Cultural Influence on Turkmenia from Western Asia

We have seen how Mongolian late Neolithic culture and its successors in the Far East influenced the Mongolians who came down from the Altai mountains and established a Greater Turkmenia than the lands we now know as the 'stans of Central Asia, primarily are discussing the Turkmen who live in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

For today's topic let's consider the cultural influence from the West.  In fact, this culture was already there when the Turkmen began to move onto the desert oases in late antiquity, some time after 400 A.D.  There they found the remnants of the Greco-Persian kingdom of Bactria in Afghanistan and in Turkmenistan the Turkmen might have found a few people left from the ruins of the Indo-Iranian Margiana settlement that was closely related to the Bactrians.  Once the Turkoman herders settled in watered areas, they would have begun to find the ritual objects of the early Greek, Persian and Indian cultures.  In Bactria, there was still an Indo-Iranian-Buddhist culture that had reigned as the Kushans, or at least they would have found the huge amounts of cultural remains of it.  The monumental statues of Buddha in Bamiyan come to mind here.  But there was much, much more.  So much more that both archeologists and 'prospectors' are still finding the relics of that culture constantly.

But let's see what I mean when I say that the Bactria-Margiana culture that came from at least as far West as Anatolia (now Turkey, another home of the Turkmen).  But the Turks did not conquer as far West as Turkey until after 1200 A.D.   So when the first Mongol Turks came out of the Altai mountains in the Northern Steppes of Central Asia, they found the successor societies to Bactria and Margiana still steeped in much of the culture of the former residents.

Let us compare a cultural symbol of modern Afghan Turkomans, descended through the Kazakhs of Afghanistan.  It is inscribed on the back of a pendant made in the early part of the twentieth century, around 1930 or 40, I estimate.  Here is the photo and the link to the page that shows the front panel of the pendant:

More about this pendant HERE.

You will see that the figure is a circle of rhomboid shapes with a very faint circle in the middle.  The rhombus circle is so arranged that the eight shapes allow a straight line horizontally and vertically, making the + sign.  Then their arrangement allows one to make a diametrical X along the lines of the rhomboid shapes.  This suggests the symbols on the Bactrian stamp seals on which I find what I believe are meditation images that the Indo-Iranian, especially the Hindi culture, adopted as early as the Late Bronze Age, around 1,500 B. C. and evn earlier.  In the Hindi cultures, they are now called mandalas.   I have a collection of many of them.

Here is an example with just a slight difference in appearance, but a very important difference when understanding that the Mongol Turks never became much like Bactrians.  I believe they only assumed a few acculturations such as making certain images in wood, clay and metal.

Here is the photo and the link to more information on the Bactrian stamp seal

More information available HERE.

You will note that while the Turkoman inscribed design in the first photo above invites the line of sight to travel between the rhomboid shapes, the Bactrian casts the metal stamp seal so the eye follows the same distribution of lines -- horizontal, vertical and diametric -- but the eye begins at the point of the rhombuses and travels to the opposite rhombus tip, no matter whether the line is horizontal, vertical or diametric.  

We see the same distribution of eight shapes, shapes that are hauntingly similar, though the early molds for casting copper and bronze were not nearly as exact at making points as a stylus engraver can be in inscribing the silver pendant.  

I hope this proposition has been at least a bit entertaining, though not scientific.  I invite you to my online shop for the story behind many, many things in my rich collection that I am now selling.  You will find a warm welcome and a ready correspondent at CraftsofthePast.artfire.com

Ancient Mongolian Sacred Amulets in Twentieth Century Turkmenia

after Dieter and Reinhold Schletzer, Old Silver Jewellery of the Turkoman

From a  Bull in the China Cultures to a Ram in the Bushes of Turkmenia 

The people of Turkmenia who are of Mongolian descent still respect some of the same sacred images that the Mongolians crafted into jade figures in pre-historic times.  The Turkic speaking people from the Altai mountain region had come down to the plains of Turkmenistan and most of its neighboring countries beginning around 500 A.D.  They were numerous in the region by 900 A.D.

From the time that they came down from the mountains, they continued to maintain their tradition of crafting sacred amulets in wood, weaving them into their garments and tent furnishings and wearing them on their persons in the form of silver jewelry.  By the late 1800s, their metal smiths were crafting fine jewelry in gilded silver decorated with the ancient tribal symbols, especially the ram's head or ox head, depending on the interpreter of the various pieces of jewelry.

If you mentally rotate the above image into a rectangle instead of the diamond shape in which it is  designed to be worn, you will see an abstract image of the horns and eyes of a male mountain sheep, known by herders as a ram.  The Turkmen were hunters of the mountain sheep while still in the Altai mountains, and followers of domesticated sheep bred from the mountain sheep when the tribes descended from their mountain home to the desert oases of Turkmenistan and surrounding areas.

On a different Turkoman ornament, you see more obvious imitation of the ram's horn, but without the eyes:

  

after Schletzer, Old Silver Jewellery of the Turkoman

And here is another, more decorative representation that is commonly used on the Teke tribe gilded jewelry of the early 1900s.   Here the cut-outs from the metal represent the eyes and even the nose and mouth are suggested in the cut-out pattern at the bottom of this motif: 

after Schletzer, Old Silver Jewellery of the Turkoman

Can you find a similar image repeated on this antique silver Turkoman woman's pendant?  

Read more information on this piece HERE.

 I contend that the Far Eastern Chinese culture such as the Liangzhu farming community that existed at the end of the pre-historic and pre-literate Neolithic period naturally chose the ox as the totem and for a mountain  people such as the Turkmen had been,  the same image would represent a mountain sheep ram's head.  It is the image of the curved horns that the Turkmen have carried into the decoration of their clothing, their tent and now house furnishings, their outdoor furnaces, their garments and their personal jewelry or the ritual ornaments worn by the shaman of their tribe.

These photos of items from my jade collection will show some of the common characteristics of this totem shared over time and distance by the long-lived Mongol cultures.  Here is a jade reproduction in more representational art than was used in ancient times when making the extremely hard jade stone into life-like images was a much more difficult art than it is with the coming of the industrial age when the image below was made in  red jade that was used by the ancient culture now named Liangzhu.

Read more about this piece HERE.

Below is the photo of a jade ox head crafted in antiquity in green jade and based on the late Neolithic Hongshan settlers along the Yellow River in what is now called Inner Mongolia: 

Read more about this piece HERE.

The hole for hanging the jade pendant that represents the horns and eyes of the ox actually is hand drilled in the shape of an ox's nostrils and is called the Hongshan ox nose style of hole in the jade ornaments of that time.  

I have one or two more blog entries for the comparison between the ancient Mongol cultures of the East and the Turkoman tribes of Central and West Asia.  Then I will return for a while to discuss the ornamentation of the more southern styles of jewelry in Western Asia.  

Thank you for visiting my blog.  You are always welcome to see the Turkoman and Eastern jade jewelry at my Artfire shop, my Turkoman and Yemeni jewelry at my Etsy shop,  and my Turkoman textiles at my second Etsy shop. 

Dragon Tracks from Mongolia to Bactria in Afghanistan

Dragon Tracks

The task of tracking dragon image amulets from one side of the Himalayas to the other is a matter of following the old -- now probably approaching ten thousand years old -- paths of the  migrant people of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Central Asia and Northwestern China.  As the neolithic methods of farming developed in the desert oases of that huge region of the planet, which was drying out, the people were forced to follow sources of water and favorable conditions for growing their crops and herds of domesticated animals.

Migrant paths became trade routes with time and by the fourth millennium B.C., there were trading posts or caravanserai operating in certain places along the roads that the caravans followed.  Migration also continued to follow those roads to greener pastures and more fertile land to farm.  From pigs to camels, different varieties of sheep and goats, even the horse and of course the dog were part of the entourage of a migrant clan leader.  Ancient Sousiana in Persia was one of those hubs of human movement and socio-economic exchange.

By about 3,000 B.C. there were people in that area that spoke a language related to the pre-Anglo-Saxon language of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Asia Minor, Galicia and part of France, the old Celtic root.  The speakers of this now dead or dying branch of this Indo-European language group did not show up only in the historical record in Europe.  The Tocharians from Susiana in Persia spoke a version of this same Celtic language in Persia and in the place they migrated to: northwestern China.   Also to be noted is that the Indo part of the Indo-European (at this point, really Indo-Aryan) language group was spoken in the Indus Valley by this time.

But what has this to do with dragon symbols?  We will focus on the dispersal of the dragon symbol in Greater Persia and Northwestern China.  There is a connection of similar uses of the dragon symbol in ancient Susiana (Elam, Gutin) and the area of China that is just over the Himalayas in northwestern China.

To recap a bit here: Susiana was located  near the Persian Gulf where Syria and Iraq join Greater Persia which stretched from central Turkey to the western side of the Himalayas.  The trade routes are known because long stretches of them are still in use.  I have traveled along some of them.  A small sketch here of how the roads developed into the Silk Road(s) in the last millennium B.C. :

Note that the road from Bactria in Afghanistan, part of Greater Persia at the time, follows what had probably been the migrant New Stone Age oasis farmers of thousands of years before the route became known as the Silk Road.  It crosses the Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas into Tashkorgan in the land of the Jade Rivers: the White Jade River and the Black Jade River.  It is the sprawling northwest part of China, now called Xinjiang, once known as Sinkiang and list of other names.  By 2,000 B.C. the people who spoke the Indo-European language related to the Celtic branch, the Tocharian, lived in this province.  Their mummies are on display in a museum at the provincial seat, Urumqi.

Tashkorgan, the first landing of those migrants or traders over the high mountain passes from the west (Persia) or south (Indus Valley), was one of the world's busiest market places. Goods were exchanged there to be passed along by resident or traveling merchants to the remainder of China, Mongolia and other parts of the East.  Merchants had come from the other end of the route to Tashkorgan to make the exchanges and take the newly acquired goods to sell along the remainder of the route.

Beads or raw stones to make beads and other ornaments were very important items of trade. They were portable enough that they could be used as 'money.'  The eastern side of the Himalayas actually have ancient jade 'coins' with an assigned value.  Agate, quartz, jade and lapis lazuli were the prized gemstones of the area.  They were carried as far as Egypt from their source in what are now Iran and Afghanistan.  It is from that very area that the beads in the photograph below originate.  They are probably from about 1,500 B.C.  The brown banded agate bead was highly prized at this time.

Ancient Brown Banded Agates from proto-Iranian Civilization

So now we know a bit about how the people traveled from the border of Mesopotamia and Iran and carried their culture along to be mingled to various extents with the residents of each area into which they settled.  They trekked along routes that came to be known much later as trade routes.  By 3,000 B.C., they were introducing copper smelting and manufacture of refined and alloyed metal ornaments, weapons and household goods.  They no doubt assimilated culturally and adopted some of the symbols used in ornamentation by the indigenous people of the place.  These Indo-European speaking people had moved along this route to settle south of the Caspian in what is now Iran (Persia), in Margiana (Turkmenistan), Bactria (Afghanistan), Indus Valley (Pakistan) and in northwestern China.  

From Susiana to central Persia and eastern Persia (Bactria), they brought their own dragon symbols such as these found in the Kerman District south of the Caspian Sea: 

This is the time-honored symbol of the twin dragons with the phoenix, a glorious mythical bird that is very often shown with a dragon or the twin dragon symbol.  Here it is worked in steatite, a soft stone.  In other times and places, it has been produced in jade, especially in what are now the modern autonomous zones of China: Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang province nearby.

The pig images at the bottom of this amulet coin show the honored animal in the Neolithic Hongshan culture that lasted until about 3,000 B.C.  At about that time, the pig gradually became a dragon with a pig's head.  This jade coin is a modern interpretation of that cultural development.  At the bottom are the pigs, then the dragon and finally the victorious phoenix, of which we will see more in these blog posts.

As mentioned above, from some other influence, by about 3,000 B.C., the people on the eastern side of the Himalayas had adopted the dragon, and their amulet became a symbol much like the Iranian one above.  A circle of two dragons or entwined dragons with pig-like features, or like this single one that shows the mixed symbolism of pig-dragon:

Modern reproduction of Neolithic Hongshan culture fetal pig/dragon symbol

Especially in the emphasis on the eye of the creature, you will note a similarity between the image above and this one from Bactria, worked in a softer stone from ancient times:

Bactrian amulet in soft white stone.

So now the dragon appears in similar form on both sides of the Himalayas.  I am not trying to establish any real connection between languages, customs or genetics.  I am only following an interesting mystery in the attraction that humans have for dragons as ornaments.  The similarity of certain of the images at or near the same time but found at great distances apart intrigues me.  And where we find tartan plaids and/or Indo-Aryan features, we find these whorled dragon images, but I grant that there is probably no causal relationship.  Maybe they  are found all over the globe at this time, but since my interest is mainly in Central Asia, especially the Himalayan countries, I certainly find dragon tracks there.  

Sources and credits: Tocharian and the Tocharians; Friends of Jade; Linguists on Jiagu/Tocharian;Iran Chamber Society; Cultural China;  Crafts of the Past