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A Language Log reader asked:

I’m curious, do griffin motifs (creatures with four legs but beak) appear in China at a known date? do you think the imagery dispersed from the East, i.e., from Scythia and Asia westward to the Mediterranean or vice versa, from the West to the East?

Since we have often discussed language spreads of the Scythians and other nomadic groups of Central, Inner, and Southwest Asia, I believe it is a worthy topic to pursue the transmission of art motifs associated with these groups across the Eurasian expanse. Consequently, I asked Petya Andreeva, who is a specialist on this type of nomadic art, what her response to this question would be.  She replied (note especially the last two sentences):

While no definitive trajectory has been agreed upon, I would say transmission certainly happened from the Iranian plateau – actually without a doubt. We see griffins on cylinder seals from Uruk, very early on, then we see them with great frequency at Ziwiye. It is worth noting that they also dominate the Urartian repertoire – I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara last summer, and noticed they are present in some reliefs and on smaller scale objects. Then they permeate the Luristan culture very noticeably, and it is from the Iranian realm that the Scythians – many later captured by Darius [king of the Achaemenid Empire]- might have transmitted the motif. No doubt the intrusion into Chinese material culture happened from Iran. We start to see some creatures resembling griffins in the Eastern Zhou when nomadic contact is quite tangible in China.

See Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea:  Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh:  University Press, 2024).

Selected readings

• "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor
• "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21)
• "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
• "The Names of Metals in the Turkic, Indo-European, and Finno-Ugric Languages"
• "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with a bibliography of numerous relevant previous posts
• "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08) — see especially this comment
• "Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4" (10/11/20)
• "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20)
• "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
• "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
• "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
• "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19) — details how the akinakes and other attributes of Saka / Scythian culture penetrated to the far south of what is now China; excessive sacrifices of horses in the south and in Shandong
• "Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth" (5/7/24)
• "Winged lions through time and space" (5/4/24)
• "What is the difference between a dragon and a /lʊŋ³⁵/?" (2/10/24)
• "The role of long-distance communication in human history" (1/26/23)
• C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998.  Vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
• C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail.  New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000. In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy.
• "Faces of ‘Siberian Tutankhamun’ and his ‘Queen’ buried 2,600 years ago reconstructed by science", by Olga Gertcyk and Svetlana Skarbo, The Siberian Times (1/8/21).  Buried with vast amounts of gold and ornate metalwork.  "The Arzhan-2 burial of the Scythian ‘King’ and the ‘Queen’, found in 1997 and studied between 2001-2003 by Russian-German expedition is one  of the most extraordinary discoveries ever made by archeologists."
• J. P. Mallory, The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective (Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 [Nov. 2015]; free pdf, 63 pp.)
• Victor H. Mair.  "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China:  Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians'."  In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle, ed., Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse.  McDonald Institute Monographs.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004.  Pp. 163-187.
• Barry Cunliffe. By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West".  In Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World.  Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006.  Pp. 30-61.  Especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east.
• Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26.  This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".

[Thanks to Adrienne Mayor]

August 9, 2024 @ 6:41 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and history

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