The Steppes: Crucible of Eurasia - units.muohio.edu - Miami University

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Edward Vajda, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Western Washington University (Edward.Vajda@wwu.edu) Between Forest and Steppe: Language and Ethnicity in Early Inner Asia The linguistic identity of the earliest pastoral nomads to arise in eastern Eurasia – the Xiongnu and Huns – remains unresolved, and even the origins of the later Turks and Mongols cannot fully be understood by studying the steppes alone. This presentation considers the Kets and their extinct relatives – the Yugh, Arin, Assan, Kott and Pumpokol – forest tribes living north of the steppe zone in the taiga forest of central Siberia. These peoples spoke languages belonging to the Yeniseian family, which today is represented by only a few elderly speakers of the northernmost Ket dialects. Most studies of ancient steppe history do not focus attention on the Yeniseians, who were Siberia’s last hunter-gatherers and never developed, in constrast to the bettern known steppe pastoralists, large polities or empires beyond their immediate areas of habitation. Present-day Turkic and Mongolian territory in or near South Siberia, however, contain numerous substrate river names of Yeniseian origin, suggesting that ancient geographic contact between taiga hunters and peoples who later expanded through pastoralism were once quite extensive. This presentation discusses the Yeniseian family of languages by describing what is known about its former geographic spread and internal dialectal division. Alongside the expected Turkic loanwords into Yeniseian involving metallurgy or pastoral products, other, presumably earlier lexical parallels are considered. Ancient Turkic shares with Yeniseian a range of words connected with forest life that can best be explained as Yeniseian substrate loanwords that entered Turkic before the rise of the First Turk Kaganate in the 6 th century AD. These words reflect a specific Yeniseian dialect (the Ket-Arin branch of the family) and some of them show internal structure unique to Yeniseian, so they could not have been borrowed into Yeniseian from Turkic. This linguistic evidence parallels other facts from substrate river names and human genetics to suggest that a component of early Turkic ethnogenesis derives from Yeniseianspeaking forest tribes, though this fact became obscured by the subsequent disappearance of Yeniseian languages from South Siberia and the adoption of Turkic pastoral loanwords into the Yeniseian dialects that survived farther north in the taiga. Also discussed are parallels between the Pumpokol branch of Yeniseian and the ancient Xiongnu. The scholar Alexander Vovin (2002) already suggested a Yeniseian origin for certain Xiongnu words. Pumpokol river names in northern Mongolian territory are examined in this connection. Although the surviving Xiongnu linguistic material is probably too sparse to support firm conclusions about ethnic and linguistic affiliation, the possibility that at least some elements within the Xiongnu Confederation spoke a Yeniseian dialect of the Pumpokol variety must be regarded as plausible. Finally, the presentation considers words common to both Yeniseian and Mongolian languages that appear to have been borrowed from an early Uralic source. These lexical parallels suggest that the area south of Lake Baikal representing part of the homeland of the Xiongnu may have been inhabited in prehistory by people speaking a now extinct branch of Uralic. This suggests another possible linguistic origins for at least some of the tribes in the Xiongnu Confederation. A Uralic linguistic affiliation for the core ethnic element among the Xiongnu has not been considered previously, but comparative study of Yeniseian and Mongolic vocabulary appears to provide at least circumstantial evidence of such a possibility. 12
Robert S. Wicks, Miami University Art Museum and Department of Art (wicksrs@muohio.edu) Bird-Headed Antler Tines: Stability and Change in Ancient Eurasian Art" Although the original meanings ascribed to the bird-headed antler tine motif remain incompletely understood today, the transmission of such a distinctive visual sign over some 4,000 miles of sparsely inhabited grasslands among non-literate populations together with its survival for a period of more than four centuries underscore the vitality and innate power of its symbolism. As an art historian I am particularly interested in determining the typological groupings of the material in order to gain a better understanding of the motif’s possible origins, thematic development, and, ultimately, meanings. This paper was inspired by the work of Professor Esther Jacobson and is given in her honor. My presentation begins with an examination of the major morphological characteristics of the bird-headed antler tine motif and its geographical and temporal horizons within the visual art traditions of Eurasia during the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. Doubtless inspired by large birds of prey, such as the eagle with its hook-like beak, the bird-headed antler tine motif displays considerable regional variation. In Scythian art, for example, the cere, the waxy area around the opening of the nostrils, takes on the appearance of a duck's bill accompanied by a dramatic coiling of the upper beak. In its easternmost development, among the Xiongnu and Eastern Han, the bird acquires, in addition to leaf-like ears, a shovel-shaped beak structure similar to that of a flamingo. The main part of my presentation introduces an analytical strategy for examining the typological development of the bird-headed antler tine motif in isolated and narrative representations utilizing Esther Jacobson’s predation/transformation terminology for Scytho- Siberian art. While these observations and groupings do not necessarily explain the meaning behind a particular element or motif, they are valuable for pointing out unexpected patterns and relationships. 13
Page 1 and 2: PROGRAM AND ABSTRACTS The Steppes:
Page 3 and 4: Saturday, December 1 9:30-10:00 a.m
Page 5 and 6: fox, and birds (Chang et al. 2003).
Page 7 and 8: ise of the Silk Roads. In this pape
Page 9 and 10: came to the fore after M.I. Rostovt
Page 11: effects upon the geopolitics of the

The Steppes: Crucible of Eurasia - units.muohio.edu - Miami University

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