Sarmatian/Scythian burials

[Hermann]

She really doesn't look that different from some modern Ukrainians.

[Alanus]

Hi, Hermann

That's true. I visited Ukraine a few years ago and saw women who looked both Iranian and Asiatic. There was, at one time, a significant population of Tartars in Ukraine, especilly the Crimea. My third wife was Russian, born in Orenberg Province, and she descended from Tartars.

Same goes for the Kazakhs, which still have an Indo-Iranian admixture despite a national official denial. Same goes for people still living in China's Xinjiang Province and the Tarim Pendi. In the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (partly filmed in Xinjiang), we see a brown-bearded bandit who looks like an Irishman. The Ili River Valley (once home of the Wusun/Alans) also has a remaining Indo-European population. They all didn't migrate northwest.

Here is a sketch of a 19th century Kazakh woman:


[attachment=6878]kingofyusword006.JPG[/attachment]


And here is a traditional pose of Zarathtura (Zoroaster), author of the Gathas, who supposedly came from the east and lived prior to 800 BC:


[attachment=6879]mlgratiomart046.JPG[/attachment]

[Michael Kerr]

Alanus wrote:

Rostovtzeff was transferring his own Russian culture onto the Sarmatians, whether he realized or not.

Hi Alanus,I won't disagree with what you say but didn't the Scythians tend to leave the Bosporan cities alone and control the hinterland while the Sarmatians/aorsi/alans intermarry with the local ruling elites and in some cases rule some of these cities/towns. I was thinking of the Tanais marble depicting a Sarmatian horseman which some (I'm standing on thin ice here) say is a depiction of Sauromates I who was a ruler of Tanais. Quote below is from a dedication to relief of horseman.

Yulia Ustinova (1999, 192-95) argues that this is likely a depiction of the Sarmatian (Iranian) deity Theos Hypsistos, but it may also be a royal figure (Sauromates I)

Unfortunately Yulia Ustinova wants us to part with $213 if we want to read her arguments on Amazon which cover 3 pages of the book. At $71 a page, not me. Sorry about oversharpened image. I went overboard with sharpening tool trying to bring up detail and accidentally saved over the original.

[attachment=6891]Tanaismarble2ndCenturyoversharpened.jpg[/attachment]

Regards
Michael Kerr

[Hermann]

Right you are.

My father's side is part Ukrainian. Some of my relatives have that same look.

[koechlyruestow]

Michael, come to think of it, the book I was talking about was a bit more than a little excentric about its subject matter, so the story I put up may have been nonsense too. He did show some very compelling analogies though with Central European and Russian folklore, including a mural in a medieval Moravian castle of a knight in a plate armour suit who had hung up his sword-belt and lance in a peculiar-looking tree and reclined with his head in the lap of a lady (with the typical late-medieval pointed hat with cloth hanging down from the top), while a page held the two horses by the reins.

Alanus wrote:

Where in Ospray's The Scythians does it show a tall and pointed Saka hat?

Plate G2. Not pointed, sugar loaf. McBride turns her into a housewife-queen. I've seen in, if I remember right, the book about the mummies from the Tarim Basin, photographs and a description of a lady who also wore a complicated structure on her head made of wood and felt. Just like on the belt buckle, her head was shaved, and the Chinese archeologists could seee she had had her dark blonde hair shaved off almost daily, not as part of some kind of funerary procedure. She was very old, very tall and muscular, during her life must have been very healthy, and she did not seem to have ever been pregnant: a lady of considerable status, perhaps a priestess/shaman or whatever you want to call her.

[M. Demetrius]

that banal little man McBride

Hmm. Doesn't seem like respectful language, but what do I know?

[koechlyruestow]

Demetrius, do not get me started about Angus McBride. :twisted:

[M. Demetrius]

Thank you for your opinion, sir. I have no wish to rekindle your diatribe.

[Michael Kerr]

Hi, in regards to "tree" or "tree of life" symbols on Scythian art I found this explanation from the web regarding importance of trees to Central Asian people

The image of the tree with birds on its branches was placed, in particular, on the ceremonial headdresses of Scythian kings and queens and was associated with the Goddess of Fertility expressing the idea of life revival. Mythologists have proved that the image of the tree reflects the principal cosmogonic myth: the universe was represented by its three sections – the roots, the trunk and the crown. The roots symbolized the underworld; the trunk was associated with the surface of the earth and the world of humans and animals, while the crown referred to the heavens, the domain of the gods. Sometimes the four parts of the world were marked by four trees growing on the four sides of the World Tree (10)

In Chinese philosophy, which influenced Central Asian beliefs, the tree is one of the five elements of life: the tree, the fire, the earth, the metal and the water. They evolved from chaos in the process of interaction between two poles, Yin and Yang. These are the essential categories of natural philosophy signifying the unity of polar forces, the forces of the soft and the hard, the female and the male, the light and the dark, etc.(10) In Korean mythology the image of the tree, for instance, embodied the magic contract between Man and the other world.

Regards
Michael Kerr

[Alanus]

Hello, all

Evidently symbolism was so important they wore it on their heads. :grin:

Interesting about the older woman found in the Tarim Basin; sounds like a priestess, alright. I think these Takla Makan people were related to, or ancestors of, the Yue-chi... who appear to be culturally close to the Wuson/Alans. They were also dealers in jade.

The whole tree thing-- the underworld, the regular world (topside), and heaven itself-- also follows the philosophy of the Axis Mundi. There are more styles beyond the tree, including The Sword in the Stone(s), and existing today in your average "church-- the structure, the steeple, and the cross on top... which brings us back to the Sword in the Stone... which is the same thing. The whole thing places us (them) in the "midjensgaard," the "middle house" between God and our ancestors.

I guess the oddest are the women who shaved their heads. We see it again on a wall-rug from Pazyryk, where the bald priestess/queen sits in a high-backed chair while holding a cup of hauma (or kumiss, or booze) as the Saka warrior/rider approaches for whatever flolic might follow. :whistle:

[Alanus]

Hey, Michael

You can have Yulia Ustinova at $70 a page. :woot:

I'll take Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run ($5 at Walmart). illy: