TOURNAMENTS OF VALUE
Parallels between the funerals of the Sintashta chiefs and the funeral hymns of the Rig Veda (see below) suggest that poetry surrounded chariot burials. Archaeology reveals that feasts on a surprising scale also accompanied chiefly funerals. Poetry and feasting were central to a mortuary performance that emphasized exclusivity, hierarchy, and power—what the anthropologist A. Appadurai called “tournaments of value,” ceremonies meant to define membership in the elite and to channel political competition within clear boundaries that excluded most people. In order to understand the nature of these sacrificial dramas, we first have to understand the everyday secular diet.38
Flotation of seeds and charcoal from the soils excavated at Arkaim recovered only a few charred grains of barley, too few, in fact, to be certain that they came from the Sintashta-culture site rather than a later occupation. The people buried at Arkaim had no dental caries, indicating that they ate a very low-starch diet, not starchy cereals.39 Their teeth were like those of hunter-gatherers. Charred millet was found in test excavations at the walled Alands’koe stronghold, indicating that some millet cultivation probably occurred at some sites, and dental decay was found in the Krivoe Ozero cemetery population, so some communities might have consumed cultivated grain. Gathering wild seeds from Chenopodium and Amaranthus, plants that still played an important role in the LBA steppe diet centuries later (see chapter 16 for LBA wild plants), could have supplemented occasional cereal cultivation. Cultivated cereals seem to have played a minor role in the Sintashta diet.40
The scale of animal sacrifices in Sintashta cemeteries implies very large funerals. One example was Sacrificial Complex 1 at the northern edge of the Sintashta SM cemetery (see figure 15.16). In a pit 50 cm deep, the heads and hooves of six horses, four cattle, and two rams lay in two rows facing one another around an overturned pot. This single sacrifice provided about six thousand pounds (2,700 kg) of meat, enough to supply each of three thousand participants with two pounds (.9 kg). The Bolshoi Kurgan, built just a few meters to the north, required, by one estimate, three thousand man-days.41 The workforce required to build the kurgan matched the amount of food provided by Sacrificial Complex 1. However, the Bolshoi Kurgan was unique; the other burial mounds at Sintashta were small and low. If the sacrifices that accompanied the other burials at Sintashta were meant to feed work parties, what they built is not obvious. It seems more likely that most sacrifices were intended to provide food for the funeral guests. With up to eight horses sacrificed for a single funeral, Sintashta feasts would have fed hundreds, even thousands of guests. Feast-hosting behavior is the most common and consistently used avenue to prestige and power in tribal societies.42
The central role of horses in Sintashta funeral sacrifices was unprecedented in the steppes. Horse bones had appeared in EBA and earlier MBA graves but not in great numbers, and not as frequently as those of sheep or cattle. The animal bones from the Sintashta and Arkaim settlement refuse middens were 60% cattle, 26% sheep-goat, and 13% horse. Although beef supplied the preponderance of the meat diet, the funeral sacrifices in the cemeteries contained just 23% cattle, 37% sheep-goat, and 39% horse. Horses were sacrificed more than any other animal, and horse bones were three times more frequent in funeral sacrifices than in settlement middens. The zoologist L. Gaiduchenko suggested that the Arkaim citadel specialized in horse breeding for export because the high level of 15N isotopes in human bone suggested that horses, very low in 15N, were not eaten frequently. Foods derived from cattle and sheep, significantly higher in 15N than the horses from these sites, probably composed most of the diet.43 According to Epimakhov’s catalogue of five Sintashta cemeteries, the most frequent animal sacrifices were horses but they were sacrificed in no more than 48 of the 181 graves catalogued, or 27%; multiple horses were sacrificed in just 13% of graves. About one-third of the graves contained weapons, but, among these, two-thirds of graves with horse sacrifices contained weapons, and 83% of graves with multiple horse sacrifices contained weapons. Only a minority of Sintashta graves contained horse sacrifices, but those that did usually also contained weapons, a symbolic association between the ownership of large horse herds, the hosting of feasts, and the warrior’s identity.
Figure 15.16 Sacrificial complex number 1 at the northern edge of the Sintashta SM cemetery. After Gening, Zdanovich, and Gening 1992, figure 130.
There is little jewelry or ornaments in Sintashta graves, and no large houses or storage facilities in the settlements. The signs of craft specialization, a signal of social hierarchy, are weak in all crafts except metallurgy, but even in that craft, every household in every settlement seems to have worked metal. The absence of large houses, storage facilities, or craft specialists has led some experts to doubt whether the Sintashta culture had a strong social hierarchy.44 Sintashta cemeteries contained the graves of a cross-section of the entire age and sex spectrum, including many children, apparently a more inclusive funeral ritual than had been normal in EBA and earlier MBA mortuary ceremonies in the steppes. On the other hand, most Sintashta cemeteries did not contain enough graves to account for more than a small segment of the population of the associated walled settlements. The Sintashta citadel included about fifty to sixty structures, and its associated cemeteries had just sixty-six graves, most of them the graves of children. If the settlement contained 250 people for six generations (150 years), it should have generated more than fifteen hundred graves. Only a few exceptional families were given funerals in Sintashta cemeteries, but the entire family, including children, was honored in this way. This privilege, like the sacrifice of horses and chariots, was not one that everyone could claim. Horses, chariots, weapons, and multiple animal sacrifices identified the graves of the Sintashta chiefs.
The funeral sacrifices of the Simtashta culture are a critical link between archaeology and history. They closely resembled the rituals described in the Rig Veda, the oldest text preserved in an Indo-Iranian language.
SINTASHTA AND THE ORIGINS OF THE ARYANS
The oldest texts in Old Indic are the “family books,” books 2 through 7, of the Rig Veda (RV). These hymns and prayers were compiled into “books” or mandalas about 1500–1300 BCE, but many had been composed earlier. The oldest parts of the Avesta (AV), the Gathas, the oldest texts in Iranian, were composed by Zarathustra probably about 1200–1000 BCE. The undocumented language that was the parent of both, common Indo-Iranian, must be dated well before 1500 BCE, because, by this date, Old Indic had already appeared in the documents of the Mitanni in North Syria (see chapter 3). Common Indo-Iranian probably was spoken during the Sintashta period, 2100–1800 BCE. Archaic Old Indic probably emerged as a separate tongue from archaic Iranian about 1800–1600 BCE (see chapter 16). The RV and AV agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan.45 Otherwise the individual was a Dasyu, again not a racial or ethnic label but a ritual and linguistic one—a person who interrupted the cycle of giving between gods and humans, and therefore a person who threatened cosmic order, r’ta (RV) or aša (AV). Rituals performed in the right words were the core of being an Aryan.
Similarities between the rituals excavated at Sintashta and Arkaim and those described later in the RV have solved, for many, the problem of Indo-Iranian origins.46 The parallels include a reference in RV 10.18 to a kurgan (“let them … bury death in this hill”), a roofed burial chamber supported with posts (“let the fathers hold up this pillar for you”), and with shored walls (“I shore up the earth all around you; let me not injure you as I lay down this clod of earth”). This is a precise description of Sintashta and Potapovka-Filatovka grave pits, which had wooden plank roofs supported by timber posts and plank shoring walls. The horse sacrifice at a royal funeral is described in RV 1.162: “Keep the limbs undamaged and place them in the proper pattern. Cut them apart, calli
ng out piece by piece.” The horse sacrifices in Sintashta, Potapovka, and Filatovka graves match this description, with the lower legs of horses carefully cut apart at the joints and placed in and over the grave. The preference for horses as sacrificial animals in Sintashta funeral rituals, a species choice setting Sintashta apart from earlier steppe cultures, was again paralleled in the RV. Another verse in the same hymn read: “Those who see that the racehorse is cooked, who say, ‘It smells good! Take it away!’ and who wait for the doling out of the flesh of the charger—let their approval encourage us.” These lines describe the public feasting that surrounded the funeral of an important person, exactly like the feasting implied by head-and-hoof deposits of horses, cattle, goats, and sheep in Sintashta graves that would have yielded hundreds or even thousands of kilos of meat. In RV 5.85, Varuna released the rain by overturning a pot: “Varuna has poured out the cask, turning its mouth downward. With it the king of the whole universe waters the soil.” In Sacrificial Deposit 1 at Sintashta an overturned pot was placed between two rows of sacrificed animals—in a ritual possibly associated with the construction of the enormous Bolshoi Kurgan.47 Finally, the RV eloquently documents the importance of the poetry and speech making that accompanied all these events. “Let us speak great words as men of power in the sacrificial gathering” was the standard closing attached repeatedly to several different hymns (RV 2.12, 2.23, 2.28) in one of the “family books.” These public performances played an important role in attracting and converting celebrants to the Indo-Iranian ritual system and language.
The explosion of Sintashta innovations in rituals, politics, and warfare had a long-lasting impact on the later cultures of the Eurasian steppes. This is another reason why the Sintashta culture is the best and clearest candidate for the crucible of Indo-Iranian identity and language. Both the Srubnaya and the Andronovo horizons, the principal cultural groups of the Late Bronze Age in the Eurasian steppes (see chapter 16), grew from origins in the Potapovka-Sintashta complex.
A Srubnaya site excavated by this author contained surprising evidence for one more parallel between Indo-Iranian (and perhaps even Proto-Indo-European) ritual and archaeological evidence in the steppes: the midwinter New Year’s sacrifice and initiation ceremony, held on the winter solstice. Many Indo-European myths and rituals contained references to this event. One of its functions was to initiate young men into the warrior category (Männerbünde, korios), and its principal symbol was the dog or wolf. Dogs represented death; multiple dogs or a multi-headed dog (Cerberus, Saranyu) guarded the entrance to the Afterworld. At initiation, death came to both the old year and boyhood identities, and as boys became warriors they would feed the dogs of death. In the RV the oath brotherhood of warriors that performed sacrifices at midwinter were called the Vrátyas, who also were called dog-priests. The ceremonies associated with them featured many contests, including poetry recitation and chariot races.48
At the Srubnaya settlement of Krasnosamarskoe (Krasno-sa-MAR-sko-yeh) in the Samara River valley, we found the remains of an LBA midwinter dog sacrifice, a remarkable parallel to the reconstructed midwinter New Year ritual, dated about 1750 BCE. The dogs were butchered only at midwinter, many of them near the winter solstice, whereas the cattle and sheep at this site were butchered throughout the year. Dogs accounted for 40% of all the animal bones from the site. At least eighteen dogs were butchered, probably more. Nerissa Russell’s studies showed that each dog head was burned and then carefully chopped into ten to twelve small, neat, almost identical segments with axe blows. The postcranial remains were not chopped into ritually standardized little pieces, and none of the cattle or sheep was butchered like this. The excavated structure at Krasnosamarskoe probably was the place where the dog remains from a midwinter sacrifice were discarded after the event. They were found in an archaeological context assigned to the early Srubnaya culture, but early Srubnaya was a direct outgrowth from Potapovka and Abashevo, the same circle as Sintashta, and nearly the same date. Krasnosamarskoe shows that midwinter dog sacrifices were practiced in the middle Volga steppes, as in the dog-priest initiation rituals described in the RV. Although such direct evidence for midwinter dog rituals has not yet been recognized in Sintashta settlements, many individuals buried in Sintashta graves wore necklaces of dog canine teeth. Nineteen dog canine pendants were found in a single collective grave with eight youths—probably of initiation age—under a Sintashta kurgan at Kammenyi Ambar 5, kurgan 4, grave 2.49
In many small ways the cultures between the upper Don and Tobol rivers in the northern steppes showed a common kinship with the Aryans of the Rig Veda and Avesta. Between 2100 and 1800 BCE they invented the chariot, organized themselves into stronghold-based chiefdoms, armed themselves with new kinds of weapons, created a new style of funeral rituals that involved spectacular public displays of wealth and generosity, and began to mine and produce metals on a scale previously unimagined in the steppes. Their actions reverberated across the Eurasian continent. The northern forest frontier began to dissolve east of the Urals as it had earlier west of the Urals; metallurgy and some aspects of Sintashta settlement designs spread north into the Siberian forests. Chariotry spread west through the Ukrainian steppe MVK culture into southeastern Europe’s Monteoru (phase Ic1-Ib), Vatin, and Otomani cultures, perhaps with the satrm dialects that later popped up in Armenian, Albanian, and Phrygian, all of which are thought to have evolved in southeastern Europe. (Pre-Greek must have departed before this, as it did not share in the satem innovations.) And the Ural frontier was finally broken—herding economies spread eastward across the steppes. With them went the eastern daughters of Sintashta, the offspring who would later emerge into history as the Iranian and Vedic Aryans. These eastern and southern connections finally brought northern steppe cultures into face-to-face contact with the old civilizations of Asia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes
Between about 2300 and 2000 BCE the sinews of trade and conquest began to pull the far-flung pieces of the ancient world together into a single interacting system. The mainspring that drove inter-regional trade was the voracious demand of the Asiatic cities for metal, gems, ornamental stones, exotic woods, leather goods, animals, slaves, and power. Participants gained access to and control over knowledge of the urban centers and their power-attracting abilities—a source of social prestige in most societies.1 Ultimately, whether through cultural means of emulation and resistance or political means of treaty and alliance, a variety of regional centers linked their fortunes to those of the paramount cities of the Near East, Iran, and South Asia. Regional centers in turn extended their influence outward, partly in a search for raw materials for trade, and partly to feed their own internal appetites for power. On the edges of this expanding, uncoordinated system of consumption and competition were tribal cultures that probably had little awareness of its urban core, at least initially (figures table 16.1 and table 16.2). But eventually they were drawn in. By 1500 BCE chariot-driving mercenaries not too far removed from the Eurasian steppes, speaking an Old Indic language, created the Mitanni dynasty in northern Syria in the heart of the urban Near East.2
How did tribal chiefs from the steppes intrude into the dynastic politics of the Near East? Where else did they go? To understand the crucial role that Eurasian steppe cultures played in the knitting together of the ancient world during the Bronze Age, we should begin in the heartland of cities, where the demand for raw materials was greatest.
BRONZE AGE EMPIRES AND THE HORSE TRADE
About 2350 BCE Sargon of Akkad conquered and united the feuding kingdoms of Mesopotamia and northern Syria into a single super-state—the first time the world’s oldest cities were ruled by one king. The Akkadian state lasted about 170 years. It had economic and political interests in western and central Iran, leading to increased trade, occasionally backed up by military expeditions. Images of horses, distinguished from asses and onagers by their hanging manes, short ears, and bushy tails, began to app
ear in Near Eastern art during the Akkadian period, although they still were rare and exotic animals. Some Akkadian seals had images of men riding equids in violent scenes of conflict (figure 16.3). Perhaps a few Akkadian horses were acquired from the chiefs and princes of western Iran known to the Akkadians as the Elamites.
Figure 16.1 Cultures of the steppes and the Asian civilizations between about 2200 and 1800 BCE, with the locations of proven Bronze Age mines in the steppes and the Zeravshan valley.
Elamite was a non-Indo-European language, now extinct, then spoken across western Iran. A string of walled cities and trade centers stood on the Iranian plateau, revealed by excavations at Godin, Malyan, Konar Sandal, Hissar, Shar-i-Sokhta, Shahdad, and other places. Malyan, the ancient city of Anshan, the largest city on the plateau, certainly was an Elamite city allied to the Elamite king in Susa. Some of the other brick-built towns, almost all of them smaller than Malyan, were part of an alliance called Shimashki, located north of Malyan and south of the Caspian Sea. Among the fifty-nine personal names recorded in the Shimashki alliance, only twelve can be classified as Elamite; the others are from unknown non-Indo-European languages. East of the Iranian plateau, the Harappan civilization of Indo-Pakistan, centered in huge mudbrick cities on the Indus River, used its own script to record a language that has not been definitively deciphered but might have been related to modern Dravidian. The Harappan cities exported precious stones, tropical woods, and metals westward on ships that sailed up the Persian Gulf, through a chain of coastal kingdoms scattered from Oman to Kuwait. Harappa probably was the country referred to as “Melukkha” in the Mesopotamian cuneiform records.3
Figure 16.2 Civilizations of Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, and the Indus valley about 2200–1800 BCE.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 44