Origin of the Alans

[Alanus]

Back to you, Jan.

If you will, please click on a bronze animal-headed knife now for sale on Ebay and then post the photo here. I search once or twice a week and haven't found any since I purchased these. I thought they were fakes for years... until I tried cleaning the lower loop (small one) of the knife, only to discover it wasn't dirt. It was encrustation, which can't be duplicated. Also, I tried bending them... since fakes are brass and fragile. These examples don't bend, and how could a faker possibly know (other than a real archaeologist) that Northern Frontier warriors carried them in pairs?

Fakes look like this, with a nice even grayish patina. You can clean these up with soap and water:
   
For bronze artifacts in varying good condition, see Bunker, Nomadic Art of the Eastern Eurasian Steppes, and Bunker and So, Traders and Raiders of China's Northern Frontier. Both volumes are not expensive, and I've found them helpful.

To me, a horse culture lives and dies on a horse. They breed them, their lives are centered around the horse, and the horse becomes a "partner." Many cultures used horses, the Greeks, the Romans, but the horse wasn't their primary significant "other." The Tarim states certainly used horses, but the majority of graves contained Zero horse gear. At some point, I believe Michael Kerr may start a thread on the Tarim peoples; and perhaps he can convince me otherwise. Likewise, I believe Shelach-Lavi is correct in noting that both the chariot and animal-headed knives arrived from the north, not from the west (aka Tarim). To me, the important thing about Baifu M2 is its extreme antiquity for an equestrian grave which actually contains all of the elements we find in the "Scythian Triad"... yet 300 years earlier than most historians describe its emergence.