Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Balbals
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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.
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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.
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