Download PDF | Petya Andreeva - Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea_ Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE-Edinburgh University Press (2024).
338 Pages
Acknowledgements
The story behind this book is one of serendipitous discovery, a strenuous yet exhilarating journey across institutions, archives and cultures. It is also a story that empowered me to face life-changing challenges and introduced me to remarkable mentors, colleagues and friends who have left an indelible trace on my work. Three women whom I can only describe as fearless trailblazers and strong role models have made the biggest impact on my life in academia, and, by extension, this monograph.
I owe the most enormous debt of gratitude to the greatest mentor one could have, my PhD advisor Nancy Steinhardt. Her stimulating questions, nurturing guidance and unwavering emotional and professional support are at the heart of all I have achieved as an academic. Indeed, I could not imagine embarking on such a daunting research voyage across the Eurasian steppe without the devoted mentorship of Nancy Steinhardt, whose energy and generosity of spirit are truly unparalleled. Her lectures offered me a remarkable ‘bird’s eye’ view of Eurasia and guided my scholarly gaze in exciting new directions. Her kindness and constant encouragement have helped me to surmount more than one serious challenge and emboldened me to fight the dangerous cycles of self-doubt that scholars tend to face in the early days of their academic life. My interest in the arts of Asia was first fostered by my undergraduate advisor and professor at Colby.
I am indebted to Ankeney Weitz for instilling in me the desire and determination to ask bold questions and explore new avenues. Her mentorship was my only stable signpost as I was starting to navigate life in a new country whilst becoming entangled in the enchanting intellectual web of liberal arts education. Since I became a faculty member, I have been greatly encouraged by senior colleagues. My warmest appreciation is due to Rhonda Garrelick, whose star shines brightly in more than one field, from literature to fashion studies and journalism. Words cannot capture my gratitude for Rhonda’s truly transformative impact on my career, and especially her role in nurturing my desire to disseminate my ideas beyond the somewhat impenetrable walls of Academe. Several professors at the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Pennsylvania have contributed in a very direct way to the completion of this book.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Christopher Atwood for introducing me to the beauty of Mongolian history, language and culture, and for further sparking my interest in frontier history; I have more than once marvelled at how much of what I now know about the languages and geography of Central Asia is the product of my interactions with him. I am also indebted to Paul Goldin, whose courses on Sinological methods and ancient Chinese thought have made all the difference in my work with textual sources; equally central to this book were his insights on how later nationalist discourses might have shaped ancient identities. I shall always be grateful to Victor Mair, the first professor to introduce me to the many wondrous pathways in the study of Central Asia; he has, to this day, remained committed to helping me expand that knowledge. Adam Smith’s comments on my dissertation and especially his thoughts on winged hybrids have also benefited my research. Frank Chance was one of my first instructors in graduate school, and I remain thankful to him for teaching me so much about cross-cultural encounters in Buddhist art.
I have also derived new ideas from Julie Davis’ exceptional curatorial seminar on Japanese art, which left me yearning to work more closely with objects. At Colby, Elizabeth LaCouture fostered my interest in Chinese history and material culture. Finally, my work with Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian sources would have been impossible without the dedication of my foreign-language professors over the years, including Zhang Hong and Kim Besio at Colby, Tomoko Takami and Tsermaa Tomorbaatar at UPenn, and all the fantastic instructors at the Chinese and Japanese Language Schools at Middlebury and the Associated Colleges of China programme in Beijing. I wish to thank members of my department at Parsons, especially David Brody and Sarah Lichman, whose advice and support have been invaluable. My peers and colleagues Mev Luna and Allan Doyle have been my staunch supporters in these endeavours, and a great source of comfort during the various stages of completing this and other related projects. In the final stretches of this journey, I have profited from stimulating exchanges with my colleagues at the interdisciplinary GIDEST seminar at the New School, and I am indebted to its organiser Hugh Raffles for letting me join such an inspiring group of thinkers.
I would be remiss if I did not mention my former colleagues from the Art and Art History Department at Oakland University, who gave me the first opportunity to develop my research as a university professor. The number of peers and friends who have directly or indirectly contributed to my research is far too great to list, but I must make special mention of the unparalleled generosity of my colleagues and dear friends Zhang Fan and Mi Xiuyuan, who have cheered me on even in the face of the most formidable challenges. I have received generous support from UNESCO’s Silk Road Research Grant, Getty, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Penn Museum Field Fund, the India-China Institute, the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought at the New School, and the American Center for Mongolian Studies. I am also immensely grateful for several great opportunities to disseminate this research to an interdisciplinary scholarly audience. Most helpful have been my lectures on some of this material at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Cambridge, Kingston University and the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and I am greatly indebted to Nicola Di Cosmo, Peter Frankopan, Lauren Warner-Treloar and Cortney Chaffin for giving me the chance to receive meaningful feedback on this project from their academic communities.
I extend my sincere gratitude to Rachel Bridgewater at Edinburgh University Press for believing in this book’s potential and guiding me through the daunting process of publishing one’s first monograph. I am indebted to the two peer reviewers for their constructive comments, which I have duly addressed in the following pages. I must also thank Isobel Birks, who has been an incredibly patient, professional and thoughtful assistant editor, Grace BalfourHarle for taking great care of the book during production, and Jane Burkowski for her exemplary copy-editing. I am indebted to all the institutions and individuals that provided me with the images that illustrate the following pages. My three phenomenal research assistants Rayyan Mikati, Sarah Choi and Greer Bateman have given me tremendous help with the final touches on this project. On this note, I should emphasise the positive influence of my graduate and undergraduate students at Parsons on my ideas about design and materiality. Nothing has been more inspiring and transformative in my career than this daily immersion in a world of innovative makers, transdisciplinary thinkers and bold builders of a more sustainable future. I am forever grateful for my caring and supportive family. There is one person who has supported my dreams from the day I stepped into my very first classroom back in Bulgaria, who has sacrificed and given up so much to make sure I have every opportunity at bettering myself and my life. That is my mother Keta Andreeva, to whom I dedicate this book. I thank her for giving me hope and strength even in the most challenging of times.
Introduction: At a Crossroads on the Eurasian Steppe Route
AT THE PERIPHERY OF SPACE AND DISCOURSE In Iron Age Central Eurasia, numerous non-sedentary peoples lived and flourished at the geographical peripheries of powerful sedentary empires. Nomadic societies have been continuously pushed to the conceptual outskirts of the art-historical canon and the fringes of all major historiographies. Having left behind no writing system of their own, early Eurasian pastoralists have frequently fallen prey to the embellished historiographies of Chinese, Greek and Persian chronicles. Nomads seem to have fascinated and aggravated ancient historians like Sima Qian, Pliny the Elder, Herodotus, Ctesias, all of whom wrote commentaries and ethnographies of Eurasian steppe peoples and even created umbrella exonyms for otherwise heterogeneous groups (Scythians, Saka, Hu and so on).1 Thrown into the far-flung borders of convention, Eurasian nomads are often viewed as passive recipients of the artistic and cultural traits of their settled geopolitical rivals in Central Eurasia.
The art-historical canon tends to label pastoral societies as circulators, traders and intermediaries, but rarely does it conceive of them as independent thinkers, designers and inventors. Their designated role is usually that of the much-needed ‘missing link’ between the great sedentary powers of Eurasian Antiquity. Yet, members of the steppe elite left behind innumerable examples of portable luxury and conceptual design rivalling the well-known treasures of China, Persia and Greece. Sumptuous metalworks adorned their bodies and elaborate felt textiles enveloped their tomb interiors. The owners of these steppe treasures were mostly occupants of the monumental ‘kurgan’2 barrows dispersed across the Eurasian steppe belt, a vast expanse stretching from the Mongolian–Manchurian grassland all the way to the Hungarian plain. Primarily based in pastoral nomadism, the steppe economic model was quite distinct from that of China and other Eurasian empires, and so were the design and aesthetic concepts invented within nomadic communities some 2,500 years ago. As a precursor to the more expansive Silk Road infrastructure, the Eurasian steppe encompasses the following micro-spheres with semi-independent artistic and cultural developments: Middle Yellow River valley (Ordos Loop), Eastern Mongolian steppe, Tuva Basin and Transbaikal in South Siberia, Kazakh steppe, Southern Ural lowlands, Pontic–Caspian steppe, Dobrudzha and parts of the Hungarian plain (Fig. 1.1). The expanse also overlaps with the political borders of several modern-day states with entwined historical and geopolitical trajectories: China, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary. Some of these countries were once enormous empires which politicised and reclaimed nomadic heritage as part of their own history. On a larger scale, the Eurasian steppe is traditionally divided into the Eastern Steppe in East and North Asia, Central Steppe stretching from the Ural Mountains to Dzungaria, Western (Pontic–Caspian) Steppe extending from the northern Black Sea coastline to the Caspian Sea through the northern Caucasus.3 Although the steppe terrain is often associated with monotonous flat land, its ecosystems and topography are surprisingly varied.
The climate conditions in the Hungarian plain and the Western Steppe in general are much milder when compared with the rest of this expanse, offering better prerequisites for farming and agro-pastoralism than the lands in North Asia. The Pontic–Caspian steppe consists of forest-steppe and semi-desert regions around the Caspian lowlands. Bordered by the Siberian permafrost and Russian taiga, the Eastern Steppe has an overall dry and cold climate. Occasionally, the steppe is intersected by large mountain ranges – the Altai, Tianshan, Urals, Caucasus – which might have served as natural barriers to movement and cultural dissemination (Fig. 1.2). Surprisingly diverse also was the make-up of steppe populations. The nomadic alliances formed across this terrain are largely known in historical and art-historical studies by blanket exonyms which rarely reflect how these people saw themselves. ‘Scythian’ is a term that has now lost its original clarity because it has been applied rather frivolously to many probably unrelated peoples – nomadic or sedentary – across the Eurasian steppe. However, the western expanse between the Caspian and Black seas, and especially Crimea, was indeed occupied by a group that Herodotus identified as Pontic Scythians in his Histories, and whose shared cultural traits are attested in their burials.4 The neighbouring Cimmerians, Massagetae, Agathyrsi and other Iranian groups have sometimes been conflated with the Scythians or described as belonging to a Scythian-type cultural milieu, despite being driven away from their former territories by Scythian invaders. In the first century bce, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus describes the Scythians as a people who first lived along the Araxes River, and then migrated further into the northern Caucasus and northern Black Sea, ultimately extending their power all the way to the Nile.5 Less controversial is the term ‘Pontic Scythians’, denoting Iranian-speaking groups who likely moved to the north Black Sea region from Central Asia.
Even so, recent archaeological and genetic studies have also challenged the view of the Pontic Scythians in Eastern Ukraine as a homogeneous nomadic group, instead proposing a more diverse economic model merging pastoralism, agro-pastoralism and tradecentred sedentism.6 Most definitions of these steppe groups are still stuck in disciplinary crossfires, as each method and field tends to prioritise a certain type of evidence while dismissing others (archaeological science versus received texts, for instance). That being said, the portable objects found in Eurasian steppe tombs mostly point to the pastoral nomadic lifestyle outlined in texts, or at least to an economic model that was, to a high degree, divergent from that of the agrarian and urban centres of neighbouring empires. It is evident that by the end of the seventh century bce, the Scythians of the Pontic steppe had already established a neighbourly relationship with the Greeks who were actively building settlements in the northern Black Sea region. Port cities like Olbia and Pantikapaion were major hotbeds for commercial transactions between the Scythians and Greeks.7 Interestingly, the Scythians are even mentioned, albeit in passing, in the Bible’s New Testament. A passage from Colossians 3:11 in the Letters of Paul states: ‘Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or not, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all.’8 The use of the name ‘Scythian’ here serves to convey a stereotypical view of non-sedentary peoples as barbarians whose uncivilised conduct was in need of divine intervention. It clearly does not aim to designate any particular ethnic or cultural affiliation. Even more befuddling is the so-called ‘Saka’ group, said to have occupied much of the Central Steppe before being driven southward to the northern Indian subcontinent. But, to the Achaemenids, the Saka and Scythians were one and the same people, as evidenced by several inscriptions at Behistun and Persepolis.9 Pliny was probably right that the Persians indiscriminately gave the name Saka to all the nomadic groups that lived east of their territory to distinguish those from the Scythians to the west.10 The Avesta is even more vague, referring to the nomadic enemies of the Iranian people as the ‘Tura with the fast horses’. The later successors of these early Iron Age nomadic societies are the Sarmatians, whose historical fate is a bit clearer. Their military hegemony reached its peak in the first century bce, when their territory reportedly stretched from the Vistula River to the Danube delta. In the fourth to third centuries bce, part of the groups inhabiting the Southern Urals settled into the Lower Volga area, thus mixing with the local Sarmatians living there and giving birth to newly formed entities like the Aorsi, Roxolani and Alans – a distinction Strabo grasped early on.11 Mostly contemporaneous with the Sarmatians are the Xiongnu inhabitants of the Eastern Steppe, who feature prominently in Chinese chronicles like the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) and several dynastic histories. Prior to the Xiongnu period, however, the Chinese also applied numerous blanket terms (hu, sai) to the nomadic groups who lived on or beyond their northern frontier. All these ambiguous, umbrella ethnonyms fall into the same pitfalls that have hindered the study of the so-called Phoenicians, Germanen and prehistoric Slavs – all largely invented terms for otherwise diverse, unrelated groups that came together in the face of a common geopolitical enemy or economic challenge.12 It is difficult to deny that many steppe ethnonyms were more or less the product of later nationalist discourses and that it was often historians who conveniently drew the connecting lines in their historical trajectory. Indeed, steppe nomads were not mischaracterised only by their contemporaries. Another (and, one might argue, more problematic) layer of essentialism emerged in the colonial discourses of the nineteenth century. That era’s preoccupation with evolutionist social theory and Ernest Renan’s seminal ‘nationhood’ model resulted in even more essentialised images of ‘non-state’ steppe societies, seen as kinship tribal formations, or as fierce warrior-herdsmen who lacked administrative sophistication and thus organised into clans and tribes.13 These views of steppe societies as tribal units that existed ‘outside history’ in some arrested stage also fit well with the emerging Marxist models.14 In the two millennia separating the ethnographies written by Herodotus and the treatises of nineteenth-century thinkers, the image of steppe societies did not undergo much of a transformation in the scholarly discourse or public imagination. The study of steppe materials, whether textual or visual, has been inevitably hindered by these methodological pitfalls and political agendas. Be that as it may, archaeological cultures across the steppe expanse have exhibited curious continuities and regional variations. While there probably never was a Scythian ‘empire’ with a shared ethnogenesis, many nomadic groups conveniently ‘became’ Scythian after they faced a common geopolitical enemy. One wonders how the ancient inhabitants of this expansive terrain of more than eight thousand kilometres visualised their ecological and built environments. The reader is bound to discover that despite the vast distances and natural barriers between these cultural ‘micro-zones’, a surprising number of shared features emerged across nomadic visual cultures. By the year 700 bce, most Eurasian pastoralists lived according to fixed seasonal patterns of migration (transhumance) and flourished at the geographical and cultural frontiers of sedentary Eurasian empires like China.15 It is significant that steppe communities were engaged in forms of mobility that were markedly different from those of their sedentary neighbours, because such distinctive lifestyles should, at least in theory, lead to divergent methods of image construction and differing approaches to animal depictions – this presumed dichotomy underlines my pursuits in this study.16 In Iron Age Central Eurasia (eighth to second century bce), nomadic archaeological cultures exhibited remarkable continuities in image-making and zoomorphic design, perhaps reflective of the full transition to mounted pastoral nomadism, and the ability of a greater number of warrior-herdsmen to cross vast distances. It is evident that during both seasonal and forced long-distance migrations, early Eurasian nomads would have been exposed to new ecological parameters more frequently than their settled neighbours. They were also in far closer contact with fauna than most agrarian societies and urban centres: nomads used animals for transport, warfare and essential animal-derived products (felt, milk, food etc.). It remains to be seen how these ecological and economic factors defined the visual parameters of pastoral life, but a close link certainly existed between the early nomadic lifestyle and the zoomorphic images nomads produced. As they travel between cultural spheres, humans are not only exposed to new artistic modes but are also introduced to the topographical features of diverse landscapes and the make-up of new ecosystems. Early pastoralists moved between different ecological and cultural zones, and so did their material belongings, attached to clothing or horses, and so did the design systems behind those sets of objects. The next chapters are not as concerned with the movements of the valuable items steppe people made, bought, sold and carried – a topic favoured in earlier studies of nomadic lives. Instead, I prioritise the dissemination of image systems and design schemata over the circulation of physical objects. This study aims to decipher and understand the underlying principles of image-making along the Eurasian steppe network and trace its distant echoes in China and other parts of Central Eurasia. The book places in its limelight the zoomorphic visuality of early steppe nomadic alliances and, more particularly, their elite nucleus. How and why did members of the highest echelons of ancient pastoral societies construct composite animal bodies in their personal adornment and funerary design? The pages below will show that the nomad’s penchant for zoomorphism and portable luxury was connected to the formation of an elite nucleus which carefully controlled the construction of collective memory in a reluctant political alliance. Zoomorphism and elitism were thus inextricably linked across the Eurasian steppe domain since at least the early Iron Age. By the middle of the first millennium bce, Eurasian nomadic superelites17 had developed a complex form of shared zoomorphism that was not rooted in a particular religious or spiritual system but rather in their ever-changing interactions with various ecosystems and constructed environments. The making and remaking of a new kind of pastoral elite will thus be continuously investigated in the context of one’s shifting biota and political environment. Complex visual tropes based on fantastical, fragmented animal anatomies helped construct a shared collective memory in a reluctant alliance, subsequently solidifying its elite core. They also marked the nomad’s identity as separate from that of rival political actors in Central Eurasia. At the heart of such endeavours were three distinct forms of ‘Othering’. The nomadic elite nucleus used visual strategies rooted in zoomorphism to set itself apart from the rest of the collective that was not granted membership in that elite core; in this instance, the ordinary members of the alliance were Othered by the elite. But to the nomadic alliance as a whole, both Mother Nature and the geopolitical rivals on the outside were Others that had to be faced, understood and defeated. Steppe zoomorphic visuality was also at the heart of such Othering. Finally, the Chinese and, to a lesser degree, Persians started to strategically appropriate steppe zoomorphic elements in their material culture to demonstrate their own ability to tame the ‘Barbaric Other’. Most telling are the encounters between nomadic and Chinese conceptions of zoomorphism. Since China and its northern neighbours had seemingly divergent notions of animality and exhibited preferences for different materials and modes of making, one wonders whether such encounters resulted in actual receptivity. I will show that when receptivity did occur, it was usually design concepts rooted in deconstructed animal bodies rather than techniques or materials that were successfully exchanged. This question can help further elucidate the tumultuous, often opportunistic relationship between China and the ‘Barbaric Other’ that has been at the heart of numerous studies over the years. I hope that the great epistemological potential of nomadic design and ornament will emerge from all these enquiries. To sum up, I hereby challenge the external narratives of nomadic lives by looking at a uniquely nomadic form of elitism communicated through the careful construction of a zoomorphic visual rhetoric with distinct tropes and idioms. This complex visuality is known in art-historical literature under the loose category of ‘animal style’ and shall become the primary subject of investigation in the following chapters. The ‘animal-style’ approach to image-making, which started to circulate from the heart of the steppe cultural domain, managed to gain currency elsewhere in the wake of both symbiotic and adverse cross-cultural encounters. Whereas previous studies have focused on the transmissions and receptivity of animal-style objects, the primary goal hereafter is to look at the political, environmental and, possibly, psychological processes which engendered the zoomorphic design tropes invented within the elite core of early nomadic communities. Since animal-style décor will be at the heart of this book’s enquiries, it is important to establish what ‘animal style’ is, and what it is not, before delving further into the following chapters and their frameworks.
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