Oriental Department

In this work I make an attempt to consider how Ashurbanipal’s ‘annals’ reflect one of the episodes connected with such significant events as the war with Elam, the punishment of Elam’s allies and the suppression of the Babylonian rebellion, namely the diplomatic mission of Rusa, the king of Urartu, to Ashurbanipal in Arbela.

The article concerns the finds of pottery from the settlement of Hisorak (the upper Zeravshan), allowing to date the last stage of its active life, which is the beginning of the 9th century. Finds from other sites, like Gardani-Hisor and Kum (7th-8th centuries) provide parallels to certain groups of Hisorak pottery. A significant part of this pottery is however quite different from what we get from Gardani-Hisor and Kum, and there is nothing like the 5th-6th century forms from Penjikent.

Summary. 

The burial site of Moshtcevaya Balka is located in the North-West Caucasus in a deep gorge in the upper course of the Bolshaya Laba river by the Labinsky mountain pass leading to Bzybsk Abkhazia. The burial site is known from the 19th century. The natives, who constantly looted it, called it Moshtcevaya Balka (wrom the Russian word moshtci, the imperishable remains of saints in the Russian Orthodox tradition), which suggests the presence of mummified bodies among the burials.

The specific feature of the burial site is the wonderful preservation of organic materials (wood, leather, textiles, etc.). Initially it even caused its not being regarded as an archaeological site. At the beginning of the 20th century archaeologists Nikolai Veselovskij and Nikolai Vorobyev took it for an eighteenth-century ethnological object, and therefore one of them transferred the artifacts collected there to the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum and the other one — to the Kunstkamera, leaving no reports for the Archaeological Commission. Thus for many years the unique materials from Moshtcevaya Balka remained unknown to archaeologists. Their study began only half century later, when, by the efforts of Joseph A. Orbeli, both collections were transferred to the Hermitage Museum. This collection (so far the most complete one) formed the basis for the present authors’ many years of research. In the 1970s, when the principal ideas on the burial site had been already formed, a small expedition from the Hermitage verified certain questions connected with the arrangement of the burial structures and discovered a burial of a mummified woman. Several finds were donated to the expedition by E.A. Milovanov, the director of a school in Kurdzhinovo.

In the present book the results of the research of the Moshtcevaya Balka site is presented in two principal blocks. The first one concerns the reconstruction of many previously unknown features of life of the local tribes: their dress, crafts, religion. Special attention is given to the funeral cult, especially to its recently discovered feature conventionally named the symbolization of the grave goods, which meant that all the necessary groups of grave goods were set along with the burials but purely symbolically — not whole objects, but only parts of them (adze handles, arrow shafts with no arrow-heads, etc.) or imitations of objects. Under normal conditions such symbolic grave goods do not survive, so we get a distorted idea of the actual burial rites.

The second block aims at the explanation of a very unusual for the early medieval period concentration of imported silk textiles in Moshtcevaya Balka. At the time when silk was highly valued, when silk garments were
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the privilege of the upper classes, the local tribesmen possessed such an amount of silk that ordinary people used it for their daily needs, and their chief wore a silk kaftan worthy of the king of kings of Sasanian Iran.

The solution of this problem required a methodical research of the textile manufacture which helped to understand the nature of the silk import to Moshtcevaya Balka. Among the discovered textiles there are, on the one hand, Chinese and Sogdian silks, on the other — Byzantine and Mediterranian silk textiles. These finds allow to reconstruct a special branch of the Silk Road and to understand its function. This route, called by the author the North Caucasus Silk Road, for the first time appeared, basing upon archaeological material, as a regular trade route between the Far East and the West, evading Iran (always a go-between, preventing any direct trade). This detour ran along the foothills of the Caucasus and across the mountain passes of the West Caucasus, while the Byzantine colonies of the Black Sea coast of Apsilia (Abkhazia) served as transition points. Silk textiles were accumulated by local tribes living by the mountain passes. The Labinsky mountain pass was controlled by the tribe living by Moshtcevaya Balka: textiles were coming as payment for crossing the passes and for various services offered by the natives.

Of a special interest is the goods of a Chinese merchant’ including a notebook testifying to the actual presence here of their owner in the 8th century. It also conforms the existence of the North Caucasus Silk Road and of the whole concept suggested here.

The present book is in no way just a Russian version of the monograph published fifteen years ago in Germany. It is addressed to a wider audience and introduces many new materials and recently developed ideas.

This article is the first detailed publication of the men's fur kaftan covered with green silk with senmurvs. The kaftan was found in North-Caucasian cemetery Mosht-shevaya Balka (8-9th c). Now the kaftan is completed with fragments, discovered by the Hermitage Expedition in 1975. §1 deals with history of the investigation of this cemetery and the circumstances of finding of the kaftan. §2 discusses the attribution of the senmurv-silk and other silks of the kaftan. The author ascribes two groups of the now known senmurv-silks ('green' and 'red') to the very same workshop of the postsasanian Iran and dates them back to the end of the 8th - beginning of the 9th c. Typologically silks from M. B. is identified as the latest among five other variations. Two other silks used for the kaftan are attributed as follows : one—as sogdian silk zandanîjï, the other — as a fragments of the well-known Byzantine-Syrian silk "with the hunt of Bahram Gor". In §3 the cut of the kaftan which the author thinks to go back to Iranian type of clothing (as well as the pointed head-dress) is being analysed. Their spread in western regions of the Northern Caucasus the author connected with infiltration of the Alan (Iranian) ethnical component from more eastern region (North Ossetia, Kabarda) into the aboriginal Adygh structure. The finding of this luxurious kaftan and concentration of the silks in M.B. in general the author explains by the fact that a branch of the Silk Route was going through the western pass of the Caucasus.