Origin of the Alans

[Michael Kerr]

 I haven’t got much to add to the discussion on the source of the goddess images but in regards to the Pazyryk pile carpet from kurgan 5 possibly being of Achaemenid origin through its use of Achaemenid motifs, the jury is still out on this one but the claim by many including Rudenko, that the Pazyryk carpet was made in Achaemenid Persia because it has Achaemenid designs carries little weight from the carpet specialist's point of view. Furthermore, it was suggested long ago that the carpet belongs more to Central Asia or the region near the Aral Sea than to Persia.
 

 Harald Böhmer and Jon Thompson in their paper “The Pazyryk Carpet: A Technical Discussion” wrote from a specialist’s point of view;

There are, thus, three principal proposals for the carpet's provenance: the Iranian plateau; Central Asia (the most northerly part of Achaemenid territory); and the steppes. First, we must ask whether, from a technical point of view, the Pazyryk carpet is more likely to have been made by nomadic or urban weavers. The carpet is woven with the so called “Turkish” (double, symmetrical, closed, or Ghiordes) knot. The advantage of this knot is that it forms a robust, hard-wearing fabric. Its disadvantage is that the individual knots that are wrapped around two adjacent warps assume a rectangular shape, twice as wide (in the weft direction) as they are high (in the warp direction). Designs worked with the Turkish knot tend to become horizontally elongated—i.e., circles squash into ovals, and squares flatten into rectangles. During the last four centuries (the period of carpet weaving history that can be more or less re constructed), the “Turkish” knot has generally, though not exclusively, been used for weavings of a functional character. Urban weavings that incline toward refinement in both technique and design tend to employ the so called Persian (single, asymmetrical, open, or Senneh) knot, which, though less robust than the Turkish knot, lends itself better to the accurate rendering of designs without risk of deforming them. It is interesting to note that at the time of the Pazyryk burials, the Persian knot was already known, as the knotted-pile saddlecloth fragment from Bashadar reveals. 

There is no doubt that the carpet had Achaemenid influence with the borders and motifs as well as a lot of textiles found in kurgan 5, for example lion's heads on textiles also found seem to have wolf-like features.

 The procession of horses in the pile rug which do bear a resemblance to the Persopolis horses of Persia with thick body proportions and clipped manes similar to the so called Nisean horses. There seems to be an absence of a tail sheath in the Persopolis horses although their tails may have been knotted.

   

   

  There are other differences but the pile carpet is not the piece in question. The felt wall hanging also found in kurgan 5 is the one with the rider and the seated “goddess”. Rudenko believed that this felt wall hanging was of local or steppe manufacture. The distinct clothing of the moustachioed rider, the crenellated mane and the use of the tail sheath on the horse. The horse itself resembles the sleeker Turkoman horse, the now extinct ancestor of the akhal-teke as opposed to the fuller bodied horses on the pile rug. 
 

   

Regards

Michael Kerr