117). It is certainly possible that what he tells was actually based on practices in the Sakā region. If the remains in the Issyk Kurgan are those of a high-status Sakā woman warrior, her headdress may indicate that she was also a priestess associated with fertility. FURTHER INFORMATION Akishev, K. Ancient Gold of Kazakhstan. Almaty: Alma Ata, 1983. Akishev, K. “Golden Warrior: Sun God, Shaman, or Mythological Hero.” In Of Gold and Grass: Nomads of Kazakhstan, C. Chang and K. Guroff, eds., 57–62. Bethesda: The Foundation for International Arts & Education, 2006.

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Artifacts • Golden Warrior (Reconstructed Costume) Anthony, D. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Davis-Kimball, J. Warrior Women. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Frachetti, M. Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Jacobson, E. “The Issyk Headdress: Symbol and Meaning in Iron Age Nomadic Culture.” In Of Gold and Grass: Nomads of Kazakhstan, C. Chang and K. Guroff, eds., 63–71. Bethesda: The Foundation for International Arts & Education, 2006. Jettmar, K. Art of the Steppes. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1967. Hanks, B. “Mounted Warfare and Its Sociopolitical Implications.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 92–105. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pavlinskaya, L. “The Scythians and Sakians, Eighth to Third Centuries B.C.” In Nomads of Eurasia, V. Basilov, ed., 19–39. Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1989. Rubinson, K. “Burial Practices and Social Roles of Iron Age Mobile Pastoralists.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 76–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930 (30.11.12))

35 Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard Possibly from Crimea, Ukraine Probably Greek manufacture for a Scythian patron ca. 340–320 BCE INTRODUCTION The sword and the composite bow were essential offensive and defensive equipment for the nomad Scythian warriors. To carry the sword, the warrior wore a scabbard and for the bow and the quiver of arrows, a gorytos. The functional scabbard could be of bronze or iron but was most commonly of wood. This gold cover for a scabbard along with similar gold covers for the gorytos gave these practical items added value and made them ceremonial showpieces denoting the status of the warrior who possessed them. It also served to highlight the weapons that made the nomadic conquests in Central Asia during the 7th–4th century BCE possible, the sword or akinakes (άκινάκης) and the composite bow. One of the elements that gave the Scythians such advantage over their enemies was their method of attack. They assaulted on horseback, the first formalized cavalry, and their weapons, the akinakes and the composite, recurved or reflex Cupid’s bow with an asymmetrical profile, gave them great offensive power. The nomad akinakes was derived from the Persian short sword used for close, hand-to-hand combat, but archaeological findings indicate that by the late 6th century BCE, the Scythians began to favor a long sword that gave the mounted warriors greater tactical flexibility against both opposing cavalry and infantry. The Sarmatians still used a short akinakes, but the later Huns carried a long version. The sword also carried symbolic value. According to Herodotus, the Scythians worshipped a God of War and used an iron sword placed atop a mound as the focus for rituals to the god, which included the sacrificial offerings of cattle, horses, and captives. The original Scythian akinakes of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE 273

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Artifacts • Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard was a parallel, two-edged sword, 60–70  cm long that tapered to a point with a simple crossbar pommel. They also used daggers of similar style but shorter, 35–40 cm. The Scythian swordsmiths probably borrowed some of the design from the earlier Cimmerian sword. The Scythians remained a major fighting force into the 4th century BCE, and the sword form changed as Scythian warriors encountered the various settled peoples of the ancient Near East. In the 5th century, the smiths had changed the blade to a continuously tapering elongated isosceles triangle, and the pommel took on a more complex form with curling talons. The 4th-century warriors used both double-edged and single-edged swords with the simplified oval-shaped pommel. The sword rested in a scabbard hung from the warrior’s belt by a thong passing through a projecting ear on the scabbard and was placed far forward of the abdomen on the right side. Though no Scythian bows survive in the burials unearthed, their effectiveness is testified to in the ancient sources. The composite bow seems to have been developed at least by the mid-3rd millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, based on the interpretation of visual images since no actual bows have survived. It appears in Western Asia, the Levant, and Egypt along with the chariot in the Middle Bronze Age and may have come from the steppes as well as Mesopotamia. It was employed during the Late Bronze Age by archers in the Egyptian and Hittite armies as evidenced by finds of bows. This early composite bow consisted of a laminated, nonhomogeneous bow stave, comprising a wood core with sinew backing and horn facing. However, in the Early Iron Age, the nomads of southern Siberia modified the design by adding bone strips to stiffen the tips and the grip, and this improved model was what the Scythians brought with them as they moved west and used so effectively. Based on the representations on Arsacid coins, the Parthian bow was identical to that used earlier by the Scythians. The later Sarmatians continued to use the same bow, and the Sasanian kings, as portrayed on silver bowls, appear to use a variation of the Scythian-Parthian composite bow. Huns and Avars, based on the finds of bone fragments in graves, seem to have been employing the bow as well. The composite bow provided a balance of strength under tensile and compressive forces to facilitate an efficient transfer of the potential energy stored in the drawn bow to the arrow itself without loss of energy due to the kick and oscillation that characterized the older-style wooden bow. To achieve this result, the composite bow maker, who was really a master carpenter, glued layers of sinew on the back and horn on the front of a wooden core. The sinew added tensile strength, the horn compressive strength. The additional modifications made by nomadic bow makers in the Iron Age gave the composite bow even greater power. It was also highly maneuverable, which made it the perfect weapon for a mounted warrior. There are different types of composite bow that were used by the nomadic peoples running

Artifacts • Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard from the light and small Scythian bow to the large and heavy Xiongnu bow. However, skilled horsemanship combined with the proper weapon turned the nomad hoards of the Early Iron Age into effective cavalry and made them feared neighbors from the Black Sea to the borders of northern China. The finds of several valuable scabbard and gorytos covers of repoussé gold work, probably grave gifts for Scythian rulers or elite warriors, testify to the esteem in which the swords and bows were held. These gold foil covers turned the useful holders for essential weapons into display pieces, something that must have only been used occasionally or perhaps were made specifically for the grave, an example of conspicuous consumption funerary practices. DESCRIPTION The thin sheet-gold is decorated with two bands of friezes raised in repoussé. The main band, which would correspond with the sword itself, shows a battle of Greeks and barbarians. The Greeks are portrayed naked with mantles (chalmys) and helmets serving to emphasize the heroic nudity. The barbarians are clearly steppe nomads identified by their costumes of short tunics or jerkins over tight-fitting trousers. The Greeks are armed with round shields, short javelins, and swords, while the nomads have only offensive weapons, the recurved bow, the akinakes, and the battle ax. The figures are arranged in dueling pairs, and the composition along with dramatic aspect of the presentation recalls the frieze from the Temple of Apollo at Bassai (420–400 BCE). At the narrow end of the scabbard, the scene changes to one of two reclining figures in hand-to-hand combat and ends with a horse placed atop the dead body of what is probably a nomad warrior. The horse seems to have a saddle blanket with a stepped edge, a type associated with eastern warriors. At the opposite end, which is wider to accommodate the sword’s hilt and pommel, the frieze terminates with two griffins placed perpendicular to the direction of the frieze proper, which play no role in the battle image. Because the top portion of the scabbard is wide, the gold cover incorporates a second, smaller scene of two deer, one attacked by a lion and the other by a griffin. The image of prey animals attacked by carnivores was a well-established visual trope in the steppe art style known as the “animal style.” Not many scabbard or gorytos covers have survived from steppe burials. Those that have survived show the same treatment with repoussé technique, figures arranged in friezes, and a mixture of images, some drawn from the Greek repertoire and others from the steppe nomad “animal style.” The sheet-gold-covered scabbard and gorytos may have developed first in Greek settings, since examples have been found in 4th century BCE contexts in Macedonia at Vergina. However, they seem to have become a popular way of attaching value to these two items of a warrior’s armaments in the nomad

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Artifacts • Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard setting of the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea, where the most have been found. They may have been made as diplomatic gifts, ordered by King Perisadus I (Paerisades) (344–311 BCE) who ruled the Kingdom of Bosporus in eastern Crimea around the Strait of Kerch on the south shores of the Sea of Azov (Lake Maeotis). The Spartocid Dynasty, of which Perisadus I  was a member, ruled the kingdom beginning in 438 BCE and pursued an expansive policy. Diplomatic gifts, such as this scabbard cover and the other gorytos gold covers, would have been appropriate items for Scythian chiefs as a way of keeping them at bay, while Perisadus accumulated the nearby territory. The objects, which must have been made in a Bosporan workshop, combined current Macedonian imagery with Scythian “animal style” elements in manner that would have appealed to the Scythian royalty and nobility. Moreover, the combat scene of Greeks and barbarians may have been intended to represent battles from the Trojan War, which provided praise for the barbarians in the guise of Trojans. SIGNIFICANCE This gold scabbard cover raises a number of interesting points beyond its role as a signifier of nomadic warrior prowess. It was probably one item along with several gorytos covers made by a single workshop, which have been recovered from Scythian royal kurgans in the area of the lower Dnieper River. The repoussé decoration was made by beating the thin sheet of gold over matrices. At several points the joints between the matrices can be seen. The same matrices were used to produce four almost matching gorytos covers with differences in certain details that suggest that at some point some or all of the matrices were recarved, perhaps more than one time. Technical similarities in use of the matrices and the treatments of the decorative elements on the gorytos covers and decorations for scabbard covers from several different burials and now scattered among museum collections seem to point to the existence of a specific workshop. The stylistic treatment of the figures as fully rounded corporeal humans occupying a rational space and engaged in identifiable human activities indicates that the matrices and perhaps the actual cover were either created in a Greek workshop or by artisans under strong Greek influence. The figural friezes from the scabbard and gorytos covers have been interpreted as scenes from the Trojan cycle, including one on a gorytos cover, which may be the scene of the discovery of Achilles on the island of Skyros, an appropriate episode to illustrate a piece of a warrior’s kit. There was a cult of Achilles associated with the Greek city of Olbia on the Black Sea, which had perhaps also found a positive reception among some of the nearby Scythian tribes. More recent scholarship has challenged the assertions made previously. There are strange elements in some of the compositional arrangements,

Artifacts • Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard suggesting that the artisan was uncertain of how the matrices went together and was likely from a non-Greek workshop—a Scythian or Iranian craftsperson, trained in Greek style but not fully conversant with all aspects of Greek narratives or representing non-Greek stories. The images of animals in combat repeat an “animal style” motif translated into Greek style, and this might further suggest a native workshop (see Animal Style). On the other hand, it could well have been a workshop in Pantikapaion, on the Kerch Peninsula on the eastern end of Crimea (Krym) at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, which was also the capital of the Bosporan kingdom in the 4th century BCE, King Perisadus I’s territory. This was a multiethnic city with a polyglot population, a place where artisans of many backgrounds could have worked together to suit the needs of an equally diverse group of commissioners. FURTHER INFORMATION Bäbler. B. “Dio Chrysostom’s Construction of Olbia.” In Classical Olbia and the Scythian World from the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD, D. Braund and D. Kryzhitskiy, eds., 145–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cernenko, E. V. The Scythians 700–300 BC. Men-at-Arms series, 137. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1983. Farkas, A. ed., From the Land of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the U.S.S.R. 3000 B.C.–100 B.C. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975. Honeychurch, W. “From Steppe Roads to Silk Roads, Inner Asian Nomads and Early Interregional Exchange.” In Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The Mongol and Their Eurasian Predecessors, R. Amitai and M. Biran, eds., 50–87. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015. Karasulas, A. Mounted Archers of the Steppe 600 BC–AD 1300. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004. Katz, V. I., and A. N. Shcheglov. “A Fourth-Century B.C. Royal Kurgan in the Crimea.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 97–122. McLeod, W. “An Unpublished Egyptian Composite Bow in the Brooklyn Museum.” American Journal of Archaeology 62, no. 4 (1958): 397–401. McLeod, W. “The Range of the Ancient Bow.” Phoenix 19, no. 1 (1965): 1–14. Miller, K., E. McEwen, and C. Bergman. “Experimental Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Archery.” World Archaeology 18, no. 2 (1986): 178–195. Nickel, H. “The Emperor’s New Saddle Cloth: The Ephippium of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989): 17–24.

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Artifacts • Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard Raudzens, G. “War-Winning Weapons: The Measurement of Technological Determinism in Military History.” Journal of Military History 54, no. 4 (1990): 403–434. Reeder, E., ed. Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2000. Treister, M. “The Workshop of Gorytos and Scabbard Overlays.” In Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, E. Reeder, ed., 71–81. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2000.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Ernest Erickson Foundation, 1985 (1985.214.78))

36 Silver Plaque in Form of a Recumbent Horse Northwestern China or Inner Mongolia 3rd–1st centuries BCE INTRODUCTION The peoples of the western steppes had domesticated the horse by the start of the 3rd millennium BCE. Probably used first as a food source, the horse quickly became a traction animal used to pull carts and then chariots, and it was in the latter form that the domesticated horse was introduced to the ancient Near East and Egypt, where it developed its own distinct history. The domesticated horse, first as a traction animal and then a mounted transport, moved along with pastoral people to the East, and, by the end of the 2nd millennium, it was to be found throughout the nomadic regions of the steppe lands. Early in the 1st millennium BCE, a new type of nomad appeared, mounted and armed with the composite recurved bow, what have been labeled “predatory nomads,” which began to spread out of the Altai regions of the Central Asian steppes to the West, led by the Cimmerians and followed soon after by the Scythian tribes (see Nomad Kingdoms and Empires). These equestrian nomadic warriors were feared for their skill as horseman and their destructive force as their forays took them into the settled Near East and almost into Egypt. In a similar manner, mounted nomad warriors eventually turned east where in the form of the Yuezhi and the Xiongnu, they began to harass the settled regions of northwestern China. However, the Chinese themselves learned horseback riding from their nomad neighbors in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE. The horse was an essential part of the nomad warrior’s life. Mounts were always kept ready and available, as is still the case in parts of the steppes where horses are nearby the yurt. The horse may well have 281

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Artifacts • Silver Plaque in Form of a Recumbent Horse acquired an essential place in the cosmography of the steppe peoples, if one can legitimately use the literature of the sedentary Indo-Iranian peoples, the Avesta and the Vedic texts, to explain possible belief systems of the nomadic Indo-Iranian tribes of the steppes. The horse was possibly associated with kingship. Horse sacrifices may have been seen as a renewal of the cosmic order, and gold images of horses may have referred to solar values and, when associated with a warrior, to the solar warrior (see Golden Warrior [Reconstructed Costume], artifact 34). Members of the nomad nobility were often buried with their horses, and in the great royal kurgans found throughout the steppes, the highest-ranking members of nomad society were interred with several horses, many fully equipped with decorative horse tack. Just as warriors were decked out with gold and silver adornments to their weapons and probably their garments for ceremonial occasions, horse tack was embellished. This piece may well have been part of a bridle or some other element of the harness. The importance of the horse in nomad warrior society can be seen in the numerous horse images found in nomad gold work and in the objects included in the elite warrior burials. DESCRIPTION This is a small silver ornament made in the lost-wax-lost-textile technique in which the molten silver was poured into a mold reinforced with a textile, the traces of which are apparent on the plaque’s backside. The heat of the molted metal burns away the textile along with the wax. The image is of a recumbent horse with the hooves placed along the sides and turned upward. The well-defined muzzle, forequarters, and hindquarters suggest Chinese influence, as the stylistic treatment closely resembles other Chinese horse plaques from the 4th to the 1st century BCE. However, the twist of the hindquarters and openwork treatment of the figure all resemble more nomad metalwork, and the tear shape used for the ears and the upturned hooves is best known from Central Asian contexts. The Chinese aspects of the horse and the use of the lost-wax-lost-textile technique point to a Chinese workshop. The technique was developed to produce thin plaques in gold or silver by Chinese workshops in the border regions for the nomad market, and plaques very similar to this one have been found in Inner Mongolia, one from a good excavation context. SIGNIFICANCE Exchanges between the eastern steppe tribes and Chinese appeared in the earliest Pazyryk kurgans of the 4th century BCE, which contain finds of Chinese luxury items. The excavator of kurgan 5 found a Chinese-type carriage and proposed that it had been part of wedding paraphernalia brought to the region by a Chinese princess betrothed to the nomad chieftain buried

Artifacts • Silver Plaque in Form of a Recumbent Horse in kurgan 5. It could represent an early form of the practice of sending Chinese princesses to marry high-ranking nomad chieftains, the heqin or peace marriage alliance, a feature of early Han diplomatic negotiations with the Xiongnu in the late 3rd century BCE when the Xiongnu held the superior position. Along with the princess came specified Chinese luxury gifts, including silk fabric. By this manner high-quality Chinese manufactured items ended up in Xiongnu, Yuezhi, and other nomad contexts. Emperor Wudi assumed the throne in 141 BCE, reaffirmed the existing heqin alliance, and opened the border markets to greater trade permitting non-elite Xiongnu to have access to Chinese goods. Many objects from Xiongnu contexts that have nomadic imagery were made by Chinese workshops for the Xiongnu market, particularly metal plaques with mercury-amalgam gilding, a technique used by Chinese workshops. This plaque was most probably manufactured in one of these Chinese workshops. It is silver, which still carried elite associations in Xiongnu culture, but since there are several quite similar plaques, it may well have been a mass-produced item aimed at the non-elite Xiongnu who now had access to Chinese luxury goods made specifically for them. Chinese artisans in the borderland workshops mastered new techniques of metalworking to make their products suitable not only to the nomad purchasers but also to Chinese consumers who had a taste for the exotic art of the steppes. Cloisonné, twisted wire, loop-in-loop chains, and possibly granulation were nomadic metalworking techniques learned from the sedentary cultures of the Near East and which the Chinese artisans now began to use. The powerful steppe horses, so fundamental to the identity of the nomad elites, became important to the Han Dynasty Chinese in their aggressive movement against the Xiongnu. In 139 BCE, Emperor Wudi sent Zhang Qian to the West to find a source for horses and to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi, now occupying ancient Bactria after being pushed West by the Xiongnu. The Yuezhi were uninterested in an alliance against the Xiongnu, but Zhang Qian did find a source for horses. To purchase the horses, the Han Court sent large quantities of Chinese silk, initiating the first real Silk Road as Chinese silk began to flood Central Asia in exchange for horses and also as payments to the Chinese troops and to the support structure for the Han garrisons. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, David. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Bunker, E. C. Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes: The Eugene V. Thaw and Other New York Collections. New York; New Haven, CT: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2002.

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Artifacts • Silver Plaque in Form of a Recumbent Horse Eregzen, G. Treasures of the Xiongnu. Ulaanbaatar: Institute of Archaeology Mongolia Academy of Sciences and the National Museum of Mongolia, 2011. Frachetti, Michael. Pastoral Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Hearn, M. Ancient Chinese Art: The Ernest Erickson Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. Kwanten, Luc. Imperial Nomads: A  History of Central Asia, 500–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. Milleken, E., ed. The Year One: Art of the Ancient World East and West. New York; New Haven, CT: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2000. Rubinson, Karen. “Burial Practices and Social Roles of Iron Age Mobile Pastoralists.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 76–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Samashev, Zainolla. “The Berel Kurgans: Some Results of Investigation.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 50–61. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. So, J., and E. C. Bunker. Traders and Raisers on China’s Northern Frontier. Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sacker Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

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(Album/Alamy Stock Photo)

37 Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk Kazakhstan (now in Hermitage Museum, 1295/150) 5th century BCE INTRODUCTION Saddle covers were clearly an important feature of the trappings for the horses of the Sakā elite. Many have been found in the Pazyryk kurgans, ten alone in kurgan 1. They differ from the shabrack or saddle cloth shown on the horses being led that decorate one of the bands of the Pazyryk carpet (see Pile Carpet from Kurgan 5, Pazyryk, artifact 27). Saddle cloths could be made as small pile carpets as is the case for one found at BashAdar. The shabrack was not intended to provide comfort for the riders but rather to protect the horse from the wood of the saddle. The saddle cover, on the other hand, was an important part of the saddle on which the rider would sit. The saddles in the Pazyryk burials are of a type that seems to have first developed in the Scythian regions to the West and then spread throughout the steppes. Leather cushions, stuffed with deer hair or sedge grass, are attached to the wood frame of the saddle. The cover, usually the same shape as the cushions, was cut from soft, thin felt, piped along the edge with leather, and fixed to the frame with thongs at four points. Felt making was an important technical skill for the nomadic peoples of the steppe regions (see Wool Working and Carpet Making). It is possible that the knowledge of felting may have moved into the region from Anatolia where it seems to have been first discovered in the Neolithic period, but it is equally possible that nomadic peoples themselves observed the properties of the steppe sheep’s wool to naturally felt under the right circumstances. Whatever its origin, once introduced onto the steppes, it became a fundamental feature of life used for clothing, for shelters, as wall coverings, 287

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Artifacts • Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold rugs, and as parts of horse trappings. A feltmaker has a couple of options for creating a polychrome felt piece: lay out the colored wool to form the pattern and then place the backing wool on top, wet the entire unit, and felt it as a single object or sew separate colored felt elements onto a felted background. This last process forms a felt applique (sometimes termed “mosaic felting”) and is what was done for the saddle cover to be considered. DESCRIPTION This felt saddle cover, 119 cm by 60 cm, is designed with a bilaterally symmetrical, polychrome composition showing in profile view an eagle-griffin (see Gold Relief Foil Griffin Ornaments, artifact 8) attacking a mouflon ram against a background of red. The two units are aligned on either side of the short axis and so would have draped over the horse’s back. Three felt pendants hang from both edges of the short sides. Each pendant is a ram’s head with a curled horn of light and dark blue felt stripes surrounded by halo of red and yellow felt trimmed with blue fur from which red-dyed horsehair tufts extend. Thin pieces of cut-out leather pasted over with tin foil are used to form the eyes, lips, ear, and banding on the horn. The pendants are positioned so the ram’s red muzzle forms the point of attachment with the main cloth. The point of connection is an escutcheon of yellow, brown, and gray felt, which terminates in feline head, either horned tigers or lions between which is the ram’s muzzle. These feline heads are constructed of blue felt with red felt ears and yellow felt necks and horns. Thin leather pieces covered in tin foil accent the eyes, horns, necks, and lower jaws. The same mouflon ram forms one of the two animal figures in the main paired images of the saddle cover. The ram forms a curved line on the bottom portion of the composition. It is as though the artist has captured the movement of the ram in full flight as the eagle-griffin descends. The back legs splay out suggesting the futility of the attempted escape, and the ram turns his head to face the aggressor. The ram’s horn is of the same pattern of light and dark striped felt, but head and the muzzle are now light blue or gray with gold eye and ear. The body of the ram is a darker blue into which light-blue comma-like swirls are added, which match the color of the hooves. A thin, light-yellow band is used to outline each unit of the ram: horns, head, ear, body, comma-like forms, and hooves. The eagle-griffin forms the upper part of the composition. The top portion of the eagle-griffin is straight since the curve of the feline back is somewhat hidden by the horizontal elements that comprise the wing and serve as contrast with the curve formed by the ram’s body. The eagle-griffin is similarly constructed of discrete units, each outlined in thin, light-yellow felt. The beak is a light color set off by the slightly darker gray color of the face itself. The facial unit emerges from a yellow body that is accented with gray ears, gray and green comb, and gray, green, yellow, and brown wings.

Artifacts • Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold The haunches stand out with a gray comma-like form, gray and green circles, and a small gray triangular element. The eagle-griffin’s long yellow tail and brown claws complete the beast. Unlike the ram that seems to be captured in motion, the eagle-griffin appears static. Only the rear leg, of the three shown, suggests any type of movement. The overlapping of the ram’s horn by the eagle-griffin’s beak must be intended to communicate the idea that the eagle-griffin is actively seizing the ram. The appliqueing procedure used for the saddle cover helped to increase its strength by adding another layer of felt. Sewing in spirals and zig-zags, somewhat like quilting, the appliqued pieces are attached in a manner that may make the textile more durable and suitable as a saddle cover. SIGNIFICANCE Kurgans 1, 2, and 5 at Pazyryk yielded saddle covers. The saddle covers can be decorated with thin leather paste-on silhouettes on a dyed felt background of red or blue as well as with felt applique work as is the case with this example. The most common motif is the attack on a prey animal, a steppe ungulate, an elk, or a mouflon ram, by a carnivore, either from the steppe, a tiger or lion or from myth, a griffin or eagle-griffin. The artists favor dynamic compositions in which the two antagonists are locked in combat, usually with the aggressor above and the prey below. The curved line of the lower portion formed by the body of the prey animal is most often contrasted with somewhat straighter back portion of the animal on top. Similar motifs and compositional treatments can be found on other objects from the burials including the tattoos that survive on some of the bodies of the interred. The motifs and the manner of execution are well known from other steppe sites and belong to a general steppe style known as “animal style” (see Animal Style), which may have begun in the Early Iron Age in the western Pontic steppe region and survived until the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE in the Mongolian area among the Xiongnu. The “animal style” is found most often on objects of personal adornment in precious metals. The images carried, at a minimum, a message of ferocity associated with the large carnivores of the steppes. These items must have been intended to invoke in the viewer the notion of the physical power of the individual who wore them, and the motifs and presentations suited a warrior-based society. They could also have had a magical quality, to evoke the same spirit of physical mastery in the wearer as evidenced in the represented beast. In both instances, the animal being seized is of significant size and cunning that bringing it down raises the statue of the individual, animal or human, that can do it. While the decoration of personal adornment forms the largest corpus of this type of art, the finds from the Pazyryk burials indicate that the “animal style” was used much more extensively to enhance the full presentation of

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Artifacts • Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold a Sakā warrior and perhaps increase the magical potency of the images. Moreover, the “animal style” was employed for several other objects in the burials, several of wood and used for furniture. Because the kurgans were disturbed by robbers in antiquity, it is often not possible to fully reconstitute composite objects. The parts were strewn around the grave chamber, and how the object might have appeared and operated in its original context cannot be reconstructed. FURTHER INFORMATION Barber, E. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Barkova, L. L. “The Frozen Tombs of the Altai.” In Frozen Tombs, the Culture and Art of the Ancient Tribes of Siberia, M. P. Piotrosky and B. Zavitukhina, eds., 21–78. London: British Museum Publications, 1978. Burkett, M. The Art of the Felt Maker. Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 1979. Rudenko, S. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Stanley Herzman in memory of Adele Herzman, 1991 (1991.253.4))

38 Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze and with an Applique of a Steppe Warrior in the Pose of the Parthian Shot China Tang Dynasty, late 7th–early 8th centuries CE INTRODUCTION Plutarch (Life of Crassus, 25) and Cassius Dio (Roman History, 40.22-23) provide the only ancient descriptions of the Roman triumvir and general Crassus’s defeat by the Parthians in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. The two descriptions make clear the fear and confusion that the Parthian horsemen could cause to trained and disciplined Roman troops. The Parthians employed a tactic of retreating while turned in the saddle and firing arrows at targets behind them (Plutarch, Life of Crassus, 24.5), which has come to be known as the “Parthian shot.” It was not a military tactic devised by the Parthians but rather inherited from older steppe nomads, as Plutarch makes clear when he mentions that the Scythians also used it. It probably was not really invented for military maneuvers but for hunting, but it was clearly a frightening and effective strategy, especially when applied against less skillful mounted fighters. The Western sedentary peoples must have first encountered the “Parthian shot” with the nomad incursions of the 7th century BCE, and they continued to have to contend with it over the next several centuries, as is shown by this skyphos from the 1st century CE, not that long after ­Crassus’s defeat. Clearly the maneuver spread across the steppes. The 293

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Artifacts • Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze

Lead-glazed terracotta two-handled skyphos (drinking cup) decorated with two mounted figures in combat, one in the pose of the Parthian shot. Anatolia or Syria, 1st century CE. (Yale University Art Gallery (1952.52.3))

Chinese first record the tactic visually during the Western Han Empire of the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, often in hunting scenes with archers in both the “Parthian shot” and conventional poses. As with Greek images, the figures can be identified as non-Chinese by their dress. The first foreign archers are represented on Qin objects, and the Qin and Han interest in these barbarian types probably reflects the increased contact with the Yuezhi and Xiongnu that occurred as the Qin and then the Han pursued more aggressive policies in the northwestern region. Initially, the Xiongnu successfully repulsed the Han advances and forced the Han court into a tributary role. In the 120s BCE, the Han initiated a series of campaigns that weakened the Xiongnu eventually changing the balance of power. Throughout this period, the image of the barbarian hunter in the “Parthian shot” continued to be used as a visual motif in Chinese contexts, often in funerary settings. Perhaps the Han success made the concept of the nomad archer in conventional or “Parthian shot” pose less frightening as the Han gained the upper hand. By the time that the ewer shown here was made during the Tang Dynasty, the Chinese had themselves mastered cavalry techniques and were a formidable, mounted force. While the “Parthian shot” may have no longer caused the same fear in the Chinese, the motif still retained meaning.

Artifacts • Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze DESCRIPTION The Chinese ceramic ewer with the head of a phoenix was most likely modeled on a Sogdian silver prototype since Sogdian and Sasanian silver vessels found a ready market in Tang China. The handle attached to the rim of the mouth rather than to the body of vase is a distinctly Sogdian trait. However, the use of the sancai glaze makes the vessel unmistakably Tang. The belly of the vase is decorated with an archer dressed in barbarian clothing of trousers, a short jacket, and a pointed hat and posed in the “Parthian shot” while seated atop a horse caught in a flying gallop. The portrayal of the mounted archer who shoots over his shoulder with his bow raised to the eye level suggests that the artist of the prototype or of this ceramic version had actually seen such a feat of skill. The steppe nomads drew the bow to their faces rather than to their chest and thus gave the shot much more potential power, as noted by Ammianus Marcellinus (25.1.13). Doing this while riding at full gallop testified to the horsemanship of the steppe warriors who were literally raised in the saddle and had to learn early how to control the horse using the legs and knees to allow complete freedom for the arms and hands for other tasks. The artist for this image has captured this aspect of the steppe archer’s training. The skyphos or drinking cup is a faïence vessel colored green by the lead glaze. The raised decoration that runs in band along the body of vessel, framed on the sides by the handles and on the top and bottom by the foot and rim of the cup, shows two mounted figures one in pursuit of the other. The rear figure is best read as Greek, identified by the chlamys or short cloak that billows behind him. He chases a figure dressed in a pointed hat, breeches, a short jacket, and high boots, all nomad costume elements. The chased man turns back in the Parthian shot to aim and shoot his bow at the pursuing Greek. It is hard to be certain how to read the image, but in all likelihood we should understand that the Greek has been lured into a dangerous situation chasing a nomad warrior in feigned retreat. The skyphos was probably made in Anatolia or Syria, both areas under Roman control in the 1st. century BCE and might possibly be a visual reminder of Crassus’s disastrous battle with the Parthians at Carrhae that cost him his life and led to a major military humiliation for the Romans. The defeat of Crassus and his legions was followed by Parthian raids into the Roman territories in the east reaching even to Antioch. The fear that these Parthian incursions engendered was only increased when the Parthians became involved with internal Roman disputes during the end of the Second Triumvirate and the civil war between Anthony and Octavian. The fear of the Parthians and the need to seek revenge for the defeat at Carrhae formed a significant feature of Augustan political propaganda and was picked up and used by writers who favored the Augustan cause like Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid. The image on the vessel would fit into

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Artifacts • Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze this tradition, a warning about the potential of Parthian aggression and the need to be ever vigilant and militarily prepared. The Tang ewer would seem to be quite different. It was produced during a period of Tang expansion into western China and Central Asia, which put the dynasty in confrontation with the Eastern and later the Western Götürks, a confederation of nomadic Turkic tribes in the steppes who formed the Turkic Khaganate in the later 6th century CE. The Tang Dynasty armies successfully defeated the Götürks incorporating portions of their territory into the western regions of the Tang Empire. The Tang use of cavalry played a decisive role in their ability to overpower the Götürks, and the Tang cavalry was celebrated in the painting of the dado of Mogao Cave 156 in the mid-9th century CE with the portrayal of General Zhang Yichao leading his mounted troops in celebrations. At the time that the ewer was produced, the Tang Chinese do not seem to have been so frightened by nomad military potential, and the image of the “Parthian shot” may have held less fear and more appreciation for the skill required, which is why the image is probably one of a hunter. SIGNIFICANCE The “Parthian shot” was the tactic that most impressed the sedentary opponents of the steppe nomad forces. Its required dexterity and ability made it an impressive display of martial capability, and it was an easy way for artists to render the potential danger of the steppe nomads. However, the nomad armies possessed other tactics, honed over centuries of fighting among themselves and with sedentary armies, that made them formidable forces. Besides the recurved composite bow, which is featured in both images shown here and was the offensive and defensive weapon that made the nomads so frightening, the warriors also carried a sword (see Sheet-Gold Decoration for a Sword Scabbard, artifact 35), shield, dagger, and occasionally javelins and small battle axes. The combination of the composite construction and the recurved form gave the nomad bows an effective range of 50–60 m with deadly accuracy. The archers lifted the bow high to the face drawing the bowstring back using a thumb-draw or the “Mongolian draw” and releasing the arrow from the bow’s right side. The thumb draw, developed to work with the short composite bow, lessened finger pinch common when the Mediterranean draw is used with the short bow and gave mounted archers more flexibility to move on the horse. The draw allowed for great speed in delivery and avoided the bruising of the left forearm by the released bowstring. A thumb ring with a groove to hook the bow string was also employed. The Scythians appear to have used a saddle of two cushions placed on either side of the horse’s spine, as shown by finds from the Pazyryk kurgans

Artifacts • Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze (see Felt Saddle Cover with Leather, Fur, Hair, and Gold from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk, artifact 37). The later Sarmatians, Huns, and Avars all seem to have employed the wooden saddle. To the wooden saddle could be attached stirrups, and Avars may have introduced them to the West. However, there is some limited evidence to suggest that stirrups were already being used by the Scythians in the 4th century BCE. The stirrups provided greater stability allowing the archer rise from the seat for the shot, increasing accuracy. During the 1st millennium BCE, several breeds of horse were developed in the Central Asian steppe region that particularly suited the emerging mounted warfare of the steppe nomads. These included tall, light horses like the Akhal-Teke, the Buryat, and the Altai. The smaller Mongolian pony was a hardy horse used by the advancing Mongolian forces in the 13th century CE. These were all horses with strong, thick hooves and thick, shaggy coats suitable for steppe winters. They were fast horses requiring minimum maintenance and suitable for the mounted warfare to which they were put. The mounted archer warrior was what gave the nomads their greatest advantage when confronting sedentary forces of the Achaemenids, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine, Sasanians, and Chinese. The nomad mounted archer had to be able to fully control the horse while taking aim, calculating distance, and taking the shot. For this to be effective, the reins had to be released leaving the control of the horse solely to leg pressure, and this is obviously even more difficult when the shot is being aimed to the rear, the “Parthian shot.” These skills reflect the abilities of the individual warrior, but the nomad cavalry worked also as a group. A standard tactic, used in the Battle of Carrhae, was to send forward waves of archers to draw the enemy to counterattack even while being assaulted with showers of arrows. In these settings the nomad archers shot up so that the force of gravity would give the descending arrow even greater strength when it hit the enemy. The enemy drawn into a counterattack would then follow the nomads who feigned retreat as a device for luring the weaken, attacking the enemy into a trap as the retreating mounted warriors reversed direction and surrounded the enemy. Over the centuries of warfare, the sedentary armies adapted some of the nomad tactics for their own use. King Wuling (325–299 BCE) of the Chinese state of Zhao during the Warring States period shifted from fighting using war chariots to a cavalry and ordered his soldiers to dress in barbarian attire and learn to shoot from horseback, thus adopting the tactics of the northern nomads. Alexander the Great (Arrian, 4.4) and later the Byzantine emperor Alexius (Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, 7.11) made successful use of the feigned retreat strategy in battles.

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Artifacts • Phoenix-Headed Ewer with Three-Color Sancai Glaze FURTHER INFORMATION Belis, A. M., and H. P. Colburn. “An Urartian Belt in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Origin of the Parthian Shot.” Getty Research Journal 12 (2020): 195–204. Colburn, H. P. “A Parthian Shot of Potential Arsacid Date.” Dabj̈r 8 (2021): 35–40. Karasulas, A. Mounted Archers of the Steppe 600 BC–AD 1300. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004. Merriam, C. U. “ ‘Either with Us or against Us’: The Parthians in Augustan Ideology.” Scholia 13 (2004): 56–70. Rostovtzeff, M. “The Parthian Shot.” American Journal of Archaeology 47, no. 2 (1943): 174–187.

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(Yale University Art Gallery (1931.608))

39 Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius from Dura Europos Room 4, Christian House (pre-Christian state), Dura Europos (Syria) 200–232 CE INTRODUCTION The cataphract (from the Greek κατάφρακτος—completely encased) was a type of heavily armored cavalry warrior that emerged on the steppes. Though Scythian mounted warriors (7th–4th centuries BCE) did not always wear armor, and Cassius Dio wrote that the Sarmatian warriors who fell from their horses were easily dispatched because they wore minimal defensive armor, these statements seem to be contradicted by the images of fully armored mounted Sarmatian fighters who were Dacian allies on the Column of Trajan (panel no. 37). There is archaeological evidence for early body armor. The Scythian leather scale armor shown here might be an example of what armored Scythian warriors appeared like on the field of battle. These were the warriors who must have struck fear in the hearts of the sedentary peoples to the South with whom they came in contact such as the Greeks living in colonies on the north coast of the Black Sea, particularly when the armored warriors were equipped with the efficient composite recurved bow. The value of such body armor, both for protection and intimidation, was not lost on later nomadic forces, and the Sarmatians and the Sakās developed impressive body armor to be used by cavalry. Body armor was also employed by the sedentary peoples who fought against or with the nomads. Achaemenid Persian cavalry was armored, and the Seleucid forces who came to occupy the old Persian territory following Alexander’s conquests adopted the practice. In turn, the Parthians, who wrested control of much of Central Asia from the Seleucids in the second half of the 3rd century BCE, maintained and probably improved on the techniques of armoring both warrior and horse. When Crassus, the Roman triumvir and general, confronted

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the Parthians in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, he faced thirty-eight cataphracts and was soundly defeated (Plutarch, Life of Crassus). It took time, but by the 3rd century CE, Romans were also employing cataphracts or clibanarii in their confrontations with the Parthian and later Sasanian Empires in the East. This graffito was made during the early period of Roman use and might represent a Roman warrior since just such a horse protective covering has been found in the ruins of Tower 19 at Dura Europos. However, the pointed headdress is what is known to have been worn by Sasanian mounted troops and later by Roman troops, and so it could be a representation of a Sasanian warrior. Dura Europos was a multiethnic city (see Ceiling Tile from Dura Europos with Portrait of Heliodoros, artifact 1) founded during the period of Greek Hellenistic conScythian leather scale armor. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, trol and on the fringe of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Gift, 2000 (2000.66 a-c)) the Hellenistic and Roman world. In the early 3rd century CE, it was serving as a Roman military outpost, but it did change hands and was under Sasanian control before its final destruction by the Sasanians in 256 CE. It is just as possible that the graffito represents a Sasanian warrior, drawn either during the Sasanian period as a celebration of Persian might or during the Roman period as a representation of the Persian enemy.

Artifacts • Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius DESCRIPTION This is one of two graffiti found etched on the walls of Room 4 of the Christian House at Dura Europos. The other shows a figure armed with a reflex or recurve bow. The fact that they were under the layer of plaster associated with the refurbishing of the house into a site for Christian rituals led the excavator to argue that they predated the building’s conversion into a place for Christian worship. The image of the cataphract shows a profile-mounted warrior whose body and that of his horse are fully encased in armor. While not a piece of high-quality draftsmanship, the drawing is still filled with good detail that allows us to understand the armor being worn. The artist went to pains to make certain that several features were visually clear. The warrior wears a high-pointed helmet with side protectors. These fall onto the shoulders, which are covered by what looks to be scale armor across the chest (lorica squamata). The arms and legs seem to be protected by horizontal bands of armor (lorica segmentata or lamminata or a manica), while the lower torso is under a panel of vertical plates of metal perhaps attached to a leather backing, such as have been found in some elite Scythian tombs. The mount is under a coat in what must be scale armor (lorica squamata), which also covers the horse’s head. While no complete soldier’s armor has been found in the excavated remains of Dura Europos, the site of Tower 19 has yielded a complete scale armor covering for a horse. The inset image presents a much older armor, one made for a Scythian warrior (though a Central Asian nomad warrior from the Turfan region of Xinjiang has also been suggested). The armorer used only leather. It is a soft sleeveless garment onto which fifty-six rows of hardened leather scales have been secured with rawhide laces. It reaches from the shoulders to the upper thigh and was extended to the lower leg by a leather skirt of several layers of soft leather sewn to the edge of the scaled armor. The protective gear wrapped around the torso, overlapping on the right side and secured in place with leather straps. SIGNIFICANCE The development and spread of the armored cavalryman demonstrates the Silk Road system in operation. The need to respond to powerful new military innovations gave impetus to experiments that were different from those that resulted from the commercial exchanges along the Silk Roads. The spread of the cataphract is really the study of the way in which technological changes and knowledge as opposed to goods and products could move along the Silk Roads. The literary and archaeological evidence now supports that the Scythians who had come to occupy the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea were

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Artifacts • Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius the first to fully realize the potential of having mounted warriors, some of which were heavily armored. They would use their composite reflex bows to launch attacks on neighboring nomadic groups but more significantly on the settled communities of the ancient Near East. Herodotus’s (4.71–72) detailed description of how a deceased Scythian king was honored with the bodies of fifty strangled youths arranged upright on the backs of fifty killed and stuffed horses to create a circle of mounted warriors around the tomb suggests that the cavalry warrior had become an essential part of Scythian identity by the 5th century BCE. However, the rise of the Scythian armored warrior stimulated a response. There is reason to believe that the Achaemenid forces included a similar cavalry, though they also made use of Scythian mercenaries. The weight of such armor required that appropriate horses be found and bred that were capable of operating while carrying an armored warrior and wearing a covering of protective mail. The fame of the Nisean breed, which became the royal horse of the Achaemenids must have resulted from the fact that it had the needed characteristics for carrying a heavily armed cavalry warrior. In a similar manner, the blood-sweating horses from the Fergana Valley may have had the same qualities. It was the desire to acquire these horses by the Han Chinese to aid them in their confrontations with nomadic forces on their northern border that probably resulted in the expedition of Zhang Qian (recorded in the Shiji and Hanshu) to the west in the later 2nd century BCE, and the fact that the scale armor shown in the inset cannot be securely identified as Scythian rather than eastern steppe nomad suggests that the armored warrior had spread east across the steppes to the northwest of China. The dynamic that led the Achaemenid forces to adopt the tactics of its enemy to fight it is nothing new. It is a normal pattern in the development of military innovation. However, the spread and continued experimentation with the heavily armed cavalry represent a special feature of the Silk Road structure in Central Asia. The Seleucid kings who came to rule Central Asia in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great continued to use the cataphract warrior, but it was their opponent, the Parthian cavalry of the Arsacid Dynasty, that saw the next great change. In his novel Aethiopica (9.15), the Roman-era Greek writer Heliodorus lists a cataphract’s armor and describes him as the most effective of all Persian fighters. Considering that Heliodorus came from Emesa in Syria on the eastern edge of the Roman world, he may well have seen or at least heard about late Parthian or early Sasanian knights. His dates are debated, either the mid-3rd century CE or the mid-4th century CE. The Romans encountered the cataphract warrior in their military encounters with the Parthians and also with the Sarmatians. The power of the cataphract lay in two features. A mass charge of cataphract cavalry could seriously damage the enemy line. The Roman

Artifacts • Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius historian Tacitus described the skill of the Rhoxolani, a Sarmatian tribe, from north of the Danube, when able to fight as a massed and heavily armed cavalry (Hist. 1.79), and this can be seen in panel 37 of the Column of Trajan. Crassus’s troops may have faced similarly massed and armored Parthians at Carrhae in 53 BCE. The charge of the cataphract could impart a psychological blow as ancient historian Cassius Dio (40.15.1–6) suggested. The more that the Romans operated in Asia, the more they encountered these massively armored equestrians, and eventually they too developed a corresponding cavalryman. In describing the entrance (adventus) of Emperor Constantius into Rome, the ancient historian Ammianus Marcellinus writes of the marching soldiers clad in gleaming armor and the cavalry in full mail, clibanarii, who ride masked, in breastplates and girt with belts who appear to be statues (16.10.2–10), a simile picked up by the Roman Emperor Julian and used twice in his Orations (1.37C–D; 2.5.7C). These were the elite Roman cavalry who were clearly modeled on the cataphract cavalry of Central Asia. Recent discoveries from the mining galleries under Tower 19 at Dura Europos show that the helmet, which became the standard wear for Roman soldiers in the Late Empire, was modeled on the helmet type that Sasanian warriors were using. The Sasanian rulers who overthrew the Arsacid Dynasty and established a new Persian Empire in 224 made the image of the cataphract part of the royal iconography. At Taq-ī Bustan, near Kermanshah in western Iran, several Sasanian monarchs are shown in reliefs. Among the reliefs is a twolevel composition showing a ruler in the top band flanked by two figures, possibly an investiture scene, and below, on the second level, a mounted knight who must be the emperor himself fully armored, a cataphract, carrying a lance. Though the particular emperor is not known for certain, the imagery itself makes clear that the cataphract had become one element in the imperial presentation. FURTHER INFORMATION Hopkins, C. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. James, S. “Dark Secrets of the Archive: Evidence for ‘Chemical Warfare’ and Martial Convergences in the Siege-Mines of Dura-Europos.” In Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, L. Brody and G. Hoffman, eds., 295–317. Boston: Mc Mullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2011. MacMullen, R. “Some Pictures in Ammianus Marcellinus.” Art Bulletin 46, no. 4 (1964): 435–455. Nefedkin, A. “Sarmatian Armour According to Narratives and Archaeological Data.” In Arms and Armour as Indicators of Cultural Transfer:

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Artifacts • Graffito of a Cataphract or Roman Clibanarius The Steppes and the Ancient World from Hellenistic Times to the Early Middle Ages, S. Vashalomidze, M. Mode, and J. Tubach, eds., 433–444. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. Thomas, T. “Art Historical Frontiers: Lessons from Dura-Europas.” In Edge of Empires, Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos, J. Chiu and S. Heath, eds., 40–61. New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 2012.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Uzi Zucker, 1979 (1979.507.2))

40 Terracotta Head of Dionysus Gandhāra, Pakistan 3rd–5th centuries CE

INTRODUCTION The arrival of Greeks and Macedonians in Central Asia under Alexander’s command resulted in the establishment of Greek religious cults throughout the regions that passed to Greek control in subsequent centuries. The Temple of the Indented Niches in Aï Khanum has been identified as dedicated to a cult of Zeus based on the find of a colossal marble foot with a carved thunderbolt on the sandal. Other Greek cults must have taken root in other Greek cities and communities through the area of the eastern Seleucid Empire and the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Two of the most popular cults, based on the abundance of representations found, were those of Dionysus and Herakles. That Dionysus was an eastern god who had migrated to Greece was a well-established view by the 5th century BCE when Euripides had the Bacchae open with the return of Dionysus from Bactria, at that time the easternmost province of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The Roman period Alexander historians, Arrian (5.1.1) and Quintus Curtius, record that when Alexander’s army came upon the city of Nysa, somewhere between the rivers Kunar and Indus, representatives of the city approached the hero asking that their city be spared and allowed to remain free and autonomous because it had been founded by Dionysus himself after the god’s conquest of India, and to further the case, they stated that it is the only place in India where ivy could be found (probably Himalayan ivy, Hedera himalaica). Arrian expresses doubt of the validity of the story, but for several strategic reasons, Alexander decided to honor the claim and left the city in peace. The location of this Nysa has not yet been identified through archaeology. In his life of Apollonius of Tyana (2.2), Philostratus states the peoples of the East 309

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referred to Dionysus as the “Nysan God” and that there was a shrine founded by the god himself on the slopes of Nysa mountain surrounded by laurels, ivy, and vines (2.8). Whether there was a cult of Dionysus already operative in the region before the arrival of Alexander, it would seem that one did operate by the 1st century CE, long after the Greek presence had been subsumed under later invasions of Sakās and Parthians. This head would Schist wrestler’s weight with obverse scene of Herakles and the Nemean suggest that it was still a lion and reverse scene of wrestlers. Gandha¯ra, Pakistan, 1st century CE. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Florence and Herbert Irving Gift, vital force even in the later 1994 (1994.112)) period, under the Kushans and possibly Sasanians. Whatever the reality of a pre-Alexander cult of Dionysus in Central Asia, it is clear that the arrival and settlement of Macedonians and Greeks in the stretch from the Oxus to the Indus Rivers introduced Greek religion in a major way to the region. Dionysiac motifs become quite widespread including scenes of worship and images of satyrs and maenads (see Female Figures on a Gilt Slver Ewer, artifact 16). Certainly, the Greek-style coinage that became the medium of exchange throughout all regions in the post-Alexander Seleucid Empire presented Greek gods as standard reverse types (see Gold Tetradrachm of Demetrios I [222–180 BCE], artifact 19), and Dionysus himself may have been referenced in the royal images, because the royal diadem worn by Alexander and his successors was possibly seen as a version of what Dionysus wore as a symbol of his conquest of the East. Dionysus emerged for the Greek population as the precursor to Alexander, because of his mythical conquest of India. A Dionysus head with an ivy wreath was used as an obverse type on the coins of Agathocles, king of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom (190–180 BCE) and his contemporary and probable subking, Pantaleon (Panteleimon). One of the ways in which Dionysiac practices entered into Central Asia was through the theater. Dionysus was the god associated with theater, and the archaeological remains of at least one theater have been found in the Central Asian Greek settlement at Aï Khanum. Theaters have been found throughout the western range of the Seleucid Empire, though most dating

Artifacts • Terracotta Head of Dionysus from the Roman period, but there is good reason to assume that theatrical performances, many probably done by wandering groups of professional actors whose patron was Dionysus, could be seen throughout the Hellenized portions of Asia. If we can trust the validity of Plutarch’s reconstruction of Crassus’s end, the Roman’s head was presented to the Parthian king as he was watching a staging of Euripides’s Bacchae (33.2–4), suggesting that Greek drama had penetrated into the cultured circles of non-Greek elites in central and eastern areas of the old Seleucid Empire. Something similar may have existed in Gandhāra in the northwestern Indian region where the Indo-Greek kingdoms had been replaced by Indo-Scythian and then Indo-Parthian before the establishment of the Kushan Empire in the 1st century CE. With Greek theater came Dionysus. Herakles had already entered into Iran before Alexander’s conquests and retained importance long after the decline of the Greek presence. His image became widespread in Central Asia with the Greek penetration, and he was often conflated with other local heroes. Alexander associated himself with Herakles, as did later rulers in the hybrid Iranian Greek world, such as Antiochus I Theos from Commagene in his tomb shrine at Nemrud Dağ (modern Turkey). Just as the Greeks introduced theater to Central Asia, they also brought the culture of the gymnasium with them. Aï Khanum also has the ruins of one. The hero Herakles was the perfect figure to associate with the formal promotion of masculine physical activity and achievement. DESCRIPTION The terracotta head is that of a mature, bearded male with furrowed brow and piercing gaze. The grape leaves intertwined in the hair serve to identify the man as associated with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. However, Dionysus is usually shown as a young man. The older nature of this head, emphasized on the creased brow and strong gaze, may indicate that he is a satyr, a follower of Dionysus, rather than the god himself. Greek artists had developed techniques for producing terracotta sculptures, and they must have carried these to the East to establish workshops in the new Greek settlements in Central Asia. In Central Asia, they produced both terracotta, or fired clay sculptures, and raw clay sculptures. Examples of unbaked clay relief statues have been found at Aï Khanum, and the sculptural form was developed by later cultures in Central Asia and Gandhāra. This head, though it is baked and covered in a hard surface crust caused by its exposure, reflects the skill of Gandhāran artists who became proficient masters of clay sculpture and carried their abilities to the northeast into the southern Tarim Basin and probably even to Mogao in China proper and the northwest into Afghanistan where late Gandhāran art flourished. The continued power of Greek-inspired forms, shown here in the interest in the physiognomy of the face and in the careful treatment of the corkscrew curls,

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Artifacts • Terracotta Head of Dionysus probably reflects the regular stimulation of forms from the Mediterranean that entered Gandhāra through the maritime sea routes from Alexandria to the Indus delta that allowed for direct mercantile exchanges throughout the Roman period and the overland routes that connected Gandhāra through southern Afghanistan to Iran and the late Parthian and Sasanian Empires that also provided access to select trade materials coming from the Mediterranean. The weight with the image of Herakles and the Nemean lion on one side and wrestlers on the other was part of the equipment associated with Greek athletic culture. By the Hellenistic period, the athletic realm had acquired a distinct building type, the gymnasium, and this weight may well have belonged in such a setting. The weight itself is of schist, the local stone in Gandhāra used for most sculpture, and is equipped with two indentations on the reverse side, that with the image of the wrestlers, to allow the athlete to hold it comfortably. Herakles is easy to recognize as he holds his club and carries the lionskin over his arm. However, the scene is clearly anachronistic, perhaps the result of an artist and a patron unfamiliar with the details of the story. The lion that shares the scene is not ferocious and does not threaten Herakles, but he must be the Nemean lion that the hero dispatched in the first of his canonical labors. On the other hand, Herakles already has the skin of the slain lion over his arm, which makes no sense if this is to be read as that very lion, and there is no other known story about Herakles and a lion. In a similar way, the scene of the wrestlers, easily understood visually and appearing to be rendered by an artist somewhat confident in Greek style, lacks the needed depth into which to place the various figures rationally and breaks the expected Greek iconography by rendering the athletes as partially clad. The Greek norm would be for wrestlers to be performing in the nude, but these wrestlers wear a loin cloth, perhaps reflecting the changed cultural mores of the Gandhāran region. The weight, though belonging within a Greek cultural context and presenting images best understood as derived from Greek forms, is not a Greek item. The iconography is wrong and suggests that this is a hybrid item that probably operated in a different type of athletic system. SIGNIFICANCE Alexander’s conquest of the East did not bring an end to the older cultures of the regions. Macedonians and Greeks established their communities among the conquered peoples and introduced Mediterranean cultural forms, including Greek religion, but it was not a situation that required the replacement of the older indigenous forms with the new ones. Greek culture existed alongside and mixed with the native traditions. Greek rulers eventually issued their coinages with local gods as types sometimes with

Artifacts • Terracotta Head of Dionysus Greek inscriptions and other times with inscriptions in native languages and scripts. Heliodorus, the ambassador to the Indian court of King Bhagabhadra on behalf of the Indo-Greek king of Taxila, Antialcidas, erected a column to Vasudeva at Besnagar and may be an example of a Greek converted to Vaishnavism, one of the major sects of Hinduism. Greek religion did not replace indigenous religions but integrated with them in a standard syncretic manner known from many places where Greeks lived alongside non-Greeks. However, both the cults of Dionysus and of Herakles appear to have flowered in Central Asia, probably because these both could be fit comfortably into the existing social and religious structures of Central Asia and India. Dionysus was the exemplar of the westerners who had come east in the conquest and so appealed to transplanted Greeks. But Dionysus was a nature and fertility god, easily assimilated into existing religious constructs. The maenads who followed after Dionysus in Greek settings could be easily transformed into the yakshas of the Indian tradition. As viticulture and viniculture spread to areas under some Greek influence in Central Asia, Dionysus accompanied the move. Even in the Gandhāran region, which is not really suitable for grapes, there is archaeological evidence for wine drinking, if not production. The motif of the Bacchanalia became a common feature in early Gandharan Buddhist narrative relief panels showing figures banqueting, women fraternizing with men, and music making. These scenes were placed on the stair risers approaching the stūpa’s base but not within the setting of the stūpa proper. These are images related to the world of the devotee but not to the realm of the Buddha and probably served to mark the transition from the secular to the sacred. In this manner, Dionysus and the activities and individuals associated with him were integrated into the early Buddhist visual iconography. This Dionysus or satyr head, which is dated to the 3rd–5th century CE, might well have operated in some type of Buddhist ritual setting in the secular realm. However, Dionysus’s association with theater cannot be overlooked. Though there is no evidence for theaters in Gandhāra, there is the possibility that traveling groups of actors may well have performed throughout the areas in which residual aspects of Greek culture survived. Gandhāra had been ruled by Indo-Greek kings who fled south as Bactria fell and later by Indo-Parthian kings who were strongly philhellene. At least in the elite stratum, some degree of Greek cultural force remained. As Buddhism moved into the region, it found some interest among the elite. The Indo-Greek king Meander (Milinda in Pāli) debated with the Buddhist sage Nāgasena sometime in the late 1st century BCE, an event recorded in the Pāli text Milindapañha (Questions of Milinda). Kushan royal patronage was probably an important feature in the spread of Buddhism throughout the Gandhāra

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Artifacts • Terracotta Head of Dionysus region and elsewhere in the empire. This entrée into the elite circles of Gandhāran society may have provided early Buddhist religious leaders with exposure to Greek theatrical forms, and a possible theatrical space has been discovered at the remains of a Buddhist monastery at Nagarjunakonda in the northern Deccan area in central India. Some type of theatrical performance does appear to have developed within the Indian region since it is described in the Sanskrit text on performing arts, the Natyashastra. Greek theatrical practices may have informed some aspects of the Indian theater and may have been known in Gandhāra. The Kushan court poet and playwright, Ashvaghosha, who wrote the Sanskrit epic poem, the Buddhacarita, presented the life story of the Buddha in a compositional structure of a series of events carefully organized and tied together, perhaps reflecting his familiarity with Greek theatrical traditions learned in the Kushan court. It has been suggested that the early relief carved narrative panels that record a group of episodes from the life of the Buddha Shakyamuni in a linear format with each event being like the scene from a play, which were part of the decoration of Gandhāran stūpas and owed their inspiration to lost Buddhist plays used to present the Buddha’s message in an approachable manner for the general public. Like Dionysus, Herakles was carried to Central Asia and northwestern India by Alexander. At first, he probably continued to play his role as the Greek epitome of masculine physical prowess. The find of a gymnasium at Aï Khanum indicates that the colonial Greeks brought with them their cultivation of physical athleticism, and Herakles fits within this cultural setting. The fact that the weight shown here was probably from Gandhāra would suggest that the Indo-Greek and Indo-Parthian elite cultures maintained the Greek athletic tradition in which Herakles was a standard feature. However, in Gandhāra, Herakles found a new purpose in the hands of Gandhāran artists in the process of giving visual form to Buddhist iconography. He was transformed into Vajrapani, the guardian and guide of Shakyamuni Buddha, one of the earliest of the Mahāyāna bodhisattvas to appear. Herakles/Vajrapani’s bellicose nature and apotropaic qualities made him the perfect protector for the Buddha, while his wandering story suited him in his role as guide. The artists lifted Herakle’s Hellenistic form wholesale keeping the muscled torso revealed in partial nudity, his bearded face, his lionskin, and his club. In his new guise, Herakles/Vajrapani traveled north with Buddhist missionaries eventually turning up in some of the Buddhist caves at Mogao as a heavenly king, the Chinese versions of the Indian lokapala, the guardians of the directions. Within the Chinese context, Vajrapani/Herakles eventually entered the non-Buddhist secular realm as a guardian figure in Tang tombs, though still retaining some of the attributes of Herakles.

Artifacts • Terracotta Head of Dionysus FURTHER INFORMATION Behrendt, K. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Brancaccio, P., and Xinru Liu. “Dionysus and Drama in Buddhist Art of Gandhara.” Journal of Global History 4 (2000): 219–244. Carter, M. “The Bacchants of Mathura: New Evidence of Dionysiac Yaksha Imagery from Kushan Mathura.” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 8 (1982): 247–257. Hsing, I-Tien. “Hercules in the East: The Diffusion and Transformation of His Image in the Arts of Central Asia, India, and Medieval China.” East Asia Major 18, no. 2 (2005): 1–52. Jong, A. de. “Heracles.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XII/2, 202–203. Proser, A. Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara. New York: Asia Society, 2011. Stančo, L. Greek Gods in the East: Hellenistic Iconographic Schemes in Central Asia. Prague: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press, 2012. Tanabe, K. “Why Is the Buddha Sákyamuni Accompanied by Hercules/ Vajrapāni? Farewell to Yakşa-Theory.” East and West 55, no. 1/4 (2005): 363–381. Tanabe, T. “The Transmission of Dionysiac Imagery to Gandharan Buddhist Art.” In The Global Connections of Gandhāran Art: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop of the Gandhāra Connections Project, University of Oxford, 18th–19th March, 2019, W. Rienjangt and P. Stewart, eds., 86–101. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2020. Yang, J. “The Sinicization and Secularization of some Graeco-Buddhist Gods in China.” In The Global Connections of Gandhāran Art, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop of the Gandhāra Connections Project, University of Oxford, 18th–19th March, 2019. W. Rienjangt and P. Stewart, eds., 234–247. Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2020.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gift, 2000 (2000.42.3))

41 Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper Standing before God Shiva/Oesho Bactria, Afghanistan Kushan, 2nd–4th centuries CE INTRODUCTION The painted terracotta plaques are two from what seem to have been several that were found together, reportedly in Afghanistan. They do not come from any type of scientific excavation but were acquired by a Japanese art collector through the art market and then gifted to and purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their findspots and their possible archaeological context are therefore all conjecture. The panels were found in fragmentary state and have been reconstructed, as can be seen on these two. They are roughly square at about 57 cm. The compositional format is consistent, a male worshipper with clasped hands standing before a god identified by the nimbus. Interestingly, the worshipper and the deity are portrayed at the same height, a rare treatment since size differentiation was a standard way throughout the artistic traditions of the Eurasian continent to visually establish power relationships. The compositional arrangement may be iconographic indicating that these plaques were not icons for veneration, as would be the case were the figures in the expected height relationship, but rather are purely donor images in which the individual patron is given equal status to the god being honored with the gift. Fragments of large and permanent wall paintings have been found throughout Central Asia, and these painted terracotta panels indicate another form in which wall paintings were produced and displayed. The worshippers are all male and dressed in short, belted tunics over trousers or leggings with ankle straps that tuck into short boots. The short tunic is an Iranian type, but the costume can be paralleled to that worn 317

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Painted terracotta panel of worshiper standing before god Pharro. Bactria, Afghanistan, Kushan, 2nd–4th centuries CE. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gift, 2000 (2000.42.1))

by male devotees portrayed on Gandhāran Buddhist reliefs and probably reflects Kushan nomad-inspired dress. If the suggestion that Buddhism in Gandhāra was patronized by the Kushan elite, then it may be the case that these are also to be understood as elite worshippers on the panels, though not royal figures since they carry no attributes of kingship. Though the archaeological context for the panels is unknown, the fact that they have holes at the corners suggests that they were intended to be mounted on something, possibly walls of a structure. The paint used

Artifacts • Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper is gouache, a water-based medium using natural pigments and a binding agent, probably gum Arabic. Since the colors remain in relatively good condition, the terracotta panels were probably hung on the interior of the structure, which perhaps collapsed on to them, providing some protection to the painted surfaces. This may have been a family shrine or sanctuary. Small portable shrines from Kashmir of the same period suggest that such personal shrines did exist. The format of painted terracotta panels perhaps indicates that in addition to large wall paintings, there existed other types of painting than the present archaeological evidence reveals. The gods represented are a mix of Hindu and Iranian. Since the Kushan rulers used a variety of gods from the religions encompassed by the empire as images on coins (see Gold Tetradrahm of Demetrios I [222–180 BCE], artifact 19), it is possible to identify these figures by their resemblance to coin types with labels. The main image seems to show the Hindu deity Shiva, who is also represented on another of the panels. The figure has four arms and probably had three heads, though only two remain. These are standard attributes of the god. The smaller inset presents the Iranian fire god Pharro, and another panel provides an image of Ahuramazda, the god of Iranian Zoroastrianism. DESCRIPTION Both images are of reconstructed painted terracotta plaques, roughly 57 cm square. The opaque colors are painted in gouache, a water medium that normally requires gum Arabic as a binding agent to hold the natural pigments to the surface. The holes in the corner suggest that the plaques were attached to a surface for display. For each panel, the composition is the same; a worshipping male figure in Kushan dress with hands clasped, probably the donor of the panel, approaches a standing deity identified by attributes. For the main image, the donor figure is garbed in a tunic decorated with red heart shapes, possibly intended to represent a woven or stamped pattern. He wears red leggings and holds a libation bowl. The god that he approaches is seminude and wears a gray breechcloth with a diaphanous drape that is knee length and a form-fitting upper garment. He is bejeweled with a red torque around his neck and armlets. Based on the attributes and his similarity to Kushan coin types, he has been identified as the god Shiva. He has two preserved faces from what must have been three heads encompassed by a nimbus, identifying him as a god. The central head shows a mature male with long hair, thin mustache, and topknot. The surviving face on the left side is bearded and sports a white cap. Three surviving arms emerge from the upper torso. There must have been a fourth arm on the lower-right side. The upper-left hand holds a trident or trishula and the lower left, a lobeshaped object. The surviving upper-right-side hand has an uncertain object but is in a gesture that suggests that god is anointing the donor.

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Artifacts • Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper The three heads and four arms, one with the trishula, provide the evidence that this is the Hindu god Shiva. The Kushan coins with a similar image sometimes carry the label Oesho. There is good evidence that Shiva was honored in Gandhāra before the arrival of the Kushans, and so his presence on Kushan coins or in a Kushan era shrine should not be surprising, but it is possible that the figure represented was also to be read as Oesho. While the exact nature of Oesho remains uncertain, a strong argument has been made that this is a version of the Iranian wind god, who was either given or shared many of the attributes of Shiva. For the worshipper at the sanctuary in which this panel was displayed, the identity of the deity may have been quite clear or the god was intentionally syncretic, designed to appeal to worshippers from more than one religious tradition. The figures on the inset panel are similarly arranged. The donor wears an off-white long-sleeved tunic fringed with a red neck band and cinched with a red belt. The leggings are a similar color. The god is in a red longsleeved tunic that is either decorated at the wrists or clasped with wristlets. The upper chest portion of the tunic is similarly decorated and may represent some type of chest ornament or a decorative pattern in the fabric over which appear to be strands of pearls, which also form a choker around the god’s neck. He wears earrings and some type of red hat that flares at the top. He is probably holding a purse in his uplifted right hand, and perhaps, the missing hand held the sacred Avestan fire. Flames sprout from his shoulders. As with the figure of Shiva/Oesho, it is possible to parallel this painted figure with similar figures used as types on Kushan coins that carry the label Pharro. Pharro was a personification of the Iranian concept of khvarenah, the heavenly sent charisma of kingship, or “kingly glory,” shown by the attribute of the Avestan flame held in his hand. He is a god with royal associations and became associated with the Kushan kings under Kanishka I. Kanishka I began to issue coins that showed the king with flames emerging at his shoulders. This may have been a visual representation of his glory as expressed in a legend, recorded by the Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, in which the king called on the power of all his merit to defeat a naga or dragon, at which point his shoulders burst into flame. Kanishka’s successors maintained the attribute of their glory or khvarenah on their coin portraits. The presence of the flames on the painted image of Pharro may further connect the god to royal good fortune. However, Pharro also entered the Buddhist pantheon. He was a god of monetary wealth, as represented by the money bag. He appears in Gandhāran sculptures with his spouse Ardoxsho. As a god of wealth, he had appeal for the emerging and important Buddhist merchant class, which formed a major patronage group for Buddhist monasteries.

Artifacts • Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper SIGNIFICANCE The Kushan ruling stratum that controlled the area from northwest India in the south to the frontier with Sogdiana in the north from the 1st through the mid-4th century CE was not of local origin. They were a branch of the nomadic Yuezhi who had migrated west from northern China in the 2nd century BCE and were probably partially responsible for the destruction of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Kushans were a tribe within the Lesser Yuezhi who established themselves as the rulers of the vast territory encompassing many other older residents from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The Kushan Empire was heterogeneous, and the rulers had to successfully maintain control over the demographic mix, a task made more difficult because of their distinctly different origin. One of the ways in which the Kushan kings managed their empire was through the careful manipulation of visual imagery on the coinage, incorporating the divine images from Greek, Indian-Hindu, Iranian, and Buddhist traditions as reverse types. In this way the rulers associated themselves with the divine figures of the various religions within their realm. They also fostered syncretism, when possible, merging into one god two different but similar gods who could share the same attributes. This practice allowed the same image to work in more than one setting, especially among a largely illiterate population that depended more on visual cues than inscriptions to interpret images. The image of Shiva/Oesho shown here is an example of this type of syncretism. The Kushan kings also borrowed foreign concepts, which had perhaps already found currency in parts of their empire, to increase their prestige. The incorporation of the Iranian personification of the khvarenah in the figure of Pharro into the Kushan coinage allowed the Kushan kings to lay claim to the notion of “kingly glory” within their territory. These painted terracotta plaques provide evidence that these syncretic manipulations extended beyond just the coinage and had come to play a role in religious devotion. It has been suggested that these painted panels were decoration for a permanent shrine built in Bactria, the northern region of the Kushan Empire. Vima Kadphises (r. 113–127 CE) introduced gold coinage, most of it featuring the god Shiva. He conquered Bactria (Afghanistan) and established a sanctuary to Oesho at Dilberjin, an old settlement of Achaemenid origin that prospered under the Kushans. The focus on Shiva for the coinage and the patronage of a new sanctuary to Oesho would suggest that Vima Kadphises was actively working at syncretizing the two gods and linking them to his rule. He may have also promoted the cult of Shiva in Bactria, which was new to the area. It is possible that the inclusion of Shiva among the Kushan royal pantheon was part of a larger process of creating an imperial cult in which the king became the representative of all the divine world on

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Artifacts • Painted Terracotta Panel of a Worshiper the earth, a concept new to the Indian region but known from the Hellenistic East and the contemporary Roman Empire. The presence of the Shiva or Oesho and Pharro as well as other gods within what appears to have been a nonroyal family shrine with Kushan elite donors may indicate that just such a royal cult was being actively patronized by the local Kushan elite in the conquered region. The extent, stability, and prosperity of the Kushan Empire by the 2nd century CE made possible a flourishing long-distance trade. Merchants moved goods throughout the empire and connected it with the Mediterranean Roman Empire, the Parthian and later Sassanian Empires of Iran, the oasis cities of the Tarim basin, and Chinese Empire of the Han Dynasty. Many of these merchants were Indian, and the promotion of Hindu cults may well have also served an economic purpose by offering Hindu merchants a sense of belonging throughout the imperial territory that they traversed. FURTHER INFORMATION Behrendt, K. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Carter, M. “Oešo or Śiva.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 9 (1995): 143–157. Carter, M. L. “Museum Acquisitions and Note.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 7, Iranian Studies in Honor of A. D. H. Bivar (1993): 207–219. Cribb, J. “The Kushan Pantheon.” In Gandhara: Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise, C. Luczanits, ed., 122–125, 145–153. Mainz: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2008. Falk, H. “Kushan Religion and Politics.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 29 (2015–2019): 1–55. Roland, B. “The Iconography of the Flame Halo.” Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum 11, no. 1 (1949): 10–16. Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005.

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(Album/Alamy Stock Photo)

42 Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele Aï Khanum, Temple of the Niches under the floor of the southern sacristy ca. 300 BCE INTRODUCTION The site of Aï Khanum is the one Greek city that has been found and excavated in Central Asia, though much of the site has been severely damaged over the years since disruptions brought to Afghanistan by the Soviet and U.S. invasions and the civil wars. The main temple of the city has been identified by its most striking architectural feature as the Temple of the Niches. The gilt silver plate was unearthed beneath the floor of the southern sacristy in the temple where it seems to have been buried after it was rudely torn from its wooden support. It may have been buried just before the fall of the city to either the Sakā or slightly later the Yuezhi. It is not at all clear that the plate was part of the cultic paraphernalia of the Temple of the Niches, the cult of which has not been firmly determined. It may have been looted by the Sakā from elsewhere and stored in the south sacristy and buried only as the city was about to fall a second time. This relief is the only one of the goddess Cybele, an ancient Anatolia mother goddess, so far found in Central Asia, but she joined a group of powerful female deities with long histories throughout the region including Anahita and Nana/Nanaia. Nana, who is pictured in the inset image, was a Near Eastern Goddess whose presence is attested in Mesopotamia in the Ur III period (ca. 2100–2000 BCE). She was also established at Susa in Elam (Iran), where she was the principal deity and may have spread from there to Central Asia during the period of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) (2250–1700 BCE). She was regularly syncretized with 325

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Artifacts • Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate other goddesses beginning during the Greek period where she is sometimes associated with Artemis or Anahita and possibly the Hindu goddess Durga, the wife of Shiva. It is also possible that she was conflated in China with the Queen of the West during the period when Buddhism was entering the region.

DESCRIPTION The silver plate that is the main image has a diameter of 25 cm. The image is repoussé relief with selective gilding to portions of the landscape, garments and hair of the goddesses, parasol, chariot, lions’ manes, the star, crescent moon, bust of Helios, and censor. Originally the plate was attached to a wooden disk from which it was violently ripped. Statue of Nana. Possibly from Afghanistan, 5th–6th centuries CE, HepThe image shows the hthalite or Turkic. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Cynthia Hasen goddess Cybele, identified Polsky, 1986 (1986.506.12)) by her polos crown and chariot pulled by lions. The figure of Nike, identified by her wings, drives the chariot toward a stone platform atop which stands a figure making an incense sacrifice. The chariot is followed by a figure holding aloft a parasol to protect Cybele. Cybele and Nike are posed en face, while the other figures are all shown in profile views. Even Nike turns her head awkwardly to the profile view while she keeps her body facing to the front. This difference works to emphasize Cybele who is otherwise placed to the far left of the composition and is only a little taller than Nike. The gilding works to both add value to the plate and to focus attention on the two goddesses, the lions, the landscape setting, the ritual action, and the heavenly bodies, those elements most associated with stating the plate’s ritual status and the role of proper sacrifice.

Artifacts • Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate The inset image is of a small sculpture of a female figure seated astride a lion. She is in a frontal pose and very much presented as an icon rather than as part of a narrative. Her legs bend at the knees and the ankles touch. Her arms are bent at the elbows with the left hand holding a palm leaf and the right an unclear object. She is dressed in a long ankle-length gown with folds at her lower abdomen. She wears earrings and a necklace with three units of which the center one appears the largest and dangles down to her breasts. Her face is fleshy, and her long hair is gathered to either side to frame the face. The head is surrounded by a halo. The lion appears to recline, but only the frontally facing head is fully presented. SIGNIFICANCE Cybele (Kybele) was originally an Anatolia Mother Goddess from Phrygia who became part of the Greek pantheon sometime in the 5th century BCE where, in time, she became associated with the Greek goddess Demeter. She was not integrated into Persian religion, and her altar at Sardis, the ancient Lydian capital, was converted to a fire altar after the Achaemenid conquest of the city. Her appearance on the plate from Aï Khanum could indicate that her cult was carried East by the invading Greeks who followed Alexander and then colonized the region. Though it is not accepted as fact, the Temple of the Niches is thought to have housed a cult place for Zeus since a fragment of a foot decorated with a thunderbolt from an acrolithic statue was found in the main chamber of the temple. The temple could have had more than one cult place within it, but the fact that the silver plate was found in damaged state and was hidden suggests that it could well have come from elsewhere on the site. Two other structures have been excavated and identified as cult places, a temple outside the northern gate and a podium on the acropolis, and either could have been the center for Cybele’s worship. The image itself presents an interesting mix of iconographic elements that speak to the hybridization that seems to have occurred in places like Aï Khanum where the Greek presence was clearly the strongest force but was not capable of ousting the older cultural elements both in terms of art forms and religious belief structures. Cybele is presented with her standard attributes, the polis crown and the lions. Nike possesses her wings, one of which is shown in profile view. The rocky landscape might be intended to suggest mountains that are Cybele’s home. Both Cybele and Nike are dressed as Greek goddesses; Cybele in a himation and Nike in a high-belted and sleeved chiton. On the other hand, Cybele’s frontal pose and taller stature are operating as hieratic features, something associated with older Near Eastern treatments that had become features of imperial Achaemenid art. The stepped altar recalls Persian fire altars (see Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV [Wahrān IV] with Fire Altar Reverse Type, artifact 44). The parasol

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Artifacts • Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate belongs to the world of Asian royalty. The priests are barefoot, a symbol of ritual purity in Asian contexts. The hybrid quality of the image might suggest something of the reality of the penetration of Hellenic cultural forms into Central Asia. The cult was clearly foreign, and the goddesses appear as outsider figures. They have, however, been integrated into a more comfortable Central Asian cultural setting reflecting the residual influence of Persian elements that had been introduced during the previous 250 years of Achaemenid rule. The remains of the city itself reveal much the same mixing of elements. The Temple of the Niches seems to be based on older Near Eastern architectural models, and this seems to be the case with several of the structures in the city, but new Greek forms are also present, a theater and a gymnasium, and there are Greek decorative elements like Corinthian capitals that clearly show that urban fabric was intended to appear, even if only on the surface, to be Greek. Unlike Cybele, who was an intruder into Central Asia and never adopted by any of the non-Greek populations, Nana (Nanaia) was an old, Mesopotamian deity, not to be confused with Inanna/Ishtar, and an Iranian goddess whose cult was well established at Susa. The find of a BMAC stamp seal with a female figure riding astride a beast, possibly a feline or a dragon, may indicate that some version of her cult had already penetrated into the Bactrian region by the late 2nd millennium BCE or that a similar goddess was already present there who could later be conflated to Nana. Under the joint rulership of Sapadbizes and Agesiles of the Yuezhi/Bactrian kingdom (20 BCE–20 CE), coins were struck with the image of a lion on the reverse and the inscription Nanaia in Greek letters. Her cult became an important element in the Kushan imperial iconography that developed from the Yuezhi/Bactrian kingdom, and Kanishka I  issued gold and copper coins with her image and Greek inscription Nana and later Nanaia in Bactrian. In Huvishka I’s coinage, she is dressed in the long gown. Her importance to the concept of Kushan royal power is made clear in the Rabatak inscription, found in 1993 near the Kushan royal cult center at Surkh Kotal (Afghanistan) in which she claims to endow Kanishka with his royal authority. This might explain her presence in a statue from Afghanistan even after Buddhism had become a much stronger force. She continued to be worshipped elsewhere in Central Asia. She appears in Sogdian contexts, and it has been suggested that she was carried into China during the Han Dynasty spread of Buddhism where she became associated with the Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu. FURTHER INFORMATION Azarpay, G. “Nana: The Sumero-Akkadian Goddess of Transoxiana.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 4 (1976): 535–542.

Artifacts • Ceremonial Gilt Silver Plate Bernard, P. “The Greek Colony at Aï Khanum and Hellenism in Central Asia.” In Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., 80–129. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2008. Boardman, J. The Greeks in Asia. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Falk, H. “Kushan Rule Granted by Nana: The Background of Heavenly Legitimation.” In Kushan Histories, Literary Sources and Selected Papers from a Symposium at Berlin, December 5 to 7, 2013, H. Falk, ed., 265–299. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2015. Ghose, M. “Nana: The ‘Original’ Goddess on the Lion.” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 1 (2006): 97–112. Hanfmann, G. M. A., and W. E. Mierse. Sardis: From Prehistoric to Roman Times, Results of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Holt, F. Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Mairs, R. The Hellenistic Far East, Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Neils, J. “The Twain Shall Meet.” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 72, no. 6 (1985): 326–359. Potts, D. “Nana in Bactria.” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 7 (2001): 23–35. Shepherd, D. G. “Sasanian Art in Cleveland.” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 51, no. 4 (1964): 66–92. Stančo, L. Greek Gods in the East: Hellenistic Iconographic Schemes in Central Asia. Prague: Charles University Prague, Karolinum Press, 2012. Tanabe, K. “Nana on Lion—East and West in Sogdian Art.” Orient 30 (1995): 309–334.

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43 Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos Temple of Atargatis (Block H2), Dura Europos 2nd–3rd centuries CE INTRODUCTION Dura Europos was probably like many frontier cities in Central Asia, cities located in liminal settings where several cultural traditions came together and that were populated by a mix of local natives, soldiers, merchants, religious figures, and transients. Dura Europos was not a true Silk Road city, since it was not on any of the routes that formed the Silk Road network. It was, however, attached as a secondary node via its trade connections to major Silk Road stops at Palmyra and Hatra. Though the trade for Dura Europos was of a local nature, it was indirectly tied into the larger economic and cultural exchanges of the Silk Road. Over five hundred years it changed hands from Greeks to Parthians to Romans and eventually to Sasanians, and a variety of cultural forces played roles in its development. Such a situation was true for other frontier cities along the northern and eastern edges of Central Asia and in the Tarim Basin. The heterogeneous mix can be seen at Dura Europos in the numerous sanctuaries within the city. The small Temple of Atargatis, from which this relief comes, belonged to a native northeastern Syrian cult of a powerful local goddess who was no doubt worshipped by native residents of the town. However, the goddess was not protective of her sanctuary, and devotees to other Semitic gods made donations to her cult and erected images, such as that of the god Shamash of Hatra. Other residents of the city built their own cult shrines that served their needs with appropriate designs and images for the specific rituals. This was certainly the case for the Jewish community whose synagogue remains the earliest of the diaspora synagogues known and the only one found with surviving wall paintings. As is the case with 331

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Artifacts • Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos the Temple of Atargatis, the synagogue is integrated into the urban fabric of Dura Europos. The same is true for the Christian building, also the earliest examples of a Christian cult place so far unearthed. The mixed population of native residents, foreign troops garrisoned in the city, and merchant communities required many different sanctuaries to cater to their religious needs. The soldiers must have brought with them the cult of Mithras, which also received a cult place. Within the heartland of a kingdom or empire, it might be possible to limit how much outside influences would be permitted, but frontier regions permitted a wider mixing. When the economic incentive of large-scale, long-distance trade is added to the equation, the need to meet the spiritual and even certain cultural needs of a diverse population becomes greater if the town is to fully profit from the economic possibilities brought about by the trade. Resident foreigners must be encouraged to stay and to promote the trade by which the city prospers, merchants and traders on main and secondary routes have to find welcome in these places to continue to include them on their itineraries, and artists and artisans need to see a future in these places to establish their workshops, which produce some of the merchandise to be moved along the trade networks. DESCRIPTION This limestone relief was found in the north part of the courtyard of the building that has come to be recognized as the Temple of Atargatis. The temple shares block H2 with the Temple of Artemis-Nanaia and a house. The Temple of Artemis-Nanaia (see Ceremonial Gilt Plate with Representation of Goddess Cybele, artifact 42) is twice the size of the Temple of Atargatis, and the house has been identified as that of a priest. The relief shows two enthroned figures in frontal hieratic presentations seated within an aedicula or niche and with their feet raised on footstools. The larger figure on the right is the goddess Atargatis whose throne has two lion head armrests. She wears a long-sleeved gown, which is tied at her breasts with a tasseled belt. She is adorned with earrings, bracelets, and a pendant, and on her head, she wears a modified polis crown that is incised with a pattern of triangles. She gestures with her right hand and may have held a spindle in the left. Atargatis is the larger of the two figures. The god Hadad sits in a similar position. He too sports a similar polis crown but with a spiral decoration. He wears a long-sleeved tunic that is decorated with incised guilloche pattern down the center of the upper portion that could have been intended to suggest lacing or embroidery, perhaps with gemstones. In his right hand, he holds wheat stalks and possibly a scepter in another material in the left. Because Hadad is forced into a small space, his animal attribute, the bull, is represented in much abbreviated form to his lower right. Between the two

Artifacts • Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos gods is a staff with a horizontal bar supporting two banners and below the bar, three circular medallions somehow attached to the staff. This is probably the cult standard or semeion. Atargatis was the great Syrian Goddess whose cult was described by Lucian of Samosata, On the Syrian Goddess. Her main sanctuary was at Hierapolis (Membij) in northeastern Syria, and the relief may be a representation of the cult pair, Atargatis and her consort Hadad, as they appeared there. The relief and the cult statues would have been painted, making the various details much easier to read. It is not clear how the relief was displayed within the temple. The small room 13 on the west side of the courtyard seems to have been designed as a kind of theatrical area with stepped benches and could have held the relief. The small room 6 on the south side of the temple has also been suggested. Either space would have allowed for only limited numbers of devotees, an exclusive group, an arrangement paralleled in other sanctuaries in the city. The goddess Atargatis was conflated with the Greek Hellenistic goddess/ personification Tyche or Fortune and is so shown in another relief from Dura Europos where she wears the mural-polis crown type, the attribute of Tyche. The crown on this version of Atargatis references the shape of the mural-polis crown but without the obvious suggestion of crenelated walls. Atargatis was a goddess not only of fertility and generation but also of the desert itself, a powerful female force, and somewhat related to Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess, with whom she shares the lion attribute. Hadad, while a powerful god of the storm, the rain of which produced grain, is pushed to the side in this relief, and perhaps in the original cult statues as well; his role is of less significance than hers. It has been suggested that at Dura Europos, the Macedonian and Greek veterans who settled took native wives. There are few Greek names of women among the inscriptions found at the site, and this must have remained true for the history of the city; while the men came from other places as conquerors, garrisoned soldiers, and merchants, the wives were local. The cult of Atargatis at Dura Europos would appear to have been of especial importance to the prominent local wives and daughters, some of mixed heritage, who patronized the temple of a powerful native goddess and whose names are recorded on the benches of the theatrical room 13. SIGNIFICANCE Because the Silk Road network brought together so many different peoples and their cultures, numerous religions coexisted. In most instances, like is the case for the worship of Atargatis, the cults were local and did not move widely or spread on only a regional level, like the presence of Hatra’s Shamash in Dura Europos. However, some religions were already moving out of the local orbit as shown by the presence of a Christian house

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Artifacts • Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos church and a Jewish synagogue at Dura Europos. These religions had originated well beyond the local range of Dura Europos. The Silk Road network allowed for the wide dispersal of some religions, among which was the Semitic faith of Judaism. The religion in an earlier phase of development had moved east with the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE. Even after Cyrus I, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, allowed Jews to return to their homeland and to rebuild the temple, a community remained in Babylon. It is not clear how widely Jews spread east of the Euphrates during the Seleucid and Parthian periods. Later, Jewish communities existed and appear to have enjoyed good relations with the Sasanian monarchs, though whether there was a movement further east by Jews is not at all clear. There are legends that Jews had established themselves in Kerala in southwest India by the 1st century CE and that Saint Thomas preached in these communities. The early date is not confirmed by strong literary or archaeological evidence, but certainly there was a Jewish presence in southwestern India by the 15th century and probably earlier. In a similar vein, there is a tradition that Jews had already appeared in China during the Han Dynasty, perhaps traveling the overland trade route that joined Parthia to China through Central Asia and the Tarim Basin. However, the literary testimonia are questionable, and the archaeological findings are nonexistent. By the Tang Dynasty, there is good evidence for a Jewish presence in China, which may have also extended to the western overland trade network. Though, it is also possible that these Tang period Jews may have come via the maritime routes to southeastern China. The spread of Judaism represents the movement of one of the oldest of the Western religious developments. It was not the practice of Jews to proselytize, and so the success and continuation of a Jewish community in a foreign land required that the community largely retain its endogenous marriage practices and receive a regular supplement of new people through some type of migration. If Jews extended their reach into eastern Iran, southwest India, Central Asia, the Tarim Basin, and China by the exploitation of long-distance trade, then they must have been maintaining contacts with older Jewish communities in the West from which new migration could emanate. Jews brought a Semitic religion into the mix of Indo-Iranian, Indian, Scythian, Greek, and Chinese beliefs and practices, and Judaism has remained a feature of the religious landscapes of Iran, Central Asia, India, and China to the present day. FURTHER INFORMATION Alumkal, S. G. J. “Pesha Tradition of Saint Thomas Christians of India.” Parole de l’Orient 40 (2015): 55–66. Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Artifacts • Relief of Atargatis and Hadad from Dura Europos Dirven, L. “Strangers and Sojourners: The Religious Behavior or Palmyrenes and Other Foreigners in Dura-Europos.” In Dura Europos, Crossroads of Antiquity, L. R. Brody and G. L. Hoffman, eds., 201–220. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2011. Fowlkes-Childs, B., and M. Seymour. The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Goldstein, J., ed. The Jews of China. Vol. 1: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. Hopkins, C. The Discovery of Dura-Europos. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1979. Steinhardt, N. S. “China’s Earliest Mosque.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67, no. 3 (2008): 330–361.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, 1898 (99.35.2965))

44 Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahrām IV) with Fire Altar Reverse Type Silver Iran, Sasanian 388–399 CE INTRODUCTION Because coins circulated widely as the medium of exchange, coin images or types were one of the ways in which rulers throughout the ancient world communicated various concepts with the larger population. Sasanian monarchs portrayed themselves on the obverses of their coins, usually given specific identity through their headgear. The reverse types provided messages of meaning for the state, since the coinage was under the control of the state mints. The fire altar was a standard element in many Sasanian reverses. The fire altar was a physical manifestation of the Zoroastrian faith (see Zoroastrianism), which became the state religion under the Sasanians. The dates for Zoroaster, the great prophet and founder of the faith, are debated and range from the 13th century BCE to the 6th century BCE, though his base of operation in northeastern Iran is generally accepted. His teachings are known only from the Gathas, hymns ascribed to him and that have uncertain dates, and the Ahuna Vaiyō, a prayer, also argued to be his composition. He seems to have preached a form of monotheism with Ahuramazda (“Wise Lord”) as the focus, though the religion incorporated older Iranian deities in various forms with Ahuramazda as the supreme deity. At its heart, Zoroastrianism is a dualistic belief system presenting a universe in conflict between the forces of good and evil, personified by Ahuramazda who dwells in heaven and Angra Mainyu who occupies hell. Since Ahuramazda is perfect, omnipotent, and all good, his creations, which includes 337

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Artifacts • Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahra¯ m IV) the natural world, are also good and need to be treated with care and respect. The natural world, as represented by water, the earth, and fire, must not be polluted. The fire altar with its sacred flames became the focus of religious practice. The cult of the fire was an older feature of Iranian and Indian religious systems that became integrated into Zoroastrianism. The fire altar was a specific feature in Zoroastrianism as it developed during the Achaemenid period and is shown on Achaemenid seals. It is perhaps better referred to as a fire holder, since no actual sacrifices appear to have been made on the structure. Its role was the presentation of the fire for veneration, perhaps deriving from an earlier veneration of the household hearth fire. The earliest examples of structures identified as fire altars included those with stepped bases supporting a pillar-like form and topped by an inverted stepped top. However, there were variations on this format as shown by the possible remade altar of Cybele into a fire altar at Sardis during the Achaemenid period. There is good archaeological and some literary evidence for the continued veneration of fire on specially constructed platforms during the Seleucid and Parthian periods and even for the spread of the practice into Bactrian regions of Central Asia. With the advent of Sasanian rule, Zoroastrianism became the state cult, and the fire altar was featured prominently on coins and seals, and a number of surviving fire altars have been documented in the Sasanian heartland of Pars province. There were other important sites scattered around the empire, of which that at Takht-i Suleimān in Iranian Azerbaijan is one of the most impressive. The location allowed for both fire and water to be venerated and played an important role in the investiture of the Sasanian Shahanshah or “king-of-kings.” DESCRIPTION This is a silver coin issued by the Sasanian ruler Bahran IV (Wahrām IV) (388–399 CE). The obverse features a profile image of Bahran’s head facing left and identified by his headdress that consists of a diadem along with a pair of wings, a single crenellation, a globe, and two fillets. For the most part, the crowns of individual rulers were distinct allowing for the image to be linked to a specific Sasanian king. Bahran is bearded and wears his hair long and gathered in bun at the nape of his neck. He is adorned with earrings, a beaded choker, and a necklace. The upper portion of his garment, all that shows, appears to be decorated with beads, possibly representing gemstones sewn to the fabric, which define the V neck and right shoulder areas. The reverse features a composition of two figures flanking a central architectural unit. The unit consists of a stepped base supporting a square pillar topped by an inverted stepped capital on which a fire burns. On either side facing the unit is a repeated figure holding aloft a staff. The pillar portion of the architectural unit is decorated with a raised relief of circles, and from each side hangs some type of decoration, perhaps fabric. The image has

Artifacts • Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahra¯ m IV) been interpreted as representing a fire altar attended by two repeated images of Bahran himself. The fire may be intended to symbolize the soul of the king who is the supreme authority within the religion. The use of the motif of the fire altar as a coin type appeared on the issues of the first Sasanian monarch, Ardashir, and continued to be used until the end of the empire in the mid-7th century CE. Bahran IV’s predecessor, Shapur II, had defeated the Roman forces led by Julian in 363 CE. The peace treaty that followed gave Armenia to the Sasanians, and by the time of Bahran’s rule, eastern Armenia was completely incorporated into the Sasanian Empire. However, before the Roman defeat, the Armenian kingdom had accepted conversion to Christianity, an act that rendered the reluctant Zoroastrian population suspect and officially deemed as evil. The use of a reverse type that stressed the Sasanian state connection to Zoroastrianism may have had a stronger immediate political meaning on Bahran IV’s coinage. The growing force of Christianity, which was present within the boundaries of the empire, and the emergence of the Roman emperor Constantine as the self-proclaimed leader of all Christians in the early 4th century CE, even those outside of the confines of the Roman Empire, must have placed some concern on the Sasanian state apparatus. SIGNIFICANCE Ardashir, the founder of the Sasanian Dynasty, established Zoroastrianism as the state religion. He was looking for various devices to stitch together an empire from the different demographic and cultural components that lived on the Iranian Plateau. As a native-born faith, Zoroastrianism had cultural elements within it that could be used to help unify the new nation. In the early 3rd century CE, there was no orthodox form of Zoroastrian belief. As an Iranian cult, it had developed alongside other religions on the plateau, incorporating features of them. However, it was distinct in its dualism and monotheistic aspects, though not firmly held since other Iranian gods were incorporated. In the middle of the 3rd century CE, the priest Kartir established seminaries for the training of Zoroastrian priests in a standardized theology and ritual practice, which gave birth to a Zoroastrian orthodoxy, with other forms being declared heretical. The evidence is clear from Kartir’s inscriptions that a variety of Zoroastrian beliefs existed both in Persian Iran proper and in the outlying regions of Sogdiana and Bactria, but now the state could work to enforce orthodoxy within its own territory. Zoroastrian heretics were persecuted as were other minority religions within the empire—Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Manichaeism, though probably not Judaism. Zoroastrian orthodoxy never fully prevailed; varieties of the faith could still be found on the eve of the Islamic conquest, and communities of Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus were still resident. Yet, the state’s commitment to an orthodox Zoroastrianism could not be

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Artifacts • Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahra¯ m IV) dismissed, and the maintenance of the coin reverse type through the history of the dynasty speaks to its importance. The powerful theological force of Zoroastrianism influenced the development of Judaism, probably during the period of the Achaemenid Empire, and later certain aspects of Christian belief. The most significant offshoot of Zoroastrianism was a new 3rd century CE religion, which also incorporated elements of Christianity, Manichaeism. Its founding prophet, Mani, had grown up within a Christian community in Sasanian Babylon, and it was within the Sasanian Empire that he began to preach a faith that borrowed its duality from Zoroastrianism. Mani’s faith presented a quite different duality seeing the spiritual realm as good and the material realm as bad. Unlike Zoroastrianism that saw all of Ahuramazda’s creations as good, Manichaeism regarded the material world as inherently evil. While the Zoroastrian, Christian, and Manichaean faithful looked forward to redemption and an eternity in heaven as the goal of the faith, the Manicheans could obtain this only by escaping the clutches of the material world; only then would their bodies be resurrected with Jesus’s second coming and would they be redeemed. However, the strong dualistic nature of Mani’s faith allowed it to compete with both Zoroastrianism and Christianity in proselytizing in the Iranian regions, since like Zoroastrianism, it was at its core an Iranian belief system. Even after Mani was martyred through the machinations of Kartir, his religion continued to spread, eventually finding homes in Central Asia, the Tarim Basin, and China. The Turkic Uyghur rulers of the Tarim Basin around Turfan adopted the faith and heavily patronized it in the 8th and 9th centuries CE. The finds of fragments of illuminated Manichaean texts at Turfan testify to the faith’s successful cultivation of powerful patrons before the coming of Islam to the region and provide a visual record of some of the rituals practiced by the faithful. Though most of the influence of Zoroastrianism is to be found in the teachings and practices of other religions that had contact with it, there is evidence that the fire altar itself may have had some role in the formation of Gandhāran Buddhist rituals. A small number of reliefs that decorate the podiums on which are positioned early statues of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas portray scenes that look suspiciously like those on the Sasanian coin reverses, figures positioned on either side of a central unit that holds aloft a flame. These have been interpreted as showing devotees venerating the sacred fire, which it held atop a lampstand. It is possible that this is best explained as the integration of an aspect of Zoroastrian ritual into the formation of Kushan-patronized Buddhism. The Kushan and Sasanian Empires existed as neighbors, though not always friendly neighbors, and the appropriation of a Sasanian state religious practice or icon into the early stages of Gandhāran art is not out of the question. It has also been argued that the images reflect the presence of the Indian Vedic concept of

Artifacts • Sasanian Coin of Bahran IV (Wahra¯ m IV) the sacred fire, agni, in early Buddhism. Several canonical texts refer to the Buddha as Angīrasa—radiant, illuminating, glorious, and luminous. Yet, it cannot be denied that the composition of these scenes recalls the coin reverses, though on a grander scale with more figures and no obvious royal associations. Perhaps the concept is native Indian, a Vedic belief adopted by early Gandhāran Buddhists but rendered using a Sasanian compositional device. FURTHER INFORMATION Boyce, M. “On the Zoroastrian Temple Cult of Fire.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975): 454–465. Daryaee, T. Sasanian Iran 224–651 BCE: Portrait of a Late Antique Empire. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2008. Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London; New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010. Garrison, M. “Fire Altars.” Encyclopedia Iranica IX/6, 631–619. http:// www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fire-altars. Accessed January 10, 2022. Hansen, V. “A Brief History of the Turfan Oasis.” Orientations 30, no. 4 (1999): 24–27. Tadikonda, K. K. “Significance of the Fire Altars Depicted on Gandharan Buddhist Sculptures.” East and West 57, no. 1 (2007): 29–43. Yamamoto, Y. “The Zoroastrian Temple Cult of Fire in Archaeology and Literature (I).” Orient 15 (1979): 19–53. Yamamoto, Y. “The Zoroastrian Temple Cult of Fire in Archaeology and Literature (II).” Orient 17 (1981): 67–104.

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(Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo)

45 Reindeer Stag Horse Headdress from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk Altai Nomadic culture—Sakā 5th century BCE INTRODUCTION Burying horses alongside high-status warriors was a common practice in the Iron Age nomadic cultures (Scythians, Sakā, and Sarmatians). Among the richest finds come from the kurgans excavated at Pazyryk in a valley in the Altai Mountains of modern Kazakhstan. The preservation of organic materials (wood and leather) is possible in these kurgans because of an unusual situation. The kurgans began to fill with water during rains in antiquity. The collected water froze in the cold of the harsh winters and never completely thawed during the summers, creating, what was in effect, a deep freeze that preserved organic materials. When the horse burials were excavated, it became clear that many of the horses had been fitted with masks intended to suggest that the horse had been transformed into another animal. DESCRIPTION Kurgan 1 at Pazyryk is one of five royal kurgans set among a group of smaller kurgans, all arranged in two rows in a mountain valley in the eastern Altai Mountains about 1500 m above the sea level. The burial chamber consists of two huts, the smaller telescoped into the larger. Ten geldings were buried with the tomb’s occupant. They had been placed together in a pit on the north side and arranged in two rows of four lengthwise, one behind the other with their heads facing east. Two others were deposited side by side on the west side of the pit, heads positioned to the south. A blow to the forehead from a poleaxe had killed each. All the horses were in some manner decorated, and the ornamented saddles, bridles, and headgear had been taken off the horses and placed with the horses in the pit. The covers for the 343

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Artifacts • Reindeer Stag Horse Headdress from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk manes were left on the horses as were the tail covers on two of the horses. Unlike the main burial chamber that had been ransacked by robbers and the contents and the original arrangement damaged, the horse burials were left undisturbed. These were riding horses, tall, well-proportioned, and probably swift, similar to the modern Akhal-Teke breed, different from the other horses found in several of the burials, a short breed, like a Mongolian pony, and used for pulling wagons. It is assumed that dressed in full regalia, these handsome animals took part in a procession to the kurgan after which they were ritually slaughtered and interred with the deceased individual as companions in the afterlife. Of the ten horses, two were equipped with headgear. These headpieces were one element of more elaborate ensembles that included saddles and bridles along with decorative covers for the tails and manes. The headdress shown here is that of a reindeer’s head with life-sized antlers attached. The headdress for the other horse was that of a lion-griffin. A leather-covered felt sheath with attached large ears forms the base structure for the headdress to which the antlers are attached. The almost natural-sized antlers are formed of a skeleton of thick leather worked into shape by sewing and to which is pasted a finer leather cover with excised decoration. Tufts of red-dyed horsehair protrude from the tines of the antlers. Along the front of the mask, a feline representation cut as a silhouette from fur dyed blue is pasted and decorated with gold disks. SIGNIFICANCE The procession of ten horses that led the way to the burial site for an important and successful warrior, perhaps a chieftain, on a summer’s day sometime in the 5th century BCE must have been breathtaking. All the horses were magnificently caparisoned, and the two lead horses were even more impressive with their monumental headdress-masks. One of the horses had been transformed into a reindeer stag. The ritual killing of the horses that ended the procession would have been dramatic as would have been the placement of the horses’ bodies into the pit aside the burial chamber. This was a clear statement of the authority and importance of the individual interred in the kurgan, someone worthy enough to take as company the horses that, no doubt, had made him such a successful warrior and to remove from the community a major economic item. When included with the other intrinsically valuable finished objects, some of local manufacture and some of obviously exotic origin, the horses provided one more visual reminder of the hierarchically stratified nature of the Sakā tribal society. The point was probably made even more apparent when the assembled crowd of lower-ranking individuals was put to work building the kurgan over the burial chamber. The Altai Mountain valleys were only used as

Artifacts • Reindeer Stag Horse Headdress from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk summer pastures. The burials of high-ranking individuals who died during the other seasons had to wait until the summer when the various units that formed the larger tribal group could come together for a ritual celebration surrounding the burial and the building of the kurgan. Gruesome as the killing of the horses must have been, there was a religious aspect that underlies the practice. Horse sacrifices first appear in the transitional period of the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age, 1200–800 BCE, a period when the societal structure of the nomads in the steppe regions of Central Asia was changing. A more militarized mounted warrior culture was coming into existence with a more clearly defined hierarchical structure in which a successful warrior and his kin were at the top and were accorded the most ostentatious burials. These horses now go with the deceased to serve him and no one else. However, such a societal change does not explain the need to transform the horses into something else. Reindeer stags are a common motif in “animal style” art (see Animal Style). They often appear as single units used to decorate clothing or weaponry. An older religious concept, one belonging to the Bronze Age, may have given rise to the practice. Dotting the landscape of Central Asia, south Russia, and Mongolia are upright stones carved with images of deer, deer stones. Many of these deer forms are modified by the inclusion of foreign animal parts, particularly bird beaks, which emphasizes again the notion of animal transformation. This is a standard feature of “animal style” art. The stones themselves sometimes are carved with a belt from which hang weapons, and this has led to the conclusion that they represent dead warriors, perhaps cenotaphs. The power of the stag was being used as a symbol of the power of the warrior, and this seems to continue into the Iron Age, but now the horse is changed to a stag. Such a transformation might more fully represent the predator-prey opposition that is so strong in “animal style” artworks. It also emphasizes that the prey is not always that easy to get. To the steppe-dwelling nomads, the fact that many stags outwitted and outran the predators would not have been lost. Speed and strength were worth celebrating. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the transformation could have had a more immediate and biographical connection with the deceased. Perhaps this horse and his master had successfully brought down a reindeer stag, and the transformation imagery celebrated that event for perpetuity. FURTHER INFORMATION Barkova, L. “The Nomadic Culture of the Altai and the Animal Style.” In The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, J. Aruz, A. Farkas, A. Alekseev, and E. Korolkova, eds., 241–276. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.

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Artifacts • Reindeer Stag Horse Headdress from Kurgan 1, Pazyryk Hanks, Bryan. “Mounted Warfare and Its Sociopolitical Implications.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 92–105. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Jettmar, K. Art of the Steppes. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1967. Pavlinskaya, L. “The Scythians and Sakians: Eighth to Third Centuries B.C.” In Nomads of Eurasia, V. Basilov, ed., 19–40. Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, 1989. Rubinson, K. “Burial Practices and Social Roles of Iron Age Mobile Pastoralists.” In Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, S. Stark, K. Rubinson, Z. Samahev, and J. Chiu, eds., 76–91. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Rudenko, S. Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lester Wolfe, 1965 (65.270.1))

46 Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Including Crosses Nishapur, Iran 10th century CE INTRODUCTION The Sasanian Empire contained religious minorities within its borders, including Christians. The majority of these eastern Christians were members of the Church of the East, which had formed in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council convened by the Byzantine emperor Marcian in 451 CE. The main goal of the council was to reassert the early rulings of the Council of Ephesus of 431 CE regarding the nature of the divinity and humanity of Christ. Two heretical responses had emerged from the earlier council, those that espoused Christ was solely divine, miaphysitism known as monophysites, and those that followed Bishop Nestorius’s claim that Christ’s divine nature had to be separated from his human nature. The two views were repudiated; their followers declared heretics. Chalcedonian Orthodoxy (diophysite) was declared the only acceptable form of Christianity. Nestorius’s followers fled East to establish the separate Church of the East, also called the Nestorian Church, and it was this form of Christian belief that came to dominate outside of the eastern borders of the Byzantine Empire. In time, smaller rival Christian sects developed in the Sasanian Empire, a miaphysite church (Jacobites) whose members had fled east rather than south to Egypt during persecutions of the Chalcedonian Orthodox church of the Byzantine Empire. The Sasanian conquests to the west during the 6th century brought Chalcedonian Syrian Christians into the empire who actively competed with the Church of the East, in some instances with the encouragement of the Sasanian rulers. 349

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Artifacts • Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration Though the Christians residing within the Sasanian Empire were persecuted from time to time, they were also recognized by Sasanian monarchs and the Sasanian elites who integrated these Christians into the Sasanian political system. There were bishoprics throughout the imperial territories, and the Shahanshah (king-of-kings) took part in the investiture of the bishop of the Church of the East at the capital, Ctesiphon. Nisibis thrived as a center of theological study and learning for the Church of the East, and there were several monasteries spread throughout the land (see Stucco Architectural Roundel with Palmettes from a Window, artifact 10). The Church of the East does not appear to have produced much visual material that can be easily identified as distinctly belonging solely to it. However, the cross represented on this bowl is one symbolic attribute of the community and has been found widely throughout the area into which the Church of the East spread. The missionary activity of the church took it east through Central Asia where it could be found on the frontiers with Sogdiana at Merv and further east into China, where converted Chinese Christians following the theology and rites of the Church of the East were encountered by the early Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. DESCRIPTION This particular type of pottery bowl is associated with the ceramic production center of Nishapur (modern Iran) during the early years of the Abbasid rule (750–1258 CE). These pieces in buff were decorated in polychrome using slips and then covered in a transparent glaze. During the first centuries of Islamic rule in the region, Nishapur was a military stronghold, not a cultural center, and the development of the ceramic industry and the use of glaze were probably introduced from Iraq. Only after the Abbasid conquest did Nishapur emerge as a pottery center. This bowl is decorated with figural busts and animal images close to the rim area, rare features of the early Nishapur production. Within the field of filler decoration are crosses of a Maltese type, four equal arms that narrow toward the center. These crosses differ from the Maltese by lacking the distinctive V or arrowhead shape of the arms. They are, instead, a variation of the Nestorian cross or cross of the Church of the East. Similar decorations with crosses have been found on other excavated pottery fragments from Nishapur and from elsewhere in Central Asia and China. At the time of the Muslim conquest of Nishapur, the city had an important community of Christians, members of the Church of the East, and the city was a bishopric during the Sasanian period. The Christian presence remained strong into the Islamic period. SIGNIFICANCE The trade networks that created the Silk Roads moved not only goods from place to place but also ideas. Christian missionaries from the Church of the

Artifacts • Ceramic Bowl with Polychrome Decoration East must have accompanied trading parties as they moved out of Sasanian Persia and headed to Sogdiana, the Tarim Basin, and China. Just as the traders changed, plying only portions of the various trunk roads and connecting routes, so too the missionaries must have stopped when they found hospitable places where the possibilities of conversion seemed promising. In time, a network of Christian nodes, most probably also trading nodes, had become established, and the Christianity of the Church of the East had spread far to the East. In the south, these missionaries must have encountered another early form of Christianity in the East, the Church of Saint Thomas Christians that took root in Kerala in India. Tradition places the foundation for this branch of Christianity to the 1st century CE and the proselytizing of the apostle Saint Thomas, whose life is recorded in the apocryphal third century text, The Acts of Saint Thomas. By the 8th century, this community was under the care of the Church of the East, which organized it as the Province of India. Unlike the spread of Buddhism, with which it shares many similarities of dispersal, Christianity east of the Byzantine territories did not succeed by converting local rulers and elites. It was most commonly a tolerated minority religion practiced by emigrant communities and converts, most commonly from the lower social strata of the societies. FURTHER INFORMATION Baumer, C. The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity. New Edition. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016. Drew University Library, Special Collections, Mark W. Brown Nestorian Cross Collection. https://drew.edu/library/2019/08/19/mark-w-brown -nestorian-cross-collection/ Jenkins, P. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. New York: HarperOne, 2008. Payne, R. A State of Mixture, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Wilkinson, C. K. Nishapur: Pottery of the Early Islamic Period. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973.

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Muneichi Nitta, 2003 (2003.293.1))

47 Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding Gandhara, Pakistan or Afghanistan 1st–mid-2nd centuries CE INTRODUCTION If there was a historical Buddha, which is no more certain than for Jesus or Mohammed or Zoroaster, then he probably lived in the 6th–5th century BCE in northern India. What would emerge in the Buddhist sources as the life of the Buddha have him born as a prince in a small kingdom in the foothills of the Himalayas. According to the biography of the Buddha, he abandoned his life of privilege, in which his father had tried to keep him unaware of the suffering of most people and set out on his own to find the reason for human suffering and how to defeat it. His quest took him through many experiences, but eventually, he reached the state of enlightenment, understanding that sorrow and suffering were caused by desire and that way to escape from the world of pain and the constant rebirths, samsāra, required the individual to give up all desires, to focus on the goal of enlightenment and ultimate unity with the cosmos in Nirvana. He spent the remainder of his life preaching how to escape from desire and reach enlightenment. The Buddha, whose life and teachings form the core of Buddhism, was not the first nor the last Buddha. He had had prior lives during which he reached closer stages to enlightenment. These earlier events became the stories of the Buddha’s previous incarnations, or the Jataka tales. The Buddha we know best is the historical Buddha, sometimes known as Shakyamuni after the clan into which he was born or a Gautama, his princely name. He was also not the last Buddha; there are always those in the process of reaching enlightenment and who will eventually also become Buddhas. The faith developed in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent during centuries of social transition. The old Vedic religion had formed with the 353

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Open work ivory relief with pigments and gilt forms a portable shrine showing Mara’s temptation of the Buddha Shakyamuni. Northern India or Kashmir, 8th century CE. (Cleveland Museum of Art, J. H. Wade Fund (1971.18))

arrival of the Indo-Aryans and was closely aligned to the caste system. However, India was experiencing an urban revolution, and Buddhism was one of several religions, ultimately derived from the older Vedic force, that emerged to meet the needs of the new urban populations. Both Buddhism and Jainism provided alternatives to Brahmanism/Hinduism that were not

Artifacts • Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding tied to the caste system and offered a chance for greater participation of the various strata of urban classes that were taking shape. During the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, Buddhism spread, and in the mid3rd century BCE, it received an important boost when Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire, the most powerful state in India or Central Asia, began to patronize Buddhist sanctuaries and promote certain Buddhist ideas (see Ashoka Pillar, artifact 31). Buddhism was a proselytizing, universal faith, and those who devoted their lives or some portion of their lives to the active propagation of the faith as monks and nuns served as the transmitters of the belief system. Because of Buddhism’s connections to emerging urban life, many of the early patrons were merchants and individuals whose wealth was made in various urban ventures. They chose to invest their resources in monasteries, which while initially built outside of cities were soon found within the urban cores as well. These were often further adorned by the wealthy faithful with gifts of devotional objects, like those shown here. As with any faith that spreads widely and develops in multiple locations, there were variations in the faith and within a century of the traditional date of the Buddha’s death, or translation to Nirvana, the Parinirvana (see Stone Lintel Frieze of the Parinirvana, artifact 11), the religion was rife with fractures represented by competing schools of interpretation. The growing body of textual materials helped to fuel the battles that eventually resulted in a great schism, creating two main divisions of the faith: the Great Wheel (Mahāyāna) and the Lesser Wheel (Hinayāna). The Hinayāna form stood more closely connected to the earlier traditions of Theravāda Buddhism, by which name it is also referred, while Mahāyāna Buddhism represented a somewhat newer interpretation of the faith. During the first half millennium of Buddhist development, certain visual ideas took shape. One concept developed into an architectural ensemble that coalesced into a religious compound known as a vihara or monastery. These came to be dominated by a stūpa or stūpas, funerary monuments in the shape of domes that covered the remains of either the Buddha or other holy figures thought to be close to or in a state of enlightenment upon death. The remains were relics to be venerated by circling the stūpa in a clockwise manner. The monasteries created the setting for the display of artworks, which also provided a visual testament to the faith of the donor. These earliest works never showed an image of the Buddha himself. He could only be referenced aniconically using footprints, the Wheel of the Law, a riderless horse with a parasol above, or even the stūpa itself but never the figure of the Buddha in human form. But in the early part of the Common Era, when Buddhism came into the realm of the Kushans, there was a new urgency given to the need to find an appropriate human representation. In two locales within the empire, at Mathura in central India and in Gandhāra in northwest India (modern Pakistan), sculptural workshops began to produce the first images

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Artifacts • Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding in two quite distinct styles. In the Gandhāran style, represented here by the seated bronze Buddha, the influence of Graeco-Roman Classical forms played an important role, giving to the sculptures a strong sense of rationally conceived human being, though with certain distinct elements, the physical attributes of the Buddha. Alongside the emergence of the iconic Buddha figure, there also developed a desire for narrative images in which the Buddha played the protagonist in his own story. We can see this in the open relief panel. These artistic developments that took root and flourished in the Gandhāran homeland and in the extended area under Kushan control to the west, modern Afghanistan. The new visual aspects of Buddhism accompanied the textual and oral elements that a proselytizing monk carried deeper into Central Asia and east to China, Korea, and Japan. DESCRIPTION The small bronze statue portrays the Buddha Shakyamuni seated in a yogic position and holding his right hand in the abhaya mudra (have no fear) to welcome the devotee. The statue shows signs of gilding on the robes and on the serrated halo, which suggests the light emanating from the Buddha. His robes cover both shoulders and fall in gentle folds, giving emphasis to the drapery itself. His hands and feet are decorated with lotus flowers, which correspond to the emblems of the wheel and the triratna (the three jewels) found on other images of the Buddha. Of the thirty-two physical traits possessed by the Buddha, this small statue has several. The arms are long and must have been intended to reach below the knees. The fingers are also long and slender. Between the eyebrows is the urna, and atop the head is the cranial protuberance, the ushnisha. The gilding would have given the body the golden hue. This is probably one of the earliest images of the Buddha to be made. For the first centuries after the foundation of the faith, the Buddha was never shown. In images associated with the faith as at the early 3rd century BCE great Indian monastic and stūpa site of Sanchi, the Buddha is not shown only referenced using aniconic symbols. The actual Buddha form was introduced at the complex later. The first images of the Buddha were not produced until about the 1st century CE in two different regions of the Kushan Empire, Mathura and Gandhāra, each of which created Buddha forms in distinctly different styles. This Buddha with his mustache, treatment of the face and body that recalls Western Classical forms, and emphasis on the fall of the drapery of the robe is the work of a Gandhāran artist, either from one of the workshops in Gandhāra proper or in Afghanistan. It does not come from a known archaeological context but likely was made to be placed in a small image shrine within a monastic complex dominated by one or more domes or stūpas. Donors offered such statues and the architectural setting of the shrine to a monastery where they were set up either facing the stūpa or in a

Artifacts • Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding passageway leading to the stūpa and served to define the boundary between the public sacred space and the nonpublic sacred areas of the monastery. The Buddha’s followers began to congregate in communities early in the formation of the faith, which in time came to be recognized as vihāras or monasteries. These were often founded near existing holy sites in India and were patronized by the local wealthy who found congenial support in Buddhism. The monastic form spread north into Gandhāra where it was supported by the Kushan rulers and elite, and these were the individuals who erected the image shrines within the monastery proper. This statue, made in bronze and given added value with the gilding, must have been the gift of such a wealthy individual to a monastic complex somewhere in Gandhāra or Afghanistan, where Kushan power and Buddhism spread in the early decades of the Common Era. The inset image is of an open work relief carved from ivory that formed part of a small, portable shrine. The ivory also shows remnants of pigment and gilding. The materials again suggest a wealthy patron. The image shown here is a narrative scene; the Buddha Shakyamuni, depicted with the same physical attributes of the Buddha as the bronze statue, is represented withstanding the temptations of Mara, the last great test before his enlightenment. As he sat mediating beneath a peepul tree outside of the town of Gaya, determined to answer the riddle of suffering, the spirit of the world, and of sensual pleasure, Mara came to tempt him away from his spiritual quest by first frightening him, then attacking him with physical torments, and finally using his daughters to seduce him. Mara failed because the Buddha could see the inherent unreality of what was being presented. Mara fled, and the Buddha soon reached enlightenment. The carving offers the seated Buddha as substantially larger than the other elements, sitting calmly and unmoved by the chaos that surrounds him as the various figures attempt to draw him away from his focus. The Buddha’s robe follows the pattern developed at Mathura and covers only one shoulder. It does cling to the body, revealing the physical form of the Buddha beneath and betrays a distant echo of the old Gandhāran form of Classically (see Persistence of Classicism) inspired treatment. The two images of the Buddha also raise the question, still unanswered, as to whether the Buddha first took form as a devotional figure, as an icon of belief, or as the protagonist in a narrative portrayal of an episode from his life. In Gandhāra, both types exist side by side, but one may have initially preceded the other. The ivory relief is from Kashmir, a region of northern India within the Himalayas, where Buddhism penetrated quite early and where, according to tradition, a great Buddhist council was convened by the Kushan king Kanishka in the 1st or 2nd century CE, at which the initial ideas that would come to define the great schism between the Great and Lesser Vehicles (Mahāyāna and Hinayāna) were presented in the codification of the doctrines of the Sarvāstivādin school, the Mahāvibhāşā.

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Artifacts • Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding SIGNIFICANCE Buddhism is a textually driven faith, though during the first centuries of its existence, the texts were kept orally. The earlier collections consisted of the pitaka or the doctrine, sutras or the Buddha’s sermons, and the Vinaya or the monastic rules. The textual traditions multiplied as divergent schools arose over time, and eventually, the Hinayāna or Theravāda and Mahāyāna split resulted in the production of an additional corpus of literature in Sanskrit, which was claimed as the Buddha’s own words and which became canonical to the Mahāyāna schools. Although both Theravāda and Mahāyāna forms of Buddhism moved north into Central Asia, the Mahāyāna schools came to dominate Central Asia and the Tarim Basin and spread into China during the later Han Dynasty (25–220 CE) and then Korea and Japan. The political unification of northern and central India under the Mauryan Empire and the patronage provided by the emperor Ashoka allowed Indian Buddhism to flourish and establish a foundation. The advent of the Kushan Empire, which brought together northern India and Central Asia to the Oxus (Amu Darya) River, made for the easy movement of Buddhism to the north. This process was aided by the favorable response accorded the faith by Kushan rulers. During the Kushan Empire, the international trade networks in Asia were extensive. The empire bordered the Tarim Basin oasis settlements during a period when these were also often under control of China’s Han Dynasty. There may have even been periods when the Kushan Empire controlled portions of the Tarim routes. During these centuries, Indian merchants actively moved products north to south and vice versa as well as east to west and west to east. Along with Indian traders, it was probably during these centuries that the Central Asian Sogdians first became actively engaged in long-distance trade. The trade routes incorporated eastern Afghanistan, the Swat Valley, Kashmir, the southern and northern routes around the Täklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin, east to the Gansu corridor, and west along the Oxus River into Sogdiana. Buddhism spread along these routes, in part because it was a faith favored by merchants, and the early proselytizing Buddhist monks who carried the faith probably traveled in convoys of merchants for protection, as did the 7th-century Chinese monk Xuanzang who made a pilgrimage from Tang China to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures. As the faith spread through the work of monk-missionaries, it was often at the elite levels that the preaching found an audience. Just as early Buddhism prospered because of Ashoka and the Kushan kings, it must have also found that it succeeded best when local rulers converted and then supported the establishment of a permanent Buddhist presence in the form of monasteries. Throughout Gandhāra, the Swat Valley, eastern Afghanistan, and west to Termez in modern Uzbekistan, on the northern and southern routes of the Tarim Basin, around Turfan and north into the great loop of

Artifacts • Small, Bronze, Seated Buddha with Traces of Gilding the Yellow River and south to Xian can be found the ruins of Buddhist monasteries. These were decorated with sculptures and paintings, and in the earliest examples, the style of artwork betrays the influence of Gandhāran forms. Objects like the two shown here were portable, easily transported by monks to serve as visual aids in preaching and providing prototypes for local artists to use as they undertook the decoration of these monastic outposts. It is quite likely that artists from Gandhāra came to these new Buddhist sites once it was certain that they would last and produced works for the monasteries under the patronage of local elites. Through this process, both the foreign faith and the foreign art style made major inroads into the cultural and social lives of many people in Central and East Asia during the early 1st millennium CE. FURTHER INFORMATION Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India: A  Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims. New York: Grover Press, 1954. Behrendt, K. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Mani, B. R. The Kushan Civilization: Studies in Urban Development and Material Culture. New Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1987. Zwalf, W., ed. Buddhism: Art and Faith. London: British Museum Publications, Limited, 1985.

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48 Infant Mummy Excavated from Zaghunluq, Chärchän (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China) 8th century BCE

INTRODUCTION The process by which bodies became mummified in the Tarim Basin region was normally the result of natural conditions rather than the actions of those who interred the dead (see Funerary Practices). For the peoples who inhabited the Täklimakan Desert regions from the 2nd millennium BCE through to the 1st millennium CE, inhumation burial was common. The finds have shown that not only were men carefully buried in this manner but so too some women and even some infants. The careful treatment of the infant in the burial process might well suggest that at least some babies were accorded an identity early after birth and were thus provided with a meaningful burial upon death, one that included special garments and grave offerings. This burial was probably part of a larger grouping that included a nearby tomb of a Caucasoid man accompanied by three women. The man wore a woven coat of brown wool overdyed with red to produce a burgundy color. This is the same material that made the baby’s shroud, and the blue and light red twisted cord used to bind the shroud is the same as the cord used to tie the man’s hands together. Some scholars have argued that these connections show that the man and the child were related, perhaps father and son. The cemetery, which contains several hundred graves, lies on a plateau above the nearby village of Zaghunluq, outside of the larger town of Chärchän, and in the southeastern sector of the Tarim Basin. Only a few of these burials have been scientifically excavated. The tombs appear to belong to the Early Iron Age. The infant was placed into a shallow shaft grave with a thick layer of reeds and covered with a curved plank of poplar 361

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Artifacts • Infant Mummy or willow hollowed from a section of the tree trunk. The nearby grave of the man and three women was more impressive. It consisted of five layers of deposits of timbers, hides, and mats, all placed in a double-chambered pit that became narrower and more constricted the deeper it went. At the bottom was the chamber that contained the bodies of the man and three women, all dressed in well-woven wool garments. In addition to these two graves, archeologists have unearthed another set of graves that seem to indicate that the bodies interred were part of some type of ritual that may have involved human sacrifice. DESCRIPTION This is the mummy of swaddled baby of about 3 to 8 months of age. Surviving bits of hair and eyebrows are light brown, and the visible skin of the face is fair, all suggesting a Caucasoid child. Blue stones were placed over the eyes, perhaps indicating their color at the time of death. The baby was wrapped in a woven wool textile of dark burgundy wool, obtained by overdying natural brown wool with red, and held in place with a cord of intertwined light red and blue wool. The head was covered with a cap of blue cashmere wool with a light red lining, the same color as the light red of the binding cord. The head had been placed on a pillow made of a piece of white wool fabric woven in a long-hop twill folded over raw wool. The baby was laid atop a white felt blanket. Placed inside the infant’s nostrils were two balls of red yarn, and on either side of the infant had been laid an ox horn and a kind of baby bottle made from the udder of a sheep or goat. It has been suggested that this was an attempt to provide the infant with a means of getting nourishment after the mother’s death. SIGNIFICANCE Among the textile finds from the Chärchän cemetery are early examples of trousers found in another grave and dated to ca. 1000 BCE. Earlier trousers have been found in the Yanghai cemetery (M21, M157) near Turfan that are dated to the 13th–10th centuries BCE. It has been argued that these correspond to the spread of mobile pastoralists into the Täklimakan Desert. These trousers are made of three pieces of fabric—a rectangular piece for each leg spanning the waistband to the ankle and a bridging piece of cross-shape joining the two leg pieces. The trousers from Chärchän follow similar construction except that the bridging piece is a diamond-shaped gusset, folded on the bias to provide greater elasticity in the crotch. The design and execution of the trousers for the Yanghai and Chärchän burials show a high degree of care and skill. For the Yanghai trousers, the tailor did not cut the fabric to fit but seems to have used cloth that was shaped on the loom and then employed yarn of the same quality and color to join the pieces together. The tailor for the Chärchän trousers took a slightly different

Artifacts • Infant Mummy approach, sewing a thick pale red yarn for the visible stitching and thereby adding a decorative touch to the pants. This decorative quality may have been extended to the infant’s blue cap with red lining. The notion that the people buried at Zaghunluq may have had associations with recently arrived horse-riding pastoralists seems strengthened by the finds of a leather saddle, along with a head and front hoof of a horse, probably the remains of a sacrifice, in the upper layers of the tomb of the man with the three women. From the cemetery at Qizilchoqa near to Hami in the northeast has come the fragment of fabric of diagonal twill weave with the pattern of plaid, not dissimilar to a Scottish tartan, woven with wide and narrow stripes of color on both the warp and weft and dating to ca. 1000 BCE. Fabric in a long-hop twill weave was found in several of the Zaghunluq burials, including the white pillow on which the infant lies. The find of a textile woven with twill weave, known to have first developed in the West in the Caucasus in the 4th–3rd millennium BCE, has posed problems for understanding what was happening in the Tarim Basin. Twill weave spread to Central Europe where fragments have been found in the salt mines at Hallstatt in Austria dating to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is now suggested that the weaving form is itself a marker of Indo-Europeans and was carried both West and East from the Caucasus at the point when the proto-Celtic peoples and the proto-Tocharians began to separate themselves. FURTHER INFORMATION Anthony, D. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Barber, E. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: Norton & Company, 1999. Mair, V., ed. Secrets of the Silk Road. Santa Ana, CA: Bowers Museum, 2010. Mallory, J. P., and V. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

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(Cleveland Museum of Art, Edward L. Whittemore Fund (1976.71))

49 Bronze Reliquary Box Pakistan, probably Swat region of Gandhāra Late Kushan, 3rd–4th centuries CE

INTRODUCTION According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, as he neared the time of his death, the Buddha instructed his disciples to cremate his body in the tradition accorded to a universal monarch, a chakravartin, and then to distribute the remains among the lay followers who were to enshrine them in architectural monuments, stūpas, serving as holders for the relics. To avoid any clashes between the claimants what survived following the cremation was divided into ten portions, eight for body parts, one for the ashes from the cremation, and one for the pot that had held the relics for redistribution. For each portion, a stūpa was raised over the container holding the relics, the reliquary box. When Ashoka became the ruler of the Mauryan Empire, he had these ten reliquaries dug up and the contents redivided and then sent throughout his empire with new stūpas raised over the reliquaries. The Aśokāvadāna records that some of the relics left the borders of the empire. From these events began the cult of relics within Buddhism. The stūpa as the architectural setting for the reliquary became a fundamental feature of Buddhist monasteries, the physical manifestation of the presence of a numinous force around which worshippers would circulate in a clockwise manner. The most powerful relics were those associated with the historical Buddha, but other holy individuals regarded as having also achieved enlightenment and Buddhahood could provide relics suitable for veneration. Monasteries often had more than one stūpa reflecting the accumulating quality of relics worthy of enshrinement. The importance of relics as the physical manifestations of holiness to which the devotee could focus attention required that they be treated with 365

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Artifacts • Bronze Reliquary Box respect and be provided with a proper container, such as shown here. The relics could be parts of the body that survived the fire of cremation, objects possessed by the Buddha or the other holy figures, and other items that were deemed worthy like cult paraphernalia and sanctified donations. The pieces placed within a reliquary did not need to be in pristine condition. They could be damaged or incomplete since consecrated objects never lost their sacred quality. Reliquaries were made of many materials. They could be in bronze, like the one shown here, in stone, and even in gold. Many have inscriptions indicating the nature of the relics and the name of the donor. Their shapes ranged from simple closed containers, probably replicating food storage or serving vessels, like this one, to architecture forms that reproduce in miniature the stūpa form. DESCRIPTION This circular bronze box is a standard type of Buddhist relic container or reliquary box found in the Gandhāran region. The round container stands on low foot and is covered with a lid that fits over the vessel rather than being inset into the rim. The cover can be lifted by a raised handle. Both the lid and the body of the vessel are decorated with raised horizontal bands of floral creepers. Two of these bands encircle the belly of the vessel and its lower part, and another circles the handle on the lid. These raised bands are set off by narrow flat bands and fluted bands that frame the decorative motif. The bronze has a silverish metallic appearance, likely the result of the alloy that was commonly employed for bronzes from the Swat region, suggesting it is probably the place of manufacture. SIGNIFICANCE The cult of relics moved along with Buddhism itself into Central Asia and elsewhere. Relics offered the tangible connection to the faith that many believers needed. With the relics and their reliquaries came the stūpa form. Stūpas in the shape of a great domed architectural unit, emulating on a grander scale the dirt funerary mound covered with stones, placed atop a base, originally circular and later square, have been found in Afghanistan and along the southern route around the Täklimakan Desert. The stūpa symbolized the mahaparinirvana or the entry into the Final Nirvana and Buddhahood, and its role in directing Buddhist ritual for many worshippers gave it importance within the architectural structure of Buddhist monastery. The circumambulation of the stūpa that held the reliquary container gave to the architectural element the role of axis mundi. As Buddhism spread outside of the Indian territories where the stūpa also carried the connotations of ruler burial, the stūpa lost its non-Buddhist associations but retained its Buddhist ritual properties. It became possible for non-Indian Buddhists in

Artifacts • Bronze Reliquary Box places like the oasis towns of northern route around the Täklimakan Desert to modify the form to meet new needs. The Buddhist cave monasteries of Kizil and Kucha and those within the Chinese-controlled region of Mogao possess early cave designs in which a central unit replaces the stūpa and provides the focus for circumambulation. The ritualistic aspect and the iconographic value of the stūpa were now carried by a quite different architectural form. In turn, Chinese Buddhists of the Tang Dynasty freed this new feature from the confines of the cave shrine and once again placed it as an independent element within the space of a Buddhist monastery, the pagoda structure. In this form, it spread to Japan and Korea. FURTHER INFORMATION Czuma, S. J. Kushan Sculpture: Images of Early India. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1985. Dallapiccola, A. L., and S. Zingel-Avè Lallemant, eds. The Stupa—Its Religious, Historical and Architectural Significance. (Beiträge zur Südasienforschung, Südasien—Institut Universität Heidelberg, Bd. 55). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. Errington, E., and J. Cribb, eds. The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cambridge: The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992. Jongeward, D., E. Errington. R. Salomon, and S. Burns. Gandharan Buddhist Reliquaries. Seattle: Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project and University of Washington Press, 2012. Snodgrass, A. The Symbolism of the Stupa. Ithaca, NY: Institute of South East Studies, Cornell University, 1985.

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50 Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand Mulla-Kurgan Village near Samarkand, Uzbekistan 7th century CE INTRODUCTION During the 7th century CE, Sogdiana was the home to several autonomous mercantile cities united by a shared culture and widely dispersed networks of trading enterprises that took Sogdian merchants as far east as China and the capital at Chang-an and west to the Black Sea. Along the various trade routes, there were local Sogdian communities, Sogdians living in a diaspora throughout Central Asia and western China, but Sogdiana, the old Achaemenid satrapy, remained the heartland for the people and the culture. Sogdians had accepted the Zoroastrian faith, though when is not clear. By the 7th century CE, it was the dominant religion of the region, stronger than any of the competing religions of Central Asia, including Buddhism. However, not all regions of Sogdiana seem to have followed Zoroastrianism in the same manner. Orthodox Zoroastrianism, as it had developed in Sasanian Persia, had very specific funerary rules. The deceased’s family could neither bury nor cremate the body because both practices polluted the earth or the fire, which the faith could not tolerate. Instead, the deceased had to be exposed in a place where the earth, water, fire, or wind would not be polluted, and the body could be defleshed by dogs or vultures. The cleaned bones would then be collected and placed in an ossuary, a special box to hold bones. For noble families, the ossuary might contain only the bones of one member of the family, and several ossuaries could be placed together in a mausoleum. For non-noble families, the bones of several members of the family or even a clan could be placed in a single ossuary and then buried. The earliest ossuaries from the Samarkand region seem to have been terracotta jars that were buried in the ancient nonfunctional city walls. By 369

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Base of a Chinese funerary couch with images and Sogdian musicians and dancers. Henan Province, probably Ce Xian, Northern Qi Dynasty, 550–577 CE. (Archive PL/Alamy Stock Photo)

the 5th century CE, ossuaries had become standardized. Most were of fired clay, though there are some examples of alabaster. The potters created a formal vessel type, the rectangular or oval-shaped box, made of well-washed clay tempered with gravel and fibers and fired. For the most common type of ossuary, the potter built up the form by layering strips of clay atop each other on a slab base and then added a separate lid for the box. These thickwalled boxes fired unevenly. A  less common technique was to make the base and walls of prepared slabs of clay joined together, producing a thinwalled box that fired evenly. These usually had lids of pyramidal shape. The makers of the first ossuaries did not decorate them or limited the decoration to the painting of a red slip. However, in time, the potters developed a repertoire of decorative techniques for the boxes that included the application of sculpted clay ornaments including animal and anthropomorphic shapes, the incising of decoration on the surface of the wet clay, and the hollowing out of certain sections of the clay wall to create window-like openings. In many instances, the artisans created the relief ornamentation using matrices or stamps, a technique that was used for other types of ceramic sculpture. Most commonly, the decorators limited the treatment to only one of the long sides and the two short sides, creating a tripartite composition. Treating the box and the decorated sides as a representation of a house seems to have been quite common. The ossuary was the receptacle for the bones of the deceased within the Zoroastrian tradition as it was practiced in Sogdiana. However, as the Sogdian merchants established communities in China with families staying for generations, the funerary customs had to be adjusted so as not to offend their Chinese neighbors and the foreign steppe dynasties that controlled northern China. Exposure of the body to be defleshed was not possible, and the burials had to assume the form of a modified inhumation burial. For this

Artifacts • Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand new practice, the bodies were placed on stone funerary couches, following the Chinese form. In this manner, the decaying body did not pollute the earth and was hidden from view. DESCRIPTION The main image is of a terracotta, rectangular-shaped ossuary intended to hold the defleshed bones of the deceased. It is completed with a pyramidal lid. For the construction of the box and the lid, the artisan used prepared slabs of clay. These were decorated with stamps applied to the wet clay on the sides of the box and the lid. The crenelations were made by hand. The box is intended to resemble a building with the lid representing the roof supported by arcades that rest on columns. It is also structured to reference the two levels of Zoroastrian practices and beliefs. The lower, showing ceremonies associated with the proper treatment of the deceased, and the lid, providing a glimpse of heaven. Under the arches on the box itself are two Mazdean priests. They flank a stepped fire altar placed under its own arch. The priests can be identified by their attributes. The standing priest on the right side is the raspig or assistant priest who holds either bellows or tongs to keep the fire burning. The kneeling priest on the left is the zot or senior priest who carries the barsom, a bundle of twigs or sticks, and recites the Gathas, the short verses believed to have been composed by Zoroaster. The priestly status of the two figures is made clear by the belts that close their robes, the kusti, that wind three times around their bodies, to remind the believer of the ethical imperatives of “good thoughts,” “good words,” and “good deeds.” They also cover the lower portions of their faces with a mask, the padam, to prevent their breaths from polluting the sacred fire. The ritual in which the two priests are engaged can be identified as the Afrinagan ceremony, which was performed on the fourth day after death, at the point when the soul of the deceased was judged. The lid, or the heavenly realm, is decorated with six female dancing figures, one each on the short sides and two on each long side. Each figure holds a plant, possibly a reference to haoma plant (probably ephedrine), from which was made the sacred drink of the Zoroastrian faith. The dancers on the gabled top are perhaps intended to represent the houris, the “pleasure givers” who dwelt in paradise and represented “wholeness,” “perfection,’ and “immortality.” Above them in the apex is a star or flower form with a crescent shape below, most likely the sun or Venus and the moon. Though the form of the ossuary can be paralleled by others that have been found both in shape and in general decoration, the specific emphasis on the priestly role suggests that even though the stamped decoration could indicate that this was a mass-produced object, it was more likely a unique piece probably made for a priest. The inset image is the decorated platform of a Chinese funerary couch. It is made of gray marble, and traces of pigment remain. The base was intended

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Artifacts • Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand to support a coffin or possibly just the body of the deceased. The decoration along the front shows inverted lotus blossoms along the top edge and below a series of separate square units defined by raised dots on the second indented area, each containing a circular feature into which is carved a figure. The figures are dressed in Central Asian costume, and most carry instruments. They are best understood to be Sogdian musicians accompanied by a dancer. No doubt the costumes would have been clearer when the paint was fresh. The Northern Qi Dynasty came about as the result of a Turkic conquest of the region and was one of the foreign dynasties of the Northern and Southern Dynasties that came to rule northeastern China in the 4th–6th centuries CE, until the reunification under the Sui Dynasty. This invasion by a steppe nomadic group established even closer connections between the steppes and the Chinese mainland. Buddhism was supported by the Qi Dynasty as well as by the other Northern Dynasties, and this can be seen in the use of the inverted lotus pattern, since the lotus is a reference to the Buddha. However, during this period, the Sogdian merchants firmly established themselves in the Chinese heartland, forming distinct communities that engaged in long-distance trade between Sogdiana and China. Sogdians also performed other roles within Chinese society, as they would continue to do through the Sui and early Tang Dynasties. Among the specialties for which they were known were music making and dancing, particularly the “Sogdian whirl” (see Female Figures on a Gilt Silver Ewer, artifact 16). Among the instruments being played are ones that were new to China, the bent-neck lute, possibly a version of the Persian barbat, which influenced the development of the Chinese pipa, and the harp. Though this platform for a coffin has been identified as belonging to the tomb of a Northern Qi Dynasty dignitary, because of the possible Buddhist association of the inverted lotus pattern along the top edge, it is also possible that it was part of a larger ensemble of carved stone reliefs that formed a funerary setting with raised platform for the body of a high-ranking member of a resident Sogdian community in China. Other examples of such groupings of reliefs recognized as coming from Sogdian burials in China have been found. The Sogdians in China seem to have wanted to refer to their own homeland and cultural practices on some of the reliefs, and such could be the case here. The musicians may have been one element of a larger complex of references to Sogdiana and Sogdian culture. If such is the case, then the platform was intended to hold the body of the deceased, which would have been able to decompose without polluting the earth. SIGNIFICANCE Zoroastrian religion developed among the Iranians on the Iranian Plateau. Based on the evidence from comparative textual studies, it has been argued

Artifacts • Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand the Zoroastrian beliefs and practices and those of early Vedic religion (Hinduism) derived from the same source and probably split, like the languages, as some of the early pioneers settled to the north and others continued south into what would become India. The sacred text, the Avesta, is attributed to the religion’s founder, the prophet Zoroaster, whose dates are much debated, anywhere from 11th to 6th centuries BCE. It was the royal religion of the imperial house during the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), but how widely it spread among the Persian population is not at all clear. It may have not been practiced beyond the confines of the royal family (see Zoroastrianism). It did not retain importance during the succeeding Greek and Parthian periods but emerged as the official state religion under the Sassanian kings (226–637 CE). As a state religion, it assumed a codified form. The Avesta, as we possess it, is in fragmentary form and is a product of the Sassanian Persians. It, along with a few other texts, supplies what we know about the ancient faith but that is as it was practiced under a highly conservative priesthood that enforced rules of orthodoxy. Zoroastrianism seems to have spread at some point out of the confines of Persia proper or perhaps developed in parts of Central Asia settled by other Iranian speakers but not under the direct control of either the Achaemenid or the Sassanian Empires. There is evidence that during the Kushan Empire, Zoroastrians in Bactria and Sogdiana began to accept certain elements of Hinduism into their belief system. Since the Kushan kings were not Zoroastrians themselves, they had no reason to push for rules of orthodoxy among their Zoroastrian subjects or those within their sphere of influence. Interestingly, during the time when Sogdiana and Bactria were under direct Sassanian rule, there does not seem to have been any attempt to enforce orthodox beliefs and practices as had developed in the Sasanian heartland. Rather, the Sassanian rulers apparently tolerated the variations of Zoroastrianism that they found in these peripheral regions. It has been suggested that this may have been motivated by political considerations. Sasanian rulers were more concerned with encroaching Buddhism that had taken such strong root in eastern Central Asia and so were willing to make common cause with other, nonconformist Zoroastrians, against the common enemy of Buddhism. The result of this mixing created an interesting hybrid form of Zoroastrianism in Sogdiana and Bactria. At the best excavated Sogdian city, Pendjikent in modern Tajikistan, there are wall paintings from houses featuring non-Zoroastrian gods that decorated the public reception rooms and other special rooms dedicated to the maintenance of the eternal fire, the icon of orthodox Zoroastrianism. Within the Sogdian setting there seems to have been no discomfort mixing elements from multiple religious systems. However, even with the variations, funerary rituals seem to have been carefully observed. The prohibitions against the pollution of the fire and the earth were observed both in Sasanian Persia and in Bactria and Sogdiana. It

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Artifacts • Mullah Kurgan Ossuary, Afrasiab Museum, Samarkand is not quite so clear that these injunctions were maintained in the Sogdian settlements in the Tarim Basin and China proper where there is evidence that bodies were interred in tombs. The Sogdians in China probably continued to practice some form of Zoroastrianism in their adopted home. The Chinese did segregate the Sogdians into their own communities. These were administered, on behalf of the Chinese government, beginning during the reign of the Northern Qi and continuing through the Sui and early Tang Dynasties, by a special representative and recognized head of the various Sogdian communities, the sabao, whose role was both bureaucratic and religious within the Chinese system. Some tombs of men who were a sabao have been found, so indicated by inscriptions, and there are references in the lists of ancestors of some Sogdian families in the Gansu region that include a sabao among their predecessors. Though there is no inscription that accompanies the platform shown here in the inset, it might possibly have been part of a sabao’s tomb erected during the Northern Qi Dynasty. FURTHER INFORMATION Daryaee, T. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Grenet, F. “The Second of Three Encounters between Zoroastrianism and Hinduism: Plastic Influences in Bactria and Sogdiana (2nd–8th c. A.D.).” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay 69, new series (1994): 41–57. Lerner, J. “Central Asians in Sixth Century China: A Zoroastrian Funerary Rite.” Iranica Antiqua 30 (1995): 179–190. Lerner, J. A. “Mulla Kurgan Ossuary.” Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads. Freer/Sacker. Smithsonian. Sogdians.si.edu/mulla-kurgan-ossuary/. Accessed December 30, 2021. Marshak, B. “The Sogdians in their Homeland.” In Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China, Gansu and Ningxia, 4th–7th Century, A. Juliano and J. Lerner, eds., 230–237. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002. Pavchinskaia, L. V. “Sogdian Ossuaries.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 8, The Archaeology of Central Asia Studies from the Former Soviet Union (1994): 209–225. Pugachenkova, A. “The Form and Style of Sogdian Ossuaries.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, new series 8, The Archaeology of Central Asia Studies from the Former Soviet Union (1994): 227–243. “Telling the Sogdian Story. A  Freer/Sackler Digital Exhibtion Project.” https://kimon.hosting.nyu.edu/sogdians Vaissière, É. de la. Sogdian Traders: A History. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005.

INDEX

Abbasid Caliphate, li, 37, 148 Abbasid Dynasty, l Abbasids, l, 350 Abhaya mudra, 49, 52, 356 Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah, l Abyssinia. See Ethiopia Acanthus, 103, 138 Achaemenid, xxxiii, 7, 9, 20, 20, 21, 38, 39, 63, 77, 90, 95, 115, 117, 179, 210, 217, 218, 244, 246, 254, 257, 258, 265, 267, 301, 304, 321, 327, 328, 338, 369 Achaemenid Persian Empire, xxviii–xxx, xliii, 21, 24, 25, 44, 57, 83, 98, 103, 111, 156, 161, 244, 246, 309, 334, 340, 373 Achilles, 276 Acts of Religion. See Dēnkard Acts of Thomas, xxxv, 36, 351 Actuarius, 43, 44 Adam (Qing Qing), 34, 35 Aegean, xxviii, xxxiv, xxxix, xliv, 12, 24, 76, 77, 116, 236, 239 Aeschylus, 116 Aesop, xlix, l Aethiopica, 304 Afanasievo culture, xxv, xxvi Afghanistan, xxiv, xxx, xxxiii, xxxiv, xlix, 6, 7, 14, 17, 31, 33, 51, 111, 164, 195, 212, 245, 246,

252, 311, 312, 317, 321, 325, 328, 356, 357, 358, 366 Afrasiab (Samarkand), xxix, xlix, l, 61–65, 183, 369 Africa, 148 Afrinagan, 371 Agathyrsus, 75 Agni, 341 Agriculture, xix, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 15, 19, 32, 76, 132, 219, 247 Ahriman. See Angra Mainyu Ahuna Vaiyō, 337 Ahuramazda, 35, 39, 319, 337, 340 Aϊ Khanum, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, 7, 8, 25, 26, 152, 164, 309–311, 314, 325 Aila (Aqaba), xxxviii Ak-Alakla, 2, 269 Akatzirs, xlvii Akinakes. See Sword Akkadian, xxiv Al-Masudi, 184 Al-Muqaddasi, 87 Al-Tarbari, 115, 117 Al-Tha’alibi, 117 Al-Ubulla, 191 Alans, xxxiv, 23, 260 ‘Alayyat, 87–91 Albania (in the Balkans), 82

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Index Albania (in the Caucasus), xxxviii Alchon Huns, xliii Alexander the Great, xxii, xxix–xxx, xxxii, xxxvii, 5–7, 25, 35, 39, 44, 51, 77, 83, 110, 115, 161, 163, 189, 244, 246, 254, 297, 301, 304, 309–312, 314, 327 Alexandria, xxx, xlii, 176, 191, 199, 312 Almond tree, xviii Alopen, 18, 34 Altai Mountains, xvi, xxv, xxvii, xxix, xl, xlviii, 3, 4, 13, 21, 77, 87, 93, 115, 130, 131, 209, 215, 231, 265, 269, 280, 297, 343, 344 Altar, 18, 338 Altyn Depe, 6 Amaravati, 196 Amazon River, 28 Amazons, 2, 90, 269 Amitābha, xlix, 138 Amitābja Sutra, 137 Ammianus Marcellinus, 20, 185, 295, 305 Amu Darya (Oxus), xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxiv, xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, xlix, l, 7, 14, 63, 191, 254, 265, 358 Amulet, 49 An Lushan, 125 An Lushan Rebellion, 148, 212 Anahita, 39, 147, 211, 325, 326 Anatolian Peninsula, xxiv, xxvii, xxxviii, 8, 15, 20, 76, 87, 99, 116, 123, 255, 287, 295 Anchorite, 18, 19 Andronovo Culture, xxiv, xxvi Angīrasa, 341 Angra Mainyu, 39, 337 Anguttara Nitāya, 47 Animal Style, xxvii, xxix, 2–4, 20, 21, 73, 82, 83, 85, 267, 268, 275, 289, 345

Annals. See Tacitus Annals of the Warring States, 229 Antioch, xxxviii, xli, 36, 87, 90, 295 Antiochus I Theos, 255, 311 Antiochus II, 163 Antiochus III, 254 Antlers, 3, 4, 29, 344 Aorsi, 230 Apadana, 4, 24, 25, 67, 69 Aphrodite, 27 Apicius, 189 Apoikiai, 73 Apollonios of Tyana, 36, 309 Apple tree, xviii Apricot tree, xviii, 189 Arab, xli, xlvii, l, li, 9, 23, 24, 33, 38, 40, 65, 68, 87, 140, 141, 148, 153, 158, 179, 184–186, 191, 192, 255 Arabian camel. See Dromedary Arabian Peninsula, xxxviii, xli, 148, 192 Arabian Sea, xli, xlii, 191, 192, 197 Arabic, xxi, li, 9, 252, 319 Arachosia, xxviii, xxx Aral Sea, xvii, xxiv, xxix, xxxix, xlvii, 39, 68, 255 Aramaic, 34, 89, 245 Archaeology, xx, xxi, xxxiv, 31 Archer, 2 Arches, 99 Arctic, 28 Ardashir I, xliii, 35, 339 Argali Sheep, xix Argolid, 237 Arhat, 47 Arimaspeia. See Aristeas Arimaspi, 95, 116 Aristeas, xxvii, 36, 95, 116 Aristotle, 229 Armenia, xxxviii, xxxix, xliv, 23, 209, 260, 338 Armenian, xxi, 15, 34, 230

Index Armlet, 49 Armor, 74, 152, 301, 303, 304 Arrian, 309 Arsaces I, xxvii Arsacid Dynasty, 9, 26, 254, 304, 305 Arsacids, xxxiii, xxxiv, xliii, 254, 274 Artabanus IV, xliii Arthashastra, 247 Arzhan, xxvii, 20 Ashoka, xxxii, xli, 17, 50, 243–248, 355, 365 Asia Minor. See Anatolian Peninsula Aśokāvadāna, 51, 365 Assurbanipal, 56 Assur-bel-kala, 229 Assyria, xxviii, xxxvi Astana, 32 Atargatis, 331–335 Athena, 27 Athenian, 2 Athens, 74 Athletic competition, 152 Atlantic Period, 11 Augustus (Octavian), xli Aurelian, 258 Avalokiteshvara, 48 Avars, xlvii, 23, 82, 83, 274, 297 Avesta, xxii, xliii, 29, 32, 35, 39, 40, 235, 239, 373 Avestan, 15, 268, 282, 320 Axum, xlii Axumite Kingdom, xlvi Azerbaijan, 209, 260, 338 Azov, Sea of, xxxiv, xlvii

63, 90, 111, 155, 161, 163–165, 178–179, 224, 251, 254, 261, 283, 309, 313, 321, 339, 373 Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), xxvi, 6, 25, 238, 325, 328 Bactria-Margiana plain, xx, xxvi Bactrian, 9, 15, 24–26, 63, 66, 152, 155, 163–165, 179, 252, 257, 328, 338 Bactrian camel, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 4, 63, 141, 227–232 Bactrian Empire. See Graeco-Bactrian Empire Bactrian Kingdom. See Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom Badain Jaran, xvii Baghdad, l, 37, 148 Baghlān, 252 Bagolaggo, 252 Bagshy, 139 Bahran IV (Wahrān IV) (r. 388–399), 337, 338, 339 Bai Juyi, 141 Balawat, 229 Balcony, 98 Balkans, 23 Balochistan, xxxiii Balustrade, 99 Ban Biao, 36 Ban Chao, 36–37 Ban Gu (32–92 CE), xxxv, 36 Ban Zhao, 36 Bandits, xxxix Banliang, 10 Banquet, 5, 19, 110 Banqueting, 4–6, 19, 20, 38, 55, 59, Babylonia, xxxiii 210, 212, 313 Bacchae, 309, 311 Baqsy, 140 Backgammon, 151, 153 Barbarikon, 9, 196 Bactra, xxxi Barbat, 140, 372 Bactria, xvii, xxv, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, Bard. See Bagshy xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xlii, Barsom, 371 17, 24, 25, 28, 33, 35, 37, 51, 57, Barygaza, xlii

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Index Bash-Adar, 215, 217, 287 Bassai, 275 Battle-ax, xxvii, 275 Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, l Battle of Carrhae, 178, 293, 297, 302 Battle of Talas, 23 Beaded Roundels. See Pearl roundels Beaker, 155, 156 Beard, 43, 75, 138, 338 Bed, 109, 110, 111. See also Kline Begram, xxx, xxxviii, 195, 196. See also Kapisa Behistun, 25, 63, 265 Belitung shipwreck, xlviii, 148, 193 Belt, 56, 61, 66, 67, 74, 81–85, 152, 198, 229, 266, 274, 305, 317, 320, 327, 332, 345, 371 Belt and Road Initiative, xv Benares, 244 Bengal, 165 Bentwood, 123, 235, 238 Bernike, xlii Betpakdala, xvii Beycesultan, 123, 140 Bhāgavata purana, 152 Bharata Muni, 145 Bhikshu, 140 Bhir Mound. See Taxila Bhrikutí, 157 Bishapur, 148 Bit, 12, 132 Black earth, xvi Black market, xlv Black Obelisk, 229 Black Sea, xvi, xix, xxiv, xxvii, xxix, xxxiv, xxxix, xl, xliv, xlvii, 2, 4, 13, 20, 23, 36, 40, 63, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 85, 93, 95, 155, 185, 186, 209, 211, 217, 222, 261, 269, 275, 276, 301, 369 Bodh Gaya, xxxii

Bodhi tree, xxxii, 191 Bodhisattva, xxxvi, 17, 27, 28, 33, 47–52, 205 Bombyx mori, 30, 176 Book of Psalms, 32 Book of Zambasta, 32 Boroo, 132 Bóshi, 140 Bosporan, 77 Bosporan Kingdom, xxxiv, xxxix, 73, 276, 277 Botai, 12 Boule, xxx Bow, 20, 21, 22, 74–76, 267, 273–278, 281, 295, 296, 301, 303, 305 Bowl, 151, 203 Boyan Ridge, 122 Bracelets, 49, 68, 89, 332 Brāhmi, 15, 245 Bridle, 12, 84, 132, 237, 343, 344 Britain, xl Bronze, xxv, xxvii, xxviii, xlii, 10, 20, 37, 84, 85, 110, 116, 130, 131, 132, 147, 171, 172, 229, 254, 266, 267, 273, 356, 357, 366 Bronze Age, xxiii, xxiv, xxv–xxvii, xxxvii, xli, 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, 38, 39, 63, 81, 85, 121, 123, 132, 133, 145, 235, 236, 239, 247, 262, 268, 274, 345 Brooch, 43, 89, 221–223 Bucket, 146 Buckle, 81–85, 152, 229 Buddacarita, 314 Buddha, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi, xlix, 14, 17, 18, 25, 27, 28, 33, 37, 47–51, 98, 99, 109–111, 138, 141, 158, 191, 205, 313, 314, 340, 341, 353–359, 365, 366, 372 Buddhism, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi, xlvi, xlvii, xlix, 29, 30, 33, 35, 39,

Index 47–52, 99, 100, 110, 137, 139, 140, 156, 157, 163, 164, 191, 243–247, 313, 318, 326, 328, 339–341, 351, 353–358, 365, 366, 369, 372, 373 Buddhist, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, xlviii, li, 14, 17, 27, 28, 30–33, 38, 48, 49, 51, 52, 61, 64, 68, 98, 99, 109, 110, 111, 137–141, 157, 158, 177, 191, 192, 196, 205, 243–246, 313, 314, 318, 320, 321, 340, 353, 355, 358, 359, 366, 372 Bulgaria, 13 Bulgars, xlvii, 23, 37 Burgan, Mount, 28 Buryatia, 132 Buzhen, 70 Buzkashi, 153 Byzantine, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlvii, 9, 11, 19, 23, 31, 68, 82, 83, 153, 184–186, 192, 203, 205, 223, 257, 258, 297, 349 Byzantine Empire, xliv, xlv–xlviii, xlix–l, 9, 19, 23, 31, 33, 34, 82, 106, 147, 157, 223, 349 Caftan, 2, 61–71, 81, 164, 165, 183–186, 253–254 Čagania, xlviii Camel, xv, xx, 31, 57, 58, 63, 65, 66, 68, 85, 90, 122, 157, 179, 180, 198, 199, 227–232. See also Bactrian camel; Dromedary Canal, 8 Čang-srāy. See Harp player Canura, 152 Cao Family, 32 Caravan, xv, xx, xxvii, xxxvi– xxxix, xl, xlvii, 3, 6, 17, 21, 33, 36, 44, 58, 63, 69, 90, 91, 111, 157, 172, 179, 198, 199, 203, 204, 227, 228, 230

Caravansaries, xxxviii Carnelian, 14, 269 Carpentry, 99, 122, 235 Carpet, xl, 38, 115, 117, 123, 172, 212–219, 269, 287 Carpet making, 38–39, 217 Carrhae. See Battle of Carrhae Carriage, xl, 282 Cart, xxiii, xxv, 12, 13, 15, 93, 121, 122, 215, 235, 237, 281 Casa dei cervi. See House of the stags Caspian Sea, xvi–xx, xxiv, xxviii, xxix, xxxiii, xxxix, xlvii, 2, 22, 23, 40, 68 Cassius Dio, xli, 178, 293, 301, 305 Caste, xxxii, 3, 20, 21, 49, 247, 354–355 Çatal Hüyük, 123 Cataphract, 22, 301–306 Cattle, xix, xxiv, xxv, xlvii, 7, 11, 12, 19, 93, 237, 273 Caucasoid, xxvi, 16, 251, 265, 361, 362 Caucasus, xvi, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxxix, 12, 15, 19, 23, 37, 68, 77, 81, 121, 132, 184, 186, 209, 218, 236, 237, 257, 260, 363 Cauldron, 93, 129–134 Cavalry, 22, 24, 67, 218, 267, 275, 294, 296, 301, 304, 305 Cave 17. See Library Cave Caves, xlvi, xlix, 17, 18, 67, 138 Celtic, 15 Celts, xxiii, xxiv Cenobitic, 18 Central Asia, xvi, xix, xx, xxvi, xxviii–xxx, xxxiii, xxxvi, xxxvii, xl, xliv, xlv, xlvii–xlix, l, li, 2–12, 14–16, 18, 22–30, 32, 33, 35–40, 47, 49–51, 57, 58, 61, 63–65, 67, 68, 70, 81, 87, 88, 91, 100, 115, 121, 122, 125,

379

380

Index 126, 137–141, 145, 147, 148, 151–153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 164, 169–172, 178–180, 185, 186, 190, 191, 197, 199, 209, 210, 212, 218, 228, 230, 231, 239, 245–247, 251, 254, 257, 261, 267, 268, 273, 281–283, 296, 297, 301, 303–305, 309–311, 313, 314, 317, 325, 328, 331, 334, 338, 340, 345, 350, 355, 356, 358, 366, 369, 372, 373 Ceramics, xlviii, 4, 31, 63, 132, 147, 148, 227, 237, 295, 349–351 Chach, 66 Chagan. See Čagania Chakkavatti. See Chakravartin Chakravartin, 245, 365 Chalcedonian, xliv, 34, 349 Chalcedonian Christianity, xliii Chalcolithic, xxv Chandragupta Maurya, xxxii, xxxiii, 199, 246, 247 Chang-an, xlix, 18, 34, 40, 125, 138, 141, 190, 191, 204, 359 Changsha ware, 147, 148 Chanyu, 129 Charax, xxxviii, xlii, 36 Chärchän, xxix, 361, 362 Chariot, xxiii–xxvi, xxviii, 12, 20, 24, 235–240, 274, 281, 326 Chernozem. See Black earth Cherry tree, xviii Chersonesus, 73 Chess, 153 China, xv, xvi, xviii, xxi, xxiii, xxviii, xxxiii, xxxv–xliii, xlv– xlix, li, 5, 7, 10, 12–14, 17–22, 28, 30–32, 34–38, 40, 48, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 68, 70, 76, 83–85, 90, 100, 111, 125, 126, 129, 130, 137–141, 145–148,

153, 155–158, 165, 169, 170, 172, 175, 177, 178, 180, 185, 190–192, 203, 204, 209, 211, 212, 227–231, 235, 236, 239, 245, 246, 260, 261, 275, 281, 295, 304, 311, 321, 326, 328, 334, 340, 350, 351, 356, 358, 369, 370, 372, 374 Chinese, xv, xvi, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, xxxiv–xxxvii, xxxix–xlii, xlvi–xlix, li, 5, 8, 10, 16, 20, 30–34, 39, 57, 58, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 84, 85, 90, 99, 111, 125, 126, 129, 130, 139, 140, 145, 147, 155–158, 169–172, 175–178, 180, 184, 185, 186, 191, 196, 203, 204, 209–212, 228, 231, 236, 239, 251, 252, 260, 281–283, 293–297, 304, 314, 320, 322, 334, 350, 358, 367, 370, 371, 372, 373 Chinese Revolution, xv Chingghis Khan, 24, 28 Chiru, xvi Chlamys, 55, 275, 295 Chojt-Zenker Cave, 229 Chora, 76 Chorasmia. See Khorezm Chowgan, 67, 70 Christ. See Jesus Christian, xlv, l, 18, 34, 45, 64, 103, 106, 137, 147, 303, 332, 339, 340, 349–351 Christianity, xliii, xliv, 18, 33, 34, 35, 39, 339, 340, 349, 351 Christological Disputes, xliv Chu, 229 Chunar, 244 Church, 18, 45 Church of Saint Thomas Christians. See Saint Thomas Christianity

Index Church of the East, xliii, xlv, xlviii, xlix, li, 16, 18, 19, 23, 31, 34, 35, 105, 106, 137, 349–351 Cimmerians, xxvii, 20, 76, 93, 274, 281 Circumambulation, 17, 18, 29, 99, 109, 366, 367 Citadel, xxx, 7, 8, 63, 64 City planning, 6–8 Classical, l, 2, 25, 26, 28 Classicism, xl, 25–28 Classicizing, xlviii, 22 Claudius, xl Cleopatra, xxxvi, 31 Clibanarius. See Cataphract Cloisonné, 283 Clothing, xxii, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xli, xliii, xlv, xlix, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 75, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 146, 147, 164, 165, 179, 183–186, 228, 231, 255, 259, 266, 267, 275, 294, 338, 361, 372 Coin, xxii, xxx, xxxv, xxxvii, xli, 8–11, 32, 161–166, 169–173, 274, 310, 319, 320, 328, 337, 338 Coinage, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii, xlii, xliii, 8–11, 25, 26, 67, 161–166, 169–173, 247, 251, 253, 259, 310, 321, 328, 337, 339 Collar, 48, 89, 266 Columella, 189 Column, 51, 98, 104, 146, 243–248 Comes commerciorum, xlv Commagene, 255, 311 Composite bow. See Bow Constantine, 185, 338 Constantinople, xliv, xlv, xlvii, l, 68, 82

Copper, xxv, 7, 13, 14, 37, 133, 238 Coptic Church, xliv, 19 Coptos, xlii, 199 Coral, 177 Coral reefs, xvii Corinthian, xxx, 104, 328 Corpse, 39 Costume. See Clothing Cotton, xlii, 38, 177, 192 Couch, 55, 110, 151. See also Kline Council of Chalcedon, xliv, 349 Council of Ephesus, xliv, 349 Cranial Studies, 16 Crassus, 178, 293, 295, 301, 305, 311 Cremation, 14, 110, 365 Crimea (Krym), 23, 73, 276, 277 Cross, 349–351 Crown, 28, 29, 257, 258, 259, 261, 326, 327, 332, 333 Ctesiphon, xxxviii, xli, xliii, l, 31, 38, 57, 90, 104, 111, 115, 179, 185, 351 Cuffs, 67, 89, 93 Cup, xlviii, 5, 6, 55, 156, 203–205, 209 Cupid bow. See Bow Cybele, 325–329, 333, 338 Cymbal, 139 Cypress tree, 24 Cyprus, 237 Cyropaedia. See Xenophon Cyrus the Great, xxviii, 90, 246, 334 Da-Qin (Rome), xli Dacian Wars, 22, 301 Dagger, xxvii, 81, 266, 274 Daha bwa-Ma’ādin al-Jawhar. See Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems Dai, 229 Damascus, xxxviii, l, 148

381

382

Index Damask, 57 Dance, 137, 141, 145, 146 Dancer, 137, 141, 145, 146 Dandan Uiliq, 32 Danube Valley, xxiv, 15, 23, 305 Dapirpat, 66 Darius I, 24, 63, 265, 266 Dates, 191 Datong, xlvi Dayuan, xxxvii Deer, 216, 217, 266, 275, 287, 345 Deer Stones, 3, 345 Deerskin, 164 Demetrios I (r. 200–167 BCE), 161–163 Dēnkard, 35 Devashtich (Dēwāštīč), 33 Dhamma. See Dharma Dharma, xxxii, 17, 243–248 Dharmagupta, 33 Dhimmi, l Dhotī, 48 Dhow, 148 Diaper masonry, 98 Die (coinage), 8, 163, 164 Dilberjim, 28, 321 Diocletian, xliii Diodorus Siculus, xxxi, 22 Diodotus I, xxxi, 163, 164 Diodotus II, 163, 308–315 Dionysus, 27, 147, 211, 309 Dioscurides, 191 Diplomacy, 217, 257, 260 Diplomatic, xxxv, xl, 5, 21, 106, 116, 129, 141, 147, 155, 158, 185, 204, 209, 211, 223, 258, 260, 261, 276, 283 Djeitun Culture. See Jeitun Culture DNA, xxii Dnieper River, xxvii, xlvii, 15, 23, 76, 276

Dniester River, xxvii Dnoetsk, 76 Don River, xlvii, 23, 260 Dongting Lake, 148 Dragon, 156, 210, 211 Drangiana, xxxiv Dravidian, xxiv Drawloom, 68 Dress. See Clothing Dressel, 199 Dromedary, xvii, 229, 230 Dromos, 132 Drum, 139, 140, 141, 164 Drum player, 139 Duck, 57 Dukkha, xxxii Dumbalag-srāy. See Drum player Dunhuang, xlvi, 18, 32, 38, 125, 205, 251 Dura Europos, xxxviii, xl, 31, 43, 44, 57, 76, 90, 175, 177, 179, 180, 302, 303, 331 Dutar, 140 Dyes, 39, 175, 191 Dyeing, 39 Dyers, 39 Dyestuffs, 38 Dzungarian Basin, xvii, xix, xxxix, xliii, 178 Eagle, 94, 116, 117 Eagle-griffin, 4, 288, 289 Eagle hunter, 2 Earrings, 49, 89, 91, 266, 320, 327, 332, 338 Earth, in Zoroastrian belief, 369, 372, 373 Eastern Wei Dynasty, xlvi Ecoregion, xx Ecotone, xx Ecozone, xxv Edessa, xxxviii, 34

Index Egypt, xliv, xlvi, 14, 18, 19, 24, 26, 110, 148, 184, 197, 199, 237, 239, 274 Elamite, xxiv, 6, 16 Elect, 19, 38 Elephant, xl, xli, 162, 163, 245 Embroidery, 29, 31, 75, 177, 332 Emesa, 304 Enlightenment, xxxii, 14, 17, 18, 47–49, 52 Ephedrine, 371 Ephthalites. See Hephthalites Epic, 137, 146 Equus caballus. See Horse(s) Equus hydruntinus. See Horse(s) Ērānshahr, xliii, 35 Eros, 27 Ethiopia, xlii, xliv, xlvi, 19 Etruscan, 56 Euphrates, xxxviii, 14, 44, 57, 87, 90, 111, 179 Euripides, 309 Europe, xxiii, xxiv, 19, 84, 260 European, xv, xvi, xxi–xxiii, xxvi, xlvi, 11, 15, 16, 185, 221, 259 Euthydemos, 163 Ewer, 145–149, 155, 156, 293 Exampaeus, 132 Eyes, 16, 141, 198 Fabric. See Textiles Faxian, xlviii, 37, 192, 245 Feast. See Banquet; Banqueting “Feast of the Bema,” 19, 38 Felt, xxvii, xlviii, 23, 39, 88, 117, 121–127, 215, 257, 265, 266, 269, 287–290, 344, 362 Felt making, 39 Felter, 288 Feng Hetu, 260 Ferdowsi, 117, 153

Fergana Valley, xxxiv, xxxvii, 6, 22, 30, 178, 191, 304 Fibula. See Brooch Fig tree, 191 Filippovka, 229 Finger rings, 89 Fire, in Zoroastrian belief, 39, 369, 373 Fire-altar, 39, 164, 327, 337–341,  371 First Council of Nicaea, xlv Flan, 8 Florus, Lucius Annaeus, 178 Floss, 31, 57, 177, 180 Flute, 139 Flying gallop, 258, 295 Fortune. See Tyche Fourth Ecumenical Council. See Council of Chalcedon Frankincense, xxxviii Franks, 23 Funerary, xxx, xl, 4, 5, 11, 12–14, 20, 31, 55–59, 87, 89, 91, 121, 125, 130, 131, 132, 147, 155, 184, 228, 236, 237, 268, 294, 355, 366, 372 Funerary banquet, 4, 5, 20, 55–59, 132 Funerary couch, xlix, 125, 371 Funerary customs. See Funerary practices Funerary feast. See Funerary banquet Funerary meal. See Funerary banquet Funerary practices, 12–14, 110, 131, 235, 237, 239, 275, 369, 370, 373 Funerary rites. See Funerary practices Funerary rituals. See Funerary practices

383

384

Index Funerary traditions. See Funerary practices Furniture, 99, 110, 111, 115, 116, 130, 197, 198 Furs, xix, xxvii, xxxix, xlvii, 65, 68, 77, 211, 287 Games, 151, 152 Gandhāra, xxviii, xxix, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxviii, xlii, xliii, 17, 22, 24, 27, 28, 33, 34, 47, 49, 51, 97–99, 109, 111, 138–140, 152, 155, 311–314, 318, 320, 355–356, 357, 358–359 Gandhāran style, xxxvi, xlvi, 52, 356 Gandhāri, 31 Ganges River, xxxii, 37, 195, 196 Gangetic plain, xxiv, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, 244, 245, 247, 252 Gansu, xvi, xxiv, xxxiii, xxxviii, xxxix, xlviii, 169, 212, 230, 374 Gaochang, xlvii, 8, 125, 157, 172, 177 Gaochang City. See Gaochang Gaozong, 69 Garb. See Clothing Garnet, 221 Garrisons, xxxvii, xxxviii, l, 5, 10, 22, 44, 170, 180, 212, 260, 283 Garuda, 156 Gathas, 337, 373 Gatherer, xxv, 12 Gaul, xxxiv, xlii, 23, 189 Gautama. See Buddha Gazelle, xvi, xix Gelonus, 75 Gene sequencing, xxii, 15–16 Geography. See Ptolemy Georgia (in Caucasus), 9, 209, 260 Georgian, 34

Ger. See Yurt Germanic, xliv, 4, 15, 23, 67, 83, 221, 222 Ghaggar-Hakra waterways, 14 Ghenghis Khan. See Chingghis Khan Ghiördes knot. See Turkish knot Gift, xl, xli, xlvi, 5, 13, 15, 21, 30, 32, 66, 68, 70, 94, 106, 116, 129, 132, 141, 146, 147, 155, 158, 190, 191, 204, 209, 210, 211, 223, 227, 228, 258, 260, 261, 275, 276, 283, 355 Gift giving, 19, 70, 83, 171 Gilding. See Gilt Gilt, xlviii, 84, 85, 146, 147, 155, 157, 209, 211, 326, 356, 357 Glass, xxxvi, xl, xlviii, 189, 190, 197, 203–206 Goat, xix, xx, 153 Gobi Desert, xvii, xix, xxiv, xlvii, 23 Gold, xxvii, xli, xlii, xlviii, 2–6, 8–10, 13, 20, 23, 37, 48, 49, 73–77, 81–84, 89, 94, 95, 105, 115, 116, 130, 148, 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 171, 172, 190, 209–213, 221–224, 229, 265–270, 273–278, 282, 288, 321, 328, 366 Gold Man. See Golden Warrior Golden Eagle, xix, 3 Golden Warrior, xxviii, 2, 4, 84, 265–270 Gondophares I, xxxv, 36 Goňur Depe, 6, 29 Gordion, 99, 110 Gorgan Wall, 22, 260 Gorytos, 74, 76, 273–278 Götürks, 296 Gouache, 319 Graeco-Bactrian Empire, xxxi, 22

Index Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom, xxxi, xxxiii, 7, 9, 22, 25, 163, 165, 169, 179, 218, 309, 310, 321 Grand Astrologer. See Fu Yi1 Grand Ribaud shipwreck, 199 Granulation, 280 Grape vine, 210, 211 Grapes, 156, 191, 204, 209 Great Event. See Mahāvastu Great Indian Desert. See Thar Desert Greek, xv, xxi, xxii, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxiv, xxxv, xliv, xlix, 2, 4–10, 15, 20, 25–27, 28, 34, 35, 36, 43, 44, 51, 56, 57, 63, 73, 74, 76, 77, 83, 85, 89, 90, 95, 98, 99, 103, 104, 110, 111, 115, 116, 138, 139, 147, 152, 156, 161, 163–165, 169, 170, 179, 189, 210, 217, 222, 245, 251–255, 275–277, 294, 295, 301, 302, 304, 309–314, 321, 325–328, 333, 334, 373 Grid, 8, 14, 44 Griffin, 93–95, 115, 117, 216 Groom, 63, 124, 216, 228, 230 Guangzhou, 191 Gugāy, 258 Guild, xlvi Guishuang, xxxiv Guiyijuan, 32 Gum Arabic, 319 Gupta, 165 Gymnasium, xxx, 7, 8, 25 Hadad, 331–335 Hadda, 31 Hadrian, 185 Hair, 16, 43, 47, 48, 66, 67, 69, 75, 231, 319, 338 Hallstatt, 363 Hami, 125, 363

Hamika, 109, 110 Hammamat Valley, 199 Han, xxxv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl, xli, xlvi, 10, 22, 30, 33, 48, 169–171, 176, 178, 191, 203, 212, 228, 236, 237, 283, 294, 304 Han Dynasty, xxxiii, xxxvii, 5, 10, 15, 22, 30, 32, 36, 37, 236, 129, 130, 169, 170, 172, 177, 178, 180, 209, 210, 229, 236, 239, 283, 328, 334, 358 Han Empire, xlvi, 294 Hand drum player, 139 Hanshu (Book of the Han), xxxv, xli, 21, 36, 304 Haoma, 29, 39, 371 Harappa, 6, 14 Harappan, xxiv Harappan Civilization, 14 Hariti, 28 Harp, 139, 148, 372 Harp player, 139 Hatra, xxxviii, 44, 331, 333, 336 Headdress, 2, 4, 29, 48, 88, 89, 94, 162, 163, 265–270, 338, 343, 344 Hebrew, 32 Heliodoros (Ambassador), 313 Heliodoros (from Dura Europos), 43–45 Heliodorus, 304 Helmand River, 6 Helmet, xxviii, 20, 76, 275, 302, 303, 305 Hem, 56, 89, 94, 147 Hemp, 88 Hephthalites, xliii, xlvii, xlix, 22, 63, 67, 126, 260 Heqin, 280 Herakles, 2, 27, 28, 75, 162–163, 311–315 Herat, xxxiii

385

386

Index Herculaneum, 189 Herodotus, xxvii, xxix, 2, 4, 5, 20, 21, 35, 75–77, 90, 95, 116, 121, 131–133, 221, 265 Himalaya Mountains, xvii, 353 Himation, 57, 89, 138 Hinayāna. See Theravāda Hindu Kush Mountains, xvii, xx, xxv, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 37 Hinduism, xxii, xxxv, 50, 156, 339, 373 Hittites, xxiv, 140, 239, 274 Ho-lou, 63 Hollow cast, 116 Holoserica, 180 Homer, 2, 239 Horace, xxxvi Hormizd I, 40 Hormizd II, 257, 259 Hormizd III, 257–262 Horn of Africa, xxxviii Horse(s), xix, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xlvii, 4, 11–12, 15, 20, 39, 152, 176, 217, 227, 238, 245, 258, 266, 268, 273, 281, 282, 283, 287, 302, 304, 343–346, 363; Akhal-Teke, 297, 246; Altai, 297; Buryat, 297; Heavenly, xxxvii, 22, 30, 178; Mongolian pony, 297, 344; Nisean, 304; sacrificed, xxvi, 215, 239, 282. See also Przewalski’s horse Horse domestication, xxiii–xxv, 11–12, 19, 20, 24, 281 Horse riding, 12, 19, 21, 24, 55, 57, 84, 93, 363 Horse tack, xxiii, 132, 282 Horse trapping, 3 Hou Hanshu (Book of the Later Han), xxxiv, 34 Houris, 371 House of the Scribes, 43, 45

House of the Stags, 189 Houses, 97, 98, 100, 105, 122, 132, 237, 303 Huan, xli Huizong, 170 Human sacrifice, xxvii, 273, 362 Hunas, xliii Hungarian Plain, xxxiv, xlvii, 22, 23 Hungary, xvi Hunnic, xliii, 22, 23, 260 Huns, 22, 23, 84, 260, 273, 274, 297 Hunter-gathers, 15 Hunters, xxiv, xxv, 2–4, 12, 126, 183–185, 259–261, 294, 296 Hunting, xxviii, 5, 21, 126, 148, 152, 183, 185, 257, 258, 260, 293 Hurrian, xxiv Huvistika I, 328 Huxuan Wu. See “Sogdian Whirl” Hyrcania, xxviii Iberia (in the Caucasus), xxxviii, xxix Iberian Peninsula, l, 23 Ibex, 210, 211, 266 Ibn Fadlān, xlvii, 37 Ibn Rustan, xlvii Ikat, 88 Ikhshid, 69, 70 Ili Valley, xxxiv Iliad, 239 Incense, xxxviii, 177, 190, 191, 192, 326 Incense trade, xxxviii India, xv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxxi–xxxvi, xxxviii, xl–xlii, xlviii, xlix, l, 5, 14, 15, 17, 19, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 49, 50, 51, 58, 63, 90, 100, 109, 110,

Index 111, 115, 116, 137, 138, 140, 148, 153, 155, 157, 161, 163, 165, 175–177, 179, 190–192, 195–200, 210, 212, 223, 230, 235, 243–247, 252, 309, 310, 313, 314, 321, 334, 351, 353, 354–358, 373 Indian, xix, xxi–xxiii, xxxii, xxxv, xxxviii, xl–xlii, xlvi–xlviii, l, li, 9, 15, 35, 36, 48, 50, 58, 98–100, 104, 111, 139, 145, 156, 161, 164, 170, 175, 176, 177, 179, 191, 195–200, 245, 252–255, 268, 311, 313, 314, 321, 322, 334, 338, 340, 341, 356, 358, 366 Indian Ocean, xvii, xxxviii, xli, xlii, xlvi, 111, 197 Indian subcontinent, xvii–xix, xxix, 7, 9, 353 Indika, xxxi, 36 Indo-Afghan, 16 Indo-Aryan, xxvi, xxxv, 15, 33, 63, 247, 354 Indo-European, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 15, 16, 29, 39, 63, 87, 93, 209, 235, 236, 239 Indo-Greek, 7, 8, 25, 26 Indo-Greek Kingdoms, xxxii–xxxiv, xlii, 7, 9, 22, 163, 169 Indo-Iranian, 29, 63, 268, 282, 334 Indo-Parthian, xxxiv, xxxv, xlii, 7, 9, 36, 98, 139, 179, 196, 311, 313, 314 Indo-Sakā. See Indo-Scythian Indo-Scythian, xxxiv, xxxv, xlii, 9, 22, 98, 179, 196, 311 Indonesian Archipelago, 192 Indus River, xix, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxix, 16, 97, 161, 309 Indus Valley, xx, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xlii, 6, 245, 246 Indus Valley Civilization, 14–16 Infant, 361, 370

Inhumation, 361, 370 Inner Mongolia, xix, 20 Instruments (musical), 137, 138, 372 Ionian Greeks, 8, 199 Ionic, 8, 26 Iran, xxv, l, 6, 26, 39, 68, 148, 186, 209 Iranian, xxvi, xxviii, xxxiii–xxxv, xliii, xlix, 29, 32, 40, 61, 63, 70, 87, 94, 115, 116, 137, 145, 147, 152, 155, 164, 165, 204, 211, 221, 222, 251–255, 258, 259, 268, 277, 282, 311, 317, 319–321, 328, 337–340, 372, 373 Iranian Plateau, xix, xxv, xxviii, xxx, xliii, 15, 16, 25, 38, 97, 339 Iraq, xlvii, l, 115, 152 Iron Age, xx, xxvii–xxxiii, 4, 20, 93, 131, 265, 267, 268, 274, 275, 343, 345, 361 Irrigation, xxvi Irtysh River, xvi Isidorus of Charax, xxxiv, 36 Islam, l, li, 23, 24, 33, 165, 340 Islamic, 137, 148, 203, 204, 257, 350 Issedones, 4, 95 Issyk, xxviii, xxxiv, 3, 37, 265–270 Istanbul. See Constantinople Italian, xlii Italy, 5, 189 Ivolga, 132 Ivory, xli, xlii, 110, 192, 195, 198, 357 Iwan, 104 Jacket, 57, 58, 61, 68, 74, 75, 164, 228, 295 Jade, 84, 132, 210 Jaggayyapeta, 196 Jainism, 50, 164, 247, 354

387

388

Index Jandial, 26 Jangir Bukeev, 125 Japan, xix, 141, 153, 203, 246, 356, 358, 367 Japanese, xv, 184, 203, 317 Jataka tales, 18, 33, 353 Java Sea, 148 Javelin, 238, 275 Jaxartes River. See Syr Darya Jeitun Culture, 6 Jerkin. See Jacket Jesus, xliv, xlv, 18, 34, 340, 349, 353 Jewelry, 14, 26, 47–51, 82, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 221–223, 266–268 Jewish, xliv, xlvii, 334 Jews, l, li, 32 Jin, 30, 31, 180 Jokhang Monastery, 157, 158 Joseph (Genesis 36–37), 38 Juanjuan, 23 Judaism, xliv, xlvii, 23, 68, 334, 339 Julian, 305 Junggar Basin. See Dzungarian Basin Justinian, xlv, xlvi, 31, 68, 82 Kaiyuan tongbao, 10 Kalamus, 191 Kalat, xxvi, 6 Kalinga, xxxii, 50, 243 Kama, 27 Kamsa, 152 Kandahar, xxx Kanishka I, xxxv, 5, 61, 67, 163–165, 196, 252, 253, 320, 328, 357 Kapilavasthu, xxxii Kapisa, xl, 195–197 Karakoram Mountains, xvii, xxiv, 37

Karakum Desert, xvii–xx, xxiv–xxvi, xxviii, 6 Karder. See Kartir Karez, xviii, xx Kartal, 138 Kartir, xliii, 40, 339, 340 Kashgar, xliii, 141, 157 Kashmir, 7, 245, 319, 358 Kavad I, 259 Kazakh, 2, 140 Kazakh Steppe, xxiv, xxvii, xxxiv, xxxix, 2, 7, 13, 19, 21, 37, 126 Kazakhstan, xix, xxviii, 2–4, 12, 29, 77, 121, 130, 133, 145, 29, 265, 343 Kelermes, 20 Kerala, xxli, 334, 351 Kerch. See Pantikapaion Kerch, Strait of, 276 Kerdir. See Kartir Khafaja, 152 Khagan (qaghan), 63 Khalchayan, 26, 254 Khanate, xlvii, 63, 64, 69, 70 Kharoṣṭhī, xxxv, 9, 10, 31, 165, 170, 245 Khazar, xlvii, 23, 68 Khazar Kingdom, 23 Khiva, xxv Khorezm, xxiv, 191, 254 Khosrow I Anūširvān, 259 Khosrow II Parviz, xlvi, 148 Khotan, xliii, xlv, 10, 16, 22, 31, 32, 39, 125, 139, 170, 212 Khotanese, 15, 32 Khvarenah, 320 Khwarezm. See Khorezm Kidarites, xliii, 22 King Khosrow and the Page, 139, 148 King of Kings, 164. See also Shahanshah “Kingly Glory.” See Khvarenah

Index King’s Highway, xxxvii Kizil, 33, 367 Kline, 110, 111, 197 Knights, 304, 305 Knotted carpet, 38 Koguryo, 67 Kokcha River. See Kowkcheh River Kokonor Lake, 212 Könchi River, xxvi Kongque River. See Könchi River Kopet Dag, xvii, xix, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 6 Korea, xix, 67, 203, 246, 356, 358, 367 Korean, 69, 203 Kowkcheh River, xxx, 7 Krishna, 152 Kshatriya, 49 Kucha, xlvii, xlix, 33, 140, 141, 157, 367 Kujula Kadaphises, xxxiv, 251 Kulan, xvii, xviii Kumārajīva, 33, 138, 140 Kumis, 4 Kumtura, 61 Kunar River, 309 Kundika, 156 Kunlun Mountains, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiv Kurgan, xxv, xxvii, xxix, xl, 2, 4, 5, 13, 19, 20, 38, 73, 76, 83, 89, 90, 93, 122, 131, 132, 155, 215, 216, 229, 237, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 276, 282, 283, 287, 289, 290, 297, 343–345 Kushan, xxxiv–xxxvi, xl, xli, xlii, xlvi, 7, 9, 17, 27, 47, 49–51, 61, 67, 97–100, 109, 137, 164, 165, 195, 196, 205, 223, 251, 252, 254, 255, 313, 314, 318–322, 328, 340, 356–358, 373 Kushan Dynasty, xxxiv, 51, 165, 251, 253, 255

Kushan Empire, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xlii, xlvi, xlvii, xlix, 9, 10, 17, 22, 33, 36, 51, 57, 67, 90, 98, 111, 130, 163, 165, 196, 252, 254, 257, 311, 321, 322, 340, 356, 358, 373 Kushinagar, xxxii Kusti, 371 Kyrgyz, xxxii, xlvii, 23, 123, 124, 146 Kyrgyzstan, xix, 29, 156 Kyzylkum Desert, xvii–xi, xxiv, xxv, xxviii Lacquer, xl, 132 Lake Baikal, xlvii, 23, 130 Lake Balkhash, xvii Lambskin, 65 Lanzhou, 212 Laodice, 254 Lapels, 61, 65, 266 Lapis lazuli, xxxvi, xl, xliii, 14, 66, 179 Lathe, 110 Latin, xv, xxi, 15 Latticework, 123 Lauriya Nandangarh, 245 Leather, xx, 12, 13, 81, 231, 265, 266, 287, 289, 301, 303, 343, 344 Leggings. See Trousers Lena River, 130 Letters, 26, 31–33 Lhasa, 157 Liao River, 20 Library Cave (Cave 17), 32, 35 Life of Apollonious of Tyana. See Philostratus Linen, 38, 65 Linguistic, 15–16, 45 Lion, 4, 94, 116, 117, 141, 156, 163, 184, 244, 245, 258, 275, 289, 310, 312, 327, 328 Lion dance, 141

389

390

Index Liturgy, 18 Liu-li, 203 Liu Yanshi, 147 Long Bow. See Bow Long-necked lute player, 139 Loom, 37–39, 184, 218, 362 Loop-in-loop, 283 Looter, 13 Lop Nor, xxix Lorica lamminata, 303 Lorica squamata, 303 Lotus, 57, 138, 356, 372 Lotus Sutra, xxxvi, 48 Loulan, 38 Lucan, xxxvi, 31, 180 Lucian, 333 Lumbini Province, xxxii Luoyang, 125 Lute, 138, 140 Lute player, 139 Lydian, 161, 327 Lydian-style rosette, 216 Ma’aridh II, 104 Mace, 19, 253 Macedonian, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xli, 36, 43, 44, 45, 110, 115, 255, 275, 276, 309, 310, 312 Madder, 216 Madhyamā-pratipad. See Middle Way Maenad, 27, 147, 211, 313 Maës Titianus, xli, 36, 179 Magadha, 191, 245 Mahabharata, l Mahāparinibbāna, xxii, 110, 365 Mahaparinivanna, 366 Mahāvastu, xxxvi, 159, 205 Mahāvibhāşā, 357 Mahāyāna, xxxv, xxxvi, xlix, 18, 32, 33, 47, 51, 52, 355, 358 Maikop Culture, xxv, 12, 37, 132, 218, 237

Maitreya, 48, 49 Majjhima Nikāya, 47 Makara, 196 Maltese cross, 350 Manas, 146 Manchuria, xlvii, 11, 23 Mani, 19, 39, 340 Manica, 303 Manichaean, xlix, li, 19, 31, 32, 35, 38, 63, 137, 340 Manichaeism, xliv, xlvii, 23, 33, 39, 340 Mara, 357 Marcian, xliv, 349 Marcommanic Wars, 22 Margarodes polonicus. See Polish cochineal Margiana, xvii, xxxix, 29 Marinus of Tyre, xli Martial, 189 Martyrdom of Pethion, 34 Martyrs, 34 Mask, 141, 634 Mass, 141 Massagetae, 90 Mat, 50, 61, 253–255 Mathura, xxxv, 17, 51, 195, 199, 253, 356, 357 Maues, xxxiv Mauryan Dynasty, xxxii, 243, 246 Mauryan Empire, xxxi, 50, 98, 355, 365 Mauryan polish, 244 Mazdean priests, 371 Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, 184 Media, xxxiii Median, 25, 230 Meditation, 17, 18, 52 Mediterranean, xv, xix, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxvii–xlii, xliv, xlvii, l, li, 2, 5, 9, 16, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36, 56, 58, 59, 87,

Index 90, 97, 111, 137, 147, 148, 161, 164, 169, 170, 175, 177–179, 183, 186, 190, 191, 196–199, 200, 203, 204, 210, 296, 312, 322 Mediterranean draw, 296 Megasthenes, xxxi, 35, 199 Meiping, 156 Menander, xxxiii, 313 Mercenary, xxvii, xxviii, 9, 20, 21, 218, 267, 304 Merchant, xx, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xli, xlv–xlvii, xlix, 5, 8, 17, 30, 32, 36, 37, 40, 45, 57–59, 63, 64, 67, 69, 87, 88, 90, 91, 97, 99, 104, 111, 125, 126, 138, 141, 147, 155, 158, 170, 171, 179, 186, 191, 196, 197, 199, 200, 203, 204, 211, 212, 228–230, 247, 261, 268, 320, 322, 331–333, 355, 358, 369, 370, 372 Mercury-amalgam gilding, 259, 283 Merv, 157, 350 Mesopotamia, xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xliii, 5, 12, 14, 15, 16, 37, 39, 58, 77, 81, 90, 103, 111, 148, 152, 179, 186, 218, 257, 258, 274, 325 Metalsmith, 85, 133, 257, 261 Metalurgy, xvii, xix, xxv, 13, 133 Metalworkers, xxv, xxviii, 131 Metalworking, xliii, 3, 209, 268, 283, 349 Miaphysitism, xliv Microenvironment, xx Middle Way, xxxii, 17 Miho Museum (Japan), 125 Mihrajan, 5 Milinda. See Menander Milindapañhā, xxxii, xxxiii, 313 Miners, 133 Mines, 133 Mining, 133, 305

Minoan, 94, 116 Mint (for striking coins), xxx, 9, 169 Mirror, 132, 146, 164 Mishe, 70 Missionary, 17, 35, 138; Buddhist, xlvi, 17, 33, 48, 52, 104, 111, 137, 246, 314; Christian, xlv, xlviii, 18–19, 34, 36, 37, 350; Manichaean, l, 35 Mithradates I, xxxiii Mithras, 39, 235, 332 Mitochondrial DNA, 16 Modun, 129, 130 Mogao, xlvi, xlix, 18, 32, 35, 38, 39, 138, 205, 296, 311 Mohenjo-Daro, 6, 14 Mold-made, 105, 147, 171 Monastery, xxxii; Buddhist, xxxv, xxxvi, xlvi, xlviii, xlix, 17–18, 31, 33, 39, 48–51, 99, 137, 158, 171, 314, 358–359, 365, 367; Christian, 18–19, 105; Manichaean, 35 Monasticism, 16–19; Buddhist, xxxv, 17; Christian, 18–19; Manichaean, 19 Mongolia, xvi, xix, xlvii, 2, 3, 11, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 83, 121, 122, 129, 130, 145, 157, 178, 229, 230, 261, 282, 345 Mongolian draw, 296 Mongoloid, xxvi, 251, 265 Mongols, 24, 129 Monk, 17; Buddhist, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi, xlviii, 17–18, 34, 37, 138, 140, 246, 247, 355, 358, 359, 366; Christian, xlv, 18, 31; Manichaean, 19 Monkey, 139, 228 Monophysitism, xliv Monsoon, xli, xlii, 192, 197 Moon, 371

391

392

Index Mosaic, xlvi, 105, 148 Mosaic felting, 288 Moščevaja Balka, 68, 69, 184, 185 Mosul, l Moths, 29, 30, 175, 176 Mouflon, 3, 288, 289 Mount Mug, 33 Mountain goat, xix Mounted warfare, xxvii, 22, 297 Mounted warriors, xxvii, 273, 297, 301, 304 Mud brick, 6, 14, 26, 98, 105 Mud pise, 98 Muhammad, l Muktā (pearl). See Sapta-ratna Mulberries, 191 Mulberry Leaves, 30, 176 Mullah Kurgan, 369 Mummies, xxvi, xxix, 16, 361–363 Mummification, 13 Murghab deltas, 6 Murong, 204 Musāragalva (ammonite, agate, coral). See Sapta-ratna Mushtika, 152 Music, 137–139, 211 Musician, xlviii, 137–142, 148, 211, 372 Muslim, l, li, 23, 29, 350 Mustache, 43, 48, 319, 352 Muziris, xlii Mycenaean, 94, 116, 236, 237, 239 Myos Hormos, xlii, 199 Naandam, 2, 152 Nabataean, xil Namazga Culture, xxv, xxvi Nana, 325–329, 332 Nanaia. See Nana Nanda, 246 Naqsh-i Rustam, 152, 265 Nara, 141, 203 Nard. See Backgammon

Natural History. See Pliny Natyashastra, 145, 314 Nave, 18 Near East, xl, xliv, 6, 12, 24, 34, 38, 76, 177, 183, 185, 218, 236, 238, 239, 274, 281, 283, 304 Necklace, 49, 57, 89, 327, 338 Nemean Lion, 312 Nemrud Dağ, 255, 311 Neolithic, xxiv, xxv, 6, 16, 39, 123, 287 Nepalese, 157 Nestorian Church. See Church of the East Nestorius, xliv, 349 New Testament, 34 Nezak Huns, xliii Nicholas I, 125 Nike, 27, 325–329 Nile River, xlii, 191, 197 Ningbo, 191 Nirvana, 109, 353, 355, 366 Nisa, xxxiii, 254 Nisibis, xxxviii, 349 Niya, 8, 98, 103, 177 Noin Ula, xl, 122 Nomad, xxv, xxvii–xxix, xxxv, xl, xlvii, 2, 3–5, 11, 19–24, 26, 30, 31, 38, 50, 55, 57, 59, 61, 75, 81, 83–85, 88–90, 93–95, 111, 115, 116, 121, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 137, 141, 145, 146, 151, 155, 164, 165, 178, 204, 215, 217, 219, 222, 235, 260, 261, 267, 269, 273, 275, 281, 282, 283, 293–297, 303, 304 Nomad Empires, 22 Nomad Kingdoms, xx, xlii, 19–24 Nomadic, xix, xx, xxv–xxix, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxix, xl, xlii, xliii, 2–6, 9, 12, 13, 19–24, 26, 35, 36, 38, 39, 57, 61, 65, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76,

Index 81–83, 87, 90, 93, 94, 117, 121–123, 125, 126, 129–133, 152, 165, 172, 178, 204, 211, 212, 217–219, 221–223, 229, 231, 235, 251, 253–254, 260, 267–269, 273, 274, 276, 281–283, 287, 296, 301, 304, 321, 343 Norman, 185 North Africa, xxxiv, xliv, l Northern Dynasties, xlvi, 261, 372 Northern Qi Dynasty, xlvi, 227, 372, 373 Northern Song Dynasty, 170 Northern Wei Dynasty, xlvi, 227, 260 Northern Zhou Dynasty, xlvi Nowruz, xxix, 5, 24, 70, 147 Numismatics, xx, xxii Nuns, 246, 247 Nysa, 309 Oasis, xix, xx, xxv, xxvi, xxix, xxxv–xxxix, xlv, xlvi, xlviii– xlix, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 18, 19, 23, 30, 31–35, 38, 52, 61, 77, 97, 98, 104, 111, 139, 140, 155, 157, 169–172, 177, 180, 191, 322, 358 Octamasadas, 76 Oesho, 164, 317–322 Ohrmazd. See Ahuramazda Oiorpata, 2 Olbia, 73, 77, 276 Old Kingdom (Egypt), 14 Oman, 191, 192 On the Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon, 153 On the Wars. See Procopius Onager (equus hemionus), xxiv, 12, 146 Orchestras, 138–140, 148

Ordos, 20, 21, 129, 130 Orikos, 76 Orissa, 243 Orkhon Valley, xlvii Orthodox Church. See Chalcedonian Christianity Ortokaribantii, 265 Ossuary, xlix, 13, 39, 369 Ottonian, 185 Oud, 140 Ovid, xxxvi, 296 Oxus River. See Amu Darya Oxus-Indus stretch, xix, xxiv, xxxi, xxxiii, xxv, 8, 9, 16, 22, 31, 50, 63, 197, 245–248, 309 Oxus Treasure, 229 Padam, 371 Pagoda, 367 Pahlavi, 34, 35 Paikent, xlix, l Painting, l, 2, 5, 16, 17, 19, 38, 44, 61, 63–65, 68, 69, 103, 105, 117, 138, 140, 177, 183, 190, 205, 237, 296, 317, 319, 331, 359, 370, 373 Pakistan, xxi, xxxiii, xxxv, 7, 14, 40, 51, 98, 109, 163, 355 Palace, xxx, xl, 7, 8, 14, 36, 38, 64, 104, 138, 148 Palamedes, 253 Paleolithic, xxiv, xxv, 16 Pāli, xxxii, 17, 33, 110 Palmettes, 103–105 Palmyra, xxxviii, xl, 31, 44, 55–58, 87–91, 110, 179, 180, 191, 331 Pamir-Fergana, 16 Pamir Mountains, xvii, xx, xxv, 36, 179 Pan flute player, 139 Pan-pipes, 139 Pañcatantra, l

393

394

Index Pantaleon, 310 Panther, 146 Pantikapaion, xxxiv, 73, 277 Paper, 13, 32 Papyrus, xxx Parasol, 326, 355 Parchment, xxx Parinirvana, 18, 109, 355 Parni, xxxiii Pars, xliii, 24, 338 Parthia, xxviii, xxxiii, xxxviii, 9, 36, 334 Parthian, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxviii, xliii, xlvi, 26–28, 31, 36, 39, 43, 44, 48, 51, 57, 58, 61, 67, 75, 76, 77, 90, 97, 98, 104, 105, 115, 165, 179, 254–255, 257, 258, 274, 293, 295, 296, 304, 311, 334, 338, 373 Parthian Empire, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxviii–xli, 26, 36, 44, 77, 90, 103, 105, 111, 179, 267, 302, 312, 322 Parthian shot, 258, 293–298 Parthian Stations, xxxiv, 36 Pataliputra, 199, 246 Pausanias, xxxvii Pazyryk, xl, 38, 115, 117, 122, 131, 215–219, 269, 282, 287–290, 297, 343–346 Peach, 189–192 Pearl, xlii, 89, 91, 177, 192, 210, 320 Pearl necklace, 57 Pearl roundels, 57, 65, 66, 68, 104, 185 Peepul tree, 191 Pendjikent, xlix, 64, 117, 126, 373 Pepper, 177, 191, 192 Perederijewa Moglia, 76 Perfume, 190 Periplus Mari Erythraei (PME), xxxiv, xlii, 36, 176, 197

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. See Periplus Mari Erythraei (PME) Perisadus I, 276, 277 Periyar River, xlii Peroz I, 259, 260 Persepolis, xxix, xxxiii, xliii, 4, 24–25, 67, 69, 95, 117, 217, 244 Persepolis apadana reliefs, 4, 24–25, 67, 69, 95, 217, 229 Persia, xix, xxxiii, xliii, 39, 40, 66, 137, 139, 153, 155, 165, 190, 191, 351, 369, 373 Persian, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxvii, xxix, xxxiii, xxxv, xlviii, xli, xliii, xlvii, xlviii, li, 2, 15, 24, 25, 32, 34, 35, 39, 44, 58, 77, 83, 95, 98, 111, 116, 139, 140, 153, 161, 165, 185, 191, 204, 212, 217, 229, 255, 258, 273, 301, 302, 304, 305, 327, 328, 339, 372, 373 Persian Gulf, xix, xxxviii, xli, 36, 90, 97, 148, 179, 191, 197 Peshitta, 34 Petra, xxxviii Petroglyphs, xxv, 28, 145, 229 Pharro, 319–322 Pharsalia. See Lucan Philip II, xxxiii Philologist, xxii Philostratus, xxxv, 36, 116, 309, 327 Phyrgian, 99 Pictographs, 122, 235 Pile (carpet), 215, 216, 287 Pillar, 243–248 Pinna nobilis, 175 Pipa, 138, 372 Pistachio tree, xviii Pitaka, 358 Piticii family, 199 Plain weave. See Tabby Plates, xxxvii, xlii, xliii, 38, 105, 106, 116, 139, 152, 183, 185,

Index 205, 222, 257, 258, 259–261, 303, 325, 326, 327 Pliny, xxxvi, xl, xli, xlii, 116, 189, 191, 197, 229 Plum tree, xviii, 189 Plutarch, 178, 293 Pokrovka, 2 Pol-li, 203 Polis, xxx Polish cochineal, 216, 217 Pollution, Zoroastrian belief, 373 Polo, 7, 70, 153 Polychrome, 30, 31, 57, 62, 66, 67, 90, 180, 184, 216, 222, 230 Pompeii, xlii, 189, 195, 199 Pompey, xxxiii Pontic, xxvii, xxxiv, xliv, xlvii, 73, 95, 222, 223 Pontic-Caspian, xxiv, xxv, xxxix, 11, 15 Pontic Sea. See Black Sea Pontic steppes, xxvii, xxxiv, xlvii, 3, 11, 19, 20, 76, 93, 222, 237, 276, 289, 303 Pope, xliii Prakrit, xx, 15, 31, 33, 245 Predatory nomadism, xl, 3, 20, 93, 281 Priscus, xlvii Procopius, xlv, 22, 31 Prometheus Bound. See Aeschylus Propertius, xxxvi, 296 Proto-Celtic, 363 Proto-Indo-European, xxiii, xxv, 15, 16, 19, 20 Proto-Tocharian, 363 Prunus pérsica. See Peach Przewalski’s horse, xvi, xvii, 11, 229 Pslams. See Book of Psalms Ptolemy, Claudius, xxxiv, xli, 179 Ptolemy Philadelphus, xli Punjab, xxxii, 14

Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss. See Sukhavati Pure Land Paradise, 138 Purple, xlv, xlvi Purushapura (Peshawar), xxxv Qaidam Basin, 212 Qalat. See Kalat Qanat. See Karez Qasr-I Abu Nasr, 105 Qäwrighul, xxvi Qi Dynasty, 156, 372. See also Northern Qi Dynasty Qian, 170 Qiemo Xian. See Chärchän Qilian Mountains, 251 Qin Dynasty, xxxvii, 21, 30, 83, 294 Qin Shihuangdi, xxxvii Qinghai Lake, 212 Qinghai Province, 212 Qizilchoqa, 363 Qočo, 19, 23, 32 Qu Family, 172 Questions of Menander. See Milindapañhā Quintius Curtius, 309 Rabatak inscription, 328 Rafters, 123, 124 Ramayana, xxii Raspig, 371 Ravenna, xlvi Rebab, 141 Rebec, 141 Rebirth, 4 Red deer, xix, 3 Red Sea, xxix, xxxviii, xli, xlii, xlvi, 19, 36, 148, 191, 196, 199 Regeneration, 4 Reindeer, 2, 343–346 Reins, 12, 238, 297 Relics, xlvi, 17, 185, 365, 366

395

396

Index Reliquary, xxxvi, 14, 365, 366 Repoussé, 75, 76, 84, 94, 116, 148, 151, 156, 210, 275, 276, 326 Rhine, 23 Rhinoceros horn, xlii Rhoxolani, 305 Rhyton, 155, 156, 211 Richthofen, Baron Ferdinand von, xv Rig Veda, 239 Risala, 37 Robbers, 215, 344 Rock engravings. See Petroglyphs Roman, xviii, xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi–xliii, 2, 5, 10, 22, 23, 30, 31, 43–45, 57, 58, 76, 77, 97, 111, 165, 169, 177–180, 185, 189, 190–192, 197–199, 203–205, 221–223, 255, 257, 258, 260, 293, 295, 297, 301, 302, 304, 305, 309, 311, 312, 331, 339, 356 Roman Empire, xxxiii, xxxix, xli, xliv, 23, 31, 33, 44, 51, 56, 77, 90, 106, 111, 165, 180, 195, 221, 322, 343 Rome, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxviii, xli, xliii, xlv, 185 Roof ring, 123, 124 Rosettes, 65, 146 Roundel, 57, 65, 66, 68, 103, 104, 183–187 Rupandehi District, xxxii Rūpya (silver). See Sapta-ratna Russia, 77, 237 Russian, xlvii, 229 Russian Revolution, xv Sabao, xlix, 125, 374 Saddharmapundarika. See Lotus Sutra Saddle, 287, 297, 343, 344

Saddle covers, 287–290 Saiga antelope, xvi, xxiv Saint Thomas. See Thomas, Apostle Saint Thomas Christianity, 351 Sakā, xxvii–xxix, xxxi, xxxiii– xxxv, xxxix, xl, 2, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 39, 83, 84, 93, 122, 179, 196, 217–219, 265, 267–269, 287, 290, 301, 310, 325, 343, 344 Sakā Tigrakhauda, 21, 265, 266 Sakastan, xxxiv Sal tree. See Sala tree Sala, 152 Sala tree, 109, 191 Salt pans, xvii Samara Culture, 267 Samara River, xvi Samarkand, 63, 69, 141, 190, 369 Samatata, 165 Samite, 65, 183, 185 Samsāra, xxxii, 17, 353 Samyaksambuddha, xxxii Samyyutta Nikāya, 47 San Vitale, xlvi Sancai glaze, 227, 295 Sanchi, 109, 356 Sangha, xxxii, 17, 50, 246 Sannathi, 245 Sanskrit, xv, xvi, xxi, xxii, xxxvi, 15, 17, 29, 33, 140, 145, 205, 243, 314, 358 Sapta-ratna, xxxvi, 158, 205 Sardis, 327, 338 Sarmatians, xxxiv, 2, 22, 23, 83, 84, 87, 222, 229, 231, 260, 273, 274, 297, 301, 304, 305, 343 Sarvāstivādin School, 357 Sasan, xliii Sasanian, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, xlviii, xlix–l, 5, 9, 17, 18, 23, 28, 31–33, 35, 38–40, 45, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66–70, 77, 97, 104–106,

Index 115–117, 137, 139–141, 145–148, 152, 153, 157, 165, 183–186, 203–205, 209, 211, 212, 223, 254, 255, 257–261, 274, 295, 302, 304, 305, 334, 337–341, 349–351, 369, 373 Sasanian Empire, xxii, xliii–xlviii, l, 5, 18, 19, 22, 23, 31, 34, 38, 40, 44, 58, 68, 77, 103, 105, 106, 111, 157, 185, 186, 257, 260, 261, 302, 312, 340, 349, 350 Satavahana, 195, 196 Satrap, 163 Satrapy, xxviii, xxxiii, 161 Saturniidae, 175 Satyr, 27, 311 Sauromatae. See Sarmatians Scabbard, 273–278 Scandanavia, 37 Schist, 48, 98, 138 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 258 Scriptorium, 19 Scylas, 76 Scythes, 75 Scythian, xxviii, xxxiv, 2, 4, 5, 20–22, 68, 73–77, 83, 84, 87, 90, 95, 131, 132, 269, 273–277, 281, 287, 301, 303, 304, 334 Scythian Kingdom, xxxiv Seals, 338 Secret History. See Procopius Secret History of the Mongols, 28 Segmenta, 184 Seidenstrße, xv Seistan, xxxiv Selenga River, xl Seleucia on the Tigris. See Ctesiphon Seleucid, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvi, xxxviii, xl, 7, 9, 26, 38, 39, 58, 111, 163, 179, 217, 218, 247, 254, 255, 301, 334

Seleucid Empire, xxx, xxxi–xxxiii, 43, 44, 57, 75, 147, 163, 179, 267, 309, 310, 311 Seleucus I Nicator, xxx, 36, 43, 199, 246 Semirech’ye (Seven Rivers), xxxix, 126, 265 Semitic, 15, 34, 334 Seres, xxxvi, xxxvii Sericae, xxxvii Serikon, xxxvii Sestertius (sestertii), xxxvi Seven Treasures. See Sapta-ratna Sevta Huns. See Hephthalites Shabrack. See Saddle covers Shahanshah, xliii, 165, 338, 350 Shahnameh, 117, 153 Shahr-I Sokhta, 6 Shakyamuni. See Buddha Shalmaneser III, 229 Shalwars, 253 Shaman, 28–29, 140 Shamanic, xlvii, 28, 145 Shamanism, 4, 28, 29 Shamash, 331, 333 Shami, 254 Shang Dynasty, xxviii, 20, 209, 236 Shapur I, xliii, 31, 40, 148, 184 Shapur II, 185, 257, 259, 260, 339 Shapur III, 259 Shastras, 33 Sheep, xix, xx, xxv, 11, 12, 15, 19, 93, 153, 218, 237, 287, 362 Shiji (The Grand Scribe’s Records or the Records of the Grand Scribe), xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvii, 36, 304. See also Sima Qian Shiraz, 105 Shiva, 164, 165, 319, 320, 321, 322, 326 Shortugai, xxvi, 14

397

398

Index Siberia, xxv, 2, 20, 22, 28, 122, 209, 229, 274 Siddhartha. See Buddha Silk, xvi, xxxvi–xxxviii, xl, xlii, xlvi, xlviii, 10, 20, 29–31, 38, 43, 57, 58, 59, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 90, 99, 111, 115, 157, 170–172, 175–180, 183–186, 198, 211, 230, 258, 283 Silk Road, xv, xvi, xix–xxi, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlviii, 8, 32, 33, 35, 43–45, 57, 63, 77, 87, 90, 91, 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 110, 137, 141, 145, 158, 162, 169, 170, 179, 190, 191, 204, 217, 228, 229, 268, 303, 304, 331, 333, 334, 350 Silk Roads. See Silk Road Silk Routes. See Silk Road Silla, 203–205 Silver, xlii, xlviii, 5, 6, 8, 10, 32, 37, 38, 104, 105, 106, 115, 116, 130, 139, 146–148, 151, 152, 155–158, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172, 183, 185, 209, 211, 212, 222, 257–261, 266, 274, 282, 283, 295, 325–327, 338, 366 Silversmith, 209, 261 Sima Qian, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvii, xli, 20, 36–37, 191 Sima Tan, 36 Sindh, xxviii, 14 Sino-Kharoṣṭhī coins, 10 Sintashta Culture, xxiv, xxv, 7, 12, 235–238 Sirkap. See Taxila Sitar, 138 Six Dynasties, xlvi–xlix, 6, 18, 37, 145 Skeletons, 2, 269 Slaves, xxviii, xxxix, 32, 76 Slavs, 23 Smiths, 274

Snow leopard, xix, 3, 4, 266, 267 Sogdian, xxi, xxxviii, xlv, xlvii, xlix, l, 5, 14, 15, 32, 33–35, 40, 57–59, 61, 63, 64, 67–69, 103, 104, 111, 117, 125, 126, 137, 139–141, 147, 155–158, 171, 183–186, 209, 211, 212, 228, 261, 266, 295, 328, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374 “Sogdian Whirl,” 38, 147, 157, 372 Sogdiana, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxviii, xxxix, xliii, xlvii, xlviii, xlix–l, 17, 22, 24, 29, 33, 37, 38, 40, 63, 69, 125, 157, 163, 186, 260, 261, 321, 339, 350, 351, 358, 369, 370, 372, 373 Solidus (solidi), 9, 11 Solokha, 76 Soma. See Haoma Songtsen Gampo, 156–158, 212 Sorrento, 199 South China Sea, 192 Soviet, 145, 325 Soviet archaeology, xv Soviet Union, xv, 3 Spartocid Dynasty, 276 Sphāţika (crystal or quartz). See Sapta-ratna Spices, xli, xlii, 57, 148, 177, 190, 191 Spotted leopard, xix, 3, 4 “Spring of Khosrow” carpet, 38, 115–117 Sri Lanka, 192 Staffs, 37 Stag-horse, 343–346 Steppes, xvi, xvii, xix, xx–xxix, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxix, xlvi, xlvii, 2–7, 11–13, 15, 19–24, 28, 29, 35–39, 55, 57, 58, 68, 74–77, 81, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 93, 94, 111,

Index 116, 121–126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137, 145–147, 152, 153, 155, 157, 178, 204, 211, 212, 217–219, 221, 222, 229–231, 235, 237–239, 258–261, 267–269, 274–276, 281–283, 287, 289, 293, 295–297, 301, 303, 304, 327, 333, 338, 345, 370–372 Stirrups, 297 Stone, xv, xxv, 55, 81, 98, 103, 105, 125, 131, 132, 205, 244, 252, 260, 312, 326, 366, 371, 372 Strabo, xlii, 20, 197, 230 Strait of Malacca, 192 Stucco, 98, 103–106, 183, 252, 255 Stūpa, xxxvi, 8, 14, 17, 18, 27, 31, 51, 109, 110, 138, 313, 314, 355–357, 365–367 Subhadra, 110 Subserica, 180 Suevi, 23 Sui Dynasty, xliii, xlvi, xlviii, 140, 227, 372, 374 Sukhavati, xlix Sukhaya Tes River, 122 Sumerian, xxiv, 14 Sun, 235, 371 Sūr-pīk-srāy. See Pan flute player Surkh Kotal, xxxv, 50, 61, 252–255, 328 Surya, 235 Susa, 16, 325, 328 Sutra, xxxii, xlviii, 33, 358 Suvana (gold). See Sapta-ratna Swat Valley, xxxv, 99, 137, 358, 366 Sword, 66, 67, 81, 253, 273–278, 296 Symposium, 5 Synagogue, 43, 45, 103, 332, 334 Syncretism, 165, 321

Syr Darya (Jakartes), xvii, xviii, xxxix, xlix, 63, 265 Syria, xxi, xxxiii, l, 5, 18, 19, 23, 87, 105, 137, 175, 196, 257, 260, 295, 304, 333 Syriac, xxi, xliv, xlviii, 16, 34–36, 87, 196 Syrian Desert, xxxviii, 106 Syrian Orthodox Church, xliii–xlv, li, 18, 19, 34, 106 Tabby, 65, 68, 88, 177 Tacitus, xxxvi, 231, 305 Taiga, xvi, xix, 35 Tailors, 55, 362 Tajikistan, xix, 29, 33, 57, 64, 373 Takhar Province, 14 Takht-e Tāqdis, 117 Takht-i Suleimān, 338 Täklimakan Desert, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiii–xxvi, xxix, xlviii, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 21, 32, 33, 37, 63, 90, 100, 103, 104, 111, 125, 141, 157, 169, 171, 204, 212, 358, 361, 362, 366, 367 Talas River, l Tamgaly Valley, 29, 145 Tamgha, 10 Tamil, 197 Tamrā Nālā River, 7 Tang, xlii, xlviii, xlix, l, 8, 18, 23, 31, 33, 58, 62, 66, 69, 70, 125, 126, 137–140, 141, 147, 148, 153, 170, 171, 185, 191, 192, 203, 211, 212, 227, 295, 296, 314, 334, 358 Tang Dynasty, xlviii, 10, 18, 23, 38, 59, 138–140, 145, 155, 169, 170, 180, 192, 212, 227, 228, 296, 334, 367, 372, 374 Tang Empire, 190–192, 211, 294, 296

399

400

Index Tang huiyao. See Wang Pu Taq-ī Bustan, 148, 152, 183, 305 Taquette, 175, 177, 180 Tarim Basin, xvii, xix, xxiv–xxvi, xxxv–xxxix, xlv–xlvii, xlix, l, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 22, 23, 30–34, 36–38, 58, 77, 90, 97, 98, 100, 111, 137, 147, 155, 157, 170, 177, 178, 180, 212, 311, 322, 331, 334, 340, 351, 358, 361, 363, 374 Tarim River, xviii, xix, xx Tartan, xxiii, 34, 363 Tatoo, 3, 289 Taxila, xxix, xxxiv, xxxv, xlii, 7, 9, 25, 26, 27, 33, 36, 37, 98, 99, 163, 164, 196, 197, 313 Temüjin, 28 Termez, xlix, 358 Terracotta, 14, 141, 180, 237, 317, 319, 369 Tetradrachm, 161, 162 Textiles, xxiii, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xlvi–xlviii, 2, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 15, 37, 38, 39, 43, 57, 58, 69, 99, 111, 123, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184–186, 192, 215, 219, 225, 258, 266, 320, 338, 362 Thar Desert (Great Indian Desert), xvii, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxxii Theater, xxx, 7, 8, 25, 26, 310, 311, 328 Theodore of Mopsuestia, xliv Theophrastus, xli, 197 Theravāda, xxxv, xxxvi, xlix, 17, 33, 47, 48, 50, 51, 110, 246, 355, 358 Third Ecumenical Council. See Council of Ephesus Throne, 115–118 Thumb draw. See Mongolian draw

Tian Shan Mountains, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxiv, xxv, xxxix, xlviii, 37, 130, 178, 231 Tianshui, 141 Tiberius, xxxvi, 31 Tibet, 29, 157, 212 Tibetan, xxiv, 32, 67, 156, 157, 209, 211, 212 Tibetan Empire, 32 Tibetan Plateau, xvi, xvii, 17, 251 Tigers, xli, 266, 289 Tigris River, 14, 90 Tillya Tepe, 26, 196 Tipitaka, 33 Toba Wei, 22 Tobal River, 12 Tocharian A, B, C, xxv, xxvi, 15 Todai-ji, 203 Tomb, xxvii–xxix, xxxiii, xxxvii, xl, 2, 4, 5, 12–14, 25, 30, 32, 55–57, 73, 88, 129–131, 158, 180, 204, 215, 229, 230, 235, 268, 303, 305, 311, 314, 343, 361, 363, 372, 374 Tomyris, 190 Tools, xxv, 13, 52, 81, 84 Toprak Kala, 254 Torque, 266, 319 Tortoise shell, xli, 110 Tov Province, xl Toyok, 125 Trade, xvi, xix, xx, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxx, xxxii, xxxvi–xlii, xliv, xlvi–li, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 33, 35–39, 44, 45, 51, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 77, 83, 87, 90, 91, 97, 99, 100, 106, 111, 115, 125, 148, 155, 157, 158, 162, 165, 171, 175–180, 185, 186, 191, 195–197, 199, 200, 203, 211, 212, 217, 218, 223, 228, 229,

Index 231, 238, 239, 244, 247, 261, 268, 283, 312, 322, 331, 332, 334, 350, 351, 358, 369, 372 Trajan, xli Transhumance, xix Translators, xlviii Transylvania, xix Travelers, 35–37 Treasury, xxx Tree of Life, 4, 268, 269 Tribute, xxi, xxix, xlvii, 21, 22, 63, 64, 67, 70, 190 Trident, 164, 319 Tripoli, xxxviii Trojan War, 276 Trousers, 2, 55, 57, 61, 74–76, 81, 164, 165, 228, 253, 254, 265, 266, 275, 295, 317, 362, 363 Tungusic Evenski, 28 Tunic, 55–57, 61, 76, 81, 88, 138, 184, 265, 266, 317, 319, 320, 332 Tuoba, xlvi Turban, 89 Turfan, xxxix, xliii, xlv, xlviii, xlix, 8, 18, 19, 23, 32, 34, 35, 68, 157, 172, 177, 303, 340, 358, 362 Turfan Depression, xvii, xxiv, xxix Turkic, xlvii, xlviii, l, 4, 16, 20, 22, 23, 67, 68, 84, 121, 122, 126, 137, 140, 145, 266, 296, 340, 372 Turkic Khaganate. See Turkic Khanate Turkic Khanate, 23, 296 Turkish knot, 216 Turkmen, 87–91, 140 Turkmenistan, xix, xxxiii, 16, 29 Turks, xlvii, xlix, li, 33, 35, 63, 69 Turquoise, xxvii, xl Tushita Heaven, 48 Tussah, 30, 31, 57, 99, 175 Tuv, 132

Tuva, 20 Twill, xxiii, 65, 68, 184, 362, 363 Twisted wire, 283 Tyche, 27, 28, 333 Tyre, xlv Uehjulü-Jodi-Chanuy (Wu-ZhouLiu-Ju-Di), xl Ujjain, xxxiv Ukkok Plateau, 2, 269 Ukraine, xxvii, 15, 76, 77, 237 Ulan Bator, xli Ummah, l, li Ummayyad Dynasty, l Unaš Dynasty, 66 Ural Mountains, xvi, 2, 7, 77, 235, 259, 260 Ural River, xvi, 12, 15 Urbanization, xxvi, xxx, xxxii Urna, 356 Uruk, 37, 218 Ushnisha, 356 Ustyurt Plateau, xvii Uttar Pradesh, xxxii Uttariya, 48 Uyghurs, xlvii, xlix, 23, 212, 340 Uzbekistan, xix, xxv, xlvii, 16, 22, 29, 57, 252, 358 Vaidüry (lapis lazuli). See Sapta-ratna Vajrapani, 28, 314 Vandals, xxxiv, 23 Varanasi, 244 Varkhuman, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70 Varna, 13 Vedas, 235 Vedic, xxii, xxxii, xxxv, 15, 29, 39, 50, 245, 247, 268, 282, 340, 353, 354, 373 Venus, 371 Verethraghna, 39

401

402

Index Vergil, 296 Vesuvius, 189, 195, 198 Via dell’Abbondanza, 195 Vihāra, xxxii, 17, 357 Vikings, 37 Vima II Kadphises, 254, 321 Vimalakirti Sutra, 48 Vinaya, 33, 358 Viol, 141 Visigoths, 23 Vitman River, 130 Volga River, xvi, xlvii, 2, 23, 37, 218, 267 Vrap Treasure, 82 Vultures, xix Wagon. See Cart Walnut tree, xviii Wang Pu, 190 Wangshan, 229 Warp, 37, 177, 184, 216, 363 Warp-faced, 68, 177, 180 Warrior, xxvii, xxix, 2, 3, 4, 20, 21, 74, 75, 77, 83, 84, 90, 93, 94, 117, 221–223, 239, 265, 268, 269, 273, 275, 281, 282, 289, 293, 293, 295, 301–304, 344, 345 Watchtower, 32 Water, in Zoroastrian belief, 369 Watermelon, 191 Wattle-and-daub, 98 Weapon, xli, 13, 19, 20, 25, 37, 66, 67, 93, 132, 238, 275, 282, 296, 345 Weavers, xxiii, 31, 37, 55, 68, 99, 178, 180, 185, 217, 218 Weaving, xxiii, xliii, 15, 29, 30, 31, 57, 67, 68, 175, 177, 180, 184, 187, 218, 363 Weft, xxiii, 38, 177, 216, 363 Weft-faced, 68, 177, 178, 180, 184

Wei, 18, 22, 23 Wen-cheng, 157 Western Paradise, 138, 139, 140 Western Satraps, xxxiv Western Turkish Empire (Khanate) l, 63, 69, 126 Western Wei Dynasty, xxviii, 229 Western Zhou Dynasty, xxviii Wheel-cut, 203, 204 White Huns. See Hephthalites Willow, 123, 361 Win-karnnār-srāy. See Long-necked lute player Wind, in Zoroastrian belief, 369 Window screen, 104, 105 Wine, xxxix, 6, 27, 77, 147, 204, 209–213, 237, 260, 311, 313, 362 Wings, 123, 326 Wizarism Catrang ud Nihism New Ardaxsir. See On the Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon Wood, xviii, xl, 4, 7, 13, 18, 26, 32, 58, 84, 98, 99, 103, 110, 111, 116, 123, 125, 132, 177, 198, 210, 228, 235, 265, 266, 273, 274, 287, 290, 297, 325, 326, 343 Wooden slips, 32 Wool, xx, xxiii, xxv, 15, 37–39, 58, 88, 99, 123, 124, 177, 178, 216, 218, 287, 288, 361, 362 Wool working, 37–39 Wooly Sheep, xxv, 32, 37 Woven carpet, 38 Wrestlers, 151, 312 Wu Family Shrines, 237 Wudi, xxxvii, 22, 36, 283 Wusun, xxxiii, 22 Wuweo, 230 Wuzhu, 10, 170 Wuzurgmihr, 153

Index Xenophon, 217 Xianbei, xlvi, 22, 205, 260 Xiaowen, 260 Xinjiang, xv, xix, xxvi, 61, 67, 68, 169, 303 Xiongnu, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxix, xl, 21, 22, 23, 82–85, 122, 129, 130–132, 178, 204, 251, 275, 281, 283, 289, 294 Xionites, xliii, 22, 260 Xuanzang, xlix, 17, 37, 196, 245 Xuanzong, 140 Xusrō ud Rēdag. See King Khosrow and the Page Yak, xix, xx, 67 Yan, 229 Yamnaya Culture, 13, 121 Yanghai, 362 Yangtze River, xlvi Yangzhou, 191 Yarlung Dynasty, 212 Yavana, 199 Yazd, 40 Yellow River, 20, 30, 229, 359 Yenisey River, xvi, 122 Yingpan, 31, 38, 67 Yoke, 64, 69, 89 Yuezhi, xxxi, xxxiii–xxxv, xxxvii, xxxix, 22, 63, 67, 130, 165, 178,

179, 251, 251, 253, 281, 294, 321, 325, 328 Yuezhou, 148 Yurt, 5, 39, 87, 121–127, 281 Zab River, l Zabdidol, 88, 89 Zaghunlug, xxix, 13, 361, 363 Zambasta. See Book of Zambasta Zanzibar, 148 Zeravshan River, xvii Zeugma, xxxviii, 44, 111 Zeus, 26, 309, 327 Zhang family, 32 Zhang Qian, xxxvii, 36, 37, 178, 191, 283, 304 Zhang Yichao, 296 Zhao, 229, 297 Zhou Dynasty, 20, 39, 230 Zodiac, 210, 211 Zoroaster (Zarathuštra), 35, 39, 337, 353, 371, 373 Zoroastrian, xlv, xlix, li, 13, 17, 32, 33–35, 40, 64, 70, 125, 147, 337, 339, 340, 369, 370–373 Zoroastrianism, xxii, xxxv, xliii, 39–40, 125, 319, 337–340, 369, 373, 374 Zot, 371

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William E. Mierse, PhD, is Richard and Pamela Green and Gold Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont. He is coeditor with Alfred Andrea of “Classical Traditions, 1000 BCE–300 CE, Era 3” (Vols. 5 and 6) in ABC-CLIO’s World History Encyclopedia.