p.4-5 p. 4 “the Scythians are even mentioned, albeit in passing, in the Bible’s New Testament. A passage from Colossians 3:11 in the Letters of Paul states: Here there is no Greek or Jew, circuncised or not, barbarian Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all.” The use of the name Scythian here serves to convey a stereoptypical view of non-sedentary peoples as barbarians whose uncivilised conduct was in need of divine intervention. It clearly does not aim to designatre any particular ethnic or cultural affiliation … to the Achaemenids, the Saka and the Scythians were one and the same people, as evidenced by several inscriptions at Behistun and Persepolis. Pliny was probably right that the Persians indiscimrinately gave the name Saka to all the nomadic groups that lived east of their territory to distinguish those from the Scythians to the west. The Avesta is even more vague, referring to the nomadic enemies of the Iranian people as the ‘Tura with the fast horses”. The later successors of these early Iron Age nomadic societies are the Sarmatians, whose historical fate is a bit clearer. Their military hegemony reached its peak in the 1st century BCE, when their territory reportedly stretched from the Vistula River to the Danube delta…. Prior to the Xiongnu period… the Chinese also applied many blanket terms (hu, sai) to the nomadic groups who lived on or beyond their northern frontier. All these ambigious, unbrella ethnonyms fall into the same pitfalls that have hindered the study of the so-called Phoenicians, Germanen and prehistoric Slavs – all largely invented terms for otherwise diverse, unrelated groups that came together in the face of a common geopolitical enemy or economic challenge… steppe nomads were not mischaracterised only by their contemporaries. Another (and, one might argue, more problematic) layer of essentialism emerged in the colonial discourses of the 19th century. That era’s preoccupation with evolutionist social theory and Ernest Renan’s seminal ‘nationhood’ model resulted in even more essentialised images of ‘non-state’ steppe societies, seen as kinship tribal formations, or as fierce warrior-hersmen who lacked administyrative sophistication and thus organised into clans and tribes. These views of steppe societies as tribal units that existed ‘outside history’ in some arrested stage also fit well within the emerging Marxist models. In the two millennia separating the ethnographies written by Herodotus and the treatises of 19th-century thinkers, the image of steppe societies did not undergo much of a transformation in the scholarly discourse or public imagination. The study of steppe materials, whether textual or visual, has inevitably been hindered.”
p. 7 “Zoomorphism and elitism were thus inestricably linked- across the Eurasian steppe domain since at least the early Iron Age. By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, Eurasian nomaid superelites had developed a complex form of shared zoomorphism that was not rooted in a particular religious or spiritual system, but rather in their ever-changing interactions with various ecosystems and constructed environments…. Complex visual tropes based on fantastical, fragmented animal anatomies helped construct a shared collective memory in a reluctant alliance, subsequently solidifying its elite core. They also marked the nomad’s identity as separate from that of rival political actors in Central Euroasia. At the heart of such endeavours were three distinct forms of ‘Othering’. … the ordinary members of the alliance were Othered by the elite. But to the nomadic alliance as a whole, both Mother Nature and the geopolitical rivals on the outside were Others that had to be faced, understood and defeated. .. Finally, the Chinese and, to a lesser degree, Persians started to strategically appropriate steppe zoomorphic elements in their material culture to demonstrate their ability to tame the ‘Barbaric Other’.
p. 17 Most widely circulated along the steppe is a metonymies device rooted in a pars pro toto mode of expression, which I refer to as ‘visual synedoche’. Counterintuitive substitution is a key tool in the making of the composite beasts on the surfaces of animal-style artworks. Such fantastic creatures are accomplished through the construction of a ‘zoomorphic juncture’ which constitutes a fusion of several visual synecdoches. his is an irregular zoomorphic body consisting of the ‘signature’ anatomical parts of various animals. for example, the main body might be that of a wold with horse hooves, with deer antlers sprouting from the head and terminating in curved raptor beaks. The reliance of this method of substitution in the construction of counterintuitive biology must have been vital in earl nomadic visual cultures across the steppe: we observe the repeated occurrence of such if junctures on personal adornment and in tomb interior design across thousands of kilometres. … Can one attribute this mode of expression to a particular ecology of imagery rooted in the steppe environment and thus trace a direct link between making, meaning and nature? We’re cut tropes merely politically motivated visuals? Or could they have been both?”
p. 18 “Next comes the ‘visual parallelism” trope. This device relies on a vertical array of fantastic beasts which appear reflected along a delineated axis, usually facing each other. In nomadic art, we commonly encounter attempts at bilateral symmetry, exemplified by mirror images of ‘twin’ animals positioned in such a way as to create a mask-like configuration.”
p. 18 “Steppe artisans also reached trope of “animal combat”, which is often a misidentification for what I would preferred to describe as ‘zoomorphic interface’ of abbreviated animal forms… often composed of a pair of otherwise anatomically complete animals with bodies so contorted and entwined that they end up forming an homogenous, stylised amalgam of shapes rather than a recognisable and coherent animal form… accentuates the creation of a novel organism by creating a visual pandemonium of seemingly disparate body contours which transform and dissipate into each other.”
p. 22 Ernst Gombrich’s seminal work The Sense of Order. At the heart of Gombrich’s enquiries is his belief that decorative pattern results from the cognitive impulse to resolve a certain tension between our senses and the realities of the outside world; but to do so our mind comes equipped with its own filing and scanning system which sorts, filters and rearranges external forms, thus creating its own sense of order. .. even when we claim to render images from observation, we rely on what we know and not what we see. Gombrich’s view of successful design shines through in his succinct assertion: “Delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.”…to strike the right balance between monotony and a surfeit of novelty, the designer relies on a frame of reference which may be both psychologically and culturally determined.”
p. 23 “perhaps a composite body with with a feline head and deer antlers signified a particular religious belief in, say, Pontic Scythian culture, but had an entirely secular meaning on the northern Chinese periphery. Unable to prove a direct cultural contact between the two, we are thus intimidated by different meanings attached to the shared image… but what if we were to temporarily abandon our fixation with meaning and turn to the function of those images….? There we might find many meaningful parallels since composite images were meant to reflect a particular relationship with the natural world and do so to a certain end – whether to instil fear, release anxiety or manipulate the audience into thinking one was a master of of the most supernatural and grotesque of beings.”
p. 26 William Worringer’s thoughts on the creative process on his seminal work Abstractions and Empathy. … This view rejects the notion that the art of prehistoric societies was often abstract because of technical failure in mimetic expression. … the history of nomadic image-making was defined by tensions of fluctuations between these two polarities – the wish to respect, even celebrate the fauna around them and the simultaneous desire to keep a safe conceptual distance from the beast through excessive stylisation or metonymies expression.”
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