Origin of the Alans

[Alanus]

The Flying Horse on a Swallow

Thanks, Michael

I'll try to add some insight on two of the subjects you mentioned, both important in relation to the Yuezhi-- the Flying Horse on a Swallow, and the Journey of King Mu to Visit the Queen Mother of The West.

       
The Flying Horse found in Gansu was dated to the Western Han period. You posted it above, and it's perhaps the finest Chinese bronze sculpture of the era. I took photos of my bronze copy to record closer details. The first photo shows a single crenelation at the apex of the mane. The second pic illustrates the distinctive tail, as if it were broken in the middle. This feature, the sharply-angled tail, is due to a leather or cloth "tail sheath."

   
Here we have an older bronze sculpture, this one from the Eastern Han period. It's a bit crude, but again it shows the bent tail signifying the horse wore a tail sheath. Where did these Han (and Qin) tail sheaths come from?

   
We might look at some of the horses from Berel Kurgan 11, early 3rd century BC and just before the Han era. Here we have the same stylistic bend in the horse's tail, caused by a sheath covering its upper portion. I lifted this illustration from an excellent thesis by Gala Argent, knowledgeable on both horses and the Pazyryk culture.

   
If we go further back another century, to Pazyryk Kurgan 5, we find the same tail sheath depicted on a felt wall hanging.

This is One More Chinese-Pazyryk connection, as the list gets longer. With the current academic premise-- that the Pazyryk Culture cannot be the Yuezhi-- we find another case of "deja vu all over again." In the meantime, we have a culture (Pazyryk) leaving absolutely no historical trace behind in China, and we have a historically-mentioned culture (Yuezhi) leaving virtually no archaeological remains for anyone to discover. How inextricably odd.