Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE

Numerous Iron Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This richly illustrated book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon. Cover 1 Half Title 3 Title Page 5 Copyright 6 Contents 7 List of Figures 9 Acknowledgements 15 1 Introduction: At a Crossroads on the Eurasian Steppe Route 19 At the Periphery of Space and Discourse 19 The Search for Origins: ‘Animal Style’ and Its Ambiguous Biography 26 ‘Animal Style’ as Visual Rhetoric 33 Defining the Tropes 35 Pazyryk Textiles, Deer Stones and the Question of Transferability 37 Animal-Style Art in an Increasingly ‘Global’ Eurasia: Enter the Xiongnu 38 Lingering Traces 39 Some Notes on Methodology and Frameworks 40 2 Design Idioms in Steppe Metalwork 54 Zoomorphic Junctures: Substitution, Abbreviation, Inversion 55 Towards Bilateral Symmetry: The Power of Parallelism 89 Verticality as a Design Concept 98 Zoomorphic Entanglement: Revisiting the ‘Animal Combat’ Trope 115 The Divergent Worlds of Animal Composites 128 Receptivity, ‘Otherness’ and the Almighty Audience 136 3 The Tomb Inside Out: Playing (Mortuary) Politics 156 Textiles as Tomb Décor at Pazyryk 158 Wood, Bone and Leather: Transfer to ‘Lesser’ Materials 169 Fantastic Beasts above Ground: Deer Stones as Antecedents 183 Early Zoomorphism in the Ananyino Culture 190 Final Remarks on Transferability 193 4 Animal Style in the Xiongnu Era: The Making of a New Elite 198 Between Cosmopolitanism and Zoomorphism at Noin-Ula, Mongolia 201 Xiongnu-Period Developments in Animal-Style Metalwork 213 Animal Style in North Korea: The Case of Lelang 222 Moving South: The Kingdom of Nanyue and the Southern Chinese Periphery 224 Other Sino-Steppe Developments 229 Fantastic Beasts of the Tarim Basin: Halfway between China and the Xiongnu 231 New Trends in Animal Style Design between the Second Century bce and Second Century CE 236 5 Waning and Re-emergence 244 The Xianbei and Their ‘Landscape’ Tropes (Third to Fifth Century CE) 245 The Türkic Period: A Presumed End to Zoomorphism 259 Permian Animal Style 262 Future Avenues: A Mongol Return? 270 Lingering Traces: Understanding the Longevity of Animal-Style Visuality 272 6 Towards a Resolution 279 Enter the Almighty Audience 281 Object Itineraries 286 West vs East Dichotomies: A Double-Edged Sword 289 Selected Bibliography 296 Illustration Acknowledgements 324 Index 327 Numerous Iron Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic imagemaking was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a statusdefining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the arthistorical canon. "