University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Fantastic Beasts Of The urE asian Steppes: Toward A Revisionist Approach To Animal-Style Art Petya Andreeva University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Studies Commons, and the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Andreeva, Petya, "Fantastic Beasts Of The urE asian Steppes: Toward A Revisionist Approach To Animal-Style Art" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2963. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2963 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2963 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Fantastic Beasts Of The urE asian Steppes: Toward A Revisionist Approach To Animal-Style Art Abstract Animal style is a centuries-old approach to decoration characteristic of the various cultures which flourished along the Eurasian steppe belt in the later half of the first millennium BCE. This vast territory stretching from the Mongolian Plateau to the Hungarian Plain, has yielded hundreds of archaeological finds associated with the early Iron Age. Among these discoveries, high-end metalwork, textiles and tomb furniture, intricately embellished with idiosyncratic zoomorphic motifs, stand out as a recurrent element. While scholarship has labeled animal-style imagery as scenes of combat, this dissertation argues against this overly simplified classification model which ignores the variety of visual tools employed in the abstraction of fantastic hybrids. I identify five primary categories in the arrangement and portrayal of zoomorphic designs: these traits, frequently occurring in clusters, constitute the first comprehensive definition of animal-style art. Each chapter focuses on the materiality and strategic placement of a different type of animal-style object: headdresses, torques and plaques often embellish the body of the deceased whereas felt, leather and silk textiles used as ceiling hangings, rugs, and coffino c vers serve to define the ombt ’s spatial parameters. Lastly, the dissertation also delves into the continuous retention of animal-style motifs in the arts of the Eurasian steppes after the dawn of the first millennium BCE thus challenging the narrative that animal art disappeared after the Iron Age. I demonstrate that elite members of the various pastoral societies perched along the peripheries of sedentary empires invented local interpretations of a common visual language made of tropes and devices (such as “visual synecdoche” and “frame narrative”) resulting from ingenious interpretations of the above- mentioned five categories. In so doing, they aimed to tackle an identical conceptual problem: the attendance of a real audience of a certain social stature during the funerary ceremony and the presence of an imagined (divine) one in the afterlife. The dissertation thus deconstructs the politically-motivated role of animal-style items in elite burials and argues that animal art was a constructed visual language intelligible to a small nucleus of elites whose sociopolitical status and network of influence were in fact inextricably linked to their level of fluency in it. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group East Asian Languages & Civilizations First Advisor Nancy S. Steinhardt Keywords animal style, burials, Central Eurasia, decorative arts, metalwork, steppe This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2963 Subject Categories Asian Studies | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2963 FANTASTIC BEASTS OF THE EURASIAN STEPPES: TOWARD A REVISIONIST APPROACH TO ANIMAL-STYLE ART Petya Andreeva A DISSERTATION in East Asian Languages and Civilizations Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation Nancy Steinhardt, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Graduate Group Chairperson Christopher P. Atwood, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Dissertation Committee: Victor H. Mair, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Christopher P. Atwood, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Adam Smith, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations FANTASTIC BEASTS OF THE EURASIAN STEPPES: TOWARD A REVISIONIST APPROACH TO ANIMAL-STYLE ART COPYRIGHT 2018 PETYA ANDREEVA This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Acknowledgement This dissertation would not have been feasible without the generous support, encouragement, advice, honest critiques and friendship of many scholars, friends and family members. First, no words can sufficiently express my immense gratitude to my academic advisor Dr. Nancy Steinhardt, who has remained the most vital and inspirational figure in my academic career. I am indebted to Dr. Steinhardt for her continuous encouragement, unparalleled kindness, and professional and emotional support throughout this arduous journey. I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to have had Dr. Steinhardt as a mentor and teacher. I am thankful to her for introducing me to countless educational and professional development opportunities, and for always remaining my biggest supporter in my pursuit of exciting opportunities in Art History, Sinology and Inner Asian Studies. She has invested an incredible amount of energy and time into supervising my research projects and career endeavors, one of which is this dissertation. My interest in Central Asia and Northern China was sparked by the breadth of Dr. Steinhardt’s own research and the classes she teaches. Her constructive advice related to my first-semester final papers at Penn sparked my interest in historical archaeology and the ancient cultures of Inner Asia. I am also grateful to Dr. Steinhardt for encouraging me to make full use of my native language Bulgarian and the several foreign languages I have learned along my journey to and at Penn. She helped me develop a passion for writing, and showed me ways in which to inject agency into the works I produce. As a result, I learned how to interlace my voice and authority as a writer into the fabrics of my dissertation, which, in its own right, is nothing more than a kaleidoscopic projection of my own musings, travels, dilemmas, blind spots and research aspirations. I owe the breadth of my research, iii particularly the large scope of the regions covered in this work, to Dr. Steinhardt’s invaluable advice and support. Part of my decision to pursue a career in higher education is my aspiration to one day be able to guide and support my future students with the same level of enthusiasm and compassion which Dr. Steinhardt has continuously demonstrated in her mentorship. I am also immensely grateful to Dr. Victor Mair for introducing me to the various ethnic groups, languages, monuments and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia and the advice he has given me over the years. His class “Language, Script and Society” coupled with the countless meaningful conversations and email exchanges on exhilarating new discoveries in Inner Asia have played a major role in my growth as an academic. Dr. Mair’s support for my research has made my current work on long-distance exchange possible. I can hardly imagine my dissertation topic being what it is today had I not crossed paths with Dr. Mair and had I not familiarized myself with the unparalleled scope of his magnum opus works in Eurasian archaeology and the prehistory of the Silk Road. I also owe Dr. Mair my relatively new interest in modern and contemporary Chinese and Central Asian art. I thank him for supporting the work of so many young scholars like myself through the publications in his journal Sino-Platonic papers. My dissertation has greatly benefited from having Dr. Christopher Atwood join our department at a time when my research agenda was at a crossroads. I am thankful to him for helping me with geographic, historical and linguistic concepts, terms, transliteration systems and foreign-language sources. I would not have been able to study the ancient art of the Mongolian steppes in so much depth if Dr. Atwood had not encouraged me to study Mongolian. My recent research trip to museums in Ulaanbaatar and surrounding areas iv would have never been possible without his support. I am always going to remain grateful to Dr. Atwood for giving me the chance to work with him on a joint publication during my graduate school years: the opportunity to learn from and work alongside a scholar like Dr. Atwood is one of the highlights of my graduate student experience. Our joint research made an impact on my dissertation as it made me rethink some of the early antecedents of zoomorphic imagery as depicted on deer stones and rock sites across Mongolia and further west (as the readers will see in my occasional unabashed citations of our publication in the current study). My recent fieldwork in Mongolia and the opportunity to study Mongolian at Penn have shaped much of the content of Chapters Two and Three. My Mongolian teacher T. Tsermaa is also a large part of my