Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Balbals
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The people of the Eurasian steppes have been setting up stone statues for at least 5,000 years. They are very hard to date, of course, but we know the one above is more than 4,000 years old because it was found in a burial mound of the Yamnaya culture.
They are spread from Ukraine to Mongolia. One of the common names for them, used in Ukraine and Turkey, is Balbals, which seems to come from a Turkic word for ancestor.
A large group in Ukraine are associated with the Scythians, but I'm not sure why.
This one, in Mongolia, has an inscription in Turkish that says it was erected by a man for his father; based on the style of the writing it has been dated to between 600 and 800 AD. Fascinating headgear.
Many have been moved; in Urkraine and Kyrgystant there are parks where groups of these have been assembled.
These speak to me of the wild, barbaric steppes, and I find them wonderful.
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
Favorites
Blog Archive
-
▼
2023
(473)
-
▼
November
(32)
- Cycladic "Frying Pans" as Mirrors
- Balbals
- Chinese Government Rebuilds Mosques to Look More C...
- Muqi
- "Now and Then," by "The Beatles"
- Meet Enkidu
- Consider the Photocopier
- Links 24 November 2023
- November Morning
- Thanksgiving 2023
- Today's Place to Daydream about: Saint-Malo
- Gudea's Temple
- Anthony Doerr, "All the Light We Cannot See"
- Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Ethiopia
- The Dangers of Talking about Mental Health
- R.I.P. A.S. Byatt
- Old Parkland
- Art and Politics
- Links 17 November 2023
- On Not Getting Married, or, Nobody Better Tell Me...
- Aging Populations and Rising Wages
- Dawoud Bey Documents Landscapes of Slavery
- Mirror Worlds
- Links 10 November 2023
- Fall
- Edmund Dulac
- The Conceptual Arsenal of Climate Collapse
- Unhelpful Tarot
- Remaking the Golden Tree of Lucignano
- Links 3 November 2023
- No Deaths of Despair in Italy
- Tyler Cowen Interviews Stephen Jennings about Deve...
-
▼
November
(32)
About Me
- John
- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
2 comments:
Ditto! These are lovely. They are all expressive, but I'm struck that some of them seem to express something other than just solemn, patriarchal ancestorhood. Like that last one, with the curious sideways glance, or #3 in your collection, the kindly-seeming old man with what looks like a cane. I recognize an out-of-culture viewer would very likely get these wrong, hence my use of kindly-*seeming*; but there's clearly variety of expression, in any case, and I think the variety itself is striking. A case could be made that there was scope or even play in the tradition, as in medieval European "small" art (whatever one would call the range of column capitals, misericords, spouts, manuscript marginalia, etc.).
Looking again and comparing #1 and #3, I see that kindly old #3's cane is probably the same lethal-looking doubled-headed implement (axe? pick? thing?) that one sees laid out on #1. Probably there's an argument that #3 represents, I don't know, "the pose of pious self-satisfaction one ritually assumes after the infant sacrifice." Or summat. Oh well, alas.
Post a Comment