A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Archaeologica 8. (Szeged, 2002)

NAGY Imre: Fabulous Creatures From the Desert Sands: Central Asian Woolen Textiles from the Second Century BC to the Second Century AD.

site. Based on the grave finds and the textile fragments she says that archaeological evidence reveals a complex cultural mixture of distant Iranian artistic elements, cultural contact with dynastic China, and the traditions of the agro-pastoral lifestyle of the local population that are not duplicated elsewhere in Central Asia. The two horse burials show no direct connection to other known steppe finds, although in one of them a simple leather saddle (shabrack), and a wool pile carpet with a leaf pattern was found. About the figurai woven textiles she remarks that no tapestries with similar scenes have been discovered anywhere else. These figurai textiles decorated the lower skirts of female clothes, and no similar fragments were found on male attire. The pictorial scenes depict animals (deer, horses, camels, goats) walking from left to right, but stylized flowers and trees, as well as, stepped triangles are frequent. These stepped triangles are identified by Bunker as the Haraysa, the Avestan sacred mountain, supposing that before the spread of Buddhism the Zoroastrianism was the religion practiced in the Yutian region. Among the walking animals the deer is the most frequent which Bunker identifies as a reindeer, saying that the antlers of the cervid appear to have brow tines. However, for the contradiction between the geographical locale of Shanpula, and the distribution area of the reindeer she fails to give a plausible explanation. She discusses one of the most intriguing textiles (20; Fig. 8) in length. On that particular tapestry band, a mounted hunter with drawn bow pursues a strange, four-legged composite creature - whom Bunker calls "a winged goat with a horned human head". The composite creature has ungulate feet, wings rising above its shoulders, while in place of its tail a bush form grows up resembling the plant forms known from other Shanpula textiles. It has a human head, with an ear-form, also known from the images of cervids, while the top of its head is decorated with forms resembling to peacock tail feathers. There is a long goatee beard at its chin. Bunker originates this composite creature from the art of late fourth millenium BC ancient West Asian mythology, referring to a bronze goblet from Luristan, decorated with a human-headed winged ibex. Then she recalls the human-headed, panther-bodied, antlered creature from Pazyryk, kurgan 5, in the Altai Mountains, and introduces an 1991 finds of double silver plaques excavated from a Saka grave at Issyk, kurgan 3, in Kazakhstan, depicting four-legged, human-headed, winged and horned creatures with goatee. Bunker calls this mustached, large nosed, goat bearded creature "a human-headed goat", forgetting to pay attention to its feet which clearly end in feline paws (29; Fig. 25). This fact connects the goat-like creature of Issyk with the antlered composite creature of Pazyryk more closely, as the later one has paws on his forelegs, while his hind legs are ungulate. For the reader, these three images - from Pazyryk, Issyk, and Shanpula (separated only by one or two centuries from each other) -illustrate three different stages of the metamorphosis of the same mythical creature, suggesting the existence of a coherent mythological topos in the Altai and its southern slopes, whose major actor is a human-headed creature, blending the characteristics of the goat, deer, and panther. This mythologem from the steppe zone influenced northern China, and the bronze zither tuning key from the third century BC, depicting a human-headed creature with goat horns, and goat body is the only known example (29; Fig. 24). Bunker, however, decline any direct connection between the Altai and Shanpula, and derives them from a distant West Asian (Iranian) mythological tradition, which is several millenium older. Likewise, she declares that the immediate artistic sources for the Shanpula textiles are unidentified, but she propose they originate from "...an important long lost Central Asian pictorial wall-painting tradition about which little is yet known,... "(34). In the next thirty pages, Wang Bo and Xiao Xiaoyong, archaeologists of the two Xinjiang institutes describe the Shanpula excavations and their grave goods. The tombs they describe can be divided into the three following types: 1) collective burials in knife-shaped upright earth pits; 2) rectangular upright earth pits that contained either single or joint burials; 3) collective burial in a polygonal upright earth pit. These descriptions are quite superficial, and it is not clear, for example, that in case of the collective burials whether they were secondary, or results of a campaign, or epidemic. In the previous chapter, Emma Bunker mentioned that in the knife-shaped earth pits charcoal indicated the use of fire, which might be an indicator of an epidemic. The description of grave goods is much more detailed, and well executed line drawings illustrate the types of pottery and wooden bowls unearthed. Metal objects are meager finds in these tombs. Some bronze arrowheads, iron sickles, small knives, needles indicate the everyday life of the community. Han mirrors (generally broken) signify the trade relations with dynastic China. They provide detailed descriptions and line drawings of each garment types, which they recovered in great numbers although in fragmentary shapes during the excavations. The next chapter is about the textile fragments in the Abegg-Stiftung. Regula Schorta describes precisely each piece, giving exact technical descriptions of the weaving methods. In her analysis it becomes clear that these figurai textiles were recycled from time to time, which might be an indicator that their production ceased at one time. The actual Catalogue written by Regula Schorta and Regina Knaller starts at page 115. Each fragment of the Abegg-Stiftung collection is published in small scale black-and-white photographs, accompanied by the catalogue number(s), dimensions (in centimeters), short iconographie and technical descriptions. In some cases it would be much more useful to have a full color illustration as shades of different colors in the same value cannot be differentiated on black-and-white photographs. The next chapter deals with the dyestuff analysis of these woolen textiles, contributed by Judith H. Hofenk de Graff and Marten R. van Bommel, both researchers of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (Amsterdam). They compared the fragments according to their dyestuff