“The Bridge between Eastern and Western Cultures” Volume 5 Number 1 Summer 2007

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The Silk Road is a semi-annual publi-cation of the Silkroad Foundation. TheSilk Road can also be viewed on-lineat <http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/toc/newsletter.html>. Please feelfree to contact us with any questionsor contributions. Guidelines for con-tributors may be found in Vol. 2, No.1 (June 2004) on the website.

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Editor: Daniel C. Waughdwaugh@u.washington.edu

© 2007 Silkroad Foundation© 2007 by authors of individual ar-ticles and holders of copyright, asspecified, to individual images.

From the Editor’s Desktop

Richthofen’s “Silk Roads”: Towardthe Archaeology of a Concept

In the year now drawing to a closewe are marking the 130th

anniversary of Ferdinand Freiherrvon Richthofen’s publication of theterm “die Seidenstrasse,” the SilkRoad. Almost any discussion of theSilk Road today will begin with theobligatory reminder that the notedGerman geographer had coinedthe term, even if few seem toknow where he published it andwhat he really meant. For sometime now I have wondered exactlywhat the good Baron said, which,as it turns out was something bothnarrower and broader than whatthose who invoke him have tendedto suggest.

Rather than use my spaceprimarily for editorial comment onthe contents of this issue of ourjournal, I decided to undertake akind of archaeological investi-gation, digging a test pit todiscover what is in the layercontaining Richthofen’s originalformulation. Readers should bewarned that, l ike HeinrichSchliemann at Troy, I am going toignore most of the interveninglayers, which also merit closeattention, and try to focus on theone that contains the gold.However, unlike Schliemann, Ishould have little danger ofdigging right through it anddestroying other interestingevidence. Delimiting the rest ofthe stratigraphy, both above andbelow, is a project for futureresearch.

Ferdinand von Richthofen(1833-1905) [Fig. 1] was a scholarof impressive breadth and depth,who is honored as one of thefounders of modern geography as

a scholarly discipline (Oster-hammel 1987, p. 150). Trainedespecially in geomorphology, hestudied areas of East andSoutheast Asia, and then between1862 and 1868 worked in theAmerican West. Today a 3944 mpeak in Colorado bears his name.Between 1868 and 1872, he spentmuch of his time traveling inChina; his initial observations fromthose travels already appeared inan English edition in Shanghai in1872. While the political dis-turbances in Xinjiang preventedhis visiting that region, the rangeof mountains bordering the GansuCorridor on the south (Qilianshan)for a long time bore his name. Hisinitial academic position was as ageologist, but in 1886 he becamechair of the Geography De-

Fig. 1. Ferdinand Freiherr vonRichthofen (image source:Wikipedia Commons).

Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’ ..............1 Special feature on food: Georgia: A Culinary Crossroads...11 Food, Medicine & the Silk Road . 22 Seeking Mongolian Barbecue .... 36

Xiongnu Royal Grave at Tsaraam 44 Tsaraam Chinese Inscription ...... 56 Ancient Anatolian Tracks ........... 59 Mongolia exhibition book ........... 66 Dunhuang Centenary ................ 68 Upcoming programs .................. 73

Next Issue

Hermann Parzinger on Eurasianarchaeology

Reports on the 2007 SilkroadFoundation-Mongolian NationalMuseum excavations and surveyin Khovd aimag by Bryan Miller,Jessieca Leo, Veronica Josephand James Williams

Odbaatar on a Uighur cemeterynear Kharbalgas

Lin Ying on the Boma cup

and more…

partment at the University ofBerlin. Among the best known (ifnot most academically dedicated)of his students there was theyoung Swede, Sven Hedin, whoseadventures and discoveries inInner Asia would eventuallyovershadow those of his mentor.

Richthofen is best known for hisstudies of China, notably the fivevolumes published between 1877and 1912 which he never lived tocomplete, separate atlas volumes,and his two-volume travel diary.At first acquaintance, his 1877introduction to his China is asurprise, since it opens with achapter on Central Asia, by whichhe meant approximately what wenow call Xinjiang — that is, thearea bounded by the AltaiMountains in the north, Tibet in thesouth, the watersheds of themajor Chinese rivers in the eastand the Pamir Mountains in theWest (Richthofen 1877-1912, Vol.I, p. 7). In other words, this “EastTurkestan” was central, whereasthat which lay west of the Pamirs,and even the loess plains to theeast, the heart of agriculturalChina, were to him periphery (onRichthofen’s contributions toCentral Asian geography, seeChichagov 1983). Most of themaps in the book are centered onthe Tarim Basin and extend fromthe Caspian to Chang’an. Indeedthe Inner Asian emphasis of muchof the book provides the contextfor his development of the conceptof the Silk Roads. We can also seein Richthofen’s emphasis theembryo of what in HalfordMackinder’s formulation severaldecades later became thegeopolitical Eurasian “Heartland.”

As Ute Wardenga has indicated,Richthofen was important indeveloping as a field of study theregional geography of Asia(Wardenga 2005). In an era todaywhen desiccation of the steppelands seems to be proceedingapace, we can especiallyappreciate his ideas about theimportance of wind-blownsediment from Central Asia

contributing to the buildup of soilin the eastern plains of China. Hisunderstanding of wind erosion wasa key to the development of SvenHedin’s ideas regarding thechanging location of Lake Lop Nor.Richthofen’s ideas about theimpact of climate change onhuman settlement are directlyrelevant to any history of what weas a matter of course today label“The Silk Roads.”

As Richthofen himself makesclear (Op. cit., pp. 1, 722ff),among the most importantinfluences on his thinking aboutAsian geography was the accountof Alexander von Humboldt’stravels in 1829, L’Asie Centrale.The young Richthofen hadattended lectures by Gustav Rose,a mineralogist who had par-ticipated in Humboldt’s expedition(Zögner 1998). Richthofen alsohad the highest praise for themassive compilation by Carl Ritter,Asien (on Ritter’s influence, seeOsterhammel 1987, pp. 162-166).He seems initially to havesubscribed to Ritter’s idea thatInner Asia was the original homeof humans, even if later heabandoned that speculation(Hedin 1933, p. 83).1 The newarchaeological discoveries in thatregion about which he learned inthe last years of his life, even ifthey were not shedding light onearliest man, could havereinforced his original ideas aboutthe centrality of Central Asia.Arguably his indebtedness toHumboldt and Ritter might beworth closer examination if wewish to probe the origins of theSilk Road concept.

The second surprise for meabout Vol. I of Richthofen’s Chinais his interest in human geography(for a different view, Osterhammel1987, pp. 180-181; on his geologysee Jäkel 2005). I expected hisfocus to be physical geography,which he treats only in the firsthalf of this volume although ingreater detail in Vols. II and III,where he weaves into his analysisthe observations made during his

travels. In the conclusion to Vol. Ihe is quite explicit about what heconsiders the correct approach tothe study of geography. One muststart with studying geology andthe physical landscape, but thena geographer should move on toa second stage of analysis,focusing on human interactionwith a changing environment(Richthofen 1877-1912, Vol. I, pp.726ff). Not surprisingly then, wediscover that a significant part ofhis introduction to China is reallya history of human activity acrossEurasia, a history of travel,exploration, and the exchange ofcultural information. In short,even though he barely employsthe term, it is a history of the SilkRoads. His letters to Hedin in1890, 1892 and 1893, repeat hisearlier advice. He chides Hedinfor wanting to go off to explorewithout acquiring first sufficientacademic training in geology, atthe same time that he writes ofthe significance of the Tarim Basinand Aral Sea region for humanhistory (Hedin 1933, pp. 74-75,83, 95-96).

We can see where some of thethemes in China lead by lookingahead to the course of lecturesRichthofen offered twice in the1890s on patterns of humansettlement (Siedlung) andcommunication (Verkehr) in theirrelationship to physical geography(Richthofen 1908). He drew onexamples of human activity fromearly to modern times and rangingaround the globe. While his viewsin these lectures regarding levelsof culture of various peoples mightraise some eyebrows today (seeOsterhammel 1987), we canappreciate his emphasis on theimportance of human interactionacross space and time. Humansettlement (broadly conceived) isnot static. Geographical conditionschange, and political and culturalfactors come into play. To aconsiderable degree, humandevelopment from more“primitive” to higher culturalstages is a response to thechallenges of the surrounding

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environment but is also influencedby exchange between areas ofhuman settlement. Thus Richt-hofen is taking a “geosystems”approach to writing humaneconomic geography, in whichexchange creates conditions forthe development of more complexsocieties. The emergence of nodalpoints for exchange is a directconsequence of their occupyingkey positions on the routes ofcommunication. Communicationinvariably involves the intersectionof routes, the points of inter-section often joining land routeswith water routes. As JürgenOsterhammel has suggested, incertain ways Richthofen’s ideasabout socio-economic develop-ment anticipated “modernizationtheory” as it would emerge in thewritings of Max Weber (Oster-hammel 1987, p. 189).

Of particular interest here is thefact that for Richthofen in thelonger historical view communi-cations by water seem, ifanything, to have been moreimportant than communicationsby land. He admits though that welack sources to say anythingconcrete about those routes inEast Asia before the time ofPtolemy, whose evidence isdifficult to interpret and seems infact to reach only as far as the Gulfof Tonkin. The initiative in usingthe sea routes seems to havecome from the West, not fromChina, although in the fourth andfifth centuries, Chinese shipsmade their way into the IndianOcean. The sea trade blossomedin the Islamic period and in Mongoltimes, but seems to have beencontrolled largely by thewesterners. It is perhaps in-dicative of Richthofen’s prioritiesthat, when he delivered lecturesto the German Geological Societyanticipating some of the themesof the first volume of his China,the lecture on communication bysea (Richthofen 1876) precededthe one on communication overthe Silk Roads (Richthofen 1877).2

The father of the “Silk Road”concept was also the founding

director (1902-5) of the Institutfür Meereskunde (Institute for theStudy of the Seas) in Berlin.

The specific context forRichthofen’s use of the term“Seidenstrasse” in his China, Vol.I, is his examination of the historyof geographic knowledge in theWest with regard to China andconversely, in China with regardto the West. He devotes particularattention to the earliest acquisitionof this geographic knowledge inthe relatively narrow periodencompassing the Han Dynastyand Imperial Rome. In this largesection of his book, Richthofenanalyzes the evidence in Greekand Roman sources which firstspeak of the Serer, thoseconnected with the trade in silk,or Serica, the land of silk. Heexamines as well the evidence inthe Chinese annals concerning thefirst missions to the WesternRegions and the consequent Hancampaigns leading to expansioninto Central Asia. Much of this isthe now familiar story of thebeginnings of the “Silk Road.” Inciting some of the pioneeringanalyses of exchange with China(notably by Joseph de Guignesand Jean Baptiste Bourguignond’Anville in the 18th century),Richthofen acknowledges thatmuch of what he has to say aboutthe trade routes is not new(Richthofen 1877-1912, Vol. I, pp.460-462, 476). He also drewheavily upon the publication adecade prior to his own book ofCathay and the Way Thither byHenry Yule,whose engravedportrait oc-cupied a place ofhonor in Richt-hofen’s Berlina p a r t m e n t(Hedin 1933, p.33), and thetranslations ofearly Chinesesources by EmilBretschneider.R i c h t h o f e n ’ ssources weretextual, not

archaeological, and he was furtherlimited by having to rely ontranslations of the Chinese texts.3

Richthofen noted that followingthe establishment of a Hanpresence in Inner Asia in thesecond century BCE, referencesby the western sources to theSerer increased in frequency. Aftera period of decline toward the endof the former Han, under the latterHan the trade revived to flourishfor about a century down to ca.150 CE. As we now know,subsequent publications ofadditional primary source textsand especially the new ar-chaeological discoveries wouldsoon substantially revise manydetails of Richthofen’s analysis(see especially Herrmann 1910,1938). The revision of the“standard” history of the SilkRoads continues today.

Of particular importance inRichthofen’s narrative are thegeography and world map ofMarinus of Tyre, known to us onlyindirectly through Ptolemy(Richthofen 1877-1912, Vol. I, pp.477ff). Marinus’ information aboutthe overland route from theMediterranean to the borders ofthe land of silk derived from anaccount by the agents of aPhoenician merchant MaësTitianus. While Richthofenadmitted the difficulty of matchingMarinus’ and Ptolemy’s placenames with ones known from theChinese sources, he nonethelessidentified “Issedon Serica” withKhotan [Fig. 2] and “Sera

Fig. 2. Richthofen’s Issedon Serica (detail of map,China, Vol. I, facing p. 500).

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Metropolis” with Chang’an, andconcluded that the routedescribed was that passing southof the Taklamakan desert. WhereRichthofen differed from someearlier commentators was in hisquestioning whether the routethrough the Pamirs went viaSamarkand and the FerghanaValley. On the basis of the latestRussian geographical explora-tions, he felt there was reason tothink that the early silk merchantshad traveled in a more direct linefrom Bactria to the east throughthe Pamir-Alai.

While this discussion introducesthe term “Seidenstrasse” in thesingular specifically with referenceto Marinus’ route [Fig. 3], it alsouses the term in the plural forroutes both east and west of thePamirs (Parzinger 2005 notes thatRichthofen used the plural). Hetakes pains to emphasize that “itwould be a mistake to considerthat it [Marinus’ route] was theonly one at any given moment oreven the most important one.” Ingeneral, rather than “Seiden-strassen,” Richthofen prefers theterms “Verkehr” (communication),

“Strassen” (roads orroutes), “Haupt-strassen” (mainroutes) or “Handels-strassen” (traderoutes), even as hestresses that it wasthe trade in silkwhich fueled thedevelopment of theInner Asian con-tacts.4 When helater discusses theoverland traderoutes in the Islamicperiod and Pego-lotti’s 14th-centurydescription of theroute to China,Richthofen mappedthem respectively asthe “Hauptverkehr-strasse” and“Haupt-Handels-strasse,” the latterrunning from northof the Caspian,

south of the Aral Sea and thennorth of the Tien Shan to Barkol,Hami, and the Gansu Corridor(Richthofen 1877-1912, Vol. I,facing p. 566 and p. 672).

This is not to say that in focusingon the routes beginning in the Hanperiod Richthofen is oblivious tointeractions across Eurasia earlier,but he portrays the earlier tradecontacts as episodic exchangefrom hand to hand, not assomething organized andinvolving long distance travel andlarge quantities of goods (Ibid., p.458). Only with the extensiveresults of modern archaeologyacross Inner Asia are we now fullyappreciating how widespread werethose earlier contacts whichmoved in a great many directions(for a good overview, seeParzinger 2005). For Richthofenit is important that, during whathe considers was the relativelybrief flourishing of the Eurasiantrade under the Han, Chinesemerchants (presumably he meansethnic Chinese) were traveling allthe way into Central Asia.However, he does not claim thatmerchants traveled the whole

breadth of Eurasia from China tothe Mediterranean. Clearly theidea of trade in stages fits withinhis scheme.

At first blush, we might bepuzzled by Richthofen’s assertionthat, for several centuries after theHan withdrew from Central Asia inthe second century CE, overlandexchanges of any consequenceceased. His own evidence seemsto contradict this, where he takesup (granted, in a rathercompressed way) developmentssuch as the spread of Buddhisminto China, the rise of the TürkEmpire, and evidence in the Suiannals and in accounts such asthose of Faxian and Xuanzang. Infact, when he talks of cessation ofexchanges he seems specificallyto be referring to the trade, ifdiminished, now being in thehands of merchants other than theChinese (Richthofen 1877-1912,Vol. I, p. 523). The otherimportant factor in his view wasthat the transmission of the secretof silk to Byzantium in the 6th

century and consequent rise of asilk industry there diminishedsignificantly in the West demandfor Chinese silk.

He thus justifies his assertionthat when the Tang Dynasty re-conquered Central Asia, the verynature of the silk trade hadchanged. By this time, silk wasnot just a form of luxury textile, itwas also a form of currency, incentral China and in the Chinesenorthwest. The changes in turnaffected Chinese interest ingeographical knowledge. Whilenew information about the Westwas being acquired under theTang, there was no longer an effortto integrate it with the old into alarger picture of world geography.Even though there was aconcerted government effort togather information, especiallyabout Inner Asia, Chinese horizonsshrank to that which immediatelyadjoined their borders, and withthe Tang withdrawal from CentralAsia after the middle of the eighthcentury, those horizons them-

Fig. 3. Richthofen’s caption to his map showingMarinus’ “Silk Road.”

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selves diminished (Ibid., pp. 547,578).5 The rise of Islam cappedthis fundamental shift away fromthe kind of interaction acrossEurasia that had taken placecenturies earlier. In short, as heconcluded in his presentation tothe Geological Society in Berlin,“The concept of the trans-continental Silk Roads had lost itsmeaning” (Richthofen 1877, p.122).

At very least we might point outthat Richthofen’s analysis for theTang era ignores the over-whelming evidence of pervasiveforeign influences and contacts inthat period. He is simply wrongabout an absence of evidence forcultural interaction between Persiaand China in the pre-Mongolperiod (p. 556). Yet at the sametime, he makes it clear that thesea trade flourished, and evidencein the Chinese annals indicatesChinese vessels made it all theway to Siraf in the Persian Gulf.Idrisi (12th century) even has themvisiting Aden (p. 568). For themost part though, this trade wasin the hands of Arabs and Persians(p. 578).

It may be easier to agree withRichthofen that during the post-Han period, the West in effectforgot what it had known aboutChina.6 Indeed the establishmentof a Nestorian presence in Chinaunder the Tang seems to have leftno trace in Western geographicalknowledge (p. 555). While Islamicgeographical works wouldeventually include much newinformation about Central andEast Asia, little of this becameknown in medieval Europe.

Even though the conditions fortravel and cultural exchangechanged dramatically under theMongol Empire the impact of thison geographical knowledge wasfar more pronounced in the Westthan in China. Richthofenexpresses disappointment in notfinding a conceptual change in theChinese understanding of theworld. Instead, he finds geo-graphical inquiry l imited to

traditional kinds of compilation,despite the evidence for thesignificant presence of Chinese inwestern parts of the MongolEmpire where they must have hadample opportunity to learn aboutthe wider world (p. 587).

Finally, regarding Richthofen’streatment of the East-Westexchange of geographicalknowledge, I might note theoddity of his sweeping commentsabout Ming isolation (p. 619). Hehimself understands that such wasnot the case in the early 15th

century, when there wereembassies exchanged with theTimurids. Even though he isacquainted with Clavijo, heignores what the Spaniard tells usabout the Chinese in Samarkand.And there is only a passingmention in Richthofen’s accountconcerning one of the greatChinese fleets in the Indian Oceanduring the first third of the 15th

century.

Richthofen’s use of the term“Silk Roads” is really quite limited.He applies it, sparingly, only to theHan period, in discussing therelationship between politicalexpansion and trade on the onehand and geographical knowledgeon the other. The term refers inthe first instance to a very specificeast-west overland route definedby a single source, even thoughhe recognizes that at that timethere were other routes in variousdirections (pp. 459-462) and atleast to some extent appreciatesthat silk was not the only productcarried along them. If the SilkRoad of Marinus was aHauptstrasse, it is only becausethat is the route which his loneinformant used.

This limited use of the conceptserved Richthofen’s immediatepurpose of explaining thetransmission of geographicalknowledge and the evidence of afew ancient sources. In fact henever uses the term in discussingthe later part of that history, nordid he intend that the concept beextended to other periods and an

unlimited range of economic andcultural exchanges across Eurasia.While the title of his lecture to theGeological Society included theterm “Silk Roads,” the substanceof the lecture reiterated thearguments of the book.7 By thetime he read his general lectureson settlement and communicationa number of years later, he did noteven use the term “Seiden-strasse.” Indeed, trade in silkoccupied less than a page in thatnarrative, where, in his discussionof ancient human “Handels-verkehr,” gold, precious stonesand spices merited moreattention. Nor did Richthofen usethe term “Seidenstrasse” in hiscorrespondence with Hedin, thelast letters of which date from thetime when Hedin’s discoveries andthose of Aurel Stein and theGerman archaeologists under thesands of the Tarim Basin werebecoming known. So Richthofenboth denied that the concept oftranscontinental “Silk Roads” hadany broader application at thesame time that he neversubscribed to a narrow concept ofan ancient East-West super-highway where the central part ofthe route was of little consequenceexcept as a transmission beltbetween the civilizations of Eastand West. His narrow interestpertained to analysis of specificwritten sources, whereas hisconcept of human geography wasin fact much broader than thosewho invoke his “Silk Road” seemto have understood.

Once he had enunciated the ideaof “Silk Roads” though, did it catchon? This is a subject for a separatestudy, but let us look quickly atsome evidence. Reviewers of hisChina seem to have been littleinterested in the phrase, focusingtheir attention instead on whetheror not he was correct in hisdiscussion of dating and precisionof the information contained in theancient texts (e.g., Gutschmid1880). There is no indication thatHedin in his early books paid anyattention to the concept. In factwhen he went off to Central Asia,

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he evinced little understanding ofthe cultural history and humangeography which was so importantto Richthofen. This, despite thefact that Hedin had beenintroduced to China, Vol. I, beforehe went to study in Berlin in 1889,and despite Richthofen’s urgingsthat he pay attention to InnerAsian human history. As we shallsee, Hedin eventually invoked hismentor’s phrase, albeit inci-dentally to other priorities.

The scholar who seems first tohave done something with“Seidenstrasse” was AugustHerrmann, a proper analysis ofwhose work cannot be my taskhere. Herrmann’s 1910 book wasthe first to use “Seidenstrasse” inits title. Its use of the term, as inHerrmann’s subsequent writings,seems to have been consistentwith Richthofen’s limited originalintent. That is, the task Herrmannset himself was to review theearliest evidence concerning East-West geographical knowledge, theemphasis being on the relativelyshort period embracing the HanDynasty. Herrmann had in hand agood many texts which had notbeen available to his predecessor,incorporated new information fromexploration and archaeology, andseems, by and large, to have hada much deeper knowledge ofGreek and Roman geography thandid Richthofen.

Only in passing (Herrmann1910, p. 10) did Herrmanncomment on Richthofen’sformulation “Seidenstrasse,”suggesting (not entirelyaccurately) that Richthofen hadconfined it to describing theChinese route into Central Asia,even though it might also beextended to describe as well theroute westwards to Syria.Herrmann justified his “correction”with reference to work publishedby Friedrich Hirth in 1889regarding the eastern trade.Following the appearance of hismonograph, Herrmann publishedin 1915 an essay on “The SilkRoads from China to the RomanEmpire.”8 He continued to work on

the early sources, reconstructing(somewhat controversially, Ibelieve) the ancient Chinese mapsand including in his still usefulHistorical and Commercial Atlas ofChina several maps on which thequite numerous branches of the“Silk Roads” are i l lustrated(Herrmann 1935).9

Herrmann’s work culminated ina second “silk road” volume(Herrmann 1938) which left onlyshreds of the original detail ofRichthofen’s scheme intact andpresented at least the illusion thatone might really be able toquantify distances in the ancienttexts. In particular, following onthe first reviews of Richthofen,Herrmann emphasized how hispredecessor had misconstrued thereference points used by Ptolemyand failed to understand thatPtolemy had arbitarily halved thedistances on the eastern part ofhis map. Marinus, his source, hadcommitted the opposite mistakeof overextending them. Herrmannthus set about to reconstruct moreaccurately Marinus’ lost map.Probably the most significantconclusion he reached was thatMarinus’ route was not thesouthern one around theTaklamakan but rather the twointersecting northern ones.According to Herrmann, IssedonSerica referred not to Khotan, butto the region farther east, Shan-Shan/Kroraina (i.e. includingCharchlik and Lou-Lan), eventhough, somewhat illogically itseems, Sera Metropolis was notChang’an, as Richthofen had it,but Wu-Wei, farther to the west.By 1938 Herrmann was using theterm Seidenstrassen (plural) quitefreely in his text. Probably theonly reason he did not do so inthe title of the monograph —where he used “Land der Seide”to refer to the ancients’ China —was the fact that his colleagueSven Hedin (who wrote a briefpreface to Hermann 1938) hadpublished two years earlier hisown book entitled The Silk Road.

It is a bit difficult to imagine thatHerrmann’s dense analyses of the

Silk Roads sparked an interest inthe broad reading public. If notHerrmann then, what about Hedinor Stein? Any analysis of theirimpact will need to take intoaccount what seems to have beenan insatiable appetite of largeaudiences in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries forlectures and books on exploration,adventure travel, and archaeo-logical discovery. We may well askwhether the explorers andacademics invented the “SilkRoad” as a popular phenomenonor whether, instead, the impetuswas public demand. Stein’sexplorations were often reportedin the London Times (Wang 2002);Hedin’s collection of newspaperclippings concerning his exploitsextends over several meters ofarchival shelving.10 In the daysbefore television, the lecture tourwas a significant form of publicentertainment. Hedin had theability to mesmerize audienceswith tales about his foolishescapade of trying to cross theTaklamakan in 1896. Stein, I thinkmuch more reluctantly, alsolectured.

From his earliest days as anexplorer, Hedin was successful infinding good publishers for hisnarratives. Richthofen expressedamazement at how quickly theyoung Swede could write up histravels and have them in print(e.g., Hedin 1933, p. 82);producing the books became kindof a Hedin family businessenterprise. Both Hedin and Steinproduced rather bulky “popularnarratives” of their explorations aswell as dense scholarly compendiawith technical details. Modernreaders often find themselves putoff by even the “popularnarratives.” I happen to like Steinfor his detail about excavatingancient garbage dumps and dislikeHedin for his tiresome remindersof temperatures, stream flow,altitude and bad weather. I haveheard exactly the opposite opinionfrom others. Hedin was apublishing sensation in Germanyafter he was taken on by the firm

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of Brockhaus in Leipzig, whichissued long, intermediate lengthand short versions of the samebooks and reprinted them in largenumbers (Hedin 1933, p. 43;Waugh 2001). There was somecompetition between Stein andHedin in terms of publication.11

Of course much of the Hedinmaterial had little to do with theancient silk roads, but by the1920s there were compactlywritten popularizations (not theearlier so-called “popular nar-ratives”) which would have ledreaders to the subject, if notnecessarily to the specific term“Silk Road.” Among them wasHedin’s autobiography, with itscolorful verbal excess about hisdiscovery of Dandan Oilik, wherehe “won, in the heart of the desert,a new field for archaeology” andstood “like the prince in theenchanted wood, having wakenedto new life the city which hasslumbered for a thousand years”(Hedin 1925/1996, p. 188). VonLe Coq produced a decentoverview of the German Turfanexpeditions, mixing ethnographicand archaeological material (LeCoq 1928), and Stein’s LowellInstitute (Boston) lecturesappeared as In Ancient CentralAsian Tracks (Stein 1933). All ofthese books have been reprintedand are still available.

By the 1930s, Richthofen’soriginal formulation was barelymore than a footnote. Hedin, infact, may have been the first toinvoke his “Silk Road” for itsromantic aura as a means ofmarketing a book which had littleto do with what his mentor hadsaid. The book in question, TheSilk Road (first published inSwedish as Sidenvägen in 1936)was soon translated into Englishand German, and the Germanedition within a few short yearshad been reprinted at least tentimes. For the first three-fourthsof the book Hedin barely mentionsthe Silk Road. Then he pastes in aperfunctory 10-page overview ofits history, mentioning bothRichthofen and Herrmann.12

Otherwise, but for a fewphotographs and sketches of partsof the Great Wall and watchtowersand a paragraph or two on theSino-Swedish discoveries, there isnothing. The book is really aboutHedin’s extended motor journeyfrom 1933-35 in the last stages ofthe multi-year expedition he hadorganized. The book is typicalHedin, largely a travel taleinvolving occasional excitingadventures during the period ofcivil unrest in Xinjiang. The mirageof the title notwithstanding, it ishard to imagine that with thisfocus the book could have servedas the catalyst for the moremodern overblown enthusiasmsfor the Silk Road. The moderndevelopments include suchexcesses as the NTK-CCTV multi-million yen 30-part televisionspectacular of the 1980s, full ofblowing dust, the quicklystultifying music of Kitaro, andoften inane commentary, even ifsome of the footage is quiteinspiring. “Silk Road Studies” nowmay mean modern geopoliticaland security studies of oilpipelines, Central Asian trans-portation and ethnic unrest.13

So in its inception Seidenstrassewas a convenient shorthand,auxiliary to a specific treatment ofancient written sources. Does thisthen mean that we should ignorethe good Baron who invented theterm? On the contrary, I wouldargue that we can benefit fromreading him, not for the detailswhich in so many cases are nowobsolete or to club him for his“orientalist” and “imperialist”views, but for his breadth anddepth of understanding of theinteraction between man and theenvironment and for his ap-preciation of the significant role ofcommunication in human ex-change across the centuries andin various parts of the globe. Hecertainly is one of those whoshared with other pioneeringscholars in the nineteenth centuryan understanding of the centralityof Central Asia. Even though henever extended his neologism tolater periods, his vision en-

compassed much of what we findin the more expansive definitionsof “Silk Roads” today. He wrotewell and his magisterial pagesbreathe a willingness to tacklelarge ideas. True, his lectures onsettlement and communicationare textbookish, an accuratereflection of their genre. To adegree though that impressionderives from the fact that what wefind in them is ideas that we nowtake for granted, even if when firstenunciated they may have stuckhis listeners as new. In contrast,his China is anything butsimplistic. For its time, despite itsbiases, internal contradictions andthe limitations of its source base,it tells the story of the Silk Roadsamazingly well. Possibly re-reading Richthofen wouldencourage us to excavate in thelower layers of the culturaldeposit, which conceal the worksof his eminent predecessors who,like Richthofen, are nowadays littleread. We just might discover thattheir vision too in many waysanticipated that of our reputedlymore enlightened and betterinformed times.

Of course another response toRichthofen might be to follow theadvice of Warwick Ball and dismissthe concept of the Silk Road as ameaningless neologism whichbears little relationship to therealities on the ground in earlyEurasia (Ball 1998). Certainly themain point in his ex cathedrapronouncements about themodern popularization of theconcept has its merits, even if hehas not read his Richthofen, getssome of his facts wrong, andmisunderstands importantaspects of how Eurasian exchangeoperated in earlier times. I wouldreadily admit the concept of theSilk Roads is lacking in analyticalvalue, especially if it includesunder its umbrella almost any andall forms of human exchangeacross all of Eurasia and over twoor more millennia. Yet to interpretit this broadly seems consistentwith Richthofen’s vision of whathuman geography was all about,even if to do so ignores the limited

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use he made of the specificphrase.

Thus, I am quite comfortablewith presenting as part of “The SilkRoad,” on the pages which followhere, articles on topics asdisparate as the transmission offood and medicines, Chinesemirrors and lacquered chariots inthe royal Xiongnu burials ofBuriatia, and the historic traderoutes in Eastern Anatolia. All thisinforms us of the larger patternsof communications amongstcommunities across Eurasia. Muchof the interesting evidence cannotbe traced to a single source orindividual or a particular date. AsRichthofen understood, the routeswere indeed many, ideas mayhave been more important thanmaterial goods, and as with anyhistory, there was change overtime.

Daniel C. WaughProfessor EmeritusUniversity of Washington (Seattle)dwaugh@u.washington.edu

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. SusanWhitfield, Director of theInternational Dunhuang Project,for her suggestions, includingsome key bibliographicalreferences. Her expertiseconcerning the evolution of theconcept of the Silk Road is farsuperior to mine. Prof. Dr.Hermann Kreutzmann of the FreieUniversität Berlin, Dr. Helen Wang,Curator of East Asian Money in theDepartment of Coins and Medals,British Museum, and Dr. PhilippeForêt of the Swiss Federal Instituteof Technology (Zürich) have alsoprovided me with valuablesuggestions. I am indebted toProf. Dr. Dr. Hermann Parzinger,the President of the DeutschesArchäologisches Insitut, forsharing with me his unpublishedpaper, a version of which we shallpublish in a future number of thisjournal. Of course none of theseindividuals bears any responsibilityfor errors of commission oromission in my article.

References

Ball 1998Warwick Ball. “Following themythical road.” GeographicalMagazine 70/3 (1998): 18-23.

Chichagov 1983V. P. Chichagov. “Ferdinand vonRichthofen und die GeographieZentralasiens.” PetermannsGeographische Mitteilungen 127(1983): 221-230.

Gutschmid 1880Alfred von Gutschmid. Review of:Richthofen, China, Bd. 1. In:Zeitschrift der DeutschenMorgenländischen Gesellschaft 34(1880): 188-213.

Hedin 1925/1996My Life as an Explorer. Tr. AlfhildHuebsch (New York, etc.:Kodansha, 1996; first published1925, a translation from theSwedish Mitt l iv som upp-täcktsresande).

Hedin 1933Meister und Schüler. FerdinandFreiherr von Richthofen an SvenHedin. Introd. and annot. by SvenHedin. Berlin: Reimer, 1933.

Hedin 1936Sven Hedin. Sidenvägen. Enbilfärd genom Centralasien.Stockholm: Bonniers, 1936(English translation: The SilkRoad. New York: E. P. Dutton,1938; German translation: DieSeidenstrasse. 10. Aufl. Leipzig:Brockhaus, 1942; Japanesetranslation: Chûô Ajia: Tankenkikô zenshû. Tokyo, 1966).

Herrmann 1910Albert Herrmann. Die altenSeidenstrassen zwischen Chinaund Syrien. Beiträge zur altenGeographie Asiens. I. Abteilung.Einleitung. Die chinesischenQuellen. Zentralasien nach Sse-ma Ts’ien und den Annalen derHan-Dynastie. Quellen undForschungen zur alten Geschichteund Geographie. Heft 21. Berlin:Weidmannsche Buchhandlung,1910.

Herrmann 1935Albert Herrmann. Historical andCommercial Atlas of China.Harvard-Yenching Institute.Monograph series, Vol. 1(Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1935). The maps(not text) may be found on-lineat <http://map.huhai.net/>,accessed November 9, 2007.

Herrmann 1938Albert Herrmann. Das Land derSeide und Tibet im Lichte derAntike. Quellen und Forschungenzur Geschichte der Geographieund Völkerkunde. Bd. 1. Leipzig:K. F. Koehler, 1938.

Jäkel 2005Dieter Jäkel. “Ferdinand vonRichthofen’s contributions toChinese geology and geo-sciences.” Disiji yanjiu/QuaternarySciences 25/4 (2005): 409-431.

Le Coq 1928/1926Albert von Le Coq. BuriedTreasures of Chinese Turkestan:An Account of the Activities andAdventures of the Second andThird German Turfan Expeditions.Tr. Anna Barwell. London: Allen &Unwin, 1928 (German ed., 1926:Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkistan).

Osterhammel 1987Jürgen Osterhammel. “For-schungsreise und Kolonial-programm. Ferdinand vonRichthofen und die ErschließungChinas im 19. Jahrhundert.” In:Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 69(1987): 150-195.

Parzinger 2005Hermann Parzinger. “Ferdinandvon Richthofen’s ‘Silk Roads’Concept Reconsidered: AboutTransfers,Transports and Trans-continental Interaction.” Un-published paper presented at“Man and Environment in CentralAsia. International Symposium inHonour of Ferdinand vonRichthofen, October 6-8, 2005.”

Richthofen 1876Ferdinand von Richthofen. “Überden Seeverkehr nach und von

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China im Altertum und Mittelalter.”Verhandlungen der Gesellschaftfür Erdkunde zu Berlin 1876: 86-97.

Richthofen 1877Ferdinand von Richthofen. “Überdie zentralasiatischen Seiden-strassen bis zum 2. Jh. n. Chr.”Verhandlungen der Gesellschaftfür Erdkunde zu Berlin 1877: 96-122.

Richthofen 1877-1912Ferdinand von Richthofen. China.Ergebnisse eigener Reisen unddarauf gegründeter Studien. 5vols. Berlin: Reimer, 1877-1912;here Vol. 1.

Richthofen 1908Vorlesungen über AllgemeineSiedlungs- und Verkehrsgeo-graphie. Ed. Otto Schlüter. Berlin:Reimer, 1908.

Stein 1933/1974Aurel Stein. On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative ofThree Expeditions in InnermostAsia and Northwestern China.London: Macmillan, 1933; reprints1964, 1974 etc.

Wang 2002Helen Wang, ed. and introd. SirAurel Stein in The Times: acollection of over 100 referencesto Sir Aurel Stein and hisextraordinary expeditions toChinese Central Asia, India, Iran,Iraq and Jordan in The Timesnewspaper 1901-1943. London:Eastern Art Pub., 2002.

Wang 2007Helen Wang. “Sir Aurel Stein, thenext generation.” In: ElizabethErrington and Vesta SarkhoshCurtis, eds. From Persepolis to thePunjab: Exploring the Past in Iran,Afghanistan and Pakistan.London: British Museum Press,2007: 227-234.

Wardenga 2005Uta Wardenga. “Ferdinand vonRichthofen. Zum 100.Todestag am6. Oktober 2005.” <http://www.uni-leipzig.de/campus2009/

jubilaeen/2005/richthofen.html>,accessed November 6, 2007.

Waugh 2001Daniel C. Waugh, “A Sven HedinBibliography.” On-line at <http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/bibl iography/hedinb3.html>,accessed November 9, 2007.

Zögner 1998Lothar Zögner. “Ferdinand vonRichthofen — Neue Sicht auf einaltes Land,” In catalogue:Tsingtau. Ausstellung imDeutschen Historischen Museumvom 27. März bis 19. Juli 1998< h t t p : / / w w w . d h m . d e /ausstellungen/tsingtau/katalog/auf1_4.htm>, accessed Novem-ber 6, 2007.

Notes

1. As Prof. Ulla Ehrensvärd pointedout in her presentation at therecent symposium “Sven Hedinand Eurasia: Adventure,Knowledge, and Geopolitics” (heldin Stockholm, November 10,2007), Ritter’s cartographictechniques were very influential inBerlin, were emulated byRichthofen and, through him,Hedin.

2. He delivered his lecture on thesea routes on May 6, 1876, half ayear before he dated the prefaceto his China volume and sent it tothe printer. A note indicates thatthe lecture is an excerpt from thebook, where the correspondingmaterial begins on p. 503.Richthofen begins his talk with abrief consideration of the “Periplusof the Erythraean Sea,” which ofcourse is well known for being thefirst work to describe the impactof the monsoon winds andprovides a detailed itinerary of theroute from the Red Sea to the westcoast of India, culminating in amention China as a source of thesilk which comes overland toBactria and to the Ganges. Mostof the lecture is on the location ofPtolemy’s Kattigara, whichRichthofen argues must refer to acity in the Gulf of Tonkin. Earlierscholars had posited other

locations more closely connectedwith inland China.

3. “Da er niemals über Elemen-tarkenntnisse der chinesischenSprache hinauskam, fehlten ihmdie Voraussetzungen fürsinologische Quellenstudien”(Osterhammel 1987, p. 151).

4. A subsection of his discussionbeginning on p. 442 concerns theSeidenhandel (silk trade),anticipated in his earlier statement(p. 403): “Die Seide ist dastreibende Moment, welches durchein Jahrhundert den Verkehraufrecht erhält.” “Mit der Seidewanderte das Wort, mit dem dieChinesen sie bezeichneten” (p.443; also p. 474). His first use ofthe term “Silk Roads” is this:“Ergänzende Nachrichten überden westlichen Theil einer derfrüheren Seidenstrassen erhaltenwir wiederum durch Marinus, diehier ganze seinem Berichterstatterdem Agenten des MacedoniersMaës folgt” (p. 496). Afterspecifying Marinus’ route, hemakes it clear it was not the onlyone (“Die andere Strassen, welchedas Tarym-Becken in ver-schiedenen Richtungen durch-schnitten, kammen hier nicht inBetracht” [p. 497]; “Der Weg desAgenten von Maës war einer derdamaligen Handellstrassen…Aberes wäre ein Irrthum, sie für dieeinzige in jener Zeit, oder auch nurfür die wichtigste zu halten” [p.500]). He readily admits that newgeographical discoveries maymake it possible to specify moreprecisely the ancient routes: “Einesichere Aufklärung über denbisher betrachteten interessantenTheil des alten Seidenstrasse vonMaës darf erwartet werden, wennFedschenko einen Nachfolgerfinden, und das ganzeStrassensystem jener Gegendeingehender untersucht wordensollte” (p. 500). His index containsonly a single (and erroneous) pagereference to “Seidenstrasse” anda crossreference to “Sererstrasse.”The running head on p. 499 reads“Seidenstrasse des Marinus” eventhough there is nothing about iton the given page. The map facing

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p. 500 delineates in red “dieSeidenstrasse des Marinus.”

5. As Helen Wang has remindedme, Richthofen could have fleshedout his account with reference tothe An Lushan rebellion, whichnearly toppled the Tang, and theTibetan occupation of Central Asia.

6. “…So verlor sich doch imWesten allmälig die Kunde von derExistenz eines Volkes der Serer;denn die Chinesen waren aus denBazars verschwunden, derSeidenhandel zu Lande nahmwahrscheinlich bedeutend ab, undgelangte in die Hände von Völkern,die man unter ihren eigenenNamen kannte. Man fragte nichtnach ihrem weiteren Ursprung undbrauchte daher keine Serermehr…” (p. 523). Note, of course,that this is not an indication thatthere was no silk trade what-soever, but simply that it was nolonger being carried by Chinesemerchants.

7. The 1877 presentation beginswith allusions to how recentgeographical discoveries were nowmaking it possible and desirableto re-examine the ancient texts inorder to identify places theymentioned. After a compactoverview of the physicalgeography of Inner Asia, he movesquickly through nomadicconfrontations with sedentarysocieties and then takes up trade,in which the key product was silk.He reviews briefly the earliestmentions of silk, starting inChinese sources, and then focuseson what he sees as the dramaticconsequences of Han expansioninto Inner Asia. While there isevidence of silk getting to the Westand to India prior to the Han (viaKhotan), the advent of direct Hantrade across the Tarim Basinbeginning in 114 CE with the firstattested caravan, was aquantitative leap. Direct tradeacross Inner Asia was possiblehistorically only when a singlepolitical power controlled much ofthe route — obviously under theMongols, and to a lesser degreeduring the period of Tang control

of the Western Lands. Hesummarizes the argument in hisbook concerning Han expansionand the evidence in the Chineseannals that the southern routearound the Tarim Basin antedatedin importance the northern one.In support of the book’sarguments that the Westernmerchants might have taken moredirect route from Balkh throughthe Pamirs, he cites in his papernew reports on explorations whichhe had received while his book wasalready in press.

8. “Die Seidenstrassen von Chinanach dem Römischen Reich,” inMitteilungen der GeographischenGesellschaft in Wien 1915: 472ff.(cited Herrmann 1938, p. 3 n. 2).

9. See especially: http://map.huhai.net/24.jpg and http://map.huhai.net/37.jpg, the firstshowing the Han routes in CentralAsia; the second the situation inCentral Asia ca. 660.

10. I owe the information aboutthe clippings on Hedin to AxelOdelberg, who discussed hisforthcoming biography of Hedin atthe symposium mentioned abovein n. 1.

11. As Helen Wang indicates, inorder to fund their expeditions,they had to prove they wereworthy of support, and getfinancial backing. The press pickedup on this. See for example, theillustration to Wang 2007, p. 230,in which the Illustrated LondonNews of 30 January 1909 showsportraits of 15 “men who fill in thegaps, the great explorers of themoment,” with Stein at No.1 andHedin at No.15.

12. Even though he mentionsRichthofen in only one sentence,Hedin correctly pointed out thathis mentor had used “Silk Road”specifically in mapping the routetransmitted by Marinus of Tyre: “Itexten till sitt berömda verk China,I, talar han om ‘Die Seidenstrasse’och på en karta om ‘dieSeidenstrasse des Marinus’”(Hedin 1936, p. 310).

13. I have in mind here the SilkRoad Studies Program, based inUppsala, Sweden, a jointundertaking with the JohnsHopkins University Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. See thewebsite at <http://www.s i lk roadstud ies .org/new/>,accessed November 9, 2007.

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Fig. 1. A street in old Tbilisi.

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Georgia: A Culinary CrossroadsDarra GoldsteinWilliams CollegeWilliamstown, Massachusetts (USA)

A Brief History

For centuries, the tiny nation ofGeorgia has stood at theconfluence of East and West.Geographically part of Asia, yet aChristian nation, Georgia hashistorically looked more often tothe West — so much so, that thecapital city of Tiflis (Tbilisi) wasonce known as the Paris of theCaucasus. Lying athwart the majortrade routes between East andWest, Tiflis maintained a grandcaravanserai where merchantscould stable their animals, storetheir wares, and themselves findshelter [Fig. 1, facing page].

Thanks to its agricultural richesand long tradition of hospitality,Georgia was an object of desirefor many outsiders, not all ofwhom were good guests.

The Georgians date thebeginnings of their culture to thesixth century BCE. The ancientGreeks established colonies alongthe Black Sea coast in a regionthey called Colchis. In 66 BCE,when the Roman general Pompeyinvaded and brought the areaunder Roman rule, Greek controlcame to an end, but the outpostsin Colchis remained importantlinks in the trade route to Persia.

From the Black Sea, ships couldsail up the Phasis River (today’sRioni). Goods were then portagedover the Likhi Range to the KuraRiver Valley and on to Persia. Bythe early Middle Ages Tiflis hadbecome a major stopover on themedieval trade routes, a midpointbetween Moslem East andChristian West [Fig. 2].

Tbilisi itself was founded in thefifth century when, according tolegend, King Vakhtang Gorgaslani,on a hunt near the Kura River,kil led a pheasant, which heretrieved fully cooked from the hotsprings where it had fallen.Toasting his good fortune,Gorgaslani vowed to create a cityon this auspicious site. He calledit “Tbilis-kalaki” or “Warm City”(hence the name “Tbilisi”; outside

Fig. 2. Map of Georgia. Copyright © byPaul J. Pugliese. Used by permission.

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of Georgia, the city was known asTiflis into the twentieth century).Following a mid-seventh-centuryinvasion, Tiflis fell under Arabcontrol, and even though Georgiahad accepted Christianity in thefourth century, it remained aMoslem city-state. Only in theninth century, when the Bagrationidynasty came into power, didGeorgia begin to exert itself as astrong Christian nation. Even so,between the eighth and eleventhcenturies Tiflis was controlledsuccessively by Arabs, Khazars,and Seljuks.

The early tenth century saw therise of an independent feudalmonarchy, and during the reign ofDavid the Builder (1089-1125)Tiflis was finally freed from foreigncontrol. Under the rule of the greatqueen Tamara (1184-1212),Georgia experienced a renais-sance, a good two hundred yearsbefore Italy. During this time, theGelati Academy in the westernprovince of Imereti housed animportant school of philosophyand offered advanced teachings inastronomy, medicine, and music.In eastern Georgia, near Telavi,the arts and sciences wereassiduously pursued in the famousacademy at Ikalto, which includedthe world’s first school devoted tothe serious study of wine.

As an important stopover on thetrade routes, Tiflis both benefitedand suffered from repeated wavesof migration and invasion. Thecountry’s brilliant renaissancecame to an end when the Mongolsinvaded in the second quarter ofthe thirteenth century. The Mongoloccupation lasted until the earlyfourteenth century, after whichGeorgia was ruled by Iranians andthen Turks, who gainedascendance after the fall ofConstantinople in 1453. TheGeorgians found themselvestrapped amidst the shifting politicsand allegiances of its neighbors;only Armenia to the south, asecond island of Christianity in theIslamic world, presented nothreat. By the late sixteenth

century, the country waseffectively split in two, withwestern Georgia falling under theTurkish sphere of influence, andeastern Georgia politically part ofnorthwest Iran. Repeated attacksfrom the Persians, the Turks, andMoslem tribesmen in Dagestan tothe north finally caused theGeorgians to turn to Russia forhelp. In 1783, King Irakli II, thebeleaguered successor to theancient Bagrationi dynasty, signedthe Treaty of Georgievsk, whichacknowledged Russia’s sove-reignty, and in 1801 Russiaincorporated Georgia into itsempire. The Russian presence inGeorgia lasted until 1918 when,following the October Revolution,Georgia declared its inde-pendence. Although the twocountries had signed a non-interference treaty, in 1921Bolshevik troops invaded, andonce again Georgia was in-corporated into its more powerfulneighbor to the north, this timethe Soviet Union.

Until the dissolution of the SovietUnion in 1991, Georgia existed asa constituent republic of that

country, with its economydependent upon the Sovietsystem. Georgia’s citrus fruits,fresh vegetables, herbs, tea, andwines found a ready market inRussia and the other Sovietrepublics, and the Georgianeconomy flourished. When theSoviet system fell apart, thecountry suddenly experiencedsevere economic distress,exacerbated by political conflictsin the breakaway regions ofAbkhazia and South Ossetia, bothof which the Russians supported.These conflicts led to civil unrestin the early 1990s. By 1998, thingshad quieted down, but in 2005,just as the Georgian economy wasbeginning to recover, Russiaembargoed all Georgian agri-cultural products, including theBorzhomi mineral water thatprovided an important source ofexport revenue. In 2006 Russiaextended the embargo toGeorgian wines, claiming that theyhad been adulterated. This movewas, in fact, political, in retaliationfor Georgia’s desire to ally itselfwith the West by seekingmembership in NATO and theEuropean Union. The Russians

Fig. 3. Niko Pirosmani, Jackasses’ Bridge, a painting which depicts theGeorgian love of dining al fresco, whether under a pergola or on a boat.

After Kuznetsov 1983

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were further displeasedby the Baku-Tbil isi-Ceyhan oil project andthe Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerumnatural gas pipeline, bothof which bypass Russianterritory. Nevertheless,Russia’s attempts tocontrol Georgia must beseen in historicalperspective, as theRussians are only thelatest in a series ofoutsiders to covet thisrich land.

The Flavors of Georgia

Remarkably, through all theinvasions, sieges, and subju-gations, Georgia has maintaineda strong national identity, asocietal pride greater thanpatriotism, akin to a religiousbelief in the sacredness of theearth and its ability to sustain. Thisdevout relationship to theirsurroundings existed long beforethe Georgians accepted Christ-ianity. Two creation myths oftenretold at the feast table capturethe mix of reverence andirreverence that characterizes theGeorgian attitude toward life [Fig.3, facing page]. As one myth goes,the first Georgians were seatedunder a pergola at a table ladenwith wine and food. So engrossedwere they in feasting on grilledlamb with plum sauce and garlickyroasted eggplant that they missedGod’s deadline for choosing acountry, so the world was dividedup without them. His taskcomplete, God set off for home,only to find the Georgians stillmerrily toasting and singing. Godstopped to reproach them for theirnegligence, but the tamada, thetoastmaster, remained uncon-cerned. They had spent their timewell, he explained, thanking Godin lavish toasts for having createdsuch a magnificent world. Pleasedthat the Georgians had notforgotten Him, God rewardedthem with the very last spot onearth, the one He had been savingfor Himself. And so it was that theGeorgians came to l ive inparadise.

The second myth tells that whileGod was creating the world, Hewisely took a break for supper. ButHe happened to trip over the highpeaks of the Caucasus range [Fig.4], spilling a little of everythingfrom His plate onto the land below.And so it was that Georgia cameto be blessed with such riches,table scraps from Heaven. In fact,the agricultural bounty of thissmall country is exceptional, andeven today 50 percent of thepopulation is engaged in some sortof farming. It is not surprising thatthe early Greeks called theGeorgians georgos, “those whowork the land,” whence our Englishterm derives.

The presence of so many outsiderulers and visitors inevitablyintroduced foreign ways intoGeorgia, including certain in-fluences on the cuisine. Georgianfood is reminiscent of bothMediterranean and Middle Easterntastes, the result of a rich interplayof culinary ideas carried along thetrade routes by merchants andtravelers alike. Yet the Georgiansdid not adopt all the culinarypractices that came their way, andtoday Georgian cuisine remainsdistinct, particularly in itsextensive use of walnuts [Fig. 5].Some borrowed practices areeasily recognizable, of course. Thepilafs of southeastern Georgiaecho those of neighboring Iran,and the meats simmered with fruitare similar to variations of Persiankhoresh (stew), though to yield

the tart taste they prefer theGeorgians more often stewmeat with sour plums orpomegranates than withsweeter fruits like quince orprunes. The prized Georgiankhinkali—the overstuffedboiled dumplings of themountainous zones — revealthe culinary influence ofCentral Asian Turks. Alongthe Black Sea coast inwestern Georgia, the stuffedvegetable tolmas resembleTurkey’s various dolmas. Butthe Georgians neverdeveloped a taste for the

elaborate oriental sweets fromTurkish, Persian, or Armeniankitchens; instead, they limitdessert mainly to fresh fruits andnut preparations.

Not yet fully documented is thekinship of Georgian food with thatof northern India. The cor-respondences in culinary ter-minology between contemporaryGeorgian and Hindi are especiallynotable in a language likeGeorgian, which is not even Indo-European but South Caucasian, anentirely separate linguistic group.The Georgian word for bread, likethe Hindi, is puri; and the

Fig. 4. The Caucasus Range, bordering Georgiaon the north, seen from Mt. Elbrus.

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Fig. 5. A woman making churchkhelaby stringing walnuts and dipping themrepeatedly into concentrated freshgrape juice to form a confection.

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Georgians use a clay oven, thetoné, for baking bread androasting, much as Indians of thePunjab use the tandoor. TheGeorgian tapha, a special pan formaking the succulent ChickenTabaka that is so emblematic ofGeorgian cuisine, is related to thecast-iron skillet or tava of northernIndia. And curry blends find theircounterpart in khmeli-suneli,Georgia’s aromatic seasoningmixture, though a typical blend ofkhmeli-suneli is based more onherbs than on spices. It includesground coriander, basil, dill,summer savory, parsley, mint,fenugreek, bay leaf, and marigold,which turns foods a deep yellow,as does curry’s turmeric.

But differences often revealmore than similarities. What mostdistinguishes Georgian cuisinefrom that of its neighbors is theuse of walnuts, not merely asgarnish, but as an integralcomponent in a wide variety ofdishes. To offset what mightotherwise be a cloying richnessfrom the nuts, many recipes callfor a souring agent. Yogurt(matsoni), pungent cheese, andimmature wine (machari) oftenserve as counterpoints to groundwalnuts; vinegar or fruit juices andfruit leathers similarly lendbalance. The ground and driedpetals of marigold, known asImeretian saffron, lend an earthydepth to Georgian dishes and setthem apart from those of otherculinary cultures. For instance,cinnamon and vinegar regularlyflavor meat in the Georgian diet,just as they do in Middle Easterncuisines, but marigold rather thantrue saffron adds the distinctivetouch.

Other differences are visible inthe staple foods. Where Persiancooks turn to rice and Armeniansuse bulgur, Georgians rely onwheat and corn. And instead of thelegumes typically found in theMiddle East and the Mediterranean— lentils, chickpeas, and favas —Georgians favor kidney beans, likecorn a New World crop. Walnuts

predominate over pine nuts andalmonds. So well loved arewalnuts that many standarddishes prepared without nuts,such as the spicy beef soupkharcho or the chicken stewchakhokhbili, often includewalnuts in their western Georgianrenditions. Freshly pressed walnutoil provides a necessary sup-plement of fat (including a healthydose of Omega-3s), as do the richsuluguni and imeruli cow’s milkcheeses used in place of butterwith cornbread.

Regional Variations

Stretching as it does from theBlack Sea nearly all the way to theCaspian, the Republic of Georgiais remarkably diverse, withnumerous climatic zones, from themountainous to the subtropical.The Likhi Range running north tosouth effectively divides thecountry in half. Western Georgia,bordering on the Black Sea,endures high precipitation andsteamy temperatures. Here teaand citrus fruits thrive. Eastwardthe climate grows progressivelydrier, until sere Central Asianwinds buffet the plateaus to theeast of the Likhi chain. This hot,dry atmosphere produces the lushstone fruits and grapes of theKartli and Kakheti provinces. Theboundary between East and Westis also visible in the relative degreeof spiciness to the food. EasternGeorgians prefer a cool, freshtaste, thanks in part to their hot,arid summers, while westernGeorgians add generous amountsof fresh and dried hot pepper totheir food. A second difference liesin the western Georgianpreference for corn over wheat.Here mchadi or corncakes areprepared instead of puri. As isevident from their reliance on suchingredients as corn, peppers, andbeans, western Georgian cooksput New World crops to good use.Another New World transplant, thetomato, is highly appreciated byeastern and western Georgiansalike.

Kartli, the eastern province inwhich the capital city of Tbilisi islocated, is known for its orchardfruits, especially apples andpeaches, the best of which comefrom the environs of Gori, whereStalin was born. The local marketsabound with seasonal golden ladyapples, pink gooseberries, red andblack currants, many varieties ofplums — sweet and sour; purple,yellow, green, and red — apricots,pears, berries, sweet cherries, andsour shindi or cornelian cherries,the juice of which Georgianwarriors once drank before battleto fortify their blood. Mounds ofdried fruits and locally grownwalnuts, almonds, and hazelnutsare available year round.

Georgian dishes evolvednaturally from the produceavailable, and traditional methodsof preparation have hardlychanged over the years; high techdoes not yet have a solid place inthe Georgian kitchen. To anextraordinary degree, Georgiansstill integrate the outdoors intotheir lives when they cook and eat.Whether gathered on a citybalcony for a formal meal or bythe roadside for an impromptupicnic, Georgians consider alfresco dining the best way to eat,a chance to appreciate naturewhile consuming its gifts. Althoughthe ancients considered grillingthe most primitive of cookingmethods, and boiling the mostrefined, gril l ing remains apreferred way to cook meats inGeorgia — a legacy, perhaps, ofthe Promethean legend(Prometheus is said to have givenfire to mankind when he waschained to a rock on Mount Elbrusin the Caucasus). A secondstandard method of preparingfood is by slow cooking, andGeorgian cuisine has an extensiverepertoire of soups and stews. Theheat remaining in the toné afterbread baking is used for dishes likepurnis mtsvadi, lamb braisedslowly in a clay pot.

Perhaps the single mostimportant implement in the

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Georgian kitchen is a mortar andpestle for grinding nuts andspices. Although many affluentfamilies now have foodprocessors, the best Georgiancooks swear by labor-intensivehand grinding, since it yields thefinest texture. In western Georgia,chkmeruli (fried chicken) andcorncakes are baked in special redclay dishes called ketsi, whichrange in diameter from six totwelve inches. The use of ketsi isanother way in which theGeorgians continue to practicetime-honored cooking methods.This technique can be traced backto the ancient Egyptians, whostacked earthenware pots filledwith food atop one another to sealin moisture — creating an oven,in effect — before baking the foodover an open fire.

The pull of tradition is visible notonly in the culinary arts but alsoin paintings by some of Georgia’smost celebrated artists. NikoPirosmanashvili (Pirosmani), a

r a i l r o a dworker whop a i n t e dsignboardsin exchangefor food anddrink, wasknown asthe “Geor-gian Rous-seau” for hisf a n c i f u lanimals andnaïve de-pictions ofe v e r y d a ymoments incity andcountry life.Pirosmani’s scenes of feasting andcarousals capture both theexuberance and solemnity ofthese occasions. Other artists ofthe early twentieth-centuryGeorgian avant-garde, such asLado Gudiashvili, display a lesssunny sensibility. His paintings ofmen awaiting a bowl of tripe soup(khashi) or eyeing some freshly

caught fish (tso-tskhali) offer aglimpse into a dark,mysterious world[Fig. 6]. During theSoviet era, artistslike Elena Akhvle-diani painted nos-talgic portraits of aleisurely way of lifethat was fast dis-appearing [Fig. 7].

The Georgian Table

Throughout most ofGeorgia’s history,meat was a luxury,and so the Geor-gians took greatadvantage of theindigenous fruits,vegetables, andherbs. The bulk ofthe Georgian culin-ary repertoire ismade up of pre-parations for vege-

tables both cultivated and wild.Over one hundred varieties of suchwild greens as sarsaparil la,nettles, mallow, ramp, andpurslane are still gathered inseason and prepared in asurprising number of ways —cooked, marinated, dried forseasoning, or steeped in water fora nutritious drink. But above all,the Georgians enjoy their greensfresh, and no Georgian table iscomplete without a large platterof leafy cilantro, dill, tarragon,parsley, basil, summer savory, andpeppery tsitsmati or falseflax(Camelina sativa, similar toarugula). Often there is alsodzhondzholi (Colchis bladdernut,Staphylea colchica), an edibleornamental plant with long stemsof tightly furled, beadlike tendrilsredolent of garlic. The greens,which are rich in nutrients, providea refreshing counterpoint to theheavier foods in the meal.

These foods are washed downwith wine and local mineral waterslike Borzhomi and Nabeghlavi,which have long been touted fortheir health benefits. To dinersused to the mild taste of Perrieror Pellegrino, these waters seemheavy and salty (so much so, thatBorzhomi is now bottling a“Borzhomi Light”), but Georgiansand Russians have traditionally putthem to therapeutic use inaddition to serving them at table.Certain foods are also considered

Fig. 6. Lado Gudiashvili,Tsotskhali (Fresh Fish),1924.

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Fig. 7. Elena Akhvlediani, Tbilisi Dukhan, 1970s.

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especially nutritious. Khashi, amuch-loved tripe soup (andfavored hangover remedy), isfrequently prescribed for digestiveproblems [Fig. 8]. Nadugi, thedelicious whey derived from cow’smilk and often served mixed withfresh herbs, is virtually fat-freeand is considered a sclerosispreventative.

Food is only one component ofthe Georgian feast, however. Aformal Georgian meal, or supra,is a ritual affair that calls for theskillful exercise of moderation inthe face of excess — no small feat,considering the meal’s courtesiesand extravagances. The sharedtable is meant, above all, topromote a feeling of kinship andnational unity. Centuries ofgathering around the table toaffirm longstanding traditionshave helped the Georgianspreserve their culture even underforeign subjugation. The suprarepresents the collective publicface the Georgians proudlypresent to the world even as itreflects the honor of an individualhousehold.

The rules forcommensal cele-bration are strict.Most important, atamada or toast-master is chosen toorchestrate all butthe most informalmeals. (This practicemay have evolvedfrom the ancientGreek custom ofchoosing a sympos-iarch to guide theprogression of thefeast.) The role ofthe tamada is takenvery seriously, andhe is accorded greatrespect, for it re-quires skill to keepall the guests en-tertained, ensurethat the meal is

proceeding apace, and see to itthat no one drinks or eats toexcess, as drunken guests bringshame on the host. The besttamadas are renowned for theirwit and eloquence, including anability to improvise. The tamadaguides the company through aseries of toasts, which can be briefor complex. Each calls for downing

a glass of wine. Georgians do notsip, and drinking out of order orat random is not allowed. Amerikipe is appointed to makesure that diners’ glasses are filledat all times [Fig. 9].

The rules of the Georgian tablecall for uplifting toasts, so thateach occasion, even a sad one,becomes an affirmation of life.Traditionally, toasting begins withglasses raised heavenward inacknowledgment of God’spresence. Then the host family istoasted, particularly the lady ofthe house responsible for themeal. The tamada’s ability to pacethe evening is crucial. Each timea toast is pronounced, whether bythe tamada or someone else, wineis drunk as a mark of honor. But ifinebriation seems likely, thetamada must slow down thesuccession of toasts. Thetraditional meal is punctuated bybreaks for entertainment, often acapella singing, a holdover frommedieval patterns of feastingwhen entremets were actualdiversions.

Given such ritualized drinking,the apparent chaos of the foodservice may seem surprising.Courses are not always presentedin the fixed order of the service àla russe that western Europeans,

Fig. 8. Lado Gudiashvili,Khashi, 1919.

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Fig. 9. Niko Pirosmani, Carousal. The loaves on the table are shoti,baked in the toné. A traditional wineskin is visible in the foreground.

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and later Americans, adopted inthe nineteenth century, and whichstill prevails in Europe and Americatoday. By contrast, the Georgianstyle of service is intended todazzle the eye and pique thepalate through contrasting colors,textures, and flavors. When dinerssit down to eat, the table is alreadylaid with a wide variety of dishes.As the meal progresses, thehostess does not remove servingplates that still contain food butrather continues to pile new disheson the table, balancing some onthe edges of others, so that by theend of the evening the table isladen with a pyramid of plates,ensuring plenty at every stage.

Georgian Wine

If food is the heart of the Georgianfeast, then its spirit resides inwine. For a Georgian, wine evokesboth culture and community.Based on evidence of grape pipsunearthed from archeologicalsites, viticulture is an ancient artin Georgia, practiced as early asthe fourth millennium BCE.Scientists believe that the speciesVitis vinifera, the original winegrape, is native to the Caucasusregion, and many linguistsconsider the Georgian word forwine, ghvino, the prototype forsuch Indo-European variations asvino, vin, wine, Wein. The grapevine symbolizes life and faith, abelief that Saint Nino ofCappadocia adapted to Christiandoctrine when she introduced it to

Georgia in the fourth century.Bearing a cross plaited of driedvines and tied with her own hair,Saint Nino seemed to representdivine approval for the wine-making that had been practicedfor centuries. Thevine and the crossbecame inextricablyentwined, each anobject of devotion.

The center of winegrowing in Georgia isKakheti, in theeastern half of thecountry. The regionis known for itstraditional method ofwinemaking, whichdiffers considerablyfrom standard Euro-pean practices (be-cause it is so laborintensive, it is dyingout as a commercial process).After the grapes are crushed, thejuice is fermented together withthe skins, stems, and seeds to

yield distinctive wines of a lovely,deep amber hue and a raisinytaste with a hint of Madeira.

Traditionally, wine was made inlarge, red clay amphorae knownas kvevri [Figs. 10, 11]. Nearlyevery Georgian country householdhas a marani, a place where thetemperature remains cool andsteady. Here the kvevris areburied up to their necks in theearth. If the house lacks anearthen cellar, the kvevri areburied directly in the groundoutdoors. To make wine by theKakhetian method, the freshlycrushed juice, along with theskins, stems, and seeds, is pouredinto the buried amphorae andstirred four or six times a day forthree to five months. The resulting

new wine is calledmachari. When thewine has achievedthe desired degree offermentation, it isdrawn off from thelees. If producedcommercially, thewine is transferred tooak barrels to age forat least a year, buthomemade wine isusually ladled bymeans of a speciallong-handled gourdfrom the first kvevriinto smaller ones foraging. These kvevrisare topped with a

wooden lid, then sealed with mud.Dirt is mounded all around the lidto keep air out, lest it spoil thewine. Whenever wine is taken offfrom a kvevri in any quantity, theremainder is transferred toprogressively smaller vessels.

Some Georgian families still usespecial vessels to bring wine totable, such as the chapi, a two-handled jug with a squat neck andbulbous body tapering to a narrowbase. From this transitional vesselthe wine is poured into a varietyof other containers intended eitherfor pouring or drinking [Fig. 12].Quite common are a single-handled pitcher and the more

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Fig. 10. A newly fired kvevri in the kiln.After K

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Fig. 11. Niko Pirosmani, TwoGeorgians with a kvevri.

Fig. 12. A wine vessel fromBombori. Bronze, 2nd c. BCE.

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elaborate “mother jug” (deda-khelada) composed of a centralpitcher with several smallerpitchers affixed to the sides, likea mother with numerous breasts.

The most widespread red winegrape of Georgia is Saperavi,which, depending on its treat-ment, can yield wines rangingfrom the dry to the semi-sweet.For white wines, the indigenousRkatsiteli grape makes nicelyacidic wines with a fresh, greentaste. Both varietals predominatein Kakheti’s Alazani River Valley,which lies between the high peaksof the Greater Caucasus to thenortheast and the foothills of theTsiv-Gombori Range to thesoutheast. They are made intowines bearing such controlledappellations as Mukuzani,Kindzmarauli, and Tsinandali.Today, artisanal producers likeMildiani make some extraordinarywines that blend ancient traditionswith modern technology.

Georgian Food Today

Throughout the Soviet era, thepopulation of Georgia remainedstable at around 5 million people.Even Georgians who traveledabroad for work or study generallychose to return to their homeland,so strong was the pull of tradition.All of this has changed over thepast fifteen years, as Georgiaexperienced civil unrest andeconomic pressure. As a result,the current population of Georgiais now closer to only 4 million. Oneoutcome of this unprecedenteddiaspora is that many émigréshave opened restaurants in citiesthroughout Europe, the UnitedStates, and the Middle East, andGeorgian cuisine is slowlybecoming more well known.Within Georgia itself, a newgeneration is working to overcomethe problems that still plague thecountry after so many years ofdependence on Russia. Followingdecades of Soviet-style industrialfarming, activists are working toestablish sustainable agriculturalpractices and are reviving thelegendary wines that had either

disappeared or been restyled forthe notoriously sweet Russianpalate.

That a small country with ashattered infrastructure shouldplace its hopes on fairly traditional,organic agriculture in the twenty-first century is noteworthy, and inthe wake of the Russianembargoes, the US governmenthas stepped in to help. Inparticular, the AgVANTAGEprogram, funded by USAID, ishelping producers find newmarkets in Europe and the UnitedStates to make up for the loss ofexports to Russia. The govern-ment consultants are focusingprimarily on Georgian wines, forwhich they believe significantdemand can be created abroad.Hazelnuts are also being promotedfor export, as the best Georgianvarieties are deeper in flavor thanthose grown in the ItalianPiedmont. The challenge will be forthe Georgians to find ways tocompete successfully in the globalmarketplace while still keepingtheir rich traditions intact.

About the Author

Darra Goldstein is FrancisChristopher Oakley Third CenturyProfessor of Russian at WilliamsCollege and Founding Editor ofGastronomica: The Journal of Foodand Culture. A Ph.D. from StanfordUniversity, she has publishednumerous books and articles onRussian literature, culture, art,and cuisine, and has organizedseveral exhibitions, includingGraphic Design in the MechanicalAge and Feeding Desire: Designand the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, at the Cooper-Hewitt,National Design Museum. She isalso the author of four cookbooks:A Taste of Russia (nominated fora Tastemaker Award), TheGeorgian Feast (winner of the1994 IACP Julia Child Award forCookbook of the Year), The WinterVegetarian, and Baking BootCamp at the CIA. She hasconsulted for the Council of Europeas part of an international group

exploring ways in which food canbe used to promote tolerance anddiversity, and under her editorshipthe volume Culinary Cultures ofEurope: Identity, Diversity andDialogue was published in 2005 tocommemorate the 50th anni-versary of the signing of theEuropean Cultural Convention.Goldstein has also consulted forthe Russian Tea Room and Firebirdrestaurants in New York and iscurrently Food Editor of RussianLife magazine. She serves on theBoard of Directors of theInternational Association ofCulinary Professionals and isGeneral Editor of California Studiesin Food and Culture (University ofCalifornia Press), a book seriesthat seeks to broaden theaudience for serious scholarship infood studies and to celebrate foodas a means of understanding theworld. She may be contacted at<Darra.Goldstein@williams.edu>.

A Glossary of Georgian Foods

Adzhapsandali: a vegetablemedley, like a spicy ratatouille.Adzhapsandali contains eggplant,potato, onion, tomoatoes, greenpepper, cloves, and copiousamounts of fresh herbs.

Adzhika: the favorite Georgiancondiment made from fresh hotchile peppers, ranging inconsistency from a thick paste toa liquid relish like salsa. It is aclassic accompaniment to grilledmeats.

Buglama: a Kahketian specialtymade from beef, veal, or fishlayered with tomatoes, onions,and fresh herbs, then steamedand served with rice.

Chacha: a very strong grappa-likeliquor made from grape pomace.

Chakapuli: a liquidy, slow-cookedstew usually made with lamb orkid. The meat is stewed with drywhite wine, tkemali sauce, andbunches of tarragon, parsley,mint, dill, and cilantro.

Chakhokhbili: chicken simmeredwith vegetables and herbs until

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tender, with no extra liquid added.Georgian girls were once deemedmarriageable according to theirability to cut up chicken for thisdish. The most traditional recipescall for seventeen precise pieces.

Chanakhi: an aromatic stew ofmeat and vegetables braisedslowly in a clay pot to deepen andmeld the flavors.

Churchkhela: a long string ofnuts that have been repeatedlydipped in concentrated freshgrape juice to form a confection.Churchkhela is made with walnutsor hazelnuts, either from wholenuts or halves.

Kartuli puri: An elongated ovalloaf of bread baked in the toné.Kartuli puri is thicker in the centerthan at the edges, so that loversof both crust and chewy interiorcan enjoy their favorite textures.

Khachapuri: a cheese breadfound throughout Georgia in manyguises — round, rectangular, andboat-shaped. The dough can beyeasty with a thick crust, many-layered and flaky, or tender andcakelike. The bread is usually filledwith a fresh, slightly sour cheeselike imeruli (Imeretian) orsuluguni, but salted cheeses likebryndza may also be used, as longas they are soaked first. Thecheese is grated and mixed witheggs to bind, with butter added ifit is not creamy enough. The fillingis then either completely enclosedin dough or baked in an open-faced pie. Khachapuri is some-times topped with a barely bakedegg. Aficionados seek out theboat-shaped adzharuli khachapurior Adzharian cheese bread fromBatumi on the Black Sea coast.

Kharcho: a thick soup made frombeef, lamb, chicken, or sometimesvegetable stock. All versionscontain a special mixture of thespice blend khmeli-suneli, a liberaldose of herbs, and a souring agentsuch as fruit leather, tkemalisauce, or vinegar.

Khashi: Georgia’s best-lovedsoup, made from tripe. It istraditionally eaten early in the

morning, preferably between sixand eight a.m. following a nightof heavy drinking.

Khinkali: Large dumplings madewith a variety of fillings. In themountainous regions the choice isusually ground lamb, but else-where the filling is more often amixture of beef and pork. Thedumplings may also be stuffedwith cheese or greens. Khinkaliare served hot, with no garnishother than coarsely ground blackpepper. The doughy topknot isnever consumed but used as ahandle for holding the hotdumplings.

Khmeli-suneli: an herb and spicemixture typically containingground dried coriander seed,ground celery seed, dried basil, dillparsley, fenugreek summersavory, bay leaf, and mint. Grounddried marigold petals are oftenadded as well.

Lobio: The Georgian word forbeans, either fresh or dried. Lobioalso refers to an aromatic salad,usually made from dried kidneybeans, that is prepared in dozensof ways: moistened with herbvinaigrette, seasoned simply withbutter and eggs, or mixed withlettuce and celery. The classicrecipe calls for mixing the beanswith tkemali, the tangy plumsauce.

Masharabi: a sour pomegranatesyrup for flavoring stews. Freshpomegranate juice is cooked withcinnamon, cloves, and a littlesugar until thick.

Matsoni: Yogurt. Georgian yogurtis some of the best in the world,whether made from cow’s milk orthe even richer water buffalo milk.Matsoni is never gelatinous and ispleasantly tart.

Mchadi: Western Georgiancorncakes, traditionally baked ina ketsi or clay pot over an openfire. Because mchadi are blandand dry, they are perfect forsopping up sauce from flavorsomestews.

Mkhali (or pkhali): a vegetablepuree to which herbs and ground

walnuts are added. Mkhali is madefrom any number of differentvegetables; spinach and beets arethe most popular.

Mtsvadi: skewers of plain, freshlyslaughtered lamb, beef, or pork,what we know as shish kebab. Ifthe meat is not tender, it can bemarinated overnight beforegrilling, in which case it is knownas basturma.

Pelamushi: a dessert made bymixing concentrated grape juicewith cornmeal. The thickenedcornmeal is cut into brilliant purplediamonds.

Satsivi: the renowned Georgiannut sauce, served with poultry,fish, or vegetables. Groundwalnuts are mixed with garlic,cinnamon, cloves, coriander seed,marigold, pepper, cayenne, andvinegar, and stock. After the saucehas cooked, the prepared poultry,fish, or meat is immersed in it,then allowed to cool to roomtemperature, which thickens thesauce and gives the dish its name(the root -tsiv means “cold”).

Suluguni: the most widely usedGeorgian cheese, made fromcow’s milk. Suluguni is usually soldin large rounds up to a foot indiameter, but for special occasionsit is prepared in flat, individualdisks that can be thinly rolled.

Tabaka: partially boned youngchicken that is flattened, then friedunder a heavy weight. The namecomes from the traditional heavyskillet or tapha that is used.Tabaka is usually served withtkemali sauce.

Tkemali (Prunus divaricata): asour plum that grows throughoutGeorgia. The word also refers tothe sauce made from this plum,which is used as a seasoning insoups, stews, and vegetabledishes and also as a condiment forgrilled meats. Tkemali sauce ispiquant yet slightly sweet. It isserved fresh or preserved forwinter keeping.

Tklapi: dried fruit leather, madeby boiling tkemali or sour plums,

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then pureeing them and spreadingthe puree into a sheet to dry.Tklapi is an excellent souringagent for soups and stews — lessastringent than vinegar, moreflavorful than tomatoes. Fruitleather is also made from sweeterfruits like apricots and peaches,in which case it is intended foreating out of hand rather thancooking.

References

Allen 1971W.E.D. Allen. A History of theGeorgian People, 2nd ed. New York:Barnes and Noble, 1971.

Burney and Lang 1972Charles Burney and David MarshallLang. The Peoples of the Hills:Ancient Ararat and Caucasus. NewYork: Praeger, 1972.

Dzhikia 1978N. P. Dzhikia. Kul’tura pitaniiagruzinskikh gortsev (The foodculture of Georgian hill peoples).Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1978.

Chardin 1689Chardin, Sir John. The Travels ofSir John Chardin into Persia andthe East-Indies, Through the BlackSea and the Country of Colchis.London, 1689.

Chelebi 1834Chelebi, Evliya. Narrative ofTravels in Europe, Asia, and Africain the Seventeenth Century. Trans.The Ritter Joseph von Hammer.London, 1834.

Chiaureli 1984V. Chiaureli. Gruzinskoe vino(Georgian wine). Tbilisi: Merani,1984.

Dumas 1859Dumas, Alexandre. Le Caucase;depuis Prométhée jusqu’àChamyll. Paris, 1859.

Gudiashvili 1984Lado Gudiashvili. Edited by MoiseiKagan. Leningrad: Aurora ArtPublishers, 1984.

Holisky 1989Dee Ann Holisky. “The Rules of theSupra or How to Drink in

Georgian.” Annual of the Societyfor the Study of Caucasia 1(1989):22-40.

Kakabadze 1984Alde Kakabadze. Sovremennaiagruzinskaia keramika (Contem-porary Georgian ceramics).Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik,1984.

Khromchenko 1987S. M. Khromchenko. E. Akhvle-diani: Izbrannye proizvedeniia.Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik,1987.

Kikvidze 1988Kikvidze, Ia.A. Zemledelie izemledel’cheskii kul’t v drevneiGruzii: po arkheologicheskimmaterialam (Agriculture and theagricultural cult in ancient Georgiaaccording to archaeologicalmaterials). Tbilisi: Metsniereba,1988.

Kuznetsov 1987Erast Kuznetsov. Niko Pirosmani.Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers,1983.

Mars and Altman 1987Gerald Mars and YochananAltman, “Alternative mechanism ofdistribution in a Soviet economy.”In: Constructive Drinking:Perspectives on Drink fromAnthropology, ed. Mary Douglas.Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987: 270-279.

Pokhlebkin 1978Pokhlebkin, V.V. Nationional’nyekukhni nashikh narodov (Nationalcuisines of our peoples). Moscow:Pishchevaia promyshlennost’,1978.

Sulakvelidze 1959Tamara Sulakvelidze. Gruzinskiebliuda (Georgian dishes). Tbilisi:Gruzinskoe ministerstvo torgovli,1959.

Suny 1988Ronald Grigor Suny. The Makingof Modern Georgia. Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press,1988.

Volkova and Dzhhavakhishvili1982N. G. Volkova and G.N.Dzhhavakhishvil i. Bytovaiakul’tura Gruzii XIX-XX vekov:traditsii i innovatsii (The culture ofeveryday life of Georgia in the 19th

and 20th centuries: traditions andinnovations). Moscow: Nauka,1982.

Recipes

Khachapuri

2 cups unbleached white flour1/2 teaspoon salt12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold

butter, cut in pieces2 eggs1/4 cup plain yogurt1 1/4 pounds mixed Muenster and

Havarti cheeses1 egg yolk, beaten

Put the flour and salt in a mediumbowl and cut in the butter until themixture resembles coarsecornmeal. Beat 1 egg and stir inthe yogurt, then add to the flourmixture. Form into a ball and chillfor 1 hour.

Grate the cheeses coarsely, beatthe other egg, and stir it into thecheese. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Greasea large baking sheet. On a flouredboard roll the dough to a rectangleabout 12 x 17 inches. Trim theedges. Spread the cheese mixtureon half the dough and then foldthe other half over to enclose it,sealing and crimping the edges.

Transfer the bread to the bakingsheet and brush with beaten eggyolk. Bake for 50 minutes, or untilbrowned. The bread is best servedslightly warm, cut into smallsquares.

Serves 12 to 15.

Beet Puree (Charkhlis mkhali)

1 pound beets1/2 cup shelled walnuts3 garlic cloves, peeled1/2 teaspoon salt1/2 cup chopped cilantro1/2 cup chopped parsleyFreshly ground black pepper

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1/4 teaspoon dried summersavory

1/4 teaspoon ground corianderseed

1 or 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar(to taste)

Bake the unpeeled beets at 375ºF.for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, until tender.(If you are short of time, the beetsmay be boiled, but their flavor willnot be as good.) While the beetsare roasting, in a food processorgrind together the walnuts, garlic,and salt. Add the cilantro andparsley and continue grinding tomake a fine paste. Transfer to abowl.

When the beets are soft, peelthem and finely grate them in thefood processor. In a medium bowlmix together the grated beets andthe ground walnut mixture, thenstir in the remaining ingredients.Keep tasting, as the amount ofvinegar needed will depend on thesweetness of the beets. Themkhali should be slightly tart.

Chill in the refrigerator for at least2 hours, but bring to roomtemperature before serving,mounded on a plate and cross-hatched on top with a knife.

Serves 6.

Basturma

2 cups pomegranate juice1/4 cup olive oil1 teaspoon saltFreshly ground black pepper1 bay leaf, crushed2 garlic cloves, peeled and

crushed2 pounds boneless shoulder or leg

of lamb, cut into 2-inch cubesOne 1-pound eggplant, salted,

drained, and parboiled (op-tional)

Mix together the pomegranatejuice, olive oil, salt, pepper totaste, bay leaf, and garlic.Marinate the lamb overnight in thismixture. The following day, placethe meat on skewers, alternatingwith eggplant cubes, if desired.

Grill over hot coals for about 10minutes. Serve with tkemali orcilantro sauce.

Serves 4 to 6.

Tkemali

1 1/2 pounds plums (not too sweetor ripe)

1/4 cup water3/4 teaspoon whole coriander

seed1 teaspoon fennel seed2 large garlic cloves, peeled and

roughly chopped1 teaspoon cayenne1/2 teaspoon salt1 tablespoon finely minced fresh

mint1/3 cup finely minced cilantro

Cut the plums in half and removethe pits. Place in a saucepan withthe water and bring to a boil.Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes,or until soft.

In a mortar with a pestle, poundtogether the coriander seed,fennel seed, garlic, cayenne, andsalt to make a fine paste.

When the plums are soft, put themthrough a food mill and return toa clean pan. Bring to a boil andcook over medium heat, stirring,for 3 minutes. Stir in the groundspices and continue cooking untilthe mixture thickens slightly,another 5 minutes or so. Stir inthe minced mint and cilantro andremove from the heat. Pour into ajar while still hot. Either cool toroom temperature and keep in therefrigerator, or seal the jar forlonger storage.

Makes 1 pint.

Cilantro Sauce (Kindzissatsebela)

2 ounces apricot fruit leather1/4 cup boiling water

1/2 cup shelled walnuts4 garlic cloves, peeled1 1/2 cups finely chopped cilantro1 1/2 cups finely chopped mixed

parsley, dill, basil, tarragon1/2 cup finely chopped scallions

(including green part)1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon

juice1 1/2 teaspoons saltFreshly ground black pepperDash cayenne1 cup walnut oil

Soak the apricot leather in theboiling water until soft; stir until apuree is formed.

Grind the walnuts and the garlictogether in a food processor, beingcareful not to grind them to asticky paste. Next, add the apricotpuree, the herbs, scallions, lemonjuice, salt, pepper, and cayenne,and blend together. In a slow,steady stream, while the motor isrunning, add the walnut oil to forma thick sauce.

Allow to rest at room temperaturefor a couple of hours beforeserving. This sauce will keep,tightly covered and refrigerated,for several days. Bring to roomtemperature before using.

Makes 2 cups.

Article and recipes adapted fromDarra Goldstein, The GeorgianFeast: The Vibrant Culture andSavory Food of the Republic ofGeorgia (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1999). Used bypermission.

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Ananuri, on theGeorgian MilitaryHighway north ofTbilisi

Food, Medicine and the Silk Road: The Mongol-era ExchangesPaul D. BuellCenter for East Asian Studies, Western Washington UniversityBellingham (USA)

The Mongols are known for theirrestructuring much of Eurasia intheir particular political mode,even when elements of it wereborrowed and reinterpreted. Theyalso had an immense culturalimpact as well. This ranged fromart styles to the complex hat andassociated hair styles known asboqta, which even reachedEuropean high society. TheMongols carried art styles ratherthan originated them, but they setthe style for much of Eurasia. Theyadded many loan words in anincredible variety of languages.Some of these latter were spokenfar beyond any area of directMongol influence, showing thepower of the forces at work. Onepopular loan word was theMongolian sauqat, “bribe,”originally a “share of booty.” Eventhe Portuguese, never toucheddirectly by Mongol conquest orenvoys, knew the word (Doerfer1963-1975, Bd. I, pp. 345-347).

Another Mongol gift was anactive exchange of foods andrecipes, continuing and inten-sifying earlier exchanges. Inaddition, for the first time inhistory, there was the emergenceof a unified Eurasian medicaltradition, the “Islamic” medicinepreferred in the Mongolian Empireand within its successor states.This was based on the samemedical traditions taught inSalerno and in other earlyEuropean medical schools. InChina it even briefly eclipsedChinese medicine as the preferred

system. For a brief moment China,the Middle East, and the Westwere united medically. They evenused some of the same recipes,including a few attributed to thegreat Greek masters — usuallymentioned by name, even indistant China. Physicians in almostthe entire Mongol world order gotused to speaking about the bodyin more or less the same termsand even using generally the sameinterventions, including surgical.

Food

Food exchanges among thecultures of Eurasia were nothingnew at the time of Mongolconquests. China had longborrowed foods, spices and evenrecipes from the West and CentralAsia, and some foods andelements of food culture, such asChinese tea-drinking, had evenmoved to the Middle East andbeyond. (It took a long time tocatch on, but was not common inChina at that time either.) Whatwas new with the Mongols was theunprecedented scale of theexchanges involved. Mongol courtcuisine became the preferredcuisine of much of the Old World.It was greatly influential evenwhere it was not preferred. Someof the foods involved, I wouldargue, even persist until thepresent day in their popularity.One, baklava, is very much a worldfood these days (Buell 1999, p.216). The Mongols also popu-larized a new type of pottery, blueand white porcelain, which, if we

may believe John Carswell,became popular precisely becauseporcelain dishes were ideal forconsuming the new soupy dishesintroduced by the Mongols. Thefact that blue was the Mongolimperial color was merely icing onthe cake.

Most popular among China’searly food borrowings from theWest were various bread foodsand dumplings, including therelatives of the ubiquitousjiaozi raviolis of today, butalso apparently including the bunsnow known as mantou (Buell1999, pp. 216-217), both alreadypopular under the Tang (618-906).These borrowings greatly ex-panded in scope under the Mon-gols as witnessed by the amazingvariety of new bread foods foundin Mongol-era collections ofrecipes. Among them are therelevant sections of the early Mingencyclopedia Jujia biyong shilei

(JJBYSL), “Thingsthat Must be Used When Living atHome,” which, despite its date,carries on older, Mongol-eratraditions. Interestingly, this texteven goes so far as to call someof its fried dumplings by theirIranian name sambusak, orsamosa, clearly pointing up theirultimate origin in the Middle East(Osamu and Seiichi 1973, 14:34a).

Also a major part of Chinesefood and foodstuff imports fromthe West was a great flow of spicesand medicinals, both, in Chinese

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terms, foods, at least when themedicinals were for internal use.Those from the Iranian side havebeen detailed by Berthold Laufer(1919) and by Edward Schafer(1963). Some cultivated plants,e.g., sorghum, were alsointroduced from as far as Africavia the Arabic and Iranian West.Sorghum acquired particularimportance with the coming ofdistillation since sorghum is notonly a useful plant in semi-desertareas, where it produces a goodcrop under difficult conditions, butcan be fermented and distilled toproduce a much favored vodka,gaoliang .1 The truly importantexchanges took place after theHan Dynasty, and especiallyduring the period of disunity,China’s middle ages, and underthe Tang, the most geographicallyexpansive of all Chinese dynasties.Yet wheat, goats and sheep hadcome to China during very earlytimes indeed, and Chinese millethad moved west to the TripolyeCulture of Ukraine at an early dateas well (Buell et al. 2000;Anderson 1988). Other traitsprobably moved with it.

The Mongol period began inChina in the early 13th centurywhen the north was conquered.The conquest of all of Chinafollowed in 1279. Mongol tastesdetermined a sophisticated courtfood culture stretching acrossEurasia. There was an entirelydifferent base for food among theMongols, compared to China, Iran,or the Arabic world (Buell 2006).

The Mongols rose to powerherding sheep and goats, alongwith some cattle, as well ashorses, yaks, yak hybrids andcamels, and moving from pastureto pasture to sustain their grazing.Besides their herding, they hadtime to hunt, gather a few wild

plant foods and, when times weregood and they could spare themanpower and their enemies wereweak, they could raid and imposetribute relationships, oftenextracting food. Thus they cameby cultivated grain, although theMongols did raise a little millet ontheir own. But grain was neverimportant on the steppe.2

By contrast the herds providedmost of the food of the Mongols,supplemented by rare game andeven rarer gathered foods. But,contrary to the popular impressionabout the Mongols, their herdswere rarely consumed as meat.Mongol herds were moreimportant as sources of dairyproducts, the true staples of dailylife, and when meat was eaten itwas rarely consumed in a wholeform. Rather the preference wasfor a boiled product, a rich or notso rich soup (shülen) believed toconcentrate the essence of theslaughtered animal (Buell et al.2000; Buell 2006). It was thispractice above all, i.e., theMongolian preference for broth,and for soup, that proved to betheir most influential contributionto the world cuisine of their era.

Soups

Although the unvarnished steppebroth or soup was not verysophisticated, made with somemeat, bones, and whatever elsewas to hand, this quickly changedas the Mongols became mastersof the old world. For one thing, nolonger being dependent just uponwhat herds produced, the elite atleast could eat more meat. Thismeant richer soups, and not justlamb, mutton and goat, althoughthese meats remained thepreferred repasts. They also hadaccess to a wider range ofadditives, including cultivated

plant foods, although the oldgathered foods remained popular,and, most important, a wideningrange of spices, some broughtfrom great distances, even as farafield as Africa (grain-of-paradise,for one example, Amomumvillosum or A. xanthioides, calledfor in a number of Mongol erarecipes). Just what resulted canbe seen in the recipes for courtbanquet soups that form one ofthe largest single complex ofrecipes in the imperial dietarymanual of Mongol China, the Yin-shan zhengyao , “Properand Essential Things for theEmperor’s Food and Drink”(YSZY), presented to the court andpublished in 1330. Altogetherthere are 27 recipes for variantsof the traditional Mongol soup, allwith additives that mark theseshülen as much more than asimple Mongolian meat broth,although each is based on amutton broth flavored with large,smoky cardamoms. These are thekind used today in Punjabi cooking(the Chinese, who got them fromSoutheast Asia, know them ascaoguo ). To this is addedone or more thickenings, mostcommonly chickpeas, an impor-tation from Iraqi cuisine, in 15 ofthe 27 recipes, with the chickpeasfirst cooked and then skinned, ina manner characteristic ofMesopotamian cooking. Also usedas thickenings are barley andfenugreek seeds (another NearEastern contribution). There is onemention of oleaster fruits, at onetime a Mongolian gathered food.Rice occurs in six recipes, threeof which combine it with chickpeas(Buell et al. 2000, pp.105-107).The following soup is typical. It isnamed after a major spice, mastic,here given in a Turkic form:

Mastajhi [Mastic] Soup

It supplements and increases,warms the center, and accordsqi .

[Ingredients:]Mutton (leg; bone and cut up),caoguo cardamoms (five),

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cinnamon (2 qian), chickpeas[“Muslim beans”] (one-halfsheng; pulverize and removethe skins).

Boil ingredients together tomake a soup. Strain broth.[Cut up meat and put aside.]Add 2 ho of cooked chickpeas,1 sheng of aromatic non-glutinous rice, 1 qian ofmastajhi. Evenly adjustflavors with a little salt. Add[the] cut-up meat and[garnish with] corianderleaves. [Buell et al. 2000, pp.275-276]

Or, here is another court soup,with bear meat replacing the usualmutton:

Bear Soup

It treats migratory arthralgiainsensitivity and [evil] foot qi[usually beriberi].

[Ingredients:]Bear meat (two legs; cook.When done cut into chunks),caoguo cardamoms (three)

[Boil] ingredients [togetherinto a soup]. Use three qianof black pepper, one qian ofkasni [asafetida], two qian ofturmeric, two qian of grain-of-paradise, one qian of za’faran.Adjust flavors of everythingtogether with onions, salt, andsauce.3

Although the above examplesare from Mongol China, we knowthat variations of these soupswere eaten throughout theMongolian world, with many localvariants. This is witnessed by thewidespread borrowing of theMongolian word for them, shülen,into a variety of languages. In theIranian west, shülen means anofficial banquet. It also was thehonorific word for soup, what wasideally offered to an importantpersonage (Doerfer 1963-1975,Bd. I, pp. 368-370). One actualrecipe for one of these court soupsfrom the Mongol west, called ashülen, survives in a Mughal-era

court ritual book. Typically, it callsfor starting with mutton and thenthickening with chickpeas, andalso rice. Added at the end arespices and other flavorings,namely salt, pepper, ginger, garlic,butter, onion, cinnamon, carda-mom and cloves, all but the butterwell known from recipes for theChinese equivalents (Buell et al.2000, pp. 106-107).

In addition to the banquet soupproper, the shülen, the Mongols ofthe imperial age also consumedmany other forms of soups, orfoods starting as soups. Most usednoodles and other grain foods, atopic we will visit below.

Drinks

In addition to their soups, theMongols also had other ways ofconsuming their preferred liquiddiet. Although the distinction is notalways well drawn in comparisonto the shülen, the most commonform was the umdan, “drink.” Thiscould be anything from a lightbroth to dried cheese added towater, or even a simple liquor,above all fermented mare’s milk.It is generally called airag inMongolian, but better known byits Turkic designation, kumiss. TheSecret History makes it clear thatumdan, “drink,” and shülen,“soup,” were the primary forms offood offered Chingis Khan by themembers of his bodyguard:

When [Temüjin] had becomeCinggis-qahan, Ögölei-cerbi,the younger brother ofBo’orcu, put on a quiver [i.e.,became a member of theqan’s bodyguard]. Qaci’un-toqura’un put on a quiver. Jeteiand Doqolqu-cerbi, the twobrothers, put on a quiver.When Önggür, Söyiketü-cerbiand Qada’andaldurqan, thethree of them, spoke, saying:

Let us not allow [your]morning drink

[umdan] to be too little,let us not allow [your]

evening drinkto be neglected,

they became stewards[bawurcin]. When Degeispoke, saying:

Making a wether of twoyears into shülen,

let me not allow it to be toolittle in the morning.

Let me not be late with it atnight.

Having [your] spotted sheepherded,

let me fill a cart [with them].Having [your] yellow sheep

herded,let me fill up a pen [with

them].I have been gluttonous and

bad.Having [your] sheep herded,let me eat their rectums,

Degei caused the sheep to beherded.

[Secret History of the Mongols,cited in Buell et al. 2000, pp. 43-44]

Such simple drinks of the Khandid not stay simple long. Thesources of the period do makefrequent reference to unso-phisticated light broths, driedcheese in water (grut),4 a Mongolfavorite, and also to traditionalbeverages such as kumiss, frommare’s milk and occasionally fromcamel’s milk. Also increasinglynoticed are many other kinds ofdrinks, some of them quite exotic.The YSZY, for example, has quitea number of non-traditionalumdan, including several of theArabo-Persian sharab tradition,one drink even called by thatname (Buell et al. 2000, p. 389).There are herb and conventionalteas, including what areapparently early variants of thelater concentrated Mongolian tea,made in one case with butter(Buell et al. 2000, p. 393). There

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are also a great many liquors.These are primarily wines but alsodistilled liquors, then finding theirway into the steppe along withsimple distillation apparatus.Interestingly, a great many of theknown names for the liquors of theperiod are Turkic, pointing upprobable origins.5

Once the predominantly liquiddiet of the Mongols was es-tablished as court food, theirsubjects took it up as well, forprestige reasons. Another reasonwas that the food was gettingbetter and better itself as courtcooks and dietary physiciansfound ways to improve it, with theexchanges taking place by nomeans involving just liquid foods.Court cooks eagerly took up thebest that the Old World had tooffer with the tastes of theirmasters in mind. This above allincluded another side of theMongol cuisine of the era, ash,another Mongolian borrowing fromTurkic (Doerfer 1963-1965, Bd. II,pp. 59-62), meaning grain-foods,or, more narrowly, noodles, butalso food in general, i.e., notshülen or umdan, per se.6

Above all the foods in thiscategory were noodles andnoodle-like foods, none of them asfar as we know of Mongolian originbut borrowed from others andpopularized by the Mongols.Perhaps the most famousexample, and still eaten today,7

was the large stuffed noddleknown as tutumash, a Turkic termdescribing a noodle (ash) that waspulled and kneaded (tutum).8 TheYSZY has the following recipe:

Tutumash (This is a kind ofkneaded noodle.)

They supplement the center,and increase qi.

[Ingredients:]

White flour (six jin. Make intotutumash), mutton (leg. Roastthe meat. [Make into] quruqqima [and stuff tutum ash]).

Use a Good Meat Soup foringredients. Add the noodlesand roast [cook dry]. Adjustflavors evenly with onions.Add garlic, cream [or yogurt],finely ground basil.9

Quruq qima is a roasted and finelyminced meat, another Turkiccontribution. The garlic, basil andcream or yogurt, by the way, aresuperb additions. Note the rolethat broth plays in preparation ofthe noodle.

More or less the same recipeoccurs in the nearly contemporaryKitab al-tibakha, written in Syriabut reflecting Mongol-era cuisine,using an Arabized form of thename:

Tutmaj: Roll out dough andcut it [into noodles] and cookit in water until done. Putyoghurt, mint, garlic, clarifiedbutter and fried meat with it[Perry 2001].

It is referred to frequentlyelsewhere as well, even if norecipe is given, indicating that thiswas a popular food indeed.10

Many other, sti l l more as-similated borrowings eaten inMongol China are listed in theJJBYSL. It includes 12 Muslimrecipes: a [Tu.] Chäkärli Piräk,“sweet borek”; “Rolled ThinPancakes”; filled dumplings; a[Tu.] Kogurma, a meat pastestarting with a sheep’s head; a“Sour Soup,” black plums boiledin vinegar with sugar added, alsonuts, cream (or yogurt) and broth;another East Asian variant ofTutumash; [Tu.] Baldy, a honeydish thickened with a paste friedin sesame oil and basted withbutter; a [Ar.] Halwa, a traditionalArabic sweet paste; [Tu.] Güllach,

a primitive baklava; a Qoresh-e,a Persian classic stew; [Ar.]Julapia, Persian fritters; a PersianQarisa, another meat paste usingwheat and sheep’s tail fat andhead oil; and “West of the RiverLungs,” sheep lungs Uighur-style(Buell 1999).

Porcelain: The CarswellHypothesis

Nonetheless, despite these moresolid foods, the emphasisremained on liquid. Consequentlywith the advent of the newMongolian court cuisine in Eurasiacame a change in eating habits aswell. This found expression in theplates, pots, jugs and other disheswhich graced the tables and rugsof the period. These are wellillustrated in the Central Asian andIranian miniatures of the period,which are, in fact, our mostimportance source (Komaroff andCarboni 2002).

John Carswell, distinguishedBritish Arabist and art historian,has proposed that one of the mainreasons for the rise in popularityof blue and white and other formsof Chinese porcelain during thelate 13th and early 14th centuriesin all areas of the then Mongolworld was the associated spreadof Mongol court cuisine.11 Sincethis cuisine emphasized liquidfoods, such as the great banquetsoups, also kumiss, the Mongoldrink of choice, bowls, cups,servers and pots had to beconvenient for liquids. They hadto be leakproof, washable andsanitary, and not easily con-taminated by absorbed liquidsfrom main dishes or drinks.Porcelain, besides being beautiful,easily met the needs of a liquiddiet. It was, as a result, ideallysuited as a serving and consumingmedium for the Mongol courts andelsewhere.

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The Mongols loved all kinds ofliquid refreshments, includingtheir native fermented milks butalso the sharab, sweet drinks,from West Asia. The old dishes andold pottery, mostly porous andcrude and thus too absorptive andlikely to retain unpleasant flavors,became obsolete virtuallyovernight once the new foodscaught on. Chinese porcelain wasbeautiful. It was also abundantafter the conquest of the Chinesesouth (definitively by 1279) by theMongol successor Khanate ofChina. It thus seems to havequickly replaced most other formsof pottery as prestige dishes. Inthis case the culinary processparalleled an equivalent one in thetextiles: the highest qualityChinese silk became the cloth ofchoice for Mongol costume. Thishad formerly been largely madeof animal furs. Silk and otherwoven textiles had been rarecommodities.

The primary objection toCarswell’s thesis has been theconventional wisdom that Blueand White Porcelain was acomparatively late developmentand that large scale exports ofporcelain from China, by sea, onlycame at the very end of theMongol period. In fact, thistraditional wisdom can now beregarded with a great deal ofskepticism. Evidence revealsearlier Blue and White Porcelainin West Asia, even in Europe, anda substantial overland trade thatpreceded ocean carriage bymany decades. Much of this hasbeen uncovered by Carswellhimself. He has identified,apparently, the earliest Europeanporcelain, in what is now Bulgariadating to the early 14th century.12

Thus Blue and White wasbecoming available at the height

of the Mongol era, a factstrengthening Carswell’s as-sociation of pottery with Mongolcourt cuisine. His explanation ofevents is increasingly plausible. Itmakes sense in terms of otherknown cultural exchanges thentaking place, including painting.13

Although the term is oftenapplied to late Chinese pottery ingeneral, from Tang times on,porcelain is, strictly speaking, arather more specialized product.It is produced by using special claycombinations (principally but notexclusively kaolin) (Carswell 2000,pp. 20ff) and fired at an extremelyhigh temperature. The finalproduct is finely glazed, strong butlight, and relatively dense andnonporous. Porcelain dishes andpots are noted not only for theirconsistent fabric throughout theirstructure, but also for theirstunning appearance. Althoughthe Song Chinese preferred a lessgaudy decoration, namely greensand shades of blue, or even a plainwhite, the Mongols of north Chinapreferred pots with a painting ofcobalt blue underglaze, resultingin a more stunning appearance.The Mongols also had their pottersintroduce new shapes to accordwith their particular needs,associated by Carswell with theircuisine (Carswell 2000, p. 31).

One reason for a Mongol interestin pots with a cobalt blueunderglaze is most likely to havebeen nationalism. That is to say,what could be more appropriatethan “blue” pottery as symbolic ofthe court culture of the peoplelater known as the “blue” Mongols,due to their association with “BlueHeaven,” their protector anddynastic support. In any case,pottery directly ancestral to thelater Blue and White that becamea world craze seems to have

appeared among them no laterthan 1300 and probably somedecades before. Among otherthings, fragments of Blue andWhite are associated with the wallaround what later became theForbidden City and which dates tothe early Mongol period in China(Ibid.). There is a great deal ofother evidence as well whichremains to be evaluated. MarcoPolo, by the way, gave the worldthe word porcelain. It is notentirely clear what he understoodby the term, since he uses it todescribe cowry shells as well aspottery (Carswell 2000, p. 18).

In any case, porcelain,particularly Blue and WhitePorcelain, became increasinglypopular [Fig. 1, next page].Demand for it grew in the West.Efforts were made to adapt it toWestern, and for that matter,Mongol tastes. Decorationsbecame west Asian, in a kind ofearly Chinoiserie, for example,and many of the shapes of potssuited west Asian (and Mongol)rather than Chinese needs [Fig. 2,next page], often closely imitatingthe older pottery, or even leatherand wood pots, which it wasgradually replacing. Some evenhad inscriptions in Persian. Localcopies began to emerge, many ofthem highly interesting artisticcreations themselves, and freecombinations of East and West aswestern potters strove to figureout just what their Chinesebrethren had done to achieve theireffects (Carswell 2000, pp. 35ffand passim). The real heyday ofBlue and White Pottery, under theMing and Qing, does not concernus here. The pattern had alreadybeen set for a world art craze and,as Carswell suggests, thisprobably accompanied theemergence of the first worldcuisine, that of the Mongol courts.

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Medicine

Food was one part of the culturalexchanges of the Mongol era,moving primarily along with SilkRoad, but also, to a more limiteddegree, by sea. Likewise ex-tremely important was theassociated exchange of medicalideas and systems, associated

because much of the medicine ofthe time was based in dietarymedicine.

For example, in China at least,along with Mongol court cuisinecame distinct Mongol ideas aboutfood and health, in particular themedicinal values of foods andtypes of foods. One of theinnovations of the YSZY, forexample, and it became a majorpattern for later dietaries, is thattext’s interest in an amazingvariety of animal foods. TheChinese had always eaten wildanimals and parts of domesticanimals associated with qi, to gainan advantage from consuming thepowerful and uncanny. Animalproducts have also been importantin Western pharmacology.Nonetheless, neither Chinese norWestern tradition quite preparesus for the profusion of wild animalproducts, for example, consumedat the Mongol court according tothe YSZY. These wild animalproducts became part of theChinese tradition thanks partly tothe popularity of that text. Alsoconspicuous in the Chinese text isthe presence of so manyMongolian gathered foods for usein recipes. While some wereperhaps consumed simply out oftradition and nostalgia, many alsohave known medical values. Therecipes of the YSZY are nearly allassigned specific medicinalproperties, and these must derivefrom the foods used. In fact,modern Mongols, as a numberhave informed the author (e.g.,Bold, personal communication,spring 2005), assign specificmedicinal properties to differentanimal meats and parts of animalsand modern Mongols know a greatvariety of medicinal herbs, manyof them simultaneously gatheredplant foods of the very kind calledfor in YSZY recipes (Boldsaikhan

Fig. 1. Two Yuan period blue and whiteporcelain vases in the collection of theBritish Museum.

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2004). In any case, if such ideasappear so well represented inChina, they must have been foundin the Mongolian west as well,meaning that we should begin tosift Iranian and other Islamicsources of the period to see whatchanges in medical and dietaryideas were introduced in theMongol period.

Also a part of a possible Mongolcontribution to medical ideas inChina, were Altaic ideas regardingthe importance of boiled food.According to Roux (1984, pp.160ff), the essence of an animalis resident in the bone andmarrow, and thus boil ingconcentrates this essence. Thiswas why the Mongols preferredboiled foods. There were alsopractical considerations, e.g., theneed for moisture in a dryenvironment, the need to sharemeat to the maximum. If this isthe case, then the banquet soupsof the Mongol courts in Eurasiacommunicated Mongolian ideasabout the universe as well asfeeding the court multitude. Theyrepresent one more area ofcultural interaction during theMongol age.

But in addition to ideasapparently their own, the Mongolsalso actively encouraged theexchange of other medical ideaseast to west and west to east. Inpart this occurred because suchmedical ideas were part ofMongolian court cultures whereverMongols ruled. For Iran, the mostcelebrated exchange was theimportation, primarily through theagency of Rashid al-Din (1247-1313), of Chinese medical ideas,e.g., pulse lore in the form of aChinese text translated intoPersian (Rall 1960; Abdulhak1940). Also involved in the flowwere other importations, ones thatwe know little or nothing about.

Fig. 2. Blue and white porcelain ewer,Yuan era (ca. 1335). Musée GuimetMA 5657.

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Rashid knows a great deal aboutChina and Chinese culture. ForChina, a huge importation wasEurasian cosmopolitan medicine,known as “Muslim” medicine inChina. This is something of amisnomer since the medicineinvolved was as Greek as it was“Muslim” or Arabic. SyrianChristians and others, not justMuslims, were actively involved intransmitting it to China. The YSZY,already mentioned above, isreplete with the ideas of thismedicine, in addition to includingmany West Asian foods for itsdietary medicine. And even biggerwitness of what was taking placeis comprised of the survivingfragments, nearly 500 manuscriptpages, about 15 percent of theoriginal, of what is now known asthe Huihui yaofang xxx ,“Muslim Medicinal Recipes”(HHYF), once a massive ency-clopedia of cosmopolitan Eurasianmedicine to serve the needs ofMongol China’s official medicalestablishment.

As it survives today, the HHYFconsists of three content chapters(juan 12, 30 and 34) and the tableof contents for the second half ofthe complete encyclopedia. Thiscovers juan 19-36, providingsome indication (along with juan12) of the contents of more thanhalf of the original encyclopedia,a total of 19 juan. Of the threesurviving content chapters, juan12 focuses on various kinds ofparalysis, “wind” attack (includingstrokes, etc.), and relatedconditions, in terms of thetraditions of the medicinesinvolved. Juan 30, is devoted to“various symptoms.” We knowthat it is is one of two juan, alongwith juan 29, once devoted to suchgeneral conditions and to the bodyand its structures in general. Juan34, one of the most interesting, is

devoted to various kinds ofinjuries, from arrow and swordwounds to blows (such asfracturing the skull), with a listingof advanced surgical inter-ventions. Lost now are thefollowing juan:

19. coughs;20. chest symptoms;21. stomach problems;22. dysentary and related

problems;23. vomiting, constipation,

etc.;24. heat and chill;25. qi (in this case meaning

breath and connectedmatters);

26. fatness and leanness ofthe body, and pain, lice,and hand and foot, etc.;

27. jaundice, worms, etc.;28. beriberi, etc.,hemor-

rhoids;29. the first part of various

symptoms;31. a large section on women’s

medicine;32-33. ulcers and swelling;35. vermin and animal

wounds;36. listing of materia medica.

Three main types of material arefound in the content chapters.First of all, there are hundreds ofsimples, herbal formulae ofvarious origins, some of themGreek, some Arabic, some ofuncertain origin but still largelyPersian in nomenclature. Also amajor part of the text aretheoretical discussions, somequoting the great names in Greekand Arabic medicine. Finally, thereare listings of detailed procedures,how to set a bone, treat a wound,to fix a fractured skull, the latteramong the most advanced of theirkind from anywhere in Eurasia.

The following is a typical simple,in this case treating symptoms

associated with wind attack,strokes and similar conditions:

Another Recipe

It can treat wild thoughts,confused perception and thesymptoms of [Ar.] malin-khuliya [melancholia]

([subtext] This is symptoms of

a lack of peace in the heart and

wild talk due to being attacked

by a wind):

Kabuli myrobalans [Terminaliachebula]

([subtext] [Persian in theArabic Script] Halilaj-eKabuli)

[Ar.] Balilaj [bellericmyrobalan]

([subtext] [Arabic Script:]

Balilaj)“Ox orange seeds’ [uniden-tified]

([subtext] Each one liang)[Ar.] Afsintin [wormwood,Artemesia absinthium]

([subtext] This is artemesia)[Pr.] Sana-ye Makki [Cassiaangustifolia, Meccan senna]

([subtext] [Persian] Sana-ye

Makki)[Pr.] Shahtiraj [Fumitory,Fumaria officinalis]

([subtext] Shahtiraj)[Ar.] Afithimun [dodder,Cuscuta epthymum]

([subtext] Afithimun. One

liang)[Ar.] Basfayij [=Basfayij,Polypodium vulgare]

([subtext] Basfayij)[Ar.] Turbid [Ipomoeaturpethum]

([subtext] This is hare’s ear[Bupleurum falcatum and B.spp])

[Ar.] Ustukhudus [lavender,Lavandula stoechas]

([subtext] Ustukhudus. Each

five qian)

Chinese spikenard[Nardostachys chinensis]

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[Pr.] Mastaj [mastic]([subtext] This is the rue of

the Western Regions)Nutmeg

([subtext] Each two qian)[Ar.] Lisan [ath]-thaur[borage, including Boragoofficinalis]

([subtext] This is dock

[Rumex sp] root)[Ar.] Afranj-mushk [sweetbasil, Ocimum basilicum otCalamintha officinalis]

([subtext] Afranj-mushk)

“Golden Essence Stone” [lapislazuli]

([subtext] Or [Ar.] hajar.[This is] a stone flown bywater of the Armani land)

[Pr.] Badranj-buya [balm,Melissa officinalis] [Ar.] Karafs[seeds of celery, parsley, etc.]seeds

([subtext] [Persian] tokm-e

karafs)

“Rumi’ Fennel [anise]([subtext] Each two qian)

Pound the medicinals into afine powder. Having soakedwith [Pr.] badam [almond] oil([subtext] [Persian] raughan-e

badam [“oil of almond”]), takeprocessed pure honey or driedgrapes. Remove the kernelsand pound until soft. Combinetogether and use.14

Here a plethora of plants knownto Greek and Muslim medicine arecombined to provide a medicinalfor responding to the describedcondition, providing one of severalrelated compounds used to treatsimilar conditions. Few of themedicinals in any case were widelyused in the Chinese medicine ofthe time. Most, like the diseasecategories themselves, areimported. Even the method ofcompounding is not Chinese andcalls for almond oil and driedgrapes, both products typical of

Middle Eastern but not Chinesemedicine. Note that althoughmany of the names of themedicinal are common Arabic, thedescriptive terminology tends tobe Persian, something typical ofthe HHYF as a whole. Like MarcoPolo, the editors of the HHYF wereperfectly comfortable with Persian,as well many others associatedwith the Mongol court in Chinawhere Persian was one of severalofficial languages used.

Also not very Chinese is thefollowing discussion, the first injuan 12, from which the recipeabove comes as well. Followingthe discussion of general paralysisconditions is another simple, ashorter one:

Category: Left Paralysis, RightNumbness, Wry Obliqueness ofMouth and Eye

Treating left paralysis, rightnumbness:

With this disease movement orthe stopping of movementdoes not accord with theintention. That is, movement orthe stopping of movement aremutually entangled and areconstricted. When movementand the stopping of movementexhibit a movement and astopping of movement that aremutually entangled, thisbecomes transformed into thisdisease. Because of this, thereis a diminution of strength;movement and the stopping ofmovement are also dimin-ished. If on account of thedisease strength is diminished,the disease should inevitablybe chronic. If a person indulgesfrequently in sex, or overexertsor suffers a fright, or climbs toa high place, or is over-whelmed by joy, the heart mainartery [jing ] strongly startsand the body struggles. If the

seven apertures are alldiminished, there is excessmoisture within the muscles[jin ].15 It is the nature ofmuscles that they come forthaccording to the intention, andmust [then] become chill andslack. Because of this, heavyinebriation, overconsumptionof chill liquids, and food that isnot dissipated, will avail of theproximity and give rise toturbid illnesses. If the root isobstructed, the strength of theqi16 does not pass through andcannot reach the body. If [thecondition] arises due toextreme anger, then in mostcases there is moisture in themuscles. Moreover, it attachesto the anger fire and destroysthe ability to move. Or illnesssymptoms of paralysis andnumbness are frequently in themuscles of the head andhands. These are the imple-ments of movement and of thespiritual facilities. The top ofthe muscles is the top of thebrain. This is the seat of thebrain. If the hand approachesand attaches itself to moisture,the muscles of the brain alsoapproach a condition wherebythey are soft. Because of this,these illnesses are mostly inthe lower half of head andhand. The muscles of a turbidbody are stiff because they aresituated at a distance from thehead. The body is also stiff andsinking because it sustains thebody attached to turbidity.Because of this, the body doesnot produce the paralysis andnumbness il lness. If thedisease attains the root, thereis then nothing beneficial orharmful in treating symptomsof paralysis and numbnessdiseases. If the root of thedisease is dampness or there

29

is wounding eating to repletionbecause of loss or starvation,then treatment requires thespitting up of phlegm. If thereis heavy inebriation due toliquor, the inebriation isgenerally cut off after easingnature twice.

As ingredients use rose oil, or[Pr.] murd [myrtle] oil([subtext:] [Pr.] murd). Alongwith this combine vinegar andattach to the head. For food,use foods that aid the blood.Use dolichos beans, [Pr.]kurunb [cabbage] ([subtext:]

[Pr.] kurunb), and roasted rabbitbrain. If the one consuming hasleft-over medicinals, he cantake [Ar.] ustukhudus[lavender] ([subtext:] [Ar.]

ustukhudus). Use honey water,combine and consume. Or takea [Pr.] quqiya [narwhal] pill([subtext] [Pr.] habb-e quqiya [“pill

of quqiya”]) for 18 days. Or ifthe disease is chronic one, canalso take this: [Pr.] myan-ekhiza [“middle of (beaver’s)testicle,” castoreum] ([subtext:]

[Pr.] miyan-e khiza). Combinewith honey and take. It willtreat if there is a wasting [laux = ] disease due to dryness[Kong 1996, p. 25].

The main condition described,“left paralysis, right numbness,”etc., apparently includes par-asthesia, various paralysis, loss ofmuscle tone and muscle atropy,speech impairment, and com-promised pulmonary, cardiac andother functions.17 The descriptionis extremely specific compared tothe categories of the Chinesemedicine of the period and usesnone of the generalizing terms,i.e., the five elements, qi in theChinese sense, etc. The in-gredients called for in the simpleare, again, typically Middle

Eastern and include substancesthat must have been quite rare inChina, i.e., narwhal horn pill, andeven were uncommon in theMiddle East.

Other sets of directions like thismay include actual surgicalintervention. For example, in thesections found in juan 34 onbroken bones there are carefulinstructions regarding removal ofbone fragments embedded in thetissues surrounding the brain. Alsofound in juan 34 are instructionsdetailing cauterization techniques,including some using special metalinstruments. This is a typical of theWestern medicine of the time andnot of Chinese. Also a more or lessWestern technique was thera-peutic bleeding. Likewise moreWestern than Chinese are theHHYF ’s many dietary pre-scriptions. While dietary medicineis certainly Chinese too, the foodscalled in the HHYF are not,including chickpeas under theirPersian name.

The following, reproduced herein full, is typical of the highlyinteresting and detailed materialon various injuries found in juan34:

[This section] discusses allsmall wound injuries named[Arabic] wakhz [puncturewounds] [and] [Ar.] khazq[tear wounds] along with thevarious [other] things includingpuncturing arrow heads thatare to be taken out of thewound-injured place.

All [Ar.] wakhz are woundsfrom puncturing [arrow] headsor needle heads. Also, if it doesnot deeply penetrate into theflesh, even if the wound islarge, it is a matter of this. [Ar.]khazq are spear or arrow head,etc., wounds. Also, [Ar.] wakhz

wounds are somewhat better.They need not be treated by adoctor. If the original nature ofthe wounded man is uneven,and there is swelling at thewound place, together withthrobbing pain, or perhapsthere is a small wound enteringinto the flesh, there also is thistreatment to get rid theswelling and throbbing pain.One only needs to dissipate theswelling and that is all. In thecase of [Ar.] khazq, one mustthreat the swelling andthrobbing pain, and afterwardstreat the wound so that it is inbalance and restored. Ingeneral, in terms of thetreatment methods of thischapter, one only needsremove the various thingswounding. The methods forremoving these things: eitherit is a matter of pushing out,or of removing using someimplement, or using a medicineto suck it out. The method forpushing out: people can allunderstand. It need not bediscussed. When one uses animplement, one must firstexamine the nature of thewounded place, whether it isconcave or a cavity, andwhether one can remove thingsdirectly or from the side. If itis a side removal, it must bethat the wound mouth isnarrow and the arrow head isdeep into the flesh, or thearrow head has a corner. If onetakes it out straight, one mustfear that the [arrow head]corner will resulting in ahindering, and cause extremepain to the patient. Also, whenone removes from the side,one can observe whether or notit is without obstacle orhindrance, and cannot harmthe blood pulse, and also the

30

blood vessel and main arteries.One can say in general: oneonly needs that the arrowheads, etc., are not broken offand remain behind in the flesh.Moreover, when they areremoved, one must haveascertained if previously thewounding material has beenagitated. Only then does oneremove it. Also, the implementto remove are iron forceps. Ontop of the forceps one adds aniron ring that rigidly enfolds it.When it is like this one can take[the arrow head] out. There willbe times when the arrow headwill have poison and the fleshof the wound will be decayed.One must use [something] toremove the [decayed] fleshand clean its appearance. Ifone observes that the color ofthe flesh has changed, and itmoves like dead flesh, thenscatter and disperse what hasbecome bad. In general, if thearrow head is deeply situatedin the bone and flesh, and onecannot take it out, take theimplement and position aroundthe bone so that one can takeit out easily. If the arrow headwounds in a critical part of thebody like the brain, heart,lungs, liver, the stomach artery,the bladder, and a bad sign ismanifest and the signs leadone to believe that it will notget better, then it probablycannot be healed. If bad signsare not perceived, and theylead one to believe that onecan heal in the future, one candiscuss the danger of thesesymptoms with one’s col-leagues, and afterwards treat.Now, although these symp-toms are dangerous, one canalso treat and there is thepossibility of healing. Also usemedicines, etc. This means

taking [Ar.] ushaq [gumammoniac, of Doremaammoniacum] ([subtext] ushaq)and transforming it andopening it and placing it in thewound injured place. If thereare things inside, it can suckthem out. If one combines itwith honey, it will be powerful.Also take [Ar.] Zarawand[Aristolochia] ([subtext]

Zarawand), the round kind,grind finely and combine withhoney. Create an applicationmedicine and use. Also takebamboo root and pound untilsoft, or use alone or combinewith honey, and create anapplication medicine and use.One recipe uses small bambooroot leaves, one liang [?].Pound finely and stick onto [thewound place]. If the woundplace has an arrow head, thebamboo will pierce so that itcomes out itself. Also [take] theleaf of the black opium tree [?],fig tree leaf, and mix withbarley flour and henbane. Ifone adds it to alum andcombines it, it is very muchpossible. In the case of all ofthe following: Sichuan Kueihua[Osmanthus fragrans], [Ar.]Zarawand [Aristolochia], [Ar.]narjis [narcissus] ([subtext] Thisis the chuandi f lower [?Character?] ) and onions, eitheruse alone or combine and use.They can suck out the thingsthat are lodged. Also [take] afrog18 and remove the skin andcreate a pasting medicine. Itcan also suck out things. Onerecipe uses a fresh frog [found]on land where the five cerealsare [413]. Remove the skin andcreate a pasting medicine. Itcan also remove barbs andarrow heads. One recipe usesdried frog to make a powder.Combine with honey and stick

on. This is also possible. Ifthere is something lodged inthe bone it can also suck it out.Now this is because by itsoriginal nature it can removeteeth. Also grind finelyswimming crab. This is alsopossible. One recipe uses creekcrab fish [lobster-fish, shrimp?]bladder. All have removingstrength that achieves themiraculous. Also all sticky milks[anafih] of moving animals alsocan help. There is a thing called[Ar.] wazaghah [pl., geckos]([subtext] This is the gecko). It isalso able to help. One recipetakes [Ar.] wazaghah heads,puts them into an ointmentrecipe, and pastes it on. It canremove barbs along with arrowheads. If one takes [Ar.]wazaghah, [Ar.] zarawand[Aristolochia], the long kind([subtext] [Pr.] zarawand-e tawil

[“long Aristolochia”]), bambooroot, [Ar.] narjis [narcissus]([subtext] This is chuancao x

[?]), and onions and combinesthem into a sticking medicineand uses, then it can take thethings left behind and bringthem out. One recipe uses [Pr.]sam-abras [gecko] ([subtext]

This is the gecko). Take the meatand pound until tender and puton the sword punctured place.It can suck it out. One recipeuses [Ar.] wushshaq[‘ashaqah? gum ammoniac;ivy?] ([subtext] ashuku [?]).Make a powder and paste ontothe wound. The thing [in it] willcome out of itself. [Ar.]wushshaq combined withhoney is powerful. Or useround [Ar.] zarawand[Aristolochia] ([subtext] [Pr.]zarawand-e gerd [“roundAristolochia”]) and pound withbamboo root and use honey tocombine and paste on. Also use

31

long [Ar.] zarawand ([subtext][Pr.] zarawand-e tawil), onionwater, Chinese sacred lily[Narcissus tazetta] leaf, figleaf, barley sugar, and poundtogether and paste on. It hasthe power to grab iron. Also,in the case of barb needlewounds, where it takes onswelling and is dissipated, itcannot be treated, or if it islarge, the medical treatment ofit is in the previous category ofwounds from knives andarrows. It has been discussedin the section on wound traumawhere ulcers have been formed[Kong 1996, pp. 411-413].

Such lore was obviously of utilityfor the warlike Mongols. The samesections also provides many firstaid applications, many includingsubstances in use today to killgerms and promote healing.Whether any of the specificmedicinal mentioned above work,awaits further research. Note thatgecko parts and meat are calledfor under both their Arabic andPersian names, indicating acompilation from differentsources.

Origins

Whence such medicine? We doknow that many of the officialmedical institutions of the Mongolsin China focused on Muslimmedicine. This included an office,ranked first under the Xuanhuiyuan , “Bureau for ImperialHousehold Provisions,” and thenunder the Yuan Office of the ChiefPhysician (Taiyi yuan xxx ),called the Guanghui si ,“Administration of BroadCompassion,” charged with“preparing and presenting Muslim(huihui ) drugs and pre-parations to the emperor in orderto treat members of thebodyguard and poor people in the

capital” (Yuanshi 1976, juan 88,2221). The founder of this office,which seems to have been moreimportant than the above briefnotice indicates, was Jesü (Aixiex ) or, as he is known in Iraniansources, Isa, the “Translator”(1227-1308), a NestorianChristian whose family originallyhad come Syria. Jesü began hisservice to the Mongols under KhanGüyük (r. 1246-1248) and laterassociated himself with thenprince Qubilai (r. 1260-1294),forming part of the prince’s “braintrust” of associates who were tostand him in good stead when theprince had to fight to become rulerin Mongol China as the oldMongolian Empire broke down. Asfar as can be determined theGuanghui si grew out of Jesü’sprivate practice of “Muslim”medicine, or more properly of theEurasian cosmopolitan medicinethat had started primarily with theGreeks but belonged by his timeequally to Greeks, Latins, Syrians,Arabs, Persians and others, even,as we will see below, Tibetans,who had their own school of thismedicine. In any case, after theGuanghui si was founded, it, andan observatory for Muslimastronomy were put under Jesü,and members of his familycontinued in control after hisdeath. Interestingly, Jesü did notjust stay in China, once he hadbecome associated with the houseof Qubilai, but in 1283 went on anembassy for his ruler to MongolIran, then Qubilai’s principal allyin his wars in Central Asia. Unlikehis companion, the minister Bolad,who remained in Iran, Jesüreturned again in 1286 andremained in office in China formore than twenty more years,until his death aged 82.19

We do not know what books Jesühad with him when he first

founded his practice or what, ifany, books he brought back withhim from Iran in 1286. His role infounding and managing theGuanghui si was such that theHHYF, which in its present form isa Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) copy,but is based upon a now lostoriginal Yuan Dynasty (1260-1368) version, must go back atleast in part to materialsassembled and held by Jesü andhis family, which were perhapsadded to by others as time wenton.

And what of these materials, aswitnessed by the HHYF? Clearly amajor source for the survivingchapters was the Qanun fi al-tibbi,“Canon for Medicine,” of Ibn Sîna(980-1037), a standard Arabic-language medical encyclopedia inthe Islamic world, but some of thematerial from this source seemsfiltered at best, perhaps throughanother, more popular collectionthat may now be lost. Othersources include the Arabic andpossibly Syrian translationliterature for works by Galen andother Greek doctors. Other, moreimmediate sources, in view of theIranian connection of MongolChina, were probably works suchas the Nuzhat al-Qulub, “Hearts’Delight,” a scientific and medicalencyclopedia written by the son ofRashid al-Din, Ghiyath al-DinMuhammad, but also possibly thenow lost Lata’if al-Rashidiyya,“Pleasures of Rashid al-Din,” byRashid’s associate, the doctor IbnIlyas, and the latter’s other works,including his treatise on food(Elgood 1979, pp. 302-323).

More than one cosmopolitiansystem is involved in the text. Ihave suggested in a forthcomingpaper that Tibetans, drawing upontheir own Greek traditions of

32

medicine (those of the Bi-ci schooland its texts, in particular), mayhave been another source ofmedical information, theory andeven recipes in the HHYF. Thetext’s humoral system, forexample, is apparently based onthree humors, those of India andTibet, and not the four of theIslamic world. Tibetan influence iseven clearer in the YSZY, whichhas a great deal of Islamiccosmopolitan medicine in it and aclear trail back to Tibetansinvolved in imperial dietarymedicine (Buell forthcoming 1).

Nonetheless, what is importantabout the HHYF is that itrepresents a type of medicinefound from one end of the SilkRoad to the other and beyond. Notonly was much the same medicinepracticed throughout Central Asiaand in the Middle East, but“Muslim” medicine, including textstranslated from the Greek, beforethe actual Greek texts reached theWest, was also the basis of theEuropean medicine of the time astaught in the early medical schoolssuch as those of Salerno orTaranto. Texts used there, in fact,included standardized collectionsof quotations of theory,procedures, and recipes, more orless identical in format andapproach to the HHYF.20 As aconsequence, for once in history,China and much of the rest of theOld World were at the same placein terms of their medicines. Thatthe West choose to continue onthis basis and China did not isirrelevant (the question of Islamicinfluence on the Chinese medicalschools of Yuan and Ming is awhole other topic). For a briefmoment the Mongols had created,at the court level at least, a singlesystem of medicine, althoughbeyond the court a great many

local systems stil l existed,including Chinese medicine, whichremained alive and well under theMongols even if not so favored. Inthis respect, medicine and fooddeveloped into world systems inmuch the same way, surroundedby a great deal of local color.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we are onlybeginning to understand the fullrange of cultural exchangescharacterizing the Mongol age.Some of them are obvious. Some,such as the possible exportationof Mongolian ideas about medicineand diet, are not so obvious. Inany case, it is now clear that theMongols exported their cuisine andideas about it and participated ina remarkable, if temporary,codification of medical ideas witha little help from doctors of variouspersuasions practicing the Muslim,better cosmopolitan medicine ofthe day. On another level, JohnCarswell is probably entirelycorrect in assuming that a wettercuisine required new dishes andthat Chinese porcelain was ideallysuited to this mission. What isinteresting is that Blue and WhitePorcelain, the food that itcontained, and the cosmopolitanmedicine of the time — neverentirely Muslim, but a mixture oftraditions — once again suggestthe ability of the Mongols tocombine the best that East andWest had to offer in tune with theirown views of the universe andtraditions. This being the case,that Chinese porcelain, glazed inthe Mongol color, with west Asiandesigns and pot shapes,disseminated throughout theMongol world order, should in noway surprise us. Neither shouldthe universality of the foods thatit contained, Mongol base soupsand other foods, but with the

refinements that the whole worldhad to offer. Lastly a medicalunification paralleling those in foodand eating utensils should hardlybe unexpected. This was all amatter of what the Mongol agehad to offer and what it did for thepeoples and cultures of the OldWorld as the Mongols laid downthe foundations of our modernage.

About the author

Paul D. Buell holds a PhD inhistory and an MA in Chinese fromthe University of Washington andis a specialist in the history of theMongolian Empire with specialreference to the cultural history ofthe Mongolian period and theinterchanges between east andwest. He is the lead author of ASoup for the Qan: Chinese DietaryMedicine of the Mongol Era asSeen in Hu Sihui’s YinshanZhengyao, “Proper and EssentialThings for the Emperor’s Food andDrink,” and is currently completinga full translation of the HuihuiYaofang, “Muslim MedicinalRecipes,” supported by a NationalEndowment for the Humanitiesindividual scholarship.

References

Abdulhak 1940

Adman Abdulhak. “Sur leTansukname-i-Ilhani dar Ulum-u-Funun-i Khatai.” Isis 32 (1940):44-47.

Algar 1991

Ayla Esen Algar. TraditionalTurkish Food for the AmericanKitchen. New York: Harper Collins,1991.

Anderson 1988

Eugene N. Anderson, The Food ofChina, New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1988.

Baader 1982

33

Gerhard Baader, “Handschrift undInkunabel in der Überliefering dermedizinischen Literatur.” In:Gerhard Baader and Gundolf Keil,eds. Medizin im mittelalterlichenAbendland. Darmstadt: Wissen-schaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1982: 359-385.

Boldsaikhan 2004

B. Boldsaikhan. Encylopedia ofMongolian Medicinal Plants.Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian Universityof Science and Technology,System Science Research In-stitute, 2004.

Buell 1999

Paul D. Buell. “Mongolian Empireand Turkicization: the Evidence ofFood and Foodways.” In: ReuvenAmitai-Preiss ed. The MongolEmpire and its Legacy. Amster-dam: E.J. Brill, 1999: 200-223.

Buell 2001

Paul D. Buell. “Christine de Pizan(c. 1364-1431).” In: Clayton J.Drees, ed. The Late Medieval Ageof Crisis and Renewal, 1300-1500:A Biographical Dictionary. GreatCultural Eras of the WesternWorld. Westport, Conn.; London:Greenwood Press, 2001: 103-104.

Buell forthcoming 1

Paul D. Buell. “Tibetans, Mongolsand the Fusion of EurasianCultures.” In: Islam and Tibet.London: Warburg Institute,University of London (forth-coming).

Buell forthcoming 2

Paul D. Buell. Simple: EurasianMedicine of the Mongol Era asSeen in the Huihui Yaofang(forthcoming).

Buell et al. 2000

Paul D. Buell, Eugene N. Andersonand Charles Perry. A Soup for theQan: Chinese Dietary Medicine ofthe Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-hui’s Yin-shan Cheng-yao.

Introduction, translation, text,notes, with Eugene N. Anderson,appendix by Charles Perry.London: Kegan Paul International(Sir Henry Wellcome AsianSeries), 2000.

Carswell 2000

John Carswell. Blue and White,Chinese Porcelain around theWorld. Chicago: Art MediaResources, 2000.

Chang 1977

Chang Kwang-chih, ed. Food inChinese Culture. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1977.

Doerfer 1963-1975

Gerhard Doerfer, Türkische undmongolische Elemente im Neu-persischen, 4 Vols. Here: Band I,Mongolische Elemente im Neu-persischen. Band II, TürkischeElemente im Neupersischen, alifbis tâ. Wiesbaden: Franz SteinerVerlag, 1963-1975.

Elgood 1979

Cyril Elgood. A Medical History ofPersia and the Eastern Caliphate,corrected and amended ed.Amsterdam: APA – Philo Press,1979 (first published 1951).

Haroutunian 1982

Arto der Haroutunian. MiddleEastern Cookery. London: Pan,1982.

Kim 2006

Kim Ho-dong. “A Portrait of aChristian Official in China underthe Mongol Rule.” In: GabyBamana, ed. Christianity andMongolia, Past and Present,Proceedings of the AntoonMostaert Symposium onChristianity and Mongolia.Ulaanbaatar: Antoon MostaertMongolian Study Center, 2006:41-52.

Komaroff and Carboni 2002

Linda Komaroff and StefanoCarboni, eds. The Legacy of

Genghis Khan: Courtly Art andCulture in Western Asia, 1256-1353. New York: The MetropolitanMuseum of Art; New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press,2002.

Kong 1996

S. Y. Kong , et al. Huihuiyaofang . Hong Kong:Hong Kong zhong bianyi yinwuyouxian gongsi, 1996.

Kristeller 1982

Paul Oskar Kristeller. “NeueQuellen zur salernitaner Medizindes 12 Jahhunderts.” In: GerhardBaader and Gundolf Keil, eds.Medizin im mittelalterlichenAbendland. Darmstadt: Wissen-schaftliche Buchgesellschaft,1982: 191-208.

Laufer 1919

Berthold Laufer. Sino-Iranica,Chinese Contributions to theHistory of Civilization in AncientIran. Field Museum of NaturalHistory Publication 201, Anthro-pological Series XV, 3. Chicago:Field Museum, 1919.

Osamu and Seiichi 1973

Shinoda Osamu and Tan-aka Seiichi , Chûgoku so-kukei sôsho , Vol. 1.Tôkyô: Shoseki bunbutsuryûtsûkai, 1973.

Perry 2001

Charles Perry. “Kitab al-Tibakha:A Fifteenth Century Cookbook.”In: Maxime Rodinson, A. J.Arberry, and Charles Perry,Medieval Arabic Cookery. Black-awton, Totnes, Devon: ProspectBooks, 2001: 467–475.

Rall 1960

Jutta Rall. “Zur persischenÜbersetzung eines Mo-chüeh,eines chine-sischen medizinischenTextes.” Oriens Extremus 7(1960): 152-157.

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Roden 1970

Claudia Roden. A Book of MiddleEastern Food. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1970.

Roux 1984

Jean-Paul Roux. La religion desTurcs et des Mongols. Paris: Payot,1984.

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Edward Schafer. The GoldenPeaches of Samarkand. Berkeley:Uni-versity of California Press,1963.

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Tu-chien Weng. “Ai-hsieh: A Studyof His Life.” Unpublished Ph.D.dissertation, Harvard University,1938.

Wyngaert 1929

Anastasius van den Wyngaert.Sinica Franciscana, vol. I: Itineraet Relationes Fratrum Minorumsaec. XIII et XIV. Quaracchi-Firenze: College of SaintBonaventura, 1929.

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Yuanshi . 15 vols. Beijing:Zhonghua shuju, 1976.

Notes

1. On the history of Chinese food ingeneral see the relevant chapters ofChang 1977 and Anderson 1988. Seealso under individual foods and spicesBuell et al. 2000.

2. On the traditional Mongolian way oflife as it relates to food see also Buellet al. 2000.

3. Adapted from Buell et al. 2000, pp.294. Today a qian is about .011 oz anda sheng is 31.5 in3 while a he is onetenth of a sheng. The values of theqian, sheng and he were similar in the

14th century, with the sheng and thehe slightly less than today.

4. William of Rubruck speaks of theprocessing of cow’s milk and themaking and consumption of grut in thefollowing terms:

They first extract the butter fromcow’s milk and boil it until it isperfectly de-cocted andsubsequently they store it in rams’paunches which they keep for thatpurpose. And they do not put saltinto the butter which neverthelessdoes not putrefy on account of thegreat degree to which it has beendecocted. And they keep it for thewinter. The buttermilk whichremains after the butter [has beenremoved] they allow to sour, assharp as it can be. And they boilthat and it is coagulated by theboil ing. And that coagulatedbuttermilk they dry in the sun, andit is thereby made hard, just likethe slag of iron and they store thedried buttermilk in sacks for thewinter. During the winter when theylack for milk, they place this bittercoagulated milk, which they callgrut, in a hide bag and pour on tophot water and they shake the bagstrongly until the coagulated milkis dissolved in water which is madetotally acid by this. And this waterthey drink in place of milk. Theytake the greatest care lest theydrink pure water [Wyngaert 1929,p. 179].

See the discussion in Buell et al. 2000,p. 36.

5. On the general topic of Turkicinfluence on Mongolian foodways seeBuell 1999.

6. In Iran today an ash can be a stew,pointing up a further evolution.

7. For modern variants seeHaroutunian 1982, p. 80, and Roden1970, p. 135.

8. On the word and some of itsoccurrences in Persian texts seeDoerfer 1965-1975, Bd. II, pp. 457-59.

9. Adapted from Buell et al. 2000, pp.298-99. A jin is today about 500 g.

10. On Rumi and tutumash see Algar1991, pp. 6-7, 174.

11. Carswell 2000, pp. 23-24, andpersonal communications to the author.

12. John Carswell, personal com-munication to the author, summer2005.

13. The whole question of themovement of Chinese ideas of paintingwest during the Mongol era is now anarea of renewed interest. See Komaroffand Carboni 2002, particularly thearticles by James Watt, pp. 63-73, andKomaroff, pp. 168-195.

14. Kong 1996, p. 104. This and othertranslations below from the HHYF willbe contained and further annotated inBuell forthcoming 2. All rights arereserved.

15. This term is difficult to translate inthe HHYF since it can be used there todesignate muscles and tendons, minorblood vessels, nerve tissue, and eventhe spinal cord.

16. In the HHYF, qi most commonlymeans simply “breath.” Here themeaning is unclear but the contextwould be perfectly comprehensible interms of Chinese medicine, thus thetranslation. An alternative translationwould be “vital force.” As a humor, qiis the air or wind of Indian medicine.See also below.

17. I am grateful to colleague ChrisMuench for discussing this section ofthe HHYF with me.

18. The second character is not theusual one and may be a phoneticspelling.

19. On Jesü see Weng 1938. I amgrateful to Igor de Rachewiltz fordiscussing his own forthcoming workon Isa with me and for supplying mewith a copy of Weng’s dissertation. Seenow also Kim 2006.

20. On early medical texts used in theschools see, as an introduction,Kristeller 1982, and also Baader 1982.On the rise of standardized texts as apublishing phenomenon see also Buell2001.

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In Search of Mongolian BarbecueDebra McCownAbingdon, Virginia (USA)

Asking about barbecue in Mongoliacan get you some strange looks.Barbecue is not interesting, theysay. They’ll tell you food is notinteresting. And among foods,dairy products are certainly moreinteresting than barbecue, asubject that is “not takenseriously,” as one Mongolianprofessor told me. The ethno-logists with whom I spoke at theNational University of Mongoliaindicated that no one has everdone a study on barbecue or evenon meat. At most the subjectreceives passing mention. InMongolia, when people have aparty, they cook an animal. In acountry that lives primarily fromits animals, this is a given, anobvious thing, like the color of thesky or the change of seasons.Why, they wonder aloud, wouldanyone try to study such a thing?

But such pessimism aboutbarbecue is not enough to stop aNorth Carolina Tar Heel fromstudying a subject so near anddear to her heart. Others havebeen inspired by their love ofpulled pork to drive hours uponhours to experience the regionalvariations of American barbecue— but I am the first, far as I know,to go all the way to Mongolia insearch of barbecue. I said I’d goto the end of the earth for a goodbarbecue sandwich — and I wasn’tjoking.

As it turns out, true Mongolianbarbecue is nothing like the stuffmarketed as “Mongolian bar-becue” in the United States. Infact, the two traditional Mongolianmethods of making barbecue arevirtually unknown in the West.

Ultimately, my search took meto Bayanhotag sum, Hentii aimag,where I learned firsthand how tomake horhog and boodog fromPurevtogtokh (Purev), a man who

learned from his grandfather andnow cooks for tourists outsideUlaanbaatar. A translator and Itraveled with him to his familyhome, where I essentially threwtwo big barbecue parties for hisrelatives and neighbors. Before Igo into what I learned about thelabor-intensive process of makingreal Mongolian barbecue, I shouldprovide some background onbarbecue and its history inMongolia.

What is Barbecue?

Food is so taken for granted thatit rarely appears in histories; yet,there may be nothing moreillustrative of the universality ofthe human experience. Theconcept of cooking an animal andcelebrating in a large group hasprobably been around as long asmen have been hunting. It ismentioned in stories of ChingisKhan and of events in the MiddleEast more than a millenniumbefore that, in the Bible.

Not only in legend, but also inmodern-day culture, the conceptof barbecue spans the world.Natives in the Caribbean builtframeworks of sticks on which toslow-cook meat over a fire; theword barbecue arrived in Europevia Spain from their term for suchstructures. While barbecue in theUnited States usually involves alarge metal gril l, the NorthCarolina variant, “pig-picking,”originated from the practice ofturning a pig on a spit over a fireand picking the meat off theoutside as it cooked. Hawaiiansbury a pig underground with pilesof hot stones; Mongolians put hotstones inside the animal or insidea container. True Mongolianbarbecue is simply that country’svariation of the global concept thatmight best be summed up as“cook a critter, have a party.”

For Mongolia, first someterminology. Perhaps the mostconcise definition I got forMongolian barbecue came from atranslator Solongo: “In traditionalbarbecue, they use hot stones,and that’s how they cook it.Thetrick of it is everything has to beclosed. The container is closedtightly, and no air is coming out.”In fact, to most Mongols, barbecuemeans either horhog or boodog.The first of these is what Solongois describing: placing meat andhot rocks inside a sealed metalcontainer. In boodog the cookingis done made by placing hotstones inside the sealed skin of theanimal. Horhog and boodog arecooked both from the inside by thehot rocks and pressurized steamand from the outside by the heatof a fire.

What we are not talking abouthere is shorlog, an imported kindof shishkebab involving cookingmarinated chunks of meat, fat andsometimes vegetables on skewerson a grill.

A Few Words on Meat inMongolian Culture

I was told many times that in orderto be considered “real food” inMongolia, a meal must containmeat, even though historicallyother food products from thetraditional herding culture havealso been significant. Thenumerous petroglyphs in theMongolian Altai attest to theimportance of hunting by thosewho inhabited the area thousandsof years ago. An encyclopedicdescription of the Mongolian Wayof Life summarizes how with mostof the meat from hunted animals,people would make horhog orboodog or fry it on a stick in thefire. The meat from huntedanimals could also be boiled. Meatwas seasoned with wild onions andgrasses and sometimes milkproducts in soups. It was commonto eat the head, legs and insidesfirst before the meat because theygo down easily. Each organ meatwas traditionally divided evenlyamong everyone in the ger

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(Mongolian Way 1987). Earlyhistorical sources, such as theSecret History of the Mongols,while not providing details abouthow meat was prepared,emphasize the importance ofserving meat in traditionalhospitality (Secret History 1998)

Yet, as the Franciscan William ofRubruck astutely observed in the13th century while discussing theMongols’ tastes in meat, “Insummer, so long as lasts theirkumis, that is to say mare’s milk,they care not for any other food”[Fig. 1] (Rubruck 2004). Indeed,

there is an amazing range of milkproducts, not just kumis, whichform the core of the summer diet.As a recent text explains,

The main reason for the heavyfocus on dairy products insummer is the need toconsume milk and itsderivatives before they getspoiled very fast in thesummer heat. Plus summer isnot the time to slaughteranimals and therefore themeat supplies drasticallyreduce in those months.Herders also refrain fromslaughtering their animals inhot weather lest the meatbecome spoiled in a veryshort time (Baabar andEnkhbat 2002: 34).

The Mongolian language actuallyhas specific words describing thehunger for meat during thesummer. Barbecue, an exception

to the summer’s meatless diet,helps to quench this meat hunger.

My host Purev explained thatsince 1921, with urbanization, tothe degree that Mongols havebecome more settled and don’thave so many milk products in thesummertime, they eat more meatthan they did before. He said it isno longer true that meat is onlyeaten for special events in thesummer, though horhog or boodogis still a treat.

A Concise History of Barbecuein Mongolia

The preparation of horhog andboodog reflects the conditions ofnomadic life where there might beminimal cooking equipment. AsProfessor Lkhagvaa of theMongolian University of Scienceand Technology told me, the useof hot stones is a very old practice.“The easiest way of making foodis…making fire, heating twostones…barbecue is maybe fromthis, putting it on the meat andbetween it.”

There is no archaeologicalevidence regarding when boodogfirst was made, although it is safeto assume that its preparationfrom hunted animals dates fromancient times, soon after humansdiscovered fire. The idea ofmaking boodog with livestock (asis common now) is relatively newbut may date as far back as thetime when people began herdinganimals. Excavations of Xiongnugraves in Mon-golia from twomillennia agohave yieldedbronze caul-drons containingbones of animalsp r e s u m a b l yfrom the ritualpreparation offood to accom-pany the de-ceased [Fig. 2].It is possiblethat horhogcould have beenprepared in such

cauldrons if they were coveredwith a metal l id and it wasweighted down with stones.

In the absence of such lidsamong archaeological finds, asProfessor Byambadorj of theNational University of Mongoliaexplained to me, horhog likelyevolved from the ancient boodogcooking technique. Boodog isdifficult, he said, because itrequires the animal to have a goodskin for making it. Also, huntersbegan making horhog, he said,because they needed to use theanimal skin instead of burning it,and so they needed somethingother than the skin to cook themeat in. They began using a partof the stomach of a sheep or goat,taking it with them, makinghorhog in it, and then keeping theskin to use for something else. AsPurev told me, the use of modernmetal containers for makinghorhog began probably in the1920s.

Surely one of the earliest explicitreferences to what we mightassume was the preparation ofboodog is in the late 14th centuryYüan shih, the official history ofthe Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty inChina. The story relates how theyoung Temüjin, the future ChingisKhan, was fleeing for his life witha few companions, among themhis brother Khasar (Qajar):

Fig. 1. Milking a mare, Tamir Riverregion, Arkhangai aimag.

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Fig. 2. Burial goods in a Xiongnu grave,including bronze cauldron containinganimal bones. Tamiryn Ulaan Khoshuu,Arkhangai aimag, Feature 97.

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When they reached the Pan-chu-ni (Baljuni) River theirprovisions were entirelyexhausted and, since theplace was desolate andremote, there was no way toobtain food. It happened thata single wild horse camenorthward. The prince Ha-cha-erh (Qajar) shot it andkilled it. Thereupon, theyremoved the hide to make acauldron. They produced firefrom a stone. They drew thewater of the River. They boiledand ate it. [Tr. by Cleaves1955, p. 397; cf. Weatherford2004, p. 57, where he in-terpolates details not in theoriginal.]

Purev related a modernequivalent of this old story ofdestitute flight from pursuers.Before the 1921 revolution, hesaid, there were men who stolelivestock from the wealthy anddistributed it to the poor peoplesome distance to the east. Toescape the animals’ owners, theyhad to ride thousands ofkilometers, and they had no timeto sit and eat while on the run.So, as they were riding, theywould catch marmots, largerodents that inhabit the steppe ofMongolia. They would stop to takeout the bones and heat up somerocks in a fire, then stuff the rocksinside, tie it shut, hang it fromtheir saddle and continue to ride.After galloping for an hour or sothey would stop to remove the hairand put the marmot on a fire tocook the skin. They would drinkthe broth, eat the meat, drinksome cold water from a stream,and keep riding.

Barbecue in Mongolia: When,Where, Why and by Whom?

Everyone I asked told mebarbecue in Mongolia is generallya summer thing. It’s commonknowledge in Mongolia that theanimals aren’t fat enough in thewinter or spring. People also havemore free time for special mealsand gatherings in the summertime

because they are not as busy withthe herds. The summer is alsowhen people have enough milk todistill vodka from it, and when citypeople have their month-longvacations. The preparation ofbarbecue is always done in thecountryside.

Barbecue in Mongolia is usedmainly for celebrations. Horhogand boodog, while they have longexisted alongside other cookingmethods, have always been thefood of special occasions, such asNaadam (the big sports festival inJuly) or the arrival of honoredguests. Purev told me peoplemake barbecue during the felt-making time in early summer andalso when a family’s grownchildren come home from the cityto visit. Today it remains the foodof celebrations largely because itis enough to feed a large group.People enjoy it since it isn’teveryday food, especially in thesummer when little meat is eaten.As much as anything, the focus isnot on the food itself but on theoccasion for which it is served.

Generally, making barbecue inMongolia is thought of assomething done by men. However,gender roles may in fact vary.Carengerel, mother of the familyI stayed with in BayanhongorAimag, said her husband can dobarbecue but doesn’t, though hedoes hunt marmots. No one in thearea is well-known for barbecue,she said, but everyone can do it,horhog with mutton or goat. In herarea, she said, people don’t makeboodog with goats, only marmots.

The description I received fromCatherine Heffernan, an AmericanPeace Corps volunteer, on howhorhog is made in Selenge aimagand Tov aimag seemed to assignimportance to gender division oflabor in making the barbecue.When the layering of meat and hotrocks was done in the can, shesaid, the wife put in the meat andsalt, while the husband put in thehot rocks. The husband, sheobserved, kept the fire going.

Barbecue and Health

There is a significant connectionbetween barbecue and healing.When the barbecue is done,before eating it you must first tossone of the hot, greasy stones backand forth between your hands, apractice that is supposed to begood for your health [Fig. 3].

Purev told me playing with hotstones makes you less tired, andin the spring everyone is tired.You’re supposed to touch themwith your fingertips, too. I wasskeptical at first, but holding hotstones actually gets kind ofaddictive.

According Martha Avery, “Thesestones are very therapeutic, soyou can use them. Hold them inyour hands, or sit on them, or putthem under your feet. Forexample, if you have stomachproblems, put them on top of yourstomach for a while. The stoneswill be black and oily. Don’t washthem off!” (Avery 1996).

Ankhtaya, master teacher at thetraditional medicine school at

Fig. 3. Handling the hot stonesat a Mongolian barbecue.

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Mambadatsun Monastery inUlaanbaatar, told me a little bitabout how the hot stones used inmaking barbecue are also used intraditional healing. The tradition isnot connected to Buddhism, shesays, and she has no idea when itbegan, though her guess is thatpeople have been doing this aslong as they’ve been makingboodog. These practices are beingused just as much now as in therecent past, she said, though it ispossible these treatments wereused more in the 17th and 18th

centuries than they are now.

For sleeping problems,Ankhtaya says, you can put hotstones on your head, hold themin your hands, or place them onthe back of your neck. Putting ahot stone on the back of your neckwill also help to relieve nervousproblems. Placing a hot stone onthe side of your head, directly infront of your ear, can help improvea problem with your hearing.Placing a hot stone on your back,in the area of your kidney, can helpwith a kidney problem. She saidthese ailments are caused bycoldness, which is why hot stonesare helpful. Holding hot stones canalso help prevent these conditions.

Ankhtaya also had some healthadvice on eating barbecue. Peoplewith liver problems, such asHepatitis B, should not eat boodogbecause it contains a lot of fat,which is not good for people withliver problems, she said.

The Process of Making Horhog

Making horhog can bedescribed very simply,although the actualpreparation process israther involved. Youslaughter an animal, chopit up, and put the meat,still on the bones, into ametal container withpotatoes, onions, spices,and hot rocks, then put iton the fire, cooking themeat from both inside andoutside, with both heatand pressure. “It tastesnice and it looks nice,”

Purev said of horhog, “but it takesa long time and hard work.”

The process of making horhog,begins with selecting the properstones. About 100-200 km beforewe reached our destination insouthern Hentii aimag where Iwas to learn how to maketraditional Mongolian barbecue,we stopped to collect stones formaking horhog and boodog. Theproper kind of stones, Purevexplained, are not available in thearea where we were going. Youhave to get river stones, he said,because they will not break easily.They must be round and smooth,with no cracks. We collected thestones by a small, slow-runningstream that used to be a big river.We selected from the collectionthe next morning but did not haveto clean them, since heating themin the fire killed any germs.Occasionally stones will explodewhen heated. Before placing themin the horhog, they must be red-hot.

The other essential non-foodrequirement is the container itself.We used a 40-liter (roughly 10gallon) metal container of the sortused for storing water or dairyproducts—a small milk can, if youwish. Some of these have a clampwith which to fasten down the lidsecurely, although in Mongoliapeople have even been known toimprovise by holding the lid downwith an iron anvil. Using woodenwedges to tighten the clamp maybe necessary. Since such cans

normally do not have seals, it mayalso be necessary create one (inour case it involved placing underthe lid a layer of plastic bags andnewspaper). The idea is that thecontainer should be as airtight aspossible but also safe fromexploding. The key to the rapidcooking of horhog is the pressurefrom the steam inside thecontaineer. Readers should notethat pressure cooking can bedangerous. Making horhog in animprovised pot at home is notrecommended; even when usinga proper pressure cooker with asafety valve, when opening thecover one must be very careful torelease the pressure graduallyfirst.

Although any kind of meat maybe used, horhog is generally madewith mutton. The sheep isslaughtered immediately beforethe horhog is assembled. Mongolsdo not use the word “kill” withanimals. The word is alwaystranslated as “to cut.” Theyslaughter sheep by cutting a slitin the lower part of the belly andthen reaching a hand inside uppast the elbow to squeeze theaorta [Fig. 4]. When a skilledperson does this, the sheep diesin a matter of seconds, and noblood is spilled on the ground.During the entire process, Purevsaid, it is necessary to pray,because that way it is not seen tobe against the tenets of Buddhismwhich prohibit killing living beings.If a goat is being slaughtered, they

hit it on the head with ahammer and then cut itsthroat to drain the blood.The meat is cut into chunks,leaving the bones in; theentrails are processedseparately (see below).

The recipe

Add to the can thefollowing:

Water, maybe half a gallon;

1/3 of the meat andvegetables: carrots andpotatoes, peeled andpartially pre-cooked.Fig. 4. Cutting a sheep, Tamir River

region, Arkhangai aimag.

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If necessary, add more waterto cover completely.

Add half of the spices (onions,garlic, salt, pepper, pepper-corns and laurel leaves, or, ifyou have them, traditionalseasonings of wild onions andgrasses).

Add a layer of hot rocks,blowing off the ash on themfirst.

Add another third of the meatand vegetables, the other halfof the spices and, as needed,water to cover.

Then add another layer of hotrocks.

Add the final third of the meatand vegetables and cover withhot rocks. The can should thenbe approximately two-thirdsfull.

Close the can securely andplace it in the stoked fire or ontop of a stove on high heat.Cook for approximately an hourand a half. A smaller containerof the dish takes less time.

No part of the animal is allowedto go to waste [Figs. 5, 6]. When

the sheep was being cut up forhorhog, everyone in the extendedfamily helped in processing theentrails. These insides are madeinto several dishes:

1) Blood sausage, for which theblood is mixed with flour, salt,water, onions and garlic, put intothe large intestines and boiled.

2) Liver wrapped in the fat liningfrom around the organs andcooked directly in the flames. Thedung fire is supposed to give it agood taste. The liver thus cookedmay be served as an appetizerduring the preparation for cookinghorhog.

3) Soup made from the organmeats, seasoned with onions,pepper and salt. It is cooked ontop of a stove, inside the stomachwhere hot rocks have placed, asmaller version of the processused for making horhog. It iscalled “origin myth soup” and isnot ever served to tourists; it isjust a local dish. The boiledentrails, like the liver, may beserved as an appetizer.

4) Ikh Mongol, or “the greatMongolian meal,” iscalled this because itincludes the head,the tail, the fourhooves and asausage made fromthe insides – essen-

tially, it is the whole sheep. Whenthey made it in Hentii, the head,hooves and tail were takenoutside, the hair cut short andthen burned off with a blowtorch[Fig. 7], and then all of it waswashed very well and boiled. Anolder person cuts and distributesthe meat, and it is distributed in avery specific way. A young woman,I was given a small part of themouth that is customarily given toyoung girls because it is supposedto help them sew better.

To this point what I amdescribing is “traditional,” but aswe know, tradition is notunchanging. Since my barbecueteacher Purev has spent the lastseveral years working at touristcamps, when he prepares horhogand boodog in the countryside heis making traditional Mongolianfood but also adapting the menuto urban tastes and ingredients.

Thus, while the horhog began tocook, we went to work makingsalad: chopping cabbage andcarrots. The salads were of thesort served at tourist camps.

Cabbage and vinegar, salt,sugar, oil;

Carrot, mayonnaise and garlic;

Cooked potato and carrot,corn, peas, salt and mayon-naise.

When the horhog was done, thecontainer was re-moved from thestove and set on thefloor of the ger to coolfor a bit. Then every-one was called in, thecontainer was open-ed, and the hot rockswere passed around(“juggled” might be amore appropriateterm until they cool abit). Then everyonedrinks the broth,

Fig. 5. Butchering thesheep. Fig. 6. Scrapingoff the stomach lining.Fig. 7. Using a blow-torch to burn off thehair around the tail.

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which is very rich, thick and fatty.Finally the meat is divided [Figs.8, 9]. Traditionally, the meat isdivided evenly among everyone inthe ger. The choicest piece is theshoulder blade, called thedal, which is offered to thehonored oldest memberof the group, who thendivides it among everyonepresent. One sheeptypically feeds around 30people.

It is important aftereating the meat fromhorhog not to drink coldwater because it cancause the fat to congealin your stomach and getstuck there, making yousick. Hot tea is anacceptable drink withbarbecue. Milk vodka(airag) is the traditionaldrink, although commercialbottled vodka is quite commonnowadays, drunk neat, of course.

The Process of Making Boodog

As with horhog, the preparationprocess for boodog is a lot tougherthan it sounds, and it takes a longtime.The word boodog comesfrom the verb bookh, which means“to tie.” As with horhog, pressure-cooking is essential to the process,though with boodog the cookingis done inside the animal’s skininstead of in a metal container. To

make boodog, you must removethe animal’s bones and internalorgans through the neck. Thenyou put pieces of meat on bonesinside the skin, along with spicesand hot rocks. You remove the hairwith fire from the outside, and thisfire also adds heat to the cookingprocess from the outside, meaningthat, as with horhog, boodogcooks from both inside andoutside.

Boodog is made with eithermarmot or goat because thesetwo animals have a skin that cantolerate having hot rocks insidewithout breaking. It is theoreticallypossible to make camel boodog,but in reality it is impossiblebecause a camel, which is large,would take a whole truckload ofhot stones. Sometimes barbecuepeople in Mongolia tell jokes in

which “camel boodog” is thepunchline.

The process of removing all thebones and organs through thegoat’s neck takes a long time andrequires a good knowledge ofanatomy. The carcass issuspended during the process;bones must be removed one at atime, each one requiring someeffort. It is absolutely essential toremove everything withoutbreaking the stomach or makingany holes in the skin. If the

stomach breaks, it ruinseverything. In Hentii, it took twomen to wrestle the stomach andintestines out. It’s also importantto avoid cutting anything that willcause the whole carcass to falldown. “It’s like surgery, onlywithout looking,” Purev explained.

Finally, when all the bones havebeen removed, the de-boned goatskin is turned inside-out toseparate the remaining meat. Thede-boned skin for boodog is calledtulam. If a little bit of hair getsstuck inside, the hot stones willburn it up and it will not be in theboodog. This time though,because it was still May and thehair was very long, there was waytoo much hair, and they used ablowtorch to remove the hair fromthe inside the skin. Watching twogrown men, armed with ablowtorch, wrestle with an inside-

out goat is an oddsight for a visitor.

Once the goat wasfinally turned backright-side-out, theystuffed it with thefollowing:

Spices (onions,garlic, laurel leaf,salt, pepper, pep-percorns);hot rocks;meat, bone-in;hot rocks;more meat andspices, and onekidney;hot rocks.

They made a point of placing thehot rocks in certain places insidethe skin. Then they tied it up astightly as possible, even thoughsteam continued to escape.Traditionally the skin is tied shutwith hair from a horse’s tail.Nowadays, wire or plastic stringmay be used – whatever isavailable. Once the boodog bag istied shut, they burned off theremaining hair with a blowtorch.Traditionally, the skin with hotrocks inside is placed on an

Fig. 8. Dishing out horhog.

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Fig. 9. Horhog served al fresco Khoit TsenkherValley, Khovd aimag.

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elongated fire that encompassesthe whole. Purev said that a biggrill can be used for cookingboodog, like the one used forcooking pigs in the United States.As I observed it in Hentii aimag,however, the cooking was donewith a blowtorch. The meat iscooked both by the hot stonesinside and the fire from outside.If the cooking skin has really beentightly sealed, it may be necessaryto open it occasionally duringcooking to release some of thepressure and prevent its ex-ploding. Purev said that many aburn has been caused byexploding boodog after someoneaccidentally burned a hole throughthe skin.

The boodog takes about an hourto cook (much less time than ittook to de-bone the goat!); it isdone when soft all over. The skinshould be an even, golden-yellowcolor. When everyone hasgathered, someonecuts open the boodogand distributes therocks and meat.

As is the case withmutton horhog, it isimportant not to drinkcold water after eatinggoat boodog, becauseit can cause the fat tocongeal in your sto-mach. It is, however,a good idea to drinkcold water after eatingmarmot or horse meat(the fat is different andwill not congeal).

Marmot Boodog

Traditionally, boodog is made withmarmot. Because marmot meathas a lot of calories, it is believedto have good and healthy meat(Gongorjav 1999). Marmotreportedly tastes a lot l ikehorsemeat. A strange thing aboutmarmot, Purev said, is that threepeople can eat a marmot and befull, and so can ten.

Because making boodogrequires that the animal’s skin stay

intact, the hunter must shoot themarmot in the head and be carefulnot to put any holes in the skin.Hunting marmots relies on therodents’ innate curiosity. “Twirlinga tuft of yak-tail will arouse themarmot’s curiosity. When it risesup to get a better look, the hunterhas a chance for a good shot”(Goldstein and Beall 1994, p. 65).Marmots are also trapped for theirskins, which have been exportedin such large numbers in recentyears that the governmentenacted a ban on all marmothunting.

Bat, who works for a companycatering to foreign hunters,explained that, despite thehunting ban, which includes thepenalty that the marmot and thehunter’s gun will l ikely beconfiscated and the hunter fined,people still hunt enough marmotsto sell marmot boodog along theroadside in the country. The taste

for marmot boodog trumpsenthusiasm for enforcing thehunting ban. As one Mongolasserts, “Mongolians are crazyabout Marmot!” This, despite thedanger that live marmots areknown to be carriers of the plague.

Barbecue for Sale?

Before I went to Hentii to learnhow to make Mongolian barbecue,I did a pretty extensive search for

it in Ulaanbaatar. But it wasnowhere to be found, even thoughI had been told that there arerestaurants in Ulaanbaatar whichserve horhog made on a smallscale. The only advertisedcommercially available barbecuein Ulaanbaatar was the newfranchise of the Michigan-basedBD’s Mongolian Barbecue. As abillboard announced, its generalconcept is “Create Your Own StirFry.”

Billy Downs, president of BD’s,told me about the franchise. Theproject began when a restaurantowner in Ulaanbaatar who serveda similar style of “Mongolianbarbecue” contacted him to askfor help with the cooking process.“They didn’t feel like they weredoing it the right way, so theycontacted us for help,” Downssaid. “We decided to open a wholerestaurant.”

The restaurant is setup like a salad bar ofuncooked things:meats, vegetables andsauces. Diners fill a bowlwith their choice ofingredients, and cooksprepare the food on ahot griddle with two longmetal cooking tools theycall “swords” [Fig. 10].Whether the food servedat BD’s is authenticallyMongolian is a goodquestion; both Mongolsand Americans inMongolia said they don’tthink so. Mongols saidthe slivers of meat

designed to cook quickly are partof their food culture, but not therest. Americans suggested thatthe BD’s concept may have firstbeen packaged as “Mongolian” inChina or Taiwan and then exportedto the U.S.

In any event, it is certainly notthe traditonal “Mongolianbarbecue” I have described above,even if some aspects of the

Fig. 10. Cooking on the griddle at BD’s in Ulaanbaatar.

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preparation resemble what onecan find in everyday practice.

In the countryside, Mongolsgenerally cook in a big metal bowl(we might call it a wok), eitherbalanced between three rocks orset into a round hole over a fire.In the process of making soup andother dishes, they first brown allthe little pieces of chopped upmeat, then may add a smallamount of vegetables, carrots,potatoes and/or cabbage, then stirthe mixture around and let it cooka little bit before adding water.

As Paul Buell’s article in thisjournal demonstrates, Mongoliancooking in earlier times incor-porated a great deal from otherfood traditions and in turn helpedto transmit recipes across Eurasia.BD’s cooking style is a blend ofelements from several cultures,with sauces and ingredients fromall over the world. It is notimpossible that one of its sourcesis Mongolian tradition. “Mongolianbarbecue” in BD’s style is certainlya growing phenomenon. “It’sclever,” said Layton Croft, anAmerican working on Mongoliawith a non-profit organization.“There’s a market for this aroundthe world, and it’s not a Mongolianthing, but if someone’s going tocome here as a tourist, they’regoing to say, hey, I had Mongolianbarbecue in Mongolia…it’s cleverbecause it’s entrepreneurial.”

Yet in Ulaanbaatar, clearly it isalso entrepreneurial to offertraditional horhog, which Downsadded to the restaurant’s menurecently along with some newvariations. “Whenever you tell aMongol ‘chicken horhog,’ they startlaughing,” Downs said. But, hesaid, “It’s amazing flavor.” Whilethe “create your own stir-fry”remains the food of choice amongforeigners who come to therestaurant, Mongols do orderhorhog, and there are plans to addthe traditional Mongolian foods tothe menu of BD’s restaurants inthe United States.

Meanwhile, in Mongolia, the onecommercial enterprise in whichboth horhog and boodog have

been very successful is touristcamps. Employees at ChinggisiinKhuree, a tourist camp roughly 20km from Ulaanbaatar, forexample, say that on a typicalweekend they feed 70 to 100guests per day and business isincreasing. On one hectic day1,000 guests came.

Considering I traveled severalthousand miles searching forMongolian barbecue, it’s a bitstrange to expect that it will followme home. I look forward to theday when “real” Mongolianbarbecue is served at restaurantsnot only in Ulaanbaatar but alsoin the United States. Folks mayhave to drive a distance to visitone of the restaurants – thenearest one to me is about 300miles away – but it’s a whole lotcloser than Mongolia.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the followingindividuals whom I interviewedduring my research in 2005:Ankhtaya, master teacher ofMambadatsun Traditional MedicineSchool; Bat, employee of ahunting tourism company;Byambabdorj, Professor ofEthnography at the NationalUniversity of Mongolia;Carengerel, Bayanhongor aimag;Layton Croft, Asia Foundation;Dolgorsuren, Professor ofEthnography, National Universityof Mongolia; Bil ly Downs,President of BD’s MongolianBarbecue; Egii, student atUlaanbaatar University; G.Lkhagvaa, Professor of Nutritionand Food Preparation Technology,Mongolian University of Scienceand Technology; CatherineHeffernan, Peace Corps volunteerin Mongolia; S. Bayaraa,Ulaanbaatar; Solongo, Ulaan-baatar; Soylhoo, Dadal, Hentiiaimag. Above all I am indebted toPurevtogtokh, Bayanhotag, Hentiiaimag, for the lessons he providedin preparation of the realMongolian barbecue and to hisfamily for extending the hospitalityfor which Mongols are famous.

About the authorDebra McCown is a newspaperreporter and writer who spent fivemonths in Mongolia in 2005. Shenow makes her home in Abingdon,Virginia, where she continues hersearch for excellent barbecue. Shemay be contacted at<debra.mccown@gmail.com>.

ReferencesAvery 1996Martha Avery. Women of Mongolia.Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press,1996.

Baabar and Enkhbat 2002Baabar and E. Enkhbat. Mongols.Ulaanbaatar: Monsudar, 2002.

Cleaves 1955Francis Woodman Cleaves, “TheHistoricity of the Baljuna Covenant,”Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 18/3-4. (1955): 357-421.

Goldstein and Beall 1994Melvyn C. Goldstein and Cynthia M.Beall. The Changing World ofMongolian Nomads, Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1994.

Gongorjav 1999G. Gongorjav. Mongolian TraditionalFood, Vol. 2. Ulaanbaatar: C. Caaral,1999.

Mongolian Way 1987Mongolian Way of Life, Vol. 1.Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian Institute ofHistory, 1987.

Oyunbayar 1999N. Oyunbayar. “Meat, Milk andMongolia: Misunderstood and OftenMaligned, the Mongolian Diet DoesMake Sense,” Ger 2 (May 1999).

Rubruck 2004“William of Rubruck’s Account of theMongols.” In Silk Road Seattle <http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/rubruck.html>, accessed October 23,2007.

Secret History 1998The Secret History of the Mongols. TheOrigin of Chingis Khan. An Adaptationof the Yüan Ch’ao Pi Shih, BasedPrimarily on the English Translation byFrancis Woodman Cleaves by PaulKahn. Expanded ed. Boston: Cheng &Tsui, 1998 (first published 1984).

Weatherford 2004Jack Weatherford. Genghis Khan andthe Making of the Modern World. NewYork: Crown Publishers, 2004.

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Investigation of a Xiongnu Royal Complex in theTsaraam Valley

Part 2: The Inventory of Barrow No. 7

and the Chronology of the Site

Sergei S. MiniaevInstitute of the History of Material Culture (Russian Academy of Sciences), St. PetersburgLidiia M. SakharovskaiaV. A. Obruchev Regional Museum, Kiakhta

During the 1997-2005 fieldseasons the Trans-BaikalArchaeological Expedition of theInstitute of the History of MaterialCulture, Russian Academy ofSciences, St. Petersburg,investigated a Xiongnu Royalburial complex in the TsaraamValley, situated 1.5 km to thesouth of Naushki village (BuriatRepublic, Russian Federation)[Figs. 1, 2]. We published a

preliminary report about theexcavation in The Silk Road(Miniaev and Sakharovskaia2006a), where the reader mayfind site diagrams and informationabout the construction of thetomb. Its complex structureincluded a number of verticalpartitions and horizontal ceilingsor covers. In this, the second part

of the report, we expand on ourearlier description of some of thefinds in the central barrow andconclude with a discussion of thechronology of the complex.

Objects Found Inside theBurial Pit: The Chinese Mirror

Fragments of a Chinese bronzemirror [Figs. 3, 4, next page] werefound under the logs at the secondlevel of the longitudinal partitionin the center of the burial pit, 218cm below the surface. The tenfragments of the mirror were inthe following positions: six lay oneabove the other and the remainingfour alongside of them. Takentogether they do not form acomplete mirror — its center isonly partially preserved —

although they suffice toreconstruct its size anddecoration. The diameter is 13cm; around its edge is a rim 2.1cm wide and .3 cm thick. Thecharacteristic elements of thedecoration make it possible toidentify a wide range of analogiesand reconstruct the entiredecorative scheme.

Apart from the smooth rim, onthe reverse surface of a mirror ofthat type are several concentricornamental bands. Directlyadjoining the rim is a narrow (3mm) band with a comb-toothpattern, inside of which is the mainornamental band with imageswhich were separated from thecenter of the mirror also by anarrow band with a comb-tooth

Fig. 1.View of the excavation ofBarrow No. 7 from the north.

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Fig. 1. View of the burial pit of Barrow No. 7 showing intraburialconstruction.

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pattern. A smoothprotruding band 3 mmwide separated theouter bands from thecenter, where there wasa pierced knob forhanging the mirror.Narrow protruding linesdivided into four sectorsthe area around theknob and inner smoothband. In each sector inturn were three roundknobs or nipples, thecentral one of whichwas connected with theprotruding smoothband by three shortlines.

The main ornamentalband situated betweenthe two narrow bandswith the comb-toothpattern was divided intofour sectors by meansof small rounded pro-jecting knobs. The areabetween the knobs wascovered by virtuallyidentical compositions,the center of which wasa large scroll in theshape of a comma. It ispossible that initiallythis was the depiction ofthe body of an animalwhich with time hadbeen transformed into ageometric composition.Above and below thisscroll were figures ofbirds, or, more rarely,other animals.

Mirrors of this typeare not uncommon.They are known inmuseum collections;some examples of suchmirrors have been found inarchaeological excavations both ofthe Han Dynasty itself and inXiongnu excavations of that sameperiod on the territory of Mongoliaand Russia. (See, e.g., Tal’ko-Gryntsevich 1999, p. 50, fig. 3ñ;

Chou 2000, p. 39, fig. 20, Chengand Han 2002, fig. 25:1,2 and fig.26:1,2; Wenwu 1977, fig. 27:2.)According to the standardclassification (Zhongguo tongjing1997, p. 247) they belong to thegroup of mirrors “with four nipples

and four S-shapedfigures” (or dragons).The given group isdated normally be-tween the 1st centuryBCE and 1st centuryCE.

An important charac-teristic of the mirrorsfrom Xiongnu sites istheir fragmentarystate. Unlike those inHan burials (and in arare instance such asthe Xiongnu burial atthe Tamir site ex-cavated in 2005), themirrors in mostXiongnu burials arefound either inseparate fragments orin several pieces of amirror that had beenintentionally broken.Evidence of the in-tentional breaking ofmirrors is seen, forexample, in the mirrordiscovered in aresidence in thefortress of Bayan-Under, where it wasunearthed along withthe iron knife whichbroke it (Huns 2005,p. 46, fig. 63).

It is very likely thatthe Tsaraam mirror,initially intact, likewisehad been intentionallybroken. Traces ofscale clearly visible onits surface indicatethat the mirror hadbeen broken by meansof heating it to a hightemperature and thenabruptly cooling it,possibly in cold water.After that, some of thefragments were re-

moved and the rest placed underthe beams of the longitudinalpartition. Removed as a result ofthis process were the central knobof the mirror, the three nipplesdividing the main ornamental zoneinto parts, and two segments with

Figs. 3, 4. The Han mirrorfound in Barrow No. 7.

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ornament in the form of a central“comma” and adjoining birds. Thedepiction of a bird above the“comma” in the third section alsohas been damaged. In essencethen, the only remaining completesegment is the fourth one. Wenote in particular that although thethird and fourth segments hadbeen broken into several partsduring the ritual, these parts werenot removed but placed in thegrave pit along with otherfragments. At the same time, asmall fragment of the mirror withthe dividing knob between thethird and fourth segments wasremoved along with two otherfragments with nipples. Thefragment with a nipple which wasplaced in the grave pit had firstbeen subjected to strongsecondary heating, the result ofwhich was that the knob hadmelted. The melting of the nipplewas a result specifically of thatsecond heating of a separatefragment, since otherwise theadjoining more delicate parts ofthe mirror also would have melted.

Thus one can hypothesize thatduring the burial ceremony aspecial ritual was performed overthe mirror, a ritual which possiblywas the norm for the burialpractices of the Xiongnu moregenerally. The ritual involvedsubjecting the mirror tomechanical or heat treatment andbreaking it into several fragments.One or several of such fragmentsaccompanied the dead, whileother parts of the mirror wereremoved and possibly preservedby the family or relatives of thedeceased in order subsequently toaccompany other burials andserve as a kind of sign ofrecognition upon meeting in theother world. The burial of someparts of the mirror in the gravepit and the removal of others (ofanalogous design) suggests thatsuch mirrors and the ritual actionsperformed over them served as akind of connecting link betweenthe world of the living and theworld of the dead, symbolizing inboth worlds the unity of the

collective which the deceased hadleft behind.

Objects Found Inside theBurial Pit: The Chinese Chariot

A Chinese chariot was found in thecenter of the barrow at a depth of10.5 – 11 m (Miniaev and Sakha-rovskaia 2007). To its north, at thewall of the pit about a meter fromthe incline of the fifth step at adepth of 10 m were the skull, twoneck vertebrae and themetapodials of a horse. Thearrangement of the chariot’s partssuggests that its body had beenplaced beneath the third coverwhen the pit was being filled, whilethe canopy and wheels were foundabove the stones of the third coverin the center of the barrow andthus must have been locatedabove the level of that ceiling [Fig.5]. Probably thechariot had beenset onto thestones of thefourth coverwhere it wasburied by thefilling of the pit aswell as by gravel,pebbles, char-coal and slabs ofthe third ceiling(the canopy andthe wheels of thechariot havingremained abovethe latter). Whenthe fill of the pitsank, the parts ofthe chariot weredisplaced: in theprocess, themovement ofstone slabs,gravel, and peb-bles — acting likemillstones —inflicted seriousdamage. Sometime later, thechariot was yetfurther disturbedby robber pas-sages: the north-ern passagedamaged part of

the harness and frame, while thesouthern one crossed thepresumed location of the seat, inthe process demolishing aconsiderable part of the canopy.Altogether, the parts of the chariotwere very poorly preserved: thewooden parts and organic materialof the canopy had decayed almostcompletely, the bronze and ironfastenings of the harness hadbeen severely oxidized and losttheir original structure. Here is adescription of the preserved partsof the chariot [Fig. 6, next page].

The remains of the canopy werein the center of the pit 4 m fromits northern edge above the stonesof the third cover. The canopyconsisted of a wooden frame, overwhich some organic material hadbeen stretched. The base of theframe was composed of thin

Fig. 5. The remains of the chariot in situ at the level ofthe fourth cover. A and B are the looters’ passages.

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wooden strips about 4 cm wide setcrosswise, to which were attacheda number of thick arched twigs.The base included as well thinnertwigs 1–1.5 cm in diameter,arrayed radially from the center ofthe frame. The organic cover ofthe frame was duofold, its upperlayer consisting of a dark organicmaterial (leather or felt), belowwhich there was a thin layer ofcloth. This canopy covering wasfixed to the strips and twigs of theframe with thin, iron L-shaped

nails. The inside of the canopy wascoated with red lacquer, whichpreserved traces of geometricornament rendered in white,brown and dark-red paints [Fig. 7,next page]. A robber trench haddestroyed the southern part of thecanopy.

The front yoke-pole of thechariot was found on the layer ofpebbles and charcoal under thestones of the third cover of the pit,2.5 m north of the canopy. Its

western edge had beencompletely destroyed during thecollapse of the third cover. Thepreserved length of the pole was2.5 m; its diameter was 18–20cm. A bronze ferrule 10 cm longand 7 cm in diameter wasattached to the eastern tip of thepole. The ferrule had completelyoxidized and been crushed by thepressure of the fill. Probably asimilar ferrule had been attachedto the western, destroyed end ofthe pole. Five pairs of squaremortises measuring 3 × 1.5 cmfor attaching parts of the harnesswere discernible. They began 12cm from the eastern tip of theyoke-pole and ran along its entirelength at intervals of 40–45 cm(the mortises in each pair werespaced 4 cm apart). Near themortises were fragments ofbronze — probably traces of arc-shaped harness “rings” or guideswhich had been set into themortises.

Remains of yoke-heads wereuncovered at the western andeastern sides of the yoke-pole, aswell as in its center. Theseconsisted of boards 4 cm thick, 8cm wide, and with the preservedlength of 25–30 cm. The positionof the western yoke-head in situsuggests that the heads wereattached to the yoke-pole bymeans of special incisions. Thelower parts of the yoke-headswere not preserved. In the upperpart of the western and centralyoke-heads there was a cylindrical

Fig. 6. The remains of the canopy andbody of the chariot. Figures inparentheses are depth measurements.1. Bones of a horse (skull andmetapodials). 2. Front yoke-pole. 3.Yoke-heads. 4. Bronze ferrule for frontyoke-pole. 5. Bronze arc-shapedharness “rings.” 6. Remains of thinround wooden poles. 7. Rectangulariron buckles. 8. Iron plates. 9. Ironrings. 10. Bronze ferrules for rear yoke-pole. 11. Iron rings. 12. Rear yoke-pole. 13. Remains of the lattice-workbody of the chariot. 14. Shafts. 15.Elbow-rests for the seat. 16. Easternwheel. 17. Western wheel. 18. Ironclamps. 19, 20. Small iron bushings.21. Iron plate. 22. Bones of a lamb.23. Canopy.

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projection on which a bronzeferrule had been placed. On theeastern head, this projection hadbeen broken off in antiquity butits traces were discernible in theupper part of the head. The entiresurface of the yoke-pole and yoke-heads was coated with blacklacquer, over which a geometricalpattern was drawn in white andred paint. Stylistically, fragmentsof this pattern are similar to thaton the inside of the canopy of thechariot.

The two wooden shafts of thechariot were beneath the frontyoke-pole lying parallel to eachother in the N-S direction and 60cm apart. They were very poorlypreserved: their southern partshad been cut off by the robbertrench; the preserved length was95–100 cm. Traces of lacquer anda pattern rendered in red andwhite paints were visible on thesurface of the shafts. Near theeastern shaft at a distance of 10cm from it was a line of iron ovalplates with holes on the shortersides. Probably these had oncebeen sewn onto the leather strapsof the harness or the reins. Belowthis line of plates, 30 cm to theeast, was an iron ring 6.5 cm indiameter.

The remains ofthe woodenwheels were lo-cated 1 m southof the shafts, onthe stones of thethird ceiling. Thelower part of thewestern wheelwas in the layerof pebbles andgravel underlyingthat ceiling. Thewheels werespaced 2 m fromone another,each consistingof a felloe,spokes and, pos-sibly, a centraldisc into whichthe ends of thespokes had beeninserted and in

the center of which the iron hubof the axle had been placed. Thewheels were considerablydamaged by the pressure of thefilling of the pit and ceilings. Thewheels were 120 cm in diameterand had 22 spokes whosethickness was 3–4 cm. Remainsof a number of iron shackles weretraceable around the felloe of thewestern wheel. Tiny fragments ofred and white paint werepreserved on the felloe andspokes. The felloe and theadjoining parts of the spokes werepainted red to a length of 10–12cm, whereas the rest of the spokeswas painted white. Practicallynothing of the central parts of thewheels survives; neverthelesstraces of red paint detected theresuggest that the central disc of thewheel into which the spokes hadbeen inserted was painted red.

Small iron hubs with twoprojections were uncovereddirectly outside of the wheels inthe pebble layer which underlaythe third ceiling. There were tracesof wood on the outer side of thehubs. Large iron hubs with threeprojections on the outside of eachwere found under the wheels inthe pebble layer of the thirdceiling. These also bore traces of

wood on the outer side, whereasin the center of the large and smallhubs no traces of wood have beendetected. The iron nails with whichthe hubs were fixed to the woodencores of the wheels werepreserved on the outer side of thelarger hubs.

The rear yoke-pole. This is anarbitrary designation for this partof the chariot, since its realpurpose still is not clear. A numberof facts suggest, however, that itis not the axle of the chariot, viz.:

– the difference between thediameter of the pole and the innerdiameter of the large iron hubsinto which the axle must havebeen inserted;

– the separate position of thebronze axle-caps (as describedbelow), which were usually putonto the ends of the axle andwhose diameter differs from thatof the rear pole (which further-more had its own bronze caps).

In its shape and dimensions (7cm in diameter and about 3 mlong) the “rear yoke-pole”resembled the front pole. Thelargest part of the pole had beencut off by the northern robbertrench; only its eastern andwestern ends were preserved.Bronze caps 5.5 cm in diameterand 7 cm long were placed on thetips of the pole. On the surface ofthe caps was a small cylindricalflange. Two arc-shaped ironfastenings were driven into theyoke-pole 3-4 cm from these caps.Possibly some elements of theharness (straps or ropes) oncepassed through these fastenings.The surface of the rear yoke-poleshowed traces of lacquer and apattern rendered in white paint.

Wooden elbow-rests of the seat.After the wheels had beenremoved, directly below themwere found remains of somepinewood blocks which possiblywere once the elbow-rests of theseat. These consisted of boards3–4 cm thick, decayed andcompressed by the powerfulpressure of the filling of the pit.

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Fig. 7. The lacquered inside of the canopy of the chariot.

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The elbow-rests presumablymeasured 25 × 50 cm. A paintedgeometrical design could be madeout on their lacquered surface.

The body of the chariot. Afterthe wheels had been cleared andremoved, remains of a trellisedframe of the chariot and bronzeaxle-terminals were uncovered inthe space between the wheels andthe remains of the chariot shafts.The remains of the frameconsisted of several wooden laths,2-3 cm. thick, from which thetrellised part of the body had beenconstructed. The laths wereattached to each other with ironnails where they crossed. Thenorthern and southern parts of thetrellised frame of the chariot, aswell as, perhaps, the entire seathad been destroyed by the robbertrenches. North of the trellisedframe, under its wooden laths,were two cylindrical bronze axle-caps at whose bases were circularflanges [Fig. 8]. The axle-capswere 10 cm long and 12 cm indiameter in their base and 5 cmin diameter on the top. In thelower part of the caps there wererectangular holes measuring 3 ×1.5 cm for insertion of the pins.In their upper part they had L-shaped projections probably to fixthe straps of the harness. The ironpins, found lying between thecaps, were 10 cm long with arectangular section and a ring oreye on one end.

The absence of the wheel axleand the unusual position of the

pair of axle-caps (beneath thetrellised body) suggest that thechariot had been placed in thetomb in a disassembled andpossibly incomplete state. It isalso noteworthy that the presenceof three yoke-heads implies theuse of three horses in the team.However, as mentioned above,only the skull, two cervicalvertebra and metapodials of asingle horse were discovered. Thishorse was evidently laid into thetomb according to the principle “apart instead of the whole.”

The construction of this chariotand its decorations have very closeparallels among Chinese chariotsof the Han period. The mostcomprehensive recent study ofthese chariots distinguishes anumber features very similar tothose of the chariot from Tsaraam(Wang 1997). Like the Hanexamples, the Tsaraam chariothas a canopy consisting of awooden framework covered bysome organic material, fourwooden posts supporting thecanopy, a trell ised seat andwooden “elbow-rests.” The bodyof the chariot and the painting ofthe wheels are remarkably closelyparalleled in a recently restoredchariot from the burial of thefamous Han general Huoqübingwho fought against the Xiongnu(Cooke 2000). The use of twoyoke-shafts on the Tsaraamchariot suggests it was originallyintended for a team of threehorses, whereas the single centralshaft typical of the Han chariots

implies an evennumber ofhorses on theteam.

W r i t t e nsources oftenattest that char-iots were amongthe gifts offeredby the Han courtto the first-rankXiongnu nobility.Thus in 51 BCEshanyü Huhanyereceived alongwith other gifts a

“chariot with a seat” (Taskin 1968-1973, Vol. 2, p. 35). Subsequently,as mentioned in the Hanshu, onmore than one occasion theshanyü was given presents similarto those he received the first time(Ibid., pp. 36, 37, 51). During theepoch of Wang Mang (9–23 CE),who intended to divide theXiongnu into separate nomadicbands and to set his own chief atthe head of each, one of theXiongnu deserters, the right liyü-wang Xian was awarded the titleof Xiao-shanyü and, among otherpresents, given a “chariot with aseat and a chariot with a drum”(Ibid., p. 57). In 50 CE the shanyüof the southern Xiongnu, Bee(grandson of Huhanye rulingunder the same name as hisgrandfather) was granted “acarriage with a seat and anumbrella of feathers and a teamof four richly harnessed horses”(Ibid., p. 72). In 143 CE thesouthern shanyü Hulanzhuo in thethrone hall of the imperial palacewas granted along with other gifts“a chariot with a black topharnessed to a team of fourhorses, a chariot with a drum, achariot with a seat”; the shanyü’swives were granted “two carriagesdecorated with gold and brocadeand draught horses” (Ibid., p. 94).

It is thus quite possible that thechariot found in Tsaraam was alsoa gift from the Han court to one ofthe representatives of the Xiongnuelite. However, judging by theevidence from the Hanshu wemight connect the chariot with adifferent event. In Wang Mang’sreign, the above-mentioned Xiao-shanyü’s son, Deng, who was thenat the imperial court as a hostage,was executed because of hisfather’s desertion to the northernXiongnu and his brother’s frequentraids on the borderlands. At thedemand of the Xiongnu thecorpses of Deng and some othernoblemen executed together withhim were returned to theirhomeland for burial. The bodiesthey were “laid into chariots” fortransport (Ibid, p. 62). We maynot rule out that later theseFig. 8. Bronze axle caps and iron pins.

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chariots were buried in the tombstogether with other funeraryofferings.

It should be emphasized thatin any case the records of chariotseither as gifts or in connection withfunerary ceremonies concern onlythe first-rank Xiongnu nobility, i.e.shanyüs, their wives, or sons. Thisfact is a further confirmation of theprobability that Barrow No. 7 atTsaraam is a burial of a repre-sentative of the Xiongnu elite,possibly a shanyü. Parts ofchariots were found also in theXiongnu royal tombs at Noin-Ula,but unfortunately the archaeo-logical record from that site isinsufficiently precise to permitreconstructing their details.

Objects Found in the BurialChamber

The bulk of the burial goods werelocated in the corridors betweenthe walls of the chamber, theframe, and the coffin. Several setsof harness (iron bits, cheek-pieces, harness buckles) and twoburial dolls were found in thewestern external corridor. Ironhooks, found in the walls of theexternal chamber suggest thatoriginally the bridle arrays hadhung on such hooks and ended upon the floor of the chamber onlyafter its deformation.

The doll found in the center ofthe western corridor (the northernof the two, to which we have giventhe provisional designation “DollNo.1”) was formed in the followingfashion [Fig. 9]. The head of thedoll was made of a human skull,which, judging by the baby teeth,was that of a 2-4-year-old child.On the skull of the doll were sixbraids of black stiff hair, whichprobably had been attached to theskull using some kind of glue.Along with the braids on the skullwere two round beads made ofgold foil and inlaid with turquoise.Two more braids were in front andin back of the skull and two braidsin the waist region along with ironplaques. Wooden sticks coveredwith red lacquer formed theextremities of the doll. Fig. 9. Drawing of Doll No. 1 in situ in the western corridor.

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The burial inventory of Doll No.1consisted of two separate iron beltplaques measuring 15 x 6 cm (theleather strap of the belt waspreserved along with the plaques)and [Fig. 10] a wooden lacqueredbox placed behind thehead of the doll next towhich were fourbirchbark containers(possibly they wereoriginally inside thebox). The box wascovered in red lacquerand along the edgesdecorated with a redlacquer design along aband of yellow lacquer.Under the box was a hairpin of some kind of organicmaterial (possibly tortoise shell).

Under the birchbark containerswas a birch bark circle, on whichwas found a fragment of a Chinesebronze mirror. On one of thebirchbark containers were uniquedrawings [Fig. 11], showing the

Xiongnu camp with carts and yurtsplaced on carriers and [Fig. 12]the profile of a person in a helmet— possibly a copy of a depictionon some coin.

In front and behind the skull ofthe doll were several iron buckles,a bit, cheek pieces and fragmentsof iron objects. Probably theywere not connected to theinventory of the doll but originallyhad hung on the wall of thechamber and ended up on thefloor after its deformation.

The other doll found in thewestern corridor, given theprovisional designation “Doll No.

2,” was formed in an analogousfashion [Fig. 13, next page]. Itlay one meter to the south of DollNo.1. The core of Doll No. 2 wasalso a human skull which hadcompletely disintegrated. Onlysmall baby teeth were preserved,on the basis of which it wasdetermined that the skull mighthave belonged to a child only afew months old. In the vicinity ofthe skull was a short braid of stiffblack hair. The modeling of theupper extremities could not bedetermined. The lower extremitieswere made of thin iron plates,placed in a wooden sheath andcovered with red lacquer.

In the vicinity of the neck of DollNo. 2 was a necklace of glass,turquoise, flourite and largecrystal beads. In the vicinity ofthe waist of the doll were twocorroded iron plates measuring 20x 11 cm lying on the leather strapof a belt, which was preserved onlyin fragments and in places had

been covered with redlacquer. A loop ofbeads, consisting ofnow almost com-pletely scattered glassbeads, had beensuspended from thebelt. There were aswell some heart-shaped flourite andamber beads.

Below the waist ofDoll No. 2 under the bottom beamof the outer chamber wereremains of a crushed woodenlacquered vessel with geometricornament. Inside the vessel werefragments of a bronze mirror, apiece of mica, two wooden combsand a collection of iron needles ina wooden holster. On the exteriorof the vessel was a inscription inideograms, which Prof. MichèlePirazzoli-t’Serstevens analyzes ina separate article below.

The finds in the eastern externalcorridor were practically the sameas those in the western one. Herethere were also sets of bridles

Fig. 10. Remains of birchbark and lacquered boxes found with Doll No. 1.

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Fig. 11. Carved image on birchbark of trellised tents innomad camp. Photo © 2007 Miniaev & Sakharovskaia

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Fig. 12. Carving on birchbark disk,possibly depicting a coin.

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Fig. 14 (above). Drawing of Doll No. 3 in situ ineastern corridor. 1. Iron buckles. 2. Iron platecovered with red lacquer. 3. Fragments of redlacquer. 4. Wooden object covered with red lac-quer. 5. Braids. 6. Fragment of clothes (?) (woolencloth and organic material — either fur or felt).7. Pendants made from wall of a lacqueredwooden cup. 8, 10. Turquoise beads. 9. Glassbead. 11. Amber bead. 12. Fragments of a bronzeChinese mirror. 13. Birchbark case for mirror. 14.Birchbark containers. 15. Fragments of a lac-quered wooden cup. 16. Fragment of felt. 17.Hair. 18. Wooden comb. 19. Silk.

Fig. 13 (left). Drawing of Doll No. 2 in situ in thewestern corridor. 1. Iron objects. 2. Fragment of felt(?). 3. Fragment of a braid. 4. A group of beads (anecklace?) (C—carnelian; T—turquoise; Cr—crystal;F— flourite; the rest—glass). 5. Leather covered withred lacquer. 6. Leather. 7 Iron plates. 8. Wooden lac-quered plate. 9. Iron plates, covered with red lac-quer. 10. Fragments of a lacquered wooden containerwith an inscription. 11. String of beads (C—carne-lian, F—flourite, A—amber, the rest—glass). 12. Hu-man teeth.

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(consisting of iron bits,cheekpieces and buckles) andburial dolls. The burial doll whichlay in the center of the easterncorridor to the south of the piecesof harness and which was giventhe provisional designation “DollNo. 3” was formed in the sameway as the dolls in the westerncorridor [Fig. 14, previous page].The skull of the doll had practicallycompletely disintegrated. In thevicinity of the skull lay severalbraids of stiff black hair, on theends of which were little turquoise,glass and amber beads. Lac-quered wooden sticks formed theextremities. Near the neck onboth right and left in the vicinity

of the skull were remains of tworound pendants of wood coveredwith lacquer which possibly hadbeen formed from the walls ofwooden lacquered cups.

At the waist ofthe doll were alsotwo wide cor-roded iron buck-les measuring 19x 12 cm. Behindthe head of thedoll were re-mains of awooden object(possibly a box),on which was asmall birchbarkcontainer and a

large fragment of a Chinesemirror.

The fourth doll apparently hadbeen removed by the robbers;only its feet remained.

But for two bronze coffinhandles, found near its south-western and southeasterncorners, there were practically noartifacts in the western internalcorridor:

The finds in the eastern internalcorridor were confined to itssouthern part, since robbers haddestroyed the northern part.These finds included sets ofharnesses — iron bits, cheek-plates, bronze harness-plates,

bronze plaques withdepictions of a running goat[Fig. 15]; silver chestmedallions for horses(phalars) with images ofmountain goats [Fig. 16] —arrowheads, a lacqueredwooden staff, a lacqueredwooden cup and a lacqueredwooden quiver with ironarrowheads.

To a substantial degree,the entrance of a looter haddestroyed the northernexternal corridor, butfragments of ceramics andlacquered wooden objectswere found there. Nothingwas found in the southernexternal corridor, but in thatcorridor, attached to the

interior wall of the externalchamber, were remains of awoolen carpet which had beendestroyed by the shifting of thebeams of the chamber. In the

southern internal corridor were aflat iron ring and two ironfasteners.

The northern section of thecoffin had been destroyed byrobbers, but jade plaques of armorand a jade diadem were foundthere (Fig. 17). In the preserved

Fig. 15. Drawing of a bronze plaque depicting a runningmountain goat.

Drawing © 2007 S.S. Miniaev & L. M. Sakharovskaia

Fig. 16. Silver horse harness chest medal-lion (phalar) depicting a mountain goat.

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Fig. 17. White jade plaques.

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Fig. 18. Gold image of a satyrfrom a buckle.

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southern section of the coffin werethe remains of a covering of someorganic material (felt or com-pressed fur), two iron bucklescovered in gold foil and depictinga satyr [Fig. 18, previous page],and two gold fastenings. Next tothe remains of a ritual sword werethree gold objects decorated withturquoise inlay [Fig. 19]. Two ofthem may be finials; the third,with the image of a mountain goatis a small flask [Fig. 20].

The Date of the Complex

We consider the central barrowand sacrificial burials as a unique

burial complex, put in place duringone funerary ceremony, in one dayor a maximum of several days.The basis for determining thechronology of the complex is theinscription on the lacquered boxfound near Doll No. 2, fragmentsof four Chinese mirrors, and 14Cdates.

Prof. Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens has concluded in herarticle published separately herethat the inscription dates noearlier than 36-27 BCE and mightdate between 8 BCE and 4 CE(that is, immediately before the

Wang Mang period).However, she cau-tions that thesedates are at best aterminus antequem, since the boxwith the inscriptionmight have beenplaced in the gravelong after it hadbeen manufactured.We can add thatfragments of alacquered cup withthe same design asin Noin-Ula werefound in thenorthern corridor inthe central BarrowNo. 7 and in theSacrificial Burial No.16. It is very prob-able that thefragments can be

dated from the same period —from the end of the 1st centuryBCE to the beginning of the 1st

century CE (cf. Louis 2007).

As Guolong Lai recentlycautioned in this journal, datingon the basis of Chinese mirrorscan be problematic, given the factthat too many examples inmuseum collections lack detailsabout their provenance (Lai2006). With that caution in mind,we nonetheless feel that on thebasis of modern classification(Zhongguo tongjing 1997) all fourmirrors whose fragments werefound in the central barrow in theburial pit and amid grave goodsof the dolls can be dated betweenthe end of the Western Han andearly Eastern Han periods, that isnot earlier than the 1st centuryBCE.

Eight 14C dates were obtained inlaboratory of the Institute of theHistory of Material Culture [seetable, next page]. While the datesfall within a broad range,calibration of values by theprogram OxCal suggests (with aprobability 95.4 %) that theburials were made in approxi-mately the period period 30 - 120

CE.

In sum then, we know that thecomplex is no earlier than aboutthe last third of the first centuryBCE and very likely is to be datedin the first century CE.

Conclusion

The application of modernarchaeological techniques to theexcavation of Complex No. 7 in theTsaraam Valley has yieldedentirely new information aboutXiongnu mortuary practice, theconstruction of such barrows, andXiongnu social structure. Newexamples of Xiongnu art andmaterial culture were discovered.Yet much needs to be done tocomplete the study. Conservationof the finds is the first priority.Study of the material must includeDNA and morphological analysisof the skeletal remains and faunaland botanical samples and

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Fig. 19. Fragment of a ritual sword and inlaid gold objects in situ.

Fig. 20. Drawing of the gold flask shown in Fig.19, showing the image of a mountain goat.

Drawing © 2007 S.S. Miniaev & L. M. Sakharovskaia

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component analysis of ceramicand metal objects and organicmaterials such as the birchbarkcontainers, lacquerware, andtextiles. The result should provideimpressive new archaeologicalevidence concerning theorganization, chronology, andregional interaction of the Xiongnunomadic polity. This research willcomplement on-going projects inKazakhstan, Mongolia, InnerMongolia and Xinjiang and willcontribute to the developingtheories on complex organizationamong nomadic groups.

Acknowledgements

The authors are especially gratefulto Dr. Maria Kolosova of the StateHermitage Museum for herclassification of the wood samplesand to Prof. Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens of The Sorbonne forher important observationsregarding the Chinese inscription.

Editor’s note: Material in thisarticle has appeared in variousforms both in Russian and inEnglish on Dr. Miniaev’s websiteand in Russian in leadingarchaeological journals (seecitations below). The version

presented here combines severalof these sources, with some of thematerial being made available inEnglish for the first time.

About the authors

Long-time collaborators and co-authors Sergei Miniaev andLidiia Sakharovskaia are amongthe leading experts on thearchaeology of the Xiongnu.Miniaev is the founding editor of aa Russian monograph series onXiongnu archaeology, Arkheolo-gicheskie pamiatniki Siunnu. Hewill be spending part of 2008 atthe Institute for Advanced Studyin Princeton. Additional materialon their excavations may be foundat <http://xiongnu.atspace.com/>. Contact e-mail: <ssmin@yandex.ru>.

References

Chou 2000Chou Ju-hsi. Circles of Reflection:The Carter Collection of ChineseBronze Mirrors. Cleveland: TheCleveland Museum of Art, 2000.

Cheng and Han 2002.Cheng Linquan and Han Guohe.Chang’an Han jing (Chang’an Han

Mirrors). Xi’an: Shaanxi renmingchubanshe, 2002.

Cooke 2000.Bill Cooke. Imperial China: The Artof the Horse in Chinese History.Louisville, Ky.: Harmony House,2000.

Huns 2005Les Huns. Bruxelles: EuropaliaInternational, 2005.

Lai 2006Guolong Lai. “The Date of the TLVMirrors from the Xiongnu Tombs.”The Silk Road 4/1 (2006): 36-44.

Louis 2007François Louis. “Han Lacquerwareand the Wine Cups of Noin Ula.”The Silk Road 4/2 (2007): 48-53.

Miniaev 1998

Sergei S. Miniaev. Dyrestuiskiimogil’nik (Derestui cemetery).Arkheologicheskie pamiatnikisiunnu, vyp. 3. Saint-Petersburg,Evropeiskii dom, 1998.

Miniaev and Sakharovskaia 2002

Sergei S. Miniaev and Lidiia M.Sakharovskaia. “Soprovoditel’nyezakhoroneniia ‘tsarskogo’kompleksa No. 7 v mogol’nike

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Tsaram.” Arkheologicheskie vesti(St. Petersburg) 9 (2002): 86-118. In English as: “Sacrificeburials of the royal complex no. 7at the Tsaraam cemetery”<http://xiongnu.atspace.com/Sacrif.htm, 2006>, accessedOctober 23, 2007.

Miniaev and Sakharovskaia 2006aSergei S. Miniaev and Lidiia M.Sakharovskaia. “Investigation of aXiongnu Royal Complex in theTsaraam Valley.” The Silk Road 4/1 (2006): 47-51.

Miniaev and Sakharovskaia 2006bSergei S. Miniaev and Lidiia M.Sakharovskaia. “Khan’skoe zer-kalo iz mogil’nika Tsaram” (A HanMirror from the Tsaraam Ceme-tery). Zapiski Instituta istoriimaterial’noi kul’tury (St. Peters-burg) 1 (2006): 77-82.

Miniaev and Sakharovskaia 2007

Sergei S. Miniaev and Lidiia M.Sakharovskaia. “Khan’skaiakolesnitsa iz mogil’nika Tsaram” (AHan Chariot from the TsaraamCemetery). Arkheologicheskie

vesti (St. Petersburg) 13 (2007):130-140.

Tal’ko-Gryntsevich 1999.Iulian D. Tal’ko-Gryntsevich.Materialy k paleoetnologii Zabai-kal’ ia. (Materials on thePaleoethnography of the Trans-Baikal.) Arkheologicheskiepamiatniki siunnu, vyp. 4. St.Petersburg: Fond Aziatika, 1999).

Taskin 1968-1973.V. S. Taskin, tr. and ed. Materialypo istorii siunnu. (Po kitaiskimistochnikam), 2 vols. Moscow:Nauka, 1968-1973.

Wang 1997.Wang Zhenduo. Dong Han che zhifu yuan yan jiu (Reconstructionand study of the Eastern Hanvehicle). Ed. and supplemented byLi Qiang. Beijing: Kexuechubanshe, 1997.

Zhongguo tongjing 1997.Zhongguo tongjing tu dian(Encyclopaedia of ChineseMirrors). Comp. by KongXiangxing and Liu Yiman. Beijing:Wenwu chubanshe, 1992(reprinted 1997).

A Chinese Inscription from a Xiongnu EliteBarrow in the Tsaraam Cemetery

Michèle Pirazzoli-t’SerstevensEcole pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris

The pastoral herding tribes of theXiongnu, otherwise known as theAsiatic Huns, dominated in theeastern part of Central Asia duringthe 2nd century BCE — 2nd centuryCE. Systematic studies of Xiongnuarchaeological sites have beencarried out already for more thana century, with significant resultsfor the characterization ofsettlement complexes andcemeteries. One of the mostimportant excavations in recentyears was devoted to an eliteXiongnu burial complex in theTrans-Baikal area (Russia

Federation), near Naushky villagein the Tsaraam Valley. SergeiMiniaev and Lidiia Sakharovskaiahave written on the excavationthere of Barrow No. 7 for thisjournal, the second part of theirreport to be found immediatelyabove.

There are a number of Chineseitems among the finds. Objectssuch as the chariot, mirrors,lacquered cups, staff etc. are veryimportant both for chronology ofthe Xiongnu archeological sitesand to illustrate contacts between

the Xiongnu elite and Han court.A lacquered box with a Chineseinscription from Barrow No. 7deserves special attention. Thisbox was found in the westernoutside corridor as a part of thegrave inventory of burial Doll no.2,one of four found in the tomb. Thedoll was composed of the skull ofa baby (some months old) andsmall lacquered wooden stickswhich formed the extremities. Itsgrave inventory consisted of a beltwith iron plaques, a string of beadson the belt, a necklace andChinese lacquered box. This boxwas found at a depth of 17 m,where it had been destroyed bythe pressure of soil, stones andthe settling of logs of the burialchamber. Therefore it is impossibleto reconstruct correctly the shapeand the size of the box. Theoutside surface of the box wascovered with brown lacquer andornamented by incised lines andred painted lines. The quatrefoilmotif on the center of the cover isvery similar to the motif on otherChinese boxes. Inside the boxwere found two wooden combs, afragment of a Chinese mirror, afragment of mica, a small birch-bark container, a set of ironneedles and a wooden needle-box.

The Chinese inscription wasincised on the outside surface ofthe box between ornamentalincised parallel l ines. Thecharacters concentrate in groupsseparated by a small ornamentalzone, but they undoubtedly formone inscription. This inscription isincomplete — the first part of theinscription was destroyed, someother characters are missing aswell. The preserved part of theinscription includes the fourcharacters depicted in Fig. 1 onthe next page.

The first readable character(after the destroyed part of thebox) is ( nian — “year”). Beforethe character one can see ahorizontal line which in fact is apart of the character of the yearof the regnal title. As the regnaltitles of the Western Han were

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changed every five years or so,and as the lacquer box does notseem to date from the EasternHan (when regnal titles lasted forlonger periods), this year could be

“second” or “third” or “fifth.” Thisformula [regnal title] [year] istypical at the beginning ofinscriptions of this kind.

The name of the master artisanwho directed the work in theimperial workshop and the namesof the officials who managed andinspected the workshop thenfollow. The name of each officialis preceded by the character x(chen — “your servant”) whichwas used in an inscription onlywhen the piece was fit for use bythe emperor. From this fact I inferthat the inscription started withthe characters (chengyu —“for use by the emperor”) whichhad been written before the regnaltitle and year and were destroyedwith them.

The two following characters(after “nian”) are (kao gong— “imperial workshop”), followedby a sign which indicates thatthe preceding character (here“gong”) is duplicated. Thus thispart of the inscription can be readas “kaogong gong.” The second“gong” character means here“master artisan.” The kaogong( ) workshop, where the boxwas made was an imperialworkshop at the Han capitalChang’an. The two imperialworkshops in Chang’an, theGonggong ( ) and the Kao-gong, whose production was inquantity and quality a little inferiorto the production of the official Shuand Guanghan workshops ofSichuan, made many pieces to begiven as diplomatic presents(Barbieri-Low 2001; Hong 2005).The style of the inscription and ofthe décor of the Tsaraam boxcorresponds to the style of theChang’an Imperial workshops aswell. Unfortunately only fifteenpieces with inscriptions comingfrom the Gonggong or theKaogong (not including theTsaraam piece) have beenpublished so far (Hong 2005, pp.407-408). Their inscription style isdifferent from the official Shuworkshop inscriptions found atNoin-Ula.

After the name of the masterartisan Shang who made the box( ), the inscription lists thepeople (functions and names)who managed (zhu ) andinspected (xing ) the workshop.Each name is preceded by thecharacter “chen” (your servant).

[ (?)] [ (?)] — “[theworkshop overseer ] yourservant Kang,”

x — “the lacquer bureauhead your servant An.” (Thenames Kang and An were readby Prof. Gao Chongwen.)

Missing characters here could bereconstructed as (sefu —“the workshop overseer”). If so,this part of the inscription couldbe read as:

x —“the workshopoverseer your servant Kang.”

Inspected by:

x [...] — “the Assist-ant Director of the Right yourservant […],”

x [...] — “the Director yourservant […] and”

x — “the Com-mandery Clerk for WorkshopInspection your servant Zun”(? – I am not certain about thereading of the name).

Thus the Tsaraam inscription canbe reconstructed:

[ ] […] [...] [...] xx [...][...] [...] .

It translates:

[Fit for use by the emperor]made in the [?] year of the [?era] by the master artisan ofthe Kaogong imperial workshopShang. Managed by theworkshop overseer, yourservant Kang; the lacquerbureau head, your servant An.Inspected by the AssistantDirector of the Right, yourservant [?]; the Director, yourservant [?]; and theCommandery Clerk forWorkshop Inspection, yourservant Zun.

Fig. 1. The beginning of the preservedpart of the Chinese inscription on thelacquereed box from Tsaraam BarrowNo. 7.

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The inscription suggests thefollowing considerations regardingits date. The formulae of theinscription indicate that the pieceis probably not earlier than 36-27BCE. It is in this period, 36-27BCE, that we first find thedistinction between “made” (zao),“managed” (zhu) and “inspected”(xing), as it is written in theinscription. The piece was certainlynot made during the reign of WangMang (9-23 CE), because duringthis period the character (zhu— “managed by”) was replaced byx (zhang). The character “zhu”was used again under the laterHan. The style of the painteddécor — in particular the ratherthin painted outlines and therather spaced out composition —could indicate a date prior to WangMang and the Later Han, when thelines become thicker and thecomposition more crowded. Theincised décor on the Tsaraam box,made of rhombs and small incisedvertical lines, is very similar to thedécor on a lacquered box dated 4CE. Yet a similar motif can also beseen on a lacquered box dated 43BCE (Umehara 1943, Pl. XXVIII,no. 26, and Pl. III, no. 6).

Some fragments of otherlacquered pieces were found in theTsaraam complex, in the northern

corridor of the burial chamber ofthe central Barrow No. 7 and inthe sacrificial burial No. 16. Thepainted décor on these lacqueredpieces is similar to that onlacquered objects manufactured inthe official workshops of Sichuanprovince during the periodbetween 8 BCE and 4 CE. Thisstyle was copied by the imperialworkshops at the Han capitalChang’an and was maintainedthere maybe a little longer. Thus,I believe that the period between8 BCE and 4 CE could be a possibledate for the lacquer box fromTsaraam. Of course the date isonly a terminus post quem for thecomplex No. 7, since prestigiouslacquer pieces could have beenpreserved for some time as familyvaluables before being used asgrave goods.

About the author

A distinguished and widely rangingscholar of early Chinese culture,Prof. Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens isDirecteur d’études, École pratiquedes Hautes Études at theSorbonne. Her books include TheHan Dynasty (New York: Rizzoli,1982), Le Yuanmingyuan. Jeuxd’eau et palais européens duXVIIIe siècle à la cour de Chine(Paris: Editions recherche sur les

civilisations, 1987), and GiuseppeCastiglione 1688-1766: Peintre etarchitecte à la cour de Chine(Paris: Thalia, 2007). She haswritten on the Chineselacquerware found at Begram inAfghanistan and on Han foodvessels; she is participating in aforthcoming book directed by JohnLagerwey on Chinese Religionbefore the Tang, and in MichaelLoewe and Michael Nylan (eds),The Chinese First Empires: A Re-appraisal (Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press). She may becontacted at <micheleps@noos.fr>.

References

Barbieri-Low 2001

Anthony J. Barbieri-Low. “TheOrganization of Imperial Work-shops during the Han Dynasty.”Unpublished PhD dissertation,Princeton University, 2001.

Hong 2005

Hong Shi .“Zhanguo Qin Hanshiqi qiqi de shengchan yu guanlix .” Kao-gu xuebao 2005/4: 381-410.

Umehara 1943

Umehara Sueji . ShinaKandai kinenmei shikki zusetsux Kyôtô,1943.

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The Tsaraam Valley

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On Ancient Tracks in EasternAnatoliaFrank HaroldUniversity of Washington, Seattle (USA)Photographs by Ruth Harold

Glance at a map, and you are aptto see the Anatolian peninsula asa bridge that links Asia withEurope; and it has served thatpurpose many times, most notablyin giving passage to the Turks.Look more closely, and you willnotice that Anatolia is corrugatedwith mountains, the easternportion in particular, and makes forrough traveling. Eastern Anatoliahas always been remote country,the frontier between empires andhome to fractious and inde-pendent-minded peoples; and soit remains today.

Such were the hazards of travelout there that long-distancetraders preferred the sea-lanesacross the eastern Mediterraneanwhenever possible. In Roman andearly Byzantine times, forinstance, a bolt of silk might makeits way overland from one oasisto the next all the way from China,but would probably travel the finalleg of its journey by sea. It wouldfirst be carried on camelbackacross the Syrian Desert toAntioch (today Antakya, inTurkey’s Hatay); or perhaps skirtthe desert to the north via Nisibis(Nusaybin) and Edessa (nowSanliurfa, or plain Urfa); and thenit would be loaded aboard a shipbound for Rome or Constan-tinople. For much of that period,eastern Anatolia was a zone ofconflict between Romans andParthians, Byzantines andSassanians, with Kurds andArmenians thrown in. All thesame, established trade routes didtraverse those highlands, andwhen the sea-lanes turned unsafeor the tolls too high the caravantracks came into their own.

We are quite well informedabout the Anatolian trade routes

in Ottoman times, thanks in thefirst place to the scholarly laborsof Franz Taeschner eighty yearsago (Taeschner 1924-1926), andthere is every reason to believethat those routes recapitulate inoutline (albeit not in detail) trailsin use for centuries before. Themap of the trade routes in the 17th

century [Fig. 1] has beensimplified so as to highlight thechief overland tracks and theirconnections with the high roadsof Iran and the Arab lands.Several branches, deviations andconnectors have been omitted forclarity. To make sense of theAnatolian road-net, think of threemajor cords: the diagonal route,linking Istanbul to Tarsus (Adana),Antakya, Damascus and ultimatelyto Mecca in faraway Arabia; acentral route passing throughSivas, Malatya and Diyarbakir enroute to Mosul and then to Basraon the Persian Gulf; and a skein

of northeastern tracks to Erzurum,the Caucasus and Iran.

The diagonal was the spine ofthe system, its most ancientelement and the only one thatcontinued to function through theturbulent centuries of the Araband Turkish conquests. Portions ofthe diagonal paralleled the RoyalRoad of Achaemenid times, whichlinked Susa in the foothills of theZagros Mountains with Sardis nearthe Aegean shore. Roman,Byzantine and later Arab armiesmarched that way. For theOttomans, the diagonal served asthe military road that connectedIstanbul with the importantseaports of Tarsus, Adana andPayas. When Sultan Selim (“TheGrim”) set out in 1514 CE to annexeastern Anatolia, his armyfollowed that well-trodden track allthe way to Eregli before turningnortheast for Sivas, Erzurum andthe Iranian frontier (Taeschner1924). In early Ottoman timesmerchant caravans, too, relied onthe military road, but with thereturn of centralized governmenttrade reverted to the more directcentral route to the east. Yet thediagonal lost none of itssignificance, for it carried the Hajj,

Fig 1. Towns and trade routes of Anatolia in the 17th century.

Map © 2007 Frank & Ruth Harold

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the annual pilgrim caravan fromIstanbul to Mecca.

The central route, wellestablished in Byzantine times, ledthrough settled country withancient and populous cities suchas Amasiya (classical Amaseia)and Sivas (Sebaste). Turning moreto the south, it passed throughMalatya (Melitene), Diyarbakir(Amida) and Mardin, towns thatlater came to mark and defend thefrontier of Byzantium. The routecrossed onto the Syrian plain atNusaybin (Nisibis), and thenfollowed the river Dicle (Tigris)south to Baghdad and the Gulf.

The northeastern routebranched off at Sivas and marchedeastward to the frontier strong-hold of Erzurum (Theodosiopolis;the contemporary name comesfrom the Arabic for “Land of theRomans”). But east of Erzurumthe country grows wilder, and theinformation sparser. Taeschner isof no help here, for his inquiriesstopped at Erzurum. Fig.1, drawnfrom several sources (Le Strange1905; Brice 1981; TAVO 1994),shows two main routes. One ranthrough Ani (near today’s Kars),down the valley of the Aras River,past Yerevan to Tabriz in Iran; theother corresponds to what is todaythe main road, from Erzurum viaDogubeyazit to Tabriz. Some mapsshow a third route, from Erzurumsoutheast to Lake Van and on toTabriz, but this has been omittedas the mountain crossing appearsto have been a minor track. Notealso the spur that leads fromErzurum northwest to the port ofTrabzon (ancient Trebizond) on theBlack Sea. In practice, traderoutes from Iran and Central Asiawere likely to terminate atTrabzon, from where goods wereshipped to the capital by sea.

By the 17th century CE the glorydays of the caravan trade werelong past, and the protractedwarfare between the OttomanSultans and the Safavid Shahs ofIran had left eastern Anatoliaimpoverished and depopulated.The country was in much better

state in earlier centuries, when itstrade routes formed part of thatlarger net that we designate as theSilk Road. The Anatolian silk tradegoes well back into classical times.For example, despite the frequentwars that pitted the ByzantineEmpire against Sassanian Iran,the Emperor Justinian I waspleased to negotiate a treaty thatdesignated fixed ports of entrywhere silk could be purchasedfrom Persian merchants: Nisibis(Nusaybin) on the Syrian plain,Raqqa on the Euphrates River andArtaxa on the Aras, near modernYerevan (Boulnois 2004).

The Byzantine port city ofTrebizond (modern Trabzon) holdsa prominent place in the annals ofAnatolian trade. We learn of aSogdian embassy in 509 CE, whichtraveled there overland fromCentral Asia via the Volga Riverand clear around the CaucasusMountains, with the object of by-passing the rapacious Persians byestablishing direct commerciallinks with Constantinople. TheEmperor responded with a missionof his own, but little came of it atthe time (Boulnois 2004). Acentury later, the situationchanged dramatically. The Muslimarmies burst out of Arabia,overwhelmed Sassanian Iran,drove the Byzantines out of thelowlands (contemporary Syria andIraq), and disrupted the familiarsea-lanes. The caravans wereforced northward, reachingTrebizond from Central Asia eitherby way of northern Iran or elsearound both the Caspian Sea andthe Caucasus. Trebizond in the 8th

through 10th centuries was a majortransit port, where silk, paper,perfumes and spices from easternlands were exchanged for westernlinens, woolens, medicinal sub-stances and especially gold andsilver coins. Incidentally, thosewere not camel caravans: mulesand donkeys were preferred forthe stony tracks of Anatolia. Thecarrying trade was chiefly in thehands of the Armenians, whoplayed a large role in thecommercial and cultural life of

Anatolia until they were mas-sacred and expelled at thebeginning of the 20th century.

The ancient Christian kingdomof Armenia, intermittently in-dependent, lay astride the traderoutes of eastern Anatolia, fromthe Pontic Alps in the north to LakeVan in the south. Armenia reachedits zenith of power and prosperityin the 10th and 11th centuries, asthe ruins of its capital city Ani (afew miles from Kars) still attest.The safest route between Erzurumand Iran passed through Ani, andthe city continued to flourish evenafter its capture, first by theByzantines and then by the SeljukTurks (1064 CE). The 13th century,however, brought misfortune: theMongol conquest, a devastatingearthquake and eventually therealignment of the trade routessouthward. Ani was not destroyedin war, but rather abandoned byits inhabitants in the 14th century.They left behind the imposing andevocative shells of churches,palatial houses and vast defensivewalls.

The Mongols get a bad press anddeservedly so, for wherever thehordes galloped they left little butsmoking ruins in their wake.Baghdad was sacked and burnt in1258 CE, and the AbbasidCaliphate collapsed in chaos. Yetsubsequent Mongol Khans ruledan empire that stretched fromChina to Syria, peaceful andorderly and hospitable tocommerce. Eastern Anatolia wasopen to traffic as never before.Marco Polo is only the best knownof the travelers who passed thisway, riding from Sivas to Tabrizand clear across Iran to Hormuzon the Gulf in 1271 CE, on his wayto the court of the Great Khan. Itis not altogether clear just wherethe high road then ran, for MarcoPolo’s account is quite vague.However, Marco’s failure tomention either Ani or Lake Van,coupled with his specificdescription of Mount Ararat,suggest that he may have passednot far from today’s Dogubeyazit.Trebizond continued to flourish as

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the chief port for trade betweenConstantinople and Khanbalik(contemporary Beijing). It evenenjoyed a spell of autumnal gloryin the 13th and 14th centuries,when it was the capital of adiminutive independent empirethat left us the Byzantine monu-ments that visitors come toadmire. Annexed to the OttomanEmpire in 1461 and renamed,Trabzon remained a significantport and provincial capital, wherecrown princes were sent to learnthe art of governing. But with thedecline of the caravan trade it lostits pre-eminence as the seaportof Inner Asia.

* * *Travelers to Eastern Turkey leavebehind the celebrated Greek andRoman ruins, the mosques andpalaces of the Ottoman Sultans,and also the swarms of tourists.Instead, they can savor an olderTurkey: slower, traditional in dressand manners, intensely Muslim,conservative and ethnicallydiverse. On these marches of theOttoman Empire, the minoritiescome to the fore: SyrianChristians, Alevis, Armenians,Kurds, Georgians. The remote-ness of eastern Anatolia is one of

its prime attractions, yet facilitiesfor visitors are entirely adequateand for the time being the countryis quiet. The map [Fig. 2] showsour itinerary for a three-weekjourney in the spring of 2006. Wearranged it as a private tripthrough Geographic Expeditions(geoEx.com), with our own vehicle(quite indispensable). Our guide,driver, and mentor was SerdarAkerdem, an archaeologist andnative of the region, intimatelyfamiliar with its places and peoples(not to mention the local deli-cacies); we could not have wishedfor better company.

Adana is a large commercial cityof little antiquarian interest. ButAntakya is the ancient Antioch,one of the four great cities of theclassical world (with Rome,Constantinople and Alexandria),and a terminus of those branchesof the Silk Road that traversed orskirted the Syrian Desert [Fig. 1].Antakya today is a lively andlivable city with a Mediterraneanambience, ethnically as much Arabas Turkish. Christians, Muslimsand Alevis mingle in the streetsin apparent amity (Alevis are asomewhat secretive sect, an

offshoot of Shiism, with their ownunique beliefs and places ofworship). Of ancient Antioch littleremains above ground, apart fromthe superb mosaics displayed inthe local museum; they comefrom Daphne, once a wealthysuburb in the foothills of theAmmanus Mountains. An hour’sdrive away are the ruins ofSeleucia ad Piera, Antioch’s portin classical times until siltingrendered it unusable.

Gaziantep is a prosperous andforward-looking city of about amillion, which boasts a medievalcitadel and an archaeologicalmuseum dedicated to the mar-velous Roman mosaics recoveredfrom the ruins of Zeugma on theEuphrates River. A major crossingand the staging post for militaryexpeditions eastward, Zeugmawas destroyed by the Sassaniansin 252 CE; the site is now largelydrowned by the lake rising behindthe Birecik Dam. Gaziantep is alsothe starting point for an excursionto the castle of Rumkale, whoseruins brood over those samewaters. Rumkale is quiteaccessible but not mentioned inany of the guidebooks that wehave consulted, and well worth adetour for that reason alone.About 30 km northeast ofGaziantep is the small town ofHalfeti, half-drowned by thewaters, where one hires a boat forthe short journey upstream. Thecastle consists of a large fortifiedenclosure atop a narrow rockyridge, bounded by cliffs andreinforced with walls; at its base,a great fosse cut into the rockmakes Rumkale an island in thesky. Fortunately, a placard inEnglish supplies the basic facts:built by the Byzantines, occupiedby Arabs and then Crusaders, soldto the Armenian Kingdom of LittleCilicia which made it a bishopricas well as a citadel, later held bythe Mamelukes and at last takenby the Ottomans. The ruins of achurch and of several monasteriesdate to the Armenian phase (12th

– 13th centuries CE).Fig 2. Itinerary of a journey in eastern Anatolia, spring 2006.

Map © 2007 Frank & Ruth Harold

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Still on the westernside of the Euphrates isthe astonishing funeraryextravaganza of NemrutDagh. In the first centuryB.C.E. this region madeup the independentkingdom of Commagene,which grew rich on itsfertile soil and on theproceeds of trade alongthe route that skirted theSyrian desert [Fig. 1].King Antiochus I (64 –38 BCE) had himselfburied beneath a gigantictumulus atop Mount Nemrut at7100 feet; terraces flanking thetumulus bore statues of the kingand his relations, including Zeusand Herakles, whose heads nowstand on the ground. The kingdomdid not long outlast the king:Commagene was annexed byRome, and the sanctuary on themountaintop lay utterly forgottenuntil rediscovered by a Germansurveyor in 1881.

Once across the Euphrates Riverwe are fairly into eastern Anatolia,and there is no better place tosavor Turkey in the Middle Eastthan the ancient city of Sanliurfa(usually called by its old name,Urfa). Memories are long in aplace that can trace its historyback for 3500 years, and traditionhas it that that Urfa was thebirthplace of Abraham; pilgrimscome here in droves to pray atAbraham’s cave, and to feed thecarp in the sacred pool [Fig. 3].Alexander conquered Urfa,

Romans and Byzantines held itand the Crusaders made it theCounty of Edessa; much of thecitadel is thought to date to theirreign. Urfa was destroyed by theMongols in 1260 CE, and neverreally recovered;it was absorbedinto the OttomanEmpire in the 17th

century. Urfa’sbazaar is awonder, a mazeof alleys, court-yards and oldHans, wherecraftsmen sti l lply their trades[Fig. 4], and avisitor catchesglimpses of anearlier day whenc a r a v a n straveled fromhere to Aleppoand Baghdad.

Heading east we enter basalticlands, harsh andpoor. This islargely Kurdishcountry, andDiyarbakir is theircapital. Here isanother city ofa l m o s tu n i m a g i n a b l eantiquity, whosefoundations goback nearly 4000years. In Romanand Byzantinetimes it wasAmida, a strong-

hold in the endless warsagainst the Sassanians ofIran; the modern namecomes from the Arabic(“Home of the Bakr”tribe). Subsequently, thefortress was held bySeljuks, Turkomans andOttomans. All of themcontributed to the massiveblack walls that still ringmost of the old city.Within are narrow,crowded streets, a bazaar,mosques, churches andHans built of bands of

black and white stone (you canstay in one, converted into ahotel). Diyarbakir has long sinceburst the confines of its ancientwalls; now a city of more than twomillion, swollen with refugees

displaced by the civil war of the‘nineties, Turkey’s ethnic tensionsare palpable here even to the mostinnocent of travelers.

Mardin has charm to enhance itsinterest, and will be a highlight onany tour of eastern Turkey. Thetown extends in tiers along theslope of a steep hill; stairs andnarrow alleys, buttressed witharches, connect one level to thenext [Fig. 5]. The summit iscrowned by a large fortress,unfortunately a military zone andclosed to visitors, which held offthe fearsome Mongols in the 13thFig. 3. Pilgrims at the sacred pool, Urfa.

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Fig. 4. A coppersmith in the bazaar, Urfa.

Fig. 5. A view of Mardin.

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century (it fell to Tamerlane acentury later). Mardin overlooksthe Syrian plain; it was always acitadel rather than a trading mart,and served as the capital of thelocal Artukid dynasty fromthe 12th century to the14th. Syrian OrthodoxChristianity has long hada strong presence in thecity; the community hasshrunk in recent years butseveral churches survive,and the Christian imprinton Mardin’s architecture isquite visible.

Mardin is the gateway tothe Tur Abdin, the“Mountain of the Servants”(of God), historically aChristian district but nowpredominantly Kurdish.Several of the grandmonasteries remainactive, notably MorGabriel, parts of which date backto Byzantine times. The bleak,stony plateau, dotted with flocksof sheep, leads eventually toHasankeyf, built on a rocky spuroverlooking the Dicle (Tigris) River.A Roman and then Byzantinefrontier post, it contains remainsfrom the Seljuk, Artukid andKurdish occupations. Down by theriver stands the tomb-tower(türbe) of a 15th century prince,covered in colored tiles, that would

not be out of place in nearby Iran[Fig. 6]; it will be drowned if theplanned dam is built.

Continuing eastward we leavethe last echoes of the Medi-terranean world, cross the highTaurus Range and climb onto theAnatolian plateau. Lake Van,surrounded by snowy peaks, iswild and lonesome. Historically, allthis country was occupied byArmenians who were violentlydriven out between 1915 and1918; most of the inhabitantstoday are Kurds. The numerousArmenian churches in the hills arefalling to pieces, but one exceptionis the splendid Akhtamar churchon an island in the lake, built inthe 10th century CE and decoratedwith stone reliefs [Fig. 7]. At thetime of our visit the interior wasclosed for restoration. The roadfrom Diyarbakir through Bitlis toVan was an important trade

route in Ottomantimes; a fine 15th

c e n t u r yc a r a v a n s e r a itestifies to that.And just in caseyou had forgot-ten, the name ofthe road enteringVan will jolt yourmemory: IpekYolu, the SilkRoad.

Van is an ancient place, but theold town was completely de-stroyed in the fighting of 1915.What survives is the Castle of Vanon its whaleback of a rock,crowned with ruins that reachfrom the Urartian period to theOttoman. In the surroundings area number of Urartian sites, and mypersonal Ultima Thule: the Kurdishcastle of Hoshap on the highmountain road into Iran [Fig. 8].Truck drivers love Hoshap; gas isuncommonly cheap there, justdon’t expect a receipt.

From Van northward the roadtraverses bleak but magnificentvolcanic country to the frontiertown of Dogubeyazit (“affec-tionately dubbed ‘doggie biscuit’by tourists over the years”; RoughGuide), just a short hop from theIranian border. Agri Dagh, MountArarat (17,000 ft) looms over thetown, and may (or may not)

condescend to peek outof the clouds. Of anti-quarian interest is thefantastic palace of IshakPasha, built in the 18th

century by a localgrandee on a plateauoverlooking Dogubeyazit;it blends all the regionalstyles into a mostcharming potpourri [Fig.9, next page]. Dogu-beyazit straddles themain road into Iran, onceagain named Ipek Yolu;this route seems only tohave become prominentafter the Mongol con-quest, replacing the olderroute via Ani.

Fig. 6. The 15th-century tomb-tower (türbe) at Hasankeyf.

Fig. 7. The 10th-century Akhtamar church on LakeVan (watercolor by Ruth Harold).

Fig. 8. The Kurdish castle of Hoshap.

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A few more hours’ drive, northacross glorious rolling plateau withviews into the green valley of theAras, brings one to the small cityof Kars. Though notorious for itschilly and damp climate, Kars isan attractive and relatively liberaltown. Held in turn by Armenians,

Seljuks, Georgians and evenRussians, it still keeps its largegrey castle. But the reason forcoming out here is to visit themelancholy ruins of Ani, capital ofthe Armenian state from 961 to1045 CE (until recently, this wasa somewhat hazardous excursion,requiring military permission, butis presently quite routine). Thecity was built on a triangularplateau bounded by deep andrugged ravines, and defended atthe base by a massive wallreinforced with bastions [Fig. 10].With a population of over 100,000,Ani in its heyday was said to rivalBaghdad and Constantinople. Itwas certainly a flourishing city thatdid well on the trade along the Silk

Road between Erzurum, Yerevanand Tabriz. Today the frowningwalls (restored), and the exquisiteruins of the cathedral and ofseveral churches, accentuate thelonesome landscape and thesweeping views. Though Aniceased to be a capital in the 11th

century it con-tinued to pros-per, and thefinest of itss u r v i v i n gchurches [Fig.11] was built aslate as the 13th

century. Fewplaces speak soeloquently as Ani

of the transience of all humanachievement.

North and west stretch thePontic mountains, and yet anotherculture. The “Georgian Valleys”hold numerous churches datingfrom around 1000 CE, when thiscountry was the home of theGeorgian state before the capitalwas moved to Tbilisi. It is sad tosee these splendid buildings fallinginto ruin, with almost nothingbeing done to arrest the decay.The country is mountainous andbeautiful, laced with large rivers,and turns progressively greener aswe proceed north. By the time wereach the Black Sea, thelandscape feels almost like home(except for the tea plantations):a narrow, densely populatedcoastal strip, painfully green andrelentlessly damp.

The Towers of Trebizond havehaunted my imagination eversince I read Rose Macaulay’s novelby that title thirty years ago; andeven though Trabzon is a moderncommercial city, I was notdisappointed. There has been asettlement on the Trapezus, thenarrow tableland between twosteep ravines, at least from thetime of the Greeks. Trebizond wasa flourishing port in Byzantinetimes, and after the sack of

Fig. 9. The 18th-century palace of Ishak Pasha overlooking Dogubeyazit.

Fig. 10. The fortress of Ani.

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Fig. 11. The 13th-century Church of St. Gregory at Ani.commissioned by a merchant, Tigran Honents.

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Constantinople it became thecapital of a successful commercialstate on the Black sea (1205 –1461 CE). Its emperors left us aclutch of monuments: thedignified cathedral church ofHaghia Sophia, several smallerchurches now serving asmosques, the magnificent mon-astery of Sumela plastered onto acliff in the mountains [Fig. 12],and yes, a few fragments of wallsand battlements that recall a moremartial past. Modern Trabzonbelongs to our time — workadayand up to date and frantic withtraffic. But if you give rein to yourimagination you may still hear theclip-clop of hooves in the shoppingstreets, and catch a glint ofsunlight on what remains of thefabled towers of Trebizond.

About the authors

Frank and Ruth Harold arescientists by profession andtravelers by avocation. Frank wasborn in Germany, grew up in theMiddle East and studied at CityCollege, New York, and the

University of California atBerkeley. Now retired from fortyyears of research and teaching, heis Professor Emeritus of bio-chemistry at Colorado StateUniversity, and Affiliate Professorof microbiology at the Universityof Washington. Ruth is a micro-biologist, now retired, and anaspiring watercolor painter. TheHarold family lived in Iran in 1969/70, while Frank served as Fulbrightlecturer at the University ofTehran. This experience kindleda passion for adventure travel,which has since taken them toAfghanistan and back to Iran,across the Middle East, into theHimalayas and Tibet, up and downthe Indian subcontinent and alongthe Silk road between China andTurkey. They can be reached at<frankharold@earthlink.net>.

Sources

The basic reference to thehistorical geography of Anatolia isFranz Taeschner, Das AnatolischeWegenetz nach OsmanischenQuellen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Mayer &

Müller GMBH, 1924-1926). For theregion east of Erzurum, limitedinformation can be found in GuyLe Strange, The Lands of theEastern Caliphate (1905, reprintedby Al-Biruni, Lahore, Pakistan),and in Donald Pitcher, An HistoricalGeography of the Ottoman Empirefrom the Earliest Times to the Endof the Sixteenth Century (Leiden:E.J. Brill, 1972). See also LuceBoulnois, Silk Road: Monks,Warriors and Merchants on theSilk Road (Odyssey Books, n.d.,ca. 2004). Jason Goodwin’s Lordsof the Horizons (New York: HenryHolt, 1998) offers a very readableappreciation of the OttomanEmpire. For Armenia see DavidMarshall Lang, Armenia – Cradleof Civilization (London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin, 1970); and A.E.Redgate, The Armenians (Oxford:Blackwell, 1998). For historicalmaps see: An Historical Atlas ofIslam, W.E. Brice, ed. (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1981); and the TübingerAtlas des Vorderen Orients[TAVO]. H. Kopp and W. Röllig,eds. (Tübingen: Dr LudwigReichert Verlag, 1994). For travel,we recommend the Rough Guideto Turkey, by R. Ayliffe, M. Dubin,J. Gawthorp and T. Richardson, 5th

ed. (2003), which we found to bean inexhaustible mine of in-formation on all matters Turkish.

Fig. 12. The Monastery of Sumela.

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Dschingis Khan und seine Erben: DasWeltreich der Mongolen. München: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der BundesrepublikDeutschland; Hirmer Verlag, 2005. 432 pp.

Reviewed byFlorian SchwarzUniversity of Washington, Seattle (USA)

The popular clichés of Mongolhistory evoked in the title of thisbeautifully produced exhibitioncatalog did not fail to attractseveral hundred thousands ofpaying visitors to the exhibitionshown in Bonn, Munich, andVienna in 2005 and 2006. Steppearchaeology, the imperial Mon-gols, and the legacy of ChingisKhan are all covered in this bookon Chingis Khan and his Legacy:the Mongol World Empire. Whatmakes this project stand out fromthe crowd is that its main focus isa city, Karakorum (Kharkhorin) inMongolia. An exhibition on thelargest nomad empire in historycentered around a city? Specialistsmight find this less surprising thanthe general public. But until veryrecently historians had to look atthe residence of the Great Khanmostly through the eyes ofmedieval visitors and chroniclers.Precious little was known aboutthe historical development of anddaily life in medieval Karakorum.This is changing thanks to theefforts of a joint Mongol-Germanarchaeological campaign, the“ M o n g o l i s c h - D e u t s c h eKarakorum-Expedition (MDKE)”.The MDKE, a collaborationbetween the German Archae-ological Institute (DeutschesArchäologisches Institut DAI), theUniversity of Bonn, and theAcademy of Sciences of Mongolia,began work at Karakorum in July1999. The exhibition and catalogpresent the first results of thisproject to the general public. Itwas designed and first shown inBonn, the center of Mongol studiesin Germany.

The German archeologist Hans-Georg Hüttel formulates the main

goal of the project as follows: togain a better understanding ofurban planning and developmentat Karakorum and of the site’s“changing role as the political andadministrative center of theempire and the central Khanate,as a manufacturing city and long-distance trade hub, and as areligious center and locus ofnational cult” (p.139). Theseemingly contradictory termsused in this context, “late-nomadand medieval urban history ofCentral Asia,” indicate the newimpulse this research gives toCentral Eurasian studies. It is nothard to predict that the Karakorumcampaign will contribute in animportant way to the changingperceptions of the history of thenomad-sedentary continuum inCentral Eurasia.

Within the built-up area ofKarakorum the campaign focuseson two spots: the so-called palacearea and the city center. Thecomplete excavation of the “grandhall” interpreted in 1949 by SergeiKiselev as part of Ögedei’s palaceconfirms Kise-lev’s general re-construction ofthe plan. But italso shows thatthe building can-not have beenthe palace hall.The countlessBuddhist findsfrom the hall donot representlater strata( “ m o n a s t e r yphase”), asassumed byKiselev, but be-long to the

original 13th/14th-century building.Hans-Georg Hüttel (pp.140-146)suggests an interpretation of the“grand hall” as a 13th- or 14th-century buddhist shrine. Hecompares it (and seems to beinclined to identify it) with the“pavilion of the ascent of the Yuan”described in a Chinese-Mongolianinscription of 1346. Within the“palace area” as well, three kilnsfor the production of constructionmaterials were excavated anddated to the late 13th/early 14th

centuries (Christina Franken,pp.147-149).

The MDKE also excavated asegment of the main North-Southstreet and the adjacent residentialand commercial area near thecenter of the city [Fig. 1] (Ulam-bayar Erdenebat and Ernst Pohl,pp.168-175). The rich evidenceallows the identification of the13th- and 14th-century residents ofthis part of the city as Chineseartisans, including a coppersmithand a goldsmith. The archeologistsidentified four to five strata overa period of around 200 years.

Particularly intriguing is apaleoenvironmental study ofsediments from Lake Ögij (40 kmnorth of Karakorum) which seemsto indicate that the Mongolfoundation of Karakorum fell intoa period of stronger forestation inthe Orkhon valley (MichaelWalther, pp.128-132). The studyof ecological changes in the“steppe belt” is only beginning,

Fig. 1. The excavation of the Mongol-German archaeologi-cal expedition in the center of Karakorum. The flat stonesin the center at the first step below the surface apparentlyare the 13th-century paving of the main street.

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and the historical implicationsremain to be seen.

Illustrations to this part of thecatalog include newly discoveredfragments of the 1346 inscriptionand Buddhist finds from the grandhall. Small finds from the city diggive a vivid impression of daily lifeand work. A small ivory wand fromthe “palace area,” probably ofEuropean origin and tentativelydescribed as a stylus, underscoresthe cosmopolitan character ofKarakorum’s medieval population.Very aptly the section on thearchaeology of the Mongol capitalcity Karakorum (part 4 of thecatalog) stands at the center ofthe volume. It is framed by sixchapters offering differentperspectives on the “Mongolexperience” as a context for theKarakorum chapter. An intro-ductory section contains twoessays by a Mongol and a Germanhistorian who look back on ChingisKhan and his legacy (DschingisKhan und seine Erben). Thesecond part (Vorläufer) traces thehistory of Asian “steppe empires”from the Xiongnu to the Mongols.Part 3 (Chinggis Khan und dasMongolische Großreich) looks atpolitical, military and culturalaspects of the early MongolEmpire. Part 5 (Das Weltreich derMongolen) covers the history ofthe Mongol Empire and itssuccessor empires after ChingisKhan in the 13th and 14th centuries.The next section (Der mongolischeBuddhismus) discusses the historyof Buddhism among the Mongols,followed by a relatively briefconcluding section on the post-Chingisid history of Mongolia andits relations with China and laterRussia (Die Mongolei vom 15. biszum 20. Jahrhundert).

The introductory section showsthe range of new archeologicalprojects in Mongolia. Jean-PaulDeroches presents the French-Mongol excavations at the Xiongnunecropolis of Golmod since 2000,Dovdoi Bayar the Turkish-Mongolexcavations at the memorial forBilgä Tegin. A fascinating chapter

is devoted to burials in crevicesand caves (Ulambayar Erdenebatand Ernst Pohl, pp.81-89). TheMongols of Chingis Khan seem tocome to life again in the almostperfectly preserved weapons,gear, clothes and jewelry from one10th-century and two 13th/14th

century burials.

Part 3 is the least even sectionof the book. It includes someexcellent overviews of the Mongolsuccessor states, for exampleBirgitt Hoffmann’s elegantlywritten historical sketch of theMongols in Iran. Several briefchapters provide insight in topicssuch as Mongol monetary history(Stefan Heidemann) and QubilaiKhan’s failed attempt to conquerJapan (Josef Kreiner). Somecontributions, however, are notcompletely up-to-date. The one-page (!) historical sketch of theUlus Jöchi/Golden Horde serves upthe cliché of the “Tatar yoke”without any reference to moredifferentiated interpretations ofMoscovite-Mongol interactions.The following chapter by MarkKramarovski makes up for someof these shortcomings with anintelligent discussion of 13th- and14th-century golden belt orna-ments and drinking vessels fromthe region of the Golden Horde,showing the diversity of theirartistic traditions. His attempt todetermine the stratigraphy ofstyles and techniques and connectthem historically with theformation of the Golden Horde isvery persuasive (though perhapsmore geared toward a specialistaudience). The chapter on theUlus Chaghatai would certainlyhave gained from using MichalBiran’s groundbreaking studies.

Hirmer publishers once againlives up to its reputation as aleading publisher of art books; thereproductions are splendid (withthe exception of p. 392 in mycopy). One of my favorites is a15th-century sinocentric world mapbased on two 14th-century mapsnow in Japan (pp. 336-337,unfortunately printed across the

fold). Other objects that deserveto be singled out are the finds fromthe cave burials (particularly themen’s and women’s headgear onpp.86 and 89, so familiar frommedieval paintings), and the early20th-century manuscript mapsfrom the collection of WaltherHeissig on pp. 390-395 (now in theStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin –Preussischer Kulturbesitz).

Altogether this exhibitioncatalog presents a well-roundedsurvey of Mongol history andculture, while at the same timepointing to new directions inMongol studies. Not atypical for aGerman exhibition catalog, thetexts are quite scholarly. Theappeal to a non-specialistreadership lies mostly in itsillustrations. Complaints? A mapof the Republic of Mongoliashowing the archeological sitesmentioned in the catalog wouldhave been welcome. Wishes? Thepublication of an Englishtranslation.

About the author

Florian Schwarz is an AssistantProfessor, Department of History,University of Washington.engaged in teaching and researchon the medieval and early modernhistory of the Middle East andCentral Asia. Publications includeUnser Weg schliesst tausendWege ein: Derwische undGesellschaft im islamischenMittelasien im 16. Jahrhundert(Berlin, 2000), and two volumesof Sylloge Numorum ArabicorumTuebingen (Berlin & Tuebingen,1995, 2002). He may be contactedat <fschwarz@u.washington.edu>.

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Conference report

Marking the Centenary of DunhuangDaniel WaughSeattle, Washington (USA)

The title of this conference reportmay seem mystifying, since, as weall know Dunhuang and the MogaoCaves there are much more thana century old. What the BritishLibrary, British Museum and BritishAcademy had in mind in hostingtwo important conferences lastspring in London was thecentenary of Aurel Stein’s firstacquaintance with the riches ofMogao Cave 17 in May of 1907,which opened this trove of textsand visual material to the worldof international scholarship. Thetwo conferences were “A HundredYears of Dunhuang, 1907-2007”(May 17-19) and “The Con-servation of Dunhuang and CentralAsian Collections, the 7th Inter-national Dunhuang ProjectConservation Conference” (May21-23). All the presentations ofthe first were open to any priorregistrant. The first day of thesecond was public presentations,followed on the subsequent daysby workshops only for con-servators.

My report will highlight some ofthe presentations and valuableinformation presented but cannotattempt to discuss every paper orname every participant. Thematerial here is organizedthematically, mixing to someextent the presentations fromboth conferences. For furtherinformation at any time con-cerning Dunhuang collections andprojects, readers should visit theInternational Dunhuang Project(IDP) website <http://idp.bl.uk>,where a forthcoming issue of theIDP News will also include a reporton the conservation conference.

The two opening sessions of “AHundred Years” provided insightsinto how Stein interacted with andreceived support from a numberof key individuals [Fig. 1]. One,

Rudolf Hoernle, a prominentBritish orientalist, was importantin the early development ofCentral Asian collections in Britainand encouraged Stein toundertake his first major CentralAsian expedition. As is well known,Hoernle, an important expert inIndic languages, had themisfortune to be taken in by theforgeries of ancient documents byIslam Akhun, whom Steinexposed. In 1879 in conjunctionwith his studies of Inner Asia, theHungarian geologist Lajos Loczyhad been in Dunhuang, which headvised the Hungarian-born Steinto visit. We might note here theextensive Stein collections in theLibrary of the Hungarian Academyof Sciences, where significantprogress has been made incataloguing and digitization(Falconer et al. 2002, 2007).Stein’s first discoveries in theirturn provided the stimulus forCount Otani to undertake hisCentral Asian expeditions, settinga not necessarily felicitousprecedent for private collection inJapan of Central Asian material.Even though a certain amount ofcorrespondence passed betweenOtani and Stein, their interactions

seem to have been limited. Ofparticular interest to me was thepaper by Wang Jiqing of LanzhouUniversity which explained thecontext of what was going on atDunhuang before and duringStein’s first visit there and offeredevidence about the ways in whichStein allegedly took advantage ofthe local officials being distractedby local discontent about taxincreases and outbreaks ofcholera. It is good now to havethis careful examination of thelocal history at the time. We seemto have moved away from stridentdenunciation of the “foreigndevils” having plundered culturaltreasures, but I sensed a kind ofdefensive sub-text in thesuggestion that the local officialswere hoodwinked and thatsomehow they might haveintervened to keep the treasuresof Cave 17 from leaving. A shortversion of his paper is in IDP News30.

John Falconer’s overview of thephotographic records of the Steinexpeditions was of considerableinterest. For the most part thecollection is in the British Libraryand the Library of the HungarianAcademy of Sciences. A goodmany of the photos from hisvarious expeditions are alreadyavailable on the IDP website. Aswas true of most of what he did,Stein prepared carefully for hisphotography and kept meticulousrecords. He had learned his

p h o t o g r a p h yfrom his closefriend Fred An-drews in India inthe 1890s andeven consultedwith the eminentItalian photo-grapher VittorioSella. Stein al-ways tried to usethe most ad-vanced equip-ment, including aspecial theodolitecamera for land-scape photo-graphy, and he

Fig. 1. Dr. Helen Wang of the British Museum, one of theconference co-organizers, presenting on Stein and his teamand on the history of the Dunhuang collections in London.

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recorded exposures, time of dayand other details. In some notablecases such as the murals at Miran,which he could not removebecause of their delicate state butwhich later crumbled as they werebeing removed by others, Stein’sphotos, made in very difficultconditions, are our only record ofpart of what was there. Aninteresting footnote on theDunhuang photographs is the factthat the much-published image ofmanuscripts stacked outside ofCave 17, with Cave 16 in thebackground, is in fact a compositeof two photographs (see the photoin Whitfield 2005, p. 3). The Steinphotos include extensive “ethno-graphic” images, in addition to thelandscapes and archaeologicalones. Taken together, the Stein,Oldenburg (Russian) and Nouette(French) collections form perhapsthe largest and most importantcollections of early archaeologicalphotography anywhere andthoroughly document Central Asiain the first decade of the 20th

century.

A number of the presentationsprovided overviews of the majorDunhuang and related collectionsaround the world — in London,Paris, St. Petersburg, Japan, NewDelhi, but other locations as well— and updated information on theprogress that has been made incataloguing and conserving them.There is a wide range of cata-loguing, publication and digi-talization projects of ambitiousscope.

For me, there were manyhighlights. Of course the progressin the work of IDP, reported bySusan Whitfield in our journal in2005, has been immense; itseems as though every time onere-visits the IDP website newdigital collections and newcatalogues have becomeavailable. Recently one of theimpressive achievements was thecataloguing of the DunhuangTibetan manuscripts in the BritishLibrary. The first volume of theBritish Library Sanskrit fragments

project, described by SeishiKarashima, has appeared; thereport on it was illustrated bydramatic images of how themanuscripts had been deter-iorating and how some of thefragments may now be piecedtogether.

I had not previously been awarethat hundreds of Dunhuangtextiles are housed in the Victoriaand Albert Museum in London.They have now all been properlyconserved and images of themmade available on the IDPwebsite. Furthermore, the con-ference coincided with thepublication by Zhao Feng and hisBritish colleagues of Textiles fromDunhuang in UK Collections, thefirst in a series of volumes ofDunhuang textiles in majorinternational collections (Zhao2007). As Helen Persson, thecurator of the collection at the V& A summarized, “the Dunhuangfinds demonstrate a colourfulrange of beautiful, yet subtledamasks, vibrant polychromepattern woven silks and em-broidered gauzes, clamp-resistdyed and painted silks.” Granted,many are fragments, but theseand also most of the large bannersfound by Stein in Cave 17 maynow all be viewed in fine detail

digitally on the IDP website. Abonus was the British Museum’ssmall special exhibit, “Gods,Guardians and Immortals,” whichincluded a number of theDunhuang paintings [Fig. 2]. Theimportant collection of theDunhuang banners housed in theMusée Guimet in Paris has alsobeen digitized and will be reuniteddigitally with the British collectionson the IDP website [Fig.3].

Fig. 2. Detail of attendant to thebodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, 10th c.banner from Dunhuang. BM, OA1919.1-1.046.

Fig. 3. Donor images on a large Dunhuang silk banner depicting thebodhisattva Kshitigharbha. Dated 981 CE. Musée Guimet, MG 17662.

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As Nathalie Monnet of theBibliothèque nationale reported,the cataloguing and digitization ofthe Dunhuang materials collectedby Paul Pelliot’s expedition andheld by the BN in Paris is now welladvanced. While the Chinesemanuscripts of the collection werepublished in Shanghai between1995 and 2004, the Tibetan,Khotanese and others are still inprocess, with nearly 1000 of theTibetan ones not previouslycatalogued. Some 50,000 digitalimages of Dunhuang materialhave been made; an onlinecatalogue should soon beavailable. Since in some casesseparate parts of a singlemanuscript are in Paris andLondon, bringing them together indigital form on the IDP website willbe a major step forward.

Some of the other collections ofDunhuang material are so far lessreadily available or incompletelycatalogued. Irina Popova of theInstitute of Oriental Studiesdescribed the substantialcollection brought to St.Petersburg by the OldenburgCentral Asian expedition in 1914(Popova 2006). Included aresculpture, painting fragments, andthousands of manuscript frag-ments. In addition, there is alarge number of photographs anda substantial archive of expeditiondiaries, site plans, etc. Some ofthe very impressive sculpture andpainting is on display in theHermitage Museum where, as Idiscovered in recent years, accessmay be limited to alternate days,due to constraints on staffing forthe galleries. In Japan, as AkaoEikei of the Kyoto NationalMuseum reported, there areimportant Dunhuang and Turfanmaterials in private collections,many of which have not beenproperly inventoried, in part forfear that some of the objects mayturn out to be forgeries. Amongthe most significant collections ofDunhuang and other Central Asianmaterials are those in New Delhiat the National Museum (morethan 11,000 objects), including all

the material acquired by Stein onhis third Central Asian expedition.Work on cataloguing and con-servation has proceeded at bestfitfully. To illustrate how importantit is to complete this work, ChhayaBhattacharya-Haesner providedan example of a banner where thepieces are now divided betweenDelhi and the Hermitage in St.Petersburg. There are otherinstances where pieces of thesame textiles are divided betweenDelhi and London.

Apart from the severalprominent collections of Dun-huang material, it was of particularinterest to learn of yet anothergroup of Kharosthi manuscripts tohave come out of the Gandharanregion (here, specifically, north-west Pakistan, near the borderwith Afghanistan) in recent years.In addition to discussing a specificearly Buddhist text project, IngoStrauch provided more generalinformation on the BajaurCollection of birchbark manu-scripts from the first and secondcenturies CE, housed at theUniversity of Peshawar and nowbeing studied by a joint German-Pakistani project. Among thetreasures in these fragile scrollsare the earliest Mahayana andVinaya texts.

Texts in Sogdian, the Iranianlanguage of the Central Asianmerchants who were so importantfor centuries across much of Asia,provide critical evidence for thehistory of the Silk Road. AsNicholas Sims-Williams pointedout, most of the extant Sogdiantexts are from the last quarter ofso of the first millennium. The so-called “Ancient Letters” discoveredby Stein in a watchtower nearDunhuang are amongst theearliest Sogdian texts of anysubstance, dating from the early4th century. Sims-Williams re-ported on interesting new materialfrom Kazakhstan which had notbeen deciphered by its discoverer(Podushkin 2000). The short textsare inscribed on plaques, probablyfrom a wall or gateway, andmention Samarkand, Bukhara and

other locations in Central Asia.There is too little here even to becertain about the texts’ language,although it seems to be a veryarchaic Sogdian. possibly datinga century earlier than the “AncientLetters.”

As Rong Xinjiang of BeijingUniversity outlined in his excellentsurvey, great deal of new materialfrom the Turfan area has emergedin recent years. Some of the mostimportant finds filled gaps in thepreviously scanty written recordfor the region’s history in the latefourth and fifth centuries, in-cluding interesting information onthe relations between the smallGaochang kingdom and the Jou-Jan. Epitaphs of the Kang familyof the late sixth and early seventhcenturies tell of the sinicization ofthe Sogdian population. There isnew material on details of theregion’s administration under theTang, and, as Rong emphasizes,fascinating evidence about thefrequency of envoys fromFerghana to the region in theperiod of the famous battle ofTalas, in which the Arabs defeatedTang armies in 751.

Study and publication of olderTurfan collections has proceededapace in recent decades, amongthem the publication of the Otanicollection and a four-volumeedition of Turfan documents,which appeared in Beijing in 1992-1996 and is included on the YaleTurfan database (and available onIDP). One of the major new digitalinitiatives is that of the GermanTurfanforschung. A good overviewof its very extensive cataloguing,publication and digitizationprojects may be found in thepamphlet Turfan Studies whichwas distributed at the conferenceand may be downloaded from theInternet (Berlin 2007).

Among the presentations aboutconservation challenges andsuccesses, I found of particularinterest Vera Fominikh’s de-scription of the process by whichthe huge sculpture of theParinirvana Buddha found at

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Ajina-Tepa in Tajikistan wasrestored (Fominikh 2003) [Fig. 4].Since few people seem to make itto Dushanbe, the statue is stilllittle known. I was fascinated aswell by Sanchita Balachandran’spresentation of the history andtechnical issues involved in theinfamous foray of LangdonWarner to Dunhuang, where heremoved some sections of thebeautiful Tang-era murals using atechnique involving covering themwith glue, and took the materialback to Harvard where some of itand one of the lovely bodhisattvastatues from Cave 328 may beseen today in the SacklerMuseum. Balachandran’s paperaddressed some of the ethicalissues involved and showed thatthis was no casual effort.However, Warner in fact did notfollow the advice he had beengiven on what substances to use.The plans, fortunately neverrealized, included removal of muchmore of the Mogao painting thanhe managed to accomplish. Thetechniques for removal of his gluesfrom the paintings, in order tomount and display them, wereimperfect, failing to transferimportant amounts of pigment.

Assuming proper conservation,cataloguing, digitization andaccess to the material, what maywe learn from it about the historyand culture of early Eurasia?Various papers addressed these

issues, in somecases focusingnarrowly on a fewexamples, inother cases pro-viding an over-view of what isbeing learnedboth from theD u n h u a n gmaterial andother Silk Roadcollections.

An example ofthe latter wasT s u g u h i t oT a k e u c h i ’ sv a l u a b l e

overview of of the impact ofDunhuang on Tibetan studies. Themanuscripts have provided newevidence for the linguistic study ofOld Tibetan and a great deal ofnew material on the early historyof Buddhism in Tibet and on pre-Buddhist religion there. Sincemany texts were produced bynon-Tibetans, we seem to haveevidence of the use of Tibetan asa kind of lingua franca in Gansu inthe 10th century and much fartherafield. A great deal now is beinglearned about administration inthe Tibetan Empire, and theextent to which Tibetan culturecontinued to dominate areas ofInner Asia well after the collapseof the empire.

Another of the important groupsof texts is the Khotanese one,which was surveyed by Harvard’sOktor Skjaervo. The texts includeBuddhist sutras, princely poetry,medical texts and bil ingualglossaries and itineraries. Onedocument records the visit of aKhotanese prince to the importantcomplex of shrines at Mt. Wutai.Another provides evidence aboutthe sending of Khotanese jade astribute to China. There are a fewcommercial documents, includingone from Dunhuang whichcontains a good many Turkicwords.

Finally I would note here thepresentation by Jean-Pierre Drègeon new studies of the Chinese

book. The Diamond Sutra fromDunhuang, dating from 868 CE,has long been considered theworld’s oldest dated printed book,although it is now known thatsome printed fragments held in St.Petersburg are older. TheDiamond Sutra scroll may beviewed in an innovative digitalpresentation of the British Library<http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html>. There is abroad range of book forms andsubstances in the Dunhuangcollections, providing evidence fora re-examination of book historyand subjects such as therelationship between manuscriptsand the printed book. It is likelythat book formats in China wereinfluenced by those common inthe Western Regions, where, forexample, some Manichaean andNestorian texts were bound incodices rather than preserved inscrolls.

It is impossible in this shortspace to do justice to the value ofthese conferences last May, wherethere was much for the specialistas well as a great deal ofintellectual stimulation for thosewith a general interest in thecultural history of Eurasia andundertakings in modern times tostudy it. Apart from the work ontexts, there are stunning advancesbeing made in the study of paperand other fibers, inks, book-bindings, and much more. Whilein many ways Silk Road studieshave always been a collaborativeproject (Stein, for example,enlisted a lot of help of experts toanalyze materials he found), theextent of collaborative projectstoday is truly impressive. We canbe grateful for the conference andworkshop organizers — FrancesWood, Helen Wang, Joanne Blore,Barbara Borghese and manyothers — for enabling thiscelebration of Dunhuang a centuryafter Stein was there.

About the authorDaniel Waugh taught about theSilk Road for many years beforeretiring from the University of

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Fig. 4. The Ajina-Tepa Parinirvana Buddhia duringexcavation (after slide from presentation by VeraFominikh).

Washington in 2006. He feelsfortunate to have spent a monthat the Mogao Caves at Dunhuangin 1998 on the program co-sponsored by the SilkroadFoundation, whose journal heedits.

References

Balanchandran 2007Sanchita Balachandran. ObjectLessons: The Politics of Pre-servation and Museum Building inWestern China in the EarlyTwentieth Century.” InternationalJournal of Cultural Property 14(2007):1-32.

Berlin 2007Berlin-Brandenburg Academy ofSciences and Humanities. TurfanStudies. Berlin, 2007. Availableon-line <http://www.bbaw.de/b b a w / F o r s c h u n g /F o r s c h u n g s p r o j e k t e /t u r f a n f o r s c h u n g / b i l d e r /Turfan_deutsch_07-Druck.pdf>.An html version of pamphlet isreproduced at the Academy’sTurfanforschung website: <http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/F o r s c h u n g s p r o j e k t e /t u r f a n f o r s c h u n g / d e /Turfanforschung/view>.

Falconer et al. 2002John Falconer, Agnes Karteszi,Agnes Kelecsenyi, Lilla Russell-Smith (ed. by Eva Apor and HelenWang). Catalogue of the Col-lections of Sir Aurel Stein in theLibrary of the Hungarian Academyof Sciences. Budapest: LHAS andBritish Museum, 2002.

Falconer et al. 2007John Falconer, Agnes Karteszi,Agnes Kelecsenyi, Lilla Russell-Smith (ed. by Eva Apor and HelenWang). Supplement to theCatalogue of the Collections of SirAurel Stein in the Library of theHungarian Academy of Sciences.Budapest: LHAS, 2007.

Fominikh 2003Vera A. Fominikh. “Restavra-tsionnaia rekonstruktsiia monu-mental’noi glinianoi statui Buddyv Nirvane iz Adzhina-tepa

(Tadzhikistan)” (Restoration andReconstruction of the monumentalclay statue of the Buddha inNirvana from Adzhina-tepa[ Ta j i k i s t a n ] ) . R o s s i i s k a i aarkheologiia 2003, No. 1: 134-144.

Podushkin 2000Aleksandr Nikolaevich Podushkin.Arysskaia kul’tura IuzhnogoKazakhstana IV v. do n.e.- VI v.n.e. (The Arys Culture of SouthernKazakhstan 4th century BCE – 6th

century CE). Turkestan: Izda-tel’skii tsentr MKTU im.X.A.Yassavi, 2000.

Popova 2006Irina Fedorovna Popova. “Kitai-skaia kollektsiia Sankt-Peter-burgskogo fi l iala Institutavostokovedeniia Rossiiskoiakademii nauk” (The ChineseCollection of the St. PetersburgBranch of the Insititute of OrientalStudies of the Russian Academyof Sciences). In: Sankt-Peterburg— Kitai: tri veka kontaktov (St.Petersburg — China: ThreeCenturies of Contacts). Sankt-Peterburg: Evropeiskii dom, 2006:68-84. Note that this collectionof articles includes a number ofother valuable surveys of CentralAsian collections in St. Petersburg.

Whitfield 2005Susan Whitfield. “The Inter-national Dunhuang Project:Chinese Central Asia Online.” TheSilk Road 3/2 (2005): 3-7.

Zhao 2007Zhao Feng et al., eds. Textilesfrom Dunhuang in UK Collections.Shanghai: Donghua UniversityPress, 2007 (also available inChinese).

Selected Websites and DigitalProjects

The International DunhuangProject

In English, with links to themirror sites:<http://idp.bl.uk/>.In Chinese: <http://idp.nlc.gov.cn/>.

In Japanese: <http://idp.afc.ryukoku.ac.jp/>.In German: <http://idp.bbaw.de/>.In Russian: <http://idp.orientalstudies.ru/>.

The Bajaur Collection<ht tp: / /www.geschku l t . fu -berlin.de/e/indologie/bajaur/>.

Bibliography of DunhuangStudies, 1908-1997<http://ccs.ncl.edu.tw/ccs/EN/ExpertDB3.asp> Search boxes willidentify authors or keywords in thedatabase in Roman script eventhough the website is in Chinese.

Center for the Study of AncientChinese Documents Abroad<http://www.shnuywhw.com/>Website in Chinese, but includes165 enlargeable images ofpaintings and sculptures from theMogao Caves where the cavenumbers are in Arabic numerals.To date five volumes of a 27-volume critical edition of the UKcollections of Dunhuang docu-ments are available via thewebsite.

The Silk Road Project:Reuniting Turfan’s ScatteredTreasures<http://research.yale.edu:8084/turfan/> Includes a Chinese-English database for the mostimportant published materialsfrom Turfan.

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Summer Programs Co-Sponsored by the Silkroad Foundation

Dunhuang Art and Society: On-site Seminar (June 29-July 12, 2008)

With the strong support of the Dunhuang Research Academy, China, the Silkroad Foundation and Yale University areorganizing its fourth seminar on Dunhuang art and society, to be held at the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, Gansu Province,China, from June 29-July 12, 2008. A trip to visit Buddhist art sites in east Xinjiang, including Balikun, Hami, Turfan,Jimsar, and Urmuqi, will follow (July 13-20). The invited speakers include Roderick Whitfield, Mimi Yiengpruksawan, NeilSchmid and Ning Qiang from the US side and Peng Jingzhang, Wang Huimin, Liu Yongzheng, Zhang Xiantang and WangBinghua from the China side. Seminar participants will examine the paintings and sculptures in the Mogao and Yulincaves with the experts listed above and interact with local scholars formally and informally. In addition to visits to theBuddhist caves, this interdisciplinary seminar will provide onsite lectures/discussions examining a wide range of issuesrelating to Chinese art, religion, politics, and society. The official language of the seminar is English.

For additional details, including a list of the lectures by Profs. Whitfield, Ning, Yiengpruksawan and Schmid, visit<http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/dunhuang/dhseminar08.html>. Lecture information by Chinese scholars at theDunhuang Research Academy will be available later.

Seminar Fee: The comprehensive seminar fee is $1,060 for double which covers cave visit fees at Mogao and Yulin,accommodations at the Mogao Guest House and weekend excursions in the Dunhuang region. The July 13-20 trip toother Buddhist sites is not included in this fee.

Registration: The online registration <http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/dunhuang/dhsform00.html> should besubmitted to the Silkroad Foundation by December 12, 2007. The full nonrefundable payment is due by February 15,2008 once you are accepted to the program. A maximum of thirty participants will be accepted. For more information,please contact the program director, Prof. Ning Qiang <qning@conncoll.edu>or the Silkroad Foundation at<dunhuangseminar@silkroadfoundation.org>.

Mongol-American Khovd Archaeology ProjectXiongnu Cemeteries of the Altai Mountains

(June 19 – July 31, 2008)

For the summer of 2008, the Silkroad Foundation, in conjunction with the National Museum of Mongolian History and theUniversity of Pennsylvania, will be sponsoring excavations and surveys in the Altai Mountain region of Khovd aimag,Mongolia.

The Mongol-American Khovd Archaeology Project aims to advance material investigations of the peoples and culturesof the Altai Mountains, a crucial region between the nomads of the Mongolian steppes and the Silk Roads area withinpresent-day northwest China. Chinese historical documents attest to the emergence of a strong nomadic confederacycalled the Xiongnu in the late first millennium BCE which held sway over the steppe and mountain regions north of theChinese realm for several centuries and well into the Common Era. Our understanding of this nomad polity and itsconstituents has, within the past few decades, been transformed by archaeological discoveries not only of royal tombsbut of standard- burial graveyards, regional analyses and settlement studies. A wealth of new material is being unearthed,and new methods are being applied to its analysis. Excavations in 2008 will take place at three separate Xiongnucemeteries — Baishin uzuur in the low valleys, Dood Takhilt adjacent to the elite cemetery of Takhilt, and Shombuuzinbelchir in the high mountain pass — to analyze the relationship between those interred in different geographic locales ofthe Altai region of Khovd and the degree of variation between sites attributed to the Xiongnu in the western peripheryand those elsewhere in Mongolia. The project offers a variety of excavation activities with focuses on the analysis ofhuman remains and processes of in-field conservation. In addition, several lectures will be provided on-site, and a cross-country trips between Ulaanbaatar and Khovd will allow participants to see a large collection of sites within variedgeographic zones and relating to different periods of Mongolian history and culture.

This program provides an exciting opportunity for participants with a wide range of interests. Participants need nospecial training, but should be prepared for physical activity and wilderness camping (no electricity and living on thesteppes in Mongolian tents) for extended periods of time. Participants will be given training on archaeological survey andexcavation, including proper methods of unearthing, documenting and mapping the materials. If you have excavationexperience, we welcome your assistance, and if you have not, we look forward to the learning process! The mostimportant things you need for this project are: 1) patience and a good sense of humor; 2) the ability to adapt to radicallydifferent cultures and climates and environments (without electricity and all the trappings that go with it); and 3) asense of adventure, for we will be traveling to and seeing some fantastic places!

More details on Takhilt Xiongnu Cemetery: <http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/excavation/takhiltcemetary.html>.

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Language: The official language of the expedition is English. Lectures by local Mongolian scholars will be translated.

Site Descriptions

Tsenkher CaveTsenkher cave lies a few kilometers further up the Khoit Tsenkher river valley from the site of Takhilt cemetery. Here canbe found some of the earliest cave paintings in Mongolia and in the world. Animals are painted on the walls of the cavein an array of red, black and white.

Uyench PassThe Uyench river valley at the southern end of this mountain pass through the Altai has numerous sections of rock wallcarved with animals, chariots and hunting scenes from the Bronze Age through Turk period. Some of the most famousrock-cut art in Mongolia, for example the often depicted Xiongnu chariot with escorts, can be found on the walls of thiscanyon.

Baishin uzuur, Darvi sum, Khovd aimagSeveral Xiongnu cemeteries have been found in Darvi sum amongst the foothills. Excavations in 2008 will focus on twosites in the vicinity of a hill named Baishin uzuur. One site is a small cluster of eight features where we will excavateseveral graves. The more significant site consists of over thirty Xiongnu period graves on the eastern slope of a small hill,two small Bronze Age burials on the western side, and a dense collection of Turkic inscriptions on the boulders on top ofthe hill. We will excavate several graves at this site, including the two Bronze Age burials, several small Xiongnu graves,and a large circular Xiongnu grave with adjacent burials and a line of stones to the north. This manner of stone line wasexcavated for the first time in 2007 at Takhiltin-khotgor, and we found ritual deposits of burnt animal bone. It is our goalto further investigate this phenomenon of ritual stone lines outside the context of the more elite tomb complexes likethose at Takhiltin-khotgor.

Dood Takhilt, Manhan sum, Khovd aimagThe elite Xiongnu cemetery of Takhitin-khotgor sits in a flat area between two river valleys: the Khoit (North) TsenkherRiver and the Dund (Middle) Tsenkher River. In summer 2007, while excavating at this elite cemetery, surveys of theKhovd Archaeology Project discovered two small groups of Xiongnu period graves nearby the elite grounds and next tothe Khoit Tsenkher River. In 2008, we will excavate two graves here; one with apparent accompanying interments andanother with a stone line to the north.

Shombuuzin belchir, Monkhkhairkhan sum, Khovd aimagNumerous Xiongnu cemeteries and Bronze Age monuments were documented in the Altai mountain pass area ofMonkhkhairkhan sum during surveys in 2006, and one of the larger sites is located in a mountain niche called Shombuuzinbelchir. We will excavate a long cluster of burials here, including a large circular grave with a stone line to the north.

Program Fee: A tax deductible donation of $1500. This donation does not include airfare, visas nor incidentals in UlaanBataar and Khovd.

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Preparations: Participants should be prepared for physical activity and wilderness camping for extended periods oftime. We are going out on the Mongolian steppe and will be anywhere from 50 km to 150 km from any sizable towns. Wewill live in gers (Mongolian traditional tent houses), without electricity and plumbing. Access to water, for bathing anddrinking, will be a river nearby the campsite, so participants will need to bring water filters (or share with otherparticipants). The diet will be heavy on sheep and dairy products. Vegetarians will have a difficult time with such a diet,and thus will need to come prepared with some of their own additional food options.

Application/Deadline: The online application <http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/excavation/2008/excform008.html>should be submitted to the Silkroad Foundation by January 1, 2008. We will notify those accepted by January 15, 2008;so please be available for contact during this time. Please send email to <excavation08@silkroadfoundation.org> for anyquestions.

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The Silkroad Foundation also a proud supporter of

Silk Road House is a non-profit organization created to promote and support an impressive array of diverse ethniccultural traditions. The main goals of the Silk Road House are:to create a center for the collection of pertinent cultural and historical informationto provide a place where creative activities can bring to life the traditions of the Silk Road here in United States tocelebrate the Silk Road’s tradition of hospitality

Silk Road House symbolizes the connections, communications and bonds between peoples and cultures united by theSilk Road concept, and at the same time, a real network of the modern day contacts between those peoples andcultures. The Silk Road House is a welcoming cultural center where everyone who might be interested could find a widerange of accurate information concerning the history, culture, and everyday life of Silk Road countries.

For extensive listings of the many events, including programs in December 2007, visit the website at: <http://www.silkroadhouse.org/>.

Among the events scheduled for early in 2008 is a Central Asian film series (made possible through a generous giftof the Open Society Institute [Budapest, Hungary]). The compiler of DVD-collection is Gulnara Abikeyeva, Director ofthe Center of Central Asian Cinematography. All movies have English subtitles and will be introduced and commentedon by Alma Kunanbaeva:– Saturday January 12, from 5 to 7 PM. “The Land of the Fathers” (Kazakhstan).– Saturday, January 26, from 5 to 7 PM. “White Mountains” (Kyrgyzstan).– Saturday, February 9, from 5 to 7 PM. “You’re Not an Orphan” (Uzbekistan).– Saturday, February 23, from 5 to 7 PM. “Hassan-Arbakesh” (Tajikistan).

Also, on Sunday, February 24, 1 to 3 PM (Lecture begins at 1:30 PM) an illustrated presentation, “New perspectives onearly Inner Asian nomads,” by Dr. Daniel Waugh, University of Washington, Seattle. The talk will include new material onthe Pazyryk burials in the Altai and results of the Xiongnu archaeological excavations co-sponsored by the SilkroadFoundation in 2005 and 2007 in Mongolia.

Silk Road House: A Cultural and Educational Center

Humanities West presents:

Empire on Horseback: Genghis Khan and the MongolsFebruary 22 and 23, 2008

at the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco

The program includes:

Friday, February 22

8:00 PM. “The ‘Owl of Misfortune’ or the ‘Phoenix of Prosperity’? Reassessing Genghis Khan and the MongolEmpire.” Daniel Waugh (Emeritus Professor, University of Washington) attempts to separate myth from realityand provide a balanced picture of the Mongols’ impact on their contemporary world.

9:00 PM. “From Steppe to Stage: An Exploration of 800 Years of Mongolian Music.” Peter K. Marsh (AssistantProfessor of Music, CSU East Bay), explores the history of Mongolian music from Imperial times to the present,paying particular attention to how traditional music, including the two-stringed fiddle and khöömii or ‘throatsinging’ traditions, intersect the human, natural, and spiritual worlds. He’ll end by looking at how Mongolianmusic has fared in the era of globalization.

December 15, 2007, through April 27, 2008

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco present a selection of premier examples from their world-class holdings ofTurkmen rugs and textiles in For Tent and Trade: Masterpieces of Turkmen Weaving at the de Young Museum December15, 2007, through April 27, 2008. During the past twenty-five years, FAMSF has developed the finest public collectionof Turkmen carpets and other pile textiles outside Russia. This exhibition includes approximately 40 of the finest rugs,bags, and tent and animal trappings from these extensive holdings.

This exhibition provides an overview of Turkmen pile weaving and addresses some of the unanswered questionssurrounding Turkmen carpets in addition to new findings that are changing our understanding of this complex weavingtradition.

The textiles included in For Tent and Trade come from the plains, oases, and low hills of Turkmenistan, northwest Iran,Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. Many are woven from the superb wool of Saryja sheep, which are bred solely in thisregion. This exhibition provides the opportunity to contrast objects traditionally woven for a woman’s dowry or domesticuse with those made for the market or a prosperous city dweller.

Diane Mott, Curator of the Caroline and H. McCoy Jones Department of Textile Arts, is the curator of this exhibition.

The exhibition will be accompanied by various educational programs and public lectures, with two of the latter scheduledfor December 6 and January 12. Visit the museum website for details <http://www.deyoungmuseum.org> or call 1-415-750-3600.

The de Young Museum is located in Golden Gate Park, at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118.

Camel trapping forbridal procession(khalyk). CentralAsia, Turkmen,Yomut? tribe. Woolor goat hair; knot-ted pile (sym-metrical knot). Giftof George andMarie Hecksher2000.186.12.

Photo © 2007 The deYoung Museum. Usedwith permission.

Saturday, February 23

10:00 AM. “On Culture and Commerce.” This illustrated lecture by Morris Rossabi (Professor of History, ColumbiaUniversity) reveals that the Mongols promoted commerce and fostered some of the arts in the vast empire theysubjugated.

11:00 AM “The Women in Genghis Khan’s Life.” James D. Ryan (Emeritus Professor, CUNY) focuses on several ofthe remarkable women, including Genghis’ mother, his chief wife and mother of the four sons who figured insuccession to his empire, and several of his daughters-in-law. Their histories reveal that Mongol women enjoyedhigher position and greater recognition than those in China, the Arab world, or Europe.

1:30 PM. A Performance of Mongolian Music, coordinated by Peter K. Marsh and Orna Uranchimeg-Tsultem.

2:00 PM. “The Mongol Influence on Islamic, Especially Persian Art.” With rich illustrations, Stefano Carboni(Curator, Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) explores the impact of China’s Yüan dynasty onthe art and culture of Iran’s Ilkhanid dynasty. In a period of great cultural achievement and profound changes,local artists and artisans were introduced to previously unknown artistic traditions from East Asia, and attemptedto respond to the tastes of their new royal patrons, the Mongol rulers.

3:00 PM. Panel discussion and Q & A, moderated by Fred Astren.

This event is by paid admission ticket, which may be obtained from City Box Office <cityboxoffice.com>. For furtherinformation, visit the Humanities West website at: <www.humanitieswest.org>, write <info@humanitieswest.org> orphone 1-415-391-9700. Humanities West has prepared various educational resources to accompany the program. Amongthe program’s sponsors is the Silkroad Foundation.

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FOR TENT AND TRADE: MASTERPIECES OF TURKMEN WEAVINGAT THE DE YOUNG MUSEUM