http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLAsian/VLCaucasus.html

This is a frequently updated collection of excellent links, most centered in or near the Caucasus, compiled by Dr. T. Matthew Ciolek of the Australian National University.  The areas covered by these links include: Abkhazia, Adygheya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkariya, Karachay-Cherkessiya, Krasnodar, Mongolia, Nagorno-Karabakh, North Osetiya-Alaniya, Rostov Region, South Ossetia, Stavropol Krai, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

This is an abstract of a paper, "Warrior Women of the Eurasian Steppes," by
Jeannine Davis-Kimball.   The author discusses "50 ancient burial mounds [of women found] near the town of Pokrovka, Russia, near the Kazakhstan border."  The graves are suggestive of the ancient Amazons of Greece.  The full paper was published in 1997 by the Archaeological Institute of America.

[Added 16 September 2001]: This is the "Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads," an excellent site for browsing through articles and photographs.

[Added 20 October 2001]: This is The Alekseev Manuscript, based on a series of the late Valery Pavlovich Alexeev's online lectures/chapters delivered at Harvard in 1991.  The carefully documented work ranges from the Lower Paleolithic to the Iron Age in Eurasia (Note: the focus is on Eurasia as a whole).  From the preface by Geraldine Reinhart-Waller:

Valery Pavlovich Alexeev came to Harvard University in Summer, 1991 to teach two anthropology courses: "Peoples and Cultures of the Soviet Union" and "Archaeology of the USSR". The subject matter for this volume, "A Brief Cultural History of Eurasia as told by Professor Alexeev to his student Geraldine Reinhardt", is based on these lectures; however, much of the information has been updated to reflect the current geography of Eurasia rather than preserving the once Soviet Union....

I only had time to scan portions of this work -- what I saw will soon bring me back for more.

__________________________________________________
CENTRAL ASIA: NOMADS OF THE FOREST-STEPPES

Reclining Goat
Scythian Gold, 6th century BCE
[Hermitage Museum -- see below]

Why should we care about these nomads from desolate lands that most people have never heard of before?  Aside from the fact that they're fascinating in their own right, convincing evidence now exists that Arthurian & Grail legends, long assumed to be purely English, were born on these Eurasian steppes and only later transmitted to Europe by nomadic Sarmatian and Alan warriors.   The complex evidence is discussed in a brilliant book I've been praising for years in my lectures on European Sacred Traditions, From Scythia to Camelot, by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor.  The above link will take you to a splendid review of this book by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.   It includes a good deal of data on the Scythians and other steppe nomads.  (Note: in late 1999 this very expensive hardcover book was finally released in paperback.  Click on the above title to go to amazon.com's page on it.)

From CSEN, The Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, comes this scholarly site with full length papers as well as abstracts of papers and lectures; ethnographic photographs; excavation updates; reviews; bibliography; and much more.

From Russia's State Hermitage Museum comes this brief overview on the Scythians:

The Scythians were powerful nomads, who spoke a language from the Persian family. They arrived in the Black Sea coastal area from the eastern part of Eurasia sometime between the 8th and 7th centuries BC....

...The most notable of the nomadic tribes in the ancient world, they were the first of a whole series of tribes who conquered the South Russian steppes one after another between the 7th century BC and the end of the 15th century AD: the Scythians, Sarmatians, Bulgars, Khazars, Pechenegi, Polovtsi and Mongols.

Related to the above, this is a lovely page on Scythian art in the famous Animal Style (see the golden goat at the beginning of this section).  A link at the bottom will take you to "Gold of the Nomads," with more splendid examples of this art.  Yet another page looks at Scythian-Siberian art.  All the Hermitage's images are clickable and give further data.

This is the Hermitage's page on "Early Nomads of the Altaic Region":

This rich and fascinating collection from the Altai mountains dates to the Scythian-Sakae period (6th–4th centuries BC) and embraces over 5,000 items....

The art includes a detail of the world's oldest pile carpet, dating to the 5th-4th centuries BCE.

This is another page from the Hermitage Museum on nomadic Sarmatian art.

Again from the Hermitage comes a page on wide-ranging Eurasian nomadic art:

The discovery of a hoard in 1912 in the neighbourhood of Poltava near the village of Malaya Pereshchepina was not in itself a rare event, but in its wealth and diversity this hoard far exceeds all others. It is rightfully regarded as one of the richest finds from the period of the nomadic migrations.

Dated to the period between the ancient world and the 7th century AD, the hoard is thought to have belonged to Kuvrat (or Kubrat), Khan of Great Bolgary....

Of special interest is a stone "Baba" from the 11th-12 centuries A.D.

[Added 20 March 2000]: This is the entry page to a handsome series of pages on the Trypillia culture in what is today the Ukraine:

Seven thousands years ago huge spaces of Eurasia were inhabited mainly with hunting tribes, in which environment there were separate oases of the most ancient grain-grower civilizations on the East and on Balkan. On the east edge of grain-grower ecumene there emerged Trypillia civilization, that is of the ancient farmers of Ukraine.

Trypillia culture prevailed in the Forest-steppe on the territory of Ukraine, from the Upper Dniester on the west up to Mid Dnipro on the East.  Time-borders of its existence: second half of sixth - first quarter of third millenium B.C. . . .

The linked pages look at artifacts; an ancient soma-like drink; mythology; symbols hidden in embroideries; and much more.

_________________
THE CAUCASUS

Bronze Belt Buckle, probably a running horse
First half of the 1st millennium BCE
Northern Ossetia, Koban burial ground
[From the Hermitage Museum -- see below]

The mountains of the Caucasus have been invaded and settled for millennia by nomadic peoples from the forest-steppes.  This site gives a brief but useful overview of this complex and volatile region:

Caucasus is located at the north-west of Asia Minor, between Black and Caspian Seas. Tens of millions of years ago the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian Seas comprised one waterspace and the contemporary Caucasian ridge was the sea bottom. Due to the "continent movement" Caucasian mountains are still rising up....

From Russia's Hermitage Museum comes this page of text and art on findings from the North Caucasus:

Materials from the Maikop burial mound in the Northern Caucasus relate to the Age of Metal, the mid-3rd [millennium] BC, and are regarded as among the most important pieces in the archaeological collection. A lavishly dressed nomadic chief was found in this burial mound, his head crowned with two gold diadems, with a heavy necklace consisting of several rows of beads in gold, sard and turquoise....

[The lovely greenish-silver cup shown above in my Mythology section comes from this page.]

Again from the Hermitage is a page on two more cultures in the Caucasus:

Between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, in the early 1st millenium BC, two similar cultures, Koban and Colchaian, arose in the Caucasus. Remarkable bronzesmiths produced a range of objects which are now well represented in the Hermitage. This large collection of bronzes shows just how magnificently metalwork flourished in the Caucasus during the Prehistoric era.

This 1996 archaeology report from UC Berkeley is "Excavations in Daghestan" by David Stronach.  I'd put this link under my "Archaeology" section except that Stronach includes good introductory data about the importance of this land located where the high mountains of the Caucasus come closest to the western edge of the Caspian Sea:

...it is this thin ribbon of flat land that has formed a vital corridor from time immemorial between the Eurasian steppes to the north and the inviting lands of the Near East to the South. It has always been an invasion route, usually but not always for nomadic groups pressing southwards from the steppes. But it has also served as a major artery for the transmission - in each direction - of ideas and technology....

Tree of Life
Silk embroidery on cotton: 18th century AD, Daghestan
[From Textile Art Exhibit -- see below]

Moving from ancient Daghestan to its arts in the 16th to the 19th centuries, this beautiful page is "KAITAG: Textile Art from Daghestan" by Robert Chenciner.  There are beautiful photos throughout.

This is another beautiful site on "Textile Arts of the Caucasus: A selection of Caucasian embroideries from the 17th to the 19th centuries"; several in this exhibit are also from Daghestan.

This is another of the Weaving Art Museum's exhibits [see above under Archaeology] on Turkish tapestry weavings ---- "Soumak and Kelim Weaving of the Caucasus (January 1999); there are 19 clickable thumbnails along the left that will take you to enlargements plus first-rate data -- all are lovely.  There is also an illustrated preview of an upcoming exhibit: "Turkmen Weaving."

This is a fascinating page on the Caucasus' powerful medieval Khazars, many of whose people converted to Judaism in the 8th-10th centuries.  Their little-known role in culture and trade during these centuries is quite intriguing.  When the kingdom was eventually conquered by the Russians, the Jewish population spread out into other lands of Eastern Europe.  The site offers a huge number of great links.

This is the "North Caucasian Bibliography and Library."  It's an astonishing collection done by Amjad Jaimoukha:

More than 3,800 references, including some 450 links to on-line books, articles and documents.

I meant only to take a quick look but wound up spending an hour in the arts, myth, and music sections (e.g., Music, entry #86 includes a brief essay on Prokofiev's work with folk music in the North Caucasus during WWII).  Most of the entries can only be found in libraries but here and there are links to online data -- I culled a number of them from the aforementioned sections but many more remain.

"Lines of Uncertainty: The Frontiers of the North Caucasus" by Thomas M. Barrett is a thoroughly depressing but important look at the role of Russia and the peoples of the North Caucasus from the 17th-19 centuries.  Barrett places his careful study within the context of the equally depressing history of whites and Native Americans during the same period.

Chechnya is also in the Caucasus.  To continue with depressing reports, this is "Dhekr [Zikr] of the Chechens" by an Israeli journalist who spent several months in the region, Yo'av Karny (special to The Washington Post).  Here is an excerpt:

...Sufism, often derided by condescending Russia as "Islamic Fundamentalism," has been the Chechen ultimate weapon. It combines the militant, purist notion of an Islamic lifestyle, a message of defiance in the face of adversity and an extraordinary formula for internalizing one's rage. Central to Muslim practice in Chechnya is an ecstatic dance called zikr, taught nearly 150 years ago by Kunta Haji, an illiterate shepherd who experienced a mystical revelation "on the road to Baghdad."

Zikr is credited with helping the Chechens close their ranks and stay together, even at times of overwhelming defeat.

Imperial Russia, having just overcome the Chechen combat skills in battle, was terrified by the non-violent, self-oriented zikr. In 1864, Kunta Haji, was committed to a mental asylum. Zikr was outlawed and performing it was made a capital offense. Kunta Haji's followers were massacred or banished to Siberia....

The report isn't one-sided: Karny points out how the current Chechen leader (and former Soviet general) made matters worse:

...Dudayev...proved to be too narcissistic, too temperamental and at times unnecessarily provocative. He evoked too often the historical figure of Sheikh Mansur the heroic leader of Chechnya's first rebellion against Russia two centuries ago.

In doing so, and in dealing brutally with his political rivals, he made it much easier for Moscow to demonize him. Even worse, he played into the hands of proponents of racist stereotypes, already
prevalent in Russian society.

From the non-profit Jamestown Foundation comes Prism, a monthly e-report on Post-Soviet States.  This issue, Vol.II October 1996 Part 2, is "Islam in the Northern Caucasus" by Aleksei Malashenko.  It is a careful and sobering look at the history of Islam in this region. (At the end of this report is one on the heartbreaking poverty of today's Russians, including letters from several elderly women and a badly wounded soldier.  With so much promise in that vast region, wasting so many resources on endlessly dysfunctional warring beggars words like "tragedy" and "insanity.")

 http://www.colorq.org/MeltingPot/Asia/ChineseTurks.htm

This is "Exchanges between East Asians and Central Asians in China," a site that looks at the Huns:

Long before the time China became an empire, the Chinese people and Turkic ethnic groups from north of the Chinese border had been in contact (largely through Turkish raids into the Chinese territory and subsequent Chinese reprisals).  The Great Wall was built to keep invading Turks out.  The most notable Turkic ethnic group in Chinese history was the Huns.  Unlike the European/Euro-American stereotype of the Huns as slant-eyed Mongols, the Huns, like other Turks, are a white Caucasoid people....

...The Turks are a distinct race from the Mongols and warred with them. Part of the reason for the Turkic migration from Central Asia into West Asia and Europe was the advance of Mongol armies pursuing Turkic warrior-nomads. Intermarriages were arranged between individual Turkic and Mongolian nobles for
political purposes.  Despite hostilities between Turks and East Asians (Mongols and Chinese), intermarriages were not rare....

The above two links are from online encyclopedias on the Huns -- they're brief, although hypertext will fill in some gaps.

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Launched 13 November 1998
Latest updates:
27 May 1999 (2 links added w/mare & foal animation);
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