Author: Rebecca Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911300915
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This catalogue accompanies an exhibition which presents artefacts from burial mounds of the Saka people of East Kazakhstan, who, over 2,500 years ago, lived lives rich in complexity. The Saka people occupied a landscape of seemingly endless steppe to the west, bounded by mountains to the east and south. Known to be fierce warriors, they were also skilled craftspeople, producing intricate gold and other metalwork. Their artistic expression indicates a deep respect for the animals around them - both real and imagined. They dominated their landscapes with huge burial mounds of sophisticated construction, burying their horses with elite members of their society. Recent excavations and analyses, led by archaeologists from Kazakhstan, have demonstrated that by looking through a scientific and social lens at what the Saka left behind we can paint a picture of a complex society. We can start to understand how it affected the way people lived, how they travelled, the things they made and what they believed in.00Exhibition: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (October 2021-January 2022).
Author: Joan Aruz
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588392058
Category : Art, Scythian
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Author: Barry Cunliffe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192551868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Brilliant horsemen and great fighters, the Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south - the Chinese, the Persians and the Greeks - and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe. Relations with the Greeks around the shores of the Black Sea were rather different - both communities benefiting from trading with each other. This led to the development of a brilliant art style, often depicting scenes from Scythian mythology and everyday life. It is from the writings of Greeks like the historian Herodotus that we learn of Scythian life: their beliefs, their burial practices, their love of fighting, and their ambivalent attitudes to gender. It is a world that is also brilliantly illuminated by the rich material culture recovered from Scythian burials, from the graves of kings on the Pontic steppe, with their elaborate gold work and vividly coloured fabrics, to the frozen tombs of the Altai mountains, where all the organic material - wooden carvings, carpets, saddles and even tattooed human bodies - is amazingly well preserved. Barry Cunliffe here marshals this vast array of evidence - both archaeological and textual - in a masterful reconstruction of the lost world of the Scythians, allowing them to emerge in all their considerable vigour and splendour for the first time in over two millennia.
Author: Svetlana Pankova
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789696488
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 802
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Book Description
This book presents 45 papers presented at a major international conference held at the British Museum during the 2017 BP exhibition 'Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia'. Papers include new archaeological discoveries, results of scientific research and studies of museum collections, most presented in English for the first time.
Author: Emma C. Bunker
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 0300096887
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This fascinating book examines the artistic exchange between the nomadic peoples of what is now Inner Mongolia and their settled Chinese neighbors during the first millennium B.C.
Author: Warwick Ball
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474488068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The history of movement across the Eurasian steppe since prehistory and its effect on Europe
Author: Sarah Cameron
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime: the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, perished. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through extremely violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clear boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economy; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves integrated into Soviet society the way Moscow intended. The experience of the famine scarred the republic and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron examines the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting the creation of a new Kazakh national identity and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
Author: NICK. FIELDING
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909930865
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Anne F. Broadbridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108636624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
How did women contribute to the rise of the Mongol Empire while Mongol men were conquering Eurasia? This book positions women in their rightful place in the otherwise well-known story of Chinggis Khan (commonly known as Genghis Khan) and his conquests and empire. Examining the best known women of Mongol society, such as Chinggis Khan's mother, Hö'elün, and senior wife, Börte, as well as those who were less famous but equally influential, including his daughters and his conquered wives, we see the systematic and essential participation of women in empire, politics and war. Anne F. Broadbridge also proposes a new vision of Chinggis Khan's well-known atomized army by situating his daughters and their husbands at the heart of his army reforms, looks at women's key roles in Mongol politics and succession, and charts the ways the descendants of Chinggis Khan's daughters dominated the Khanates that emerged after the breakup of the Empire in the 1260s.
Author: R. Dale Guthrie
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022615971X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Frozen mammals of the Ice Age, preserved for millennia in the tundra, have been a source of fascination and mystery since their first discovery over two centuries ago. These mummies, their ecology, and their preservation are the subject of this compelling book by paleontologist Dale Guthrie. The 1979 find of a frozen, extinct steppe bison in an Alaskan gold mine allowed him to undertake the first scientific excavation of an Ice Age mummy in North America and to test theories about these enigmatic frozen fauna. The 36,000-year-old bison mummy, coated with blue mineral crystals, was dubbed "Blue Babe." Guthrie conveys the excitement of its excavation and shows how he made use of evidence from living animals, other Pleistocene mummies, Paleolithic art, and geological data. With photographs and scores of detailed drawings, he takes the reader through the excavation and subsequent detective work, analyzing the animal's carcass and its surroundings, the circumstances of its death, its appearance in life, the landscape it inhabited, and the processes of preservation by freezing. His examination shows that Blue Babe died in early winter, falling prey to lions that inhabited the Arctic during the Pleistocene era. Guthrie uses information gleaned from his study of Blue Babe to provide a broad picture of bison evolutionary history and ecology, including speculations on the interactions of bison and Ice Age peoples. His description of the Mammoth Steppe as a cold, dry, grassy plain is based on an entirely new way of reading the fossil record.
