Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

204 THE POLYCHROME STYLE AND
when we were speaking of the military life of the Sarmatians. But
I must add, that the Chinese adopted not only their scale and ring
armour from the Sarmatians, their heavy spears, and their conical
helmets, but their arrows, with the characteristic triangular head,
their short ring-headed daggers (almost identical with those found in
Sarmatian graves on the Kuban and those represented in the figures
of semi-Sarmatian warriors on the funerary stelai of Panticapaeum
and Tanais), their horse-trappings, which during the Han and succeeding
dynasties in China are purely Iranian, and last but not least
their long swords, in which the guard, the pommel and the bottom of
the scabbard are of jade, just as in the South Russia of the Sarmatian
period. These jade ornaments, found both in China and in South
Russia (scores of specimens have been found in Panticapaeum and
in Sarmatian graves, often with remains of the iron swords), are
almost identical in the two countries, and are made of the same
material, the jade of Central Asia. But Sarmatian influence was not
restricted to the military life of Han China. I have every reason for
supposing that the habit of interring dozens of clay figures with
the deceased, to represent the funeral procession, and the type of
funeral procession itself, were borrowed by the Chinese from the
nomadic peoples of Central Asia (compare the description of Scythian
funeral processions on pp. 45, 49, 99). It is noteworthy that the clay
figures of the gods of Death, regularly buried with the dead in China,
are Iranian : one of these figures reproduces the type of the Iranian
horned lion-griffin ; the other—a half-human, half-leonine figure,
the head of which is covered with the skin of an elephant (usually,
but wrongly, called a unicorn), reminds one of the portraits of Alexander
the Great wearing the elephant helmet, of the symbolic figure
of Egypt with the same head-dress, and of the portraits of Bactrian
and Tibetan kings. One more coincidence : strange figures of clay
are commonly found in the graves of the inhabitants of Panticapaeum
in the first and second centuries A.D., the period of strong Sarmatian
influence : fantastic .half-human, sometimes grotesque creatures of
various types ; a puzzle to archaeologists. Exactly similar figures
are found by the dozen in Chinese graves of the Han dynasty. Laufer
considers them to be personifications of various diseases.
Here I must leave the subject. The relationship between China
and South Russia is not new to the scientific world. As early as 1896,
Reinecke pointed to similarities between certain Scythian and Sarmatian
objects and certain Chinese. Some of his comparisons are
not convincing : but some remain : the same rattles in Chinese and
in Scythian graves ; the same forms of mirror in Sarmatian and