Kostromskaya (rural locality)

Last updated April 15, 2019

Coordinates: 44°30′N40°36′E / 44.500°N 40.600°E / 44.500; 40.600

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.

Sketch plan of the kurgan burial Horse burials and artifacts of Kostromskaya Kurgan.JPG — Sketch plan of the kurgan burial

Kostromskaya (Russian : Костромска́я) is a rural locality (a stanitsa ) in Mostovsky District of Krasnodar Krai, Russia, located at the footsteps of the Caucasus Mountains on the Psefir River (Fars' tributary, Kuban basin), 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) southwest of the town of Labinsk.

Russian is an East Slavic language, which is official in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991. Although nearly three decades have passed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian is used in official capacity or in public life in all the post-Soviet nation-states, as well as in Israel and Mongolia.

The classification system of the types of inhabited localities in Russia, the former Soviet Union, and some other post-Soviet states has certain peculiarities compared with the classification systems in other countries.

Stanitsa is a village inside a Cossack host (viysko). Stanitsas were the primary unit of Cossack hosts.

With a population estimated in the hundreds, it is very agrarian and rural in nature and has many mulberry trees. The roads in the village are mostly dirt or rocky. The landscape is very mountainous.

The stanitsa is also home to the ancient Scythian kurgan or burial mound of the 7th century BC where a Scythian gold stag was found, next to the iron shield it decorated. It is one of the most famous pieces of Scythian art, and is now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersberg.^[1] Apart from the principal male body with his accoutrements, the burial included thirteen humans with no adornment above him, and around the edges of the burial twenty-two horses were buried in pairs.^[2] The kurgan was excavated by the Russian archaeologist N. I. Veselovski in 1897.^[3]

The Scythians, also known as Scyth, Saka, Sakae, Sai, Iskuzai, or Askuzai, were Eurasian nomads, probably mostly using Eastern Iranian languages, who were mentioned by the literate peoples to their south as inhabiting large areas of the western and central Eurasian Steppe from about the 9th century BC up until the 4th century AD. The "classical Scythians" known to ancient Greek historians, agreed to be mainly Iranian in origin, were located in the northern Black Sea and fore-Caucasus region. Other Scythian groups documented by Assyrian, Achaemenid and Chinese sources show that they also existed in Central Asia, where they were referred to as the Iskuzai/Askuzai, Saka, and Sai, respectively.

A kurgan is a tumulus, a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood. The Russian noun, already attested in Old East Slavic, borrowed by the Turks, compare Modern Turkish kurğan, which means "fortress". Kurgans are mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Popularised by its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.

Scythian art is art, primarily decorative objects, such as jewellery, produced by the nomadic tribes in the area known to the ancient Greeks as Scythia, which was centred on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and ranged from modern Kazakhstan to the Baltic coast of modern Poland and to Georgia. The identities of the nomadic peoples of the steppes is often uncertain, and the term "Scythian" should often be taken loosely; the art of nomads much further east than the core Scythian territory exhibits close similarities as well as differences, and terms such as the "Scytho-Siberian world" are often used. Other Eurasian nomad peoples recognised by ancient writers, notably Herodotus, include the Massagetae, Sarmatians, and Saka, the last a name from Persian sources, while ancient Chinese sources speak of the Xiongnu or Hsiung-nu. Modern archaeologists recognise, among others, the Pazyryk, Tagar, and Aldy-Bel cultures, with the furthest east of all, the later Ordos culture a little west of Beijing. The art of these peoples is collectively known as steppes art.

Notes

↑ Honour and Fleming, 124
↑ Honour and Fleming, 123
↑ Piotrovsky, 29

Related Research Articles

Pazyryk burials Iron Age tombs in the Altai Mountains

The Pazyrykburials are a number of Saka Iron Age tombs found in the Pazyryk Valley of the Ukok plateau in the Altai Mountains, Siberia, south of the modern city of Novosibirsk, Russia; the site is close to the borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Numerous comparable burials have been found in neighboring western Mongolia.

The Sarmatians were a large Iranian confederation that existed in classical antiquity, flourishing from about the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD.

The Pazyryk culture is a Scythian nomadic Iron Age archaeological culture identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans found in the Siberian permafrost, in the Altay Mountains, Kazakhstan and nearby Mongolia. The mummies are buried in long barrows similar to the tomb mounds of Scythian culture in modern Ukraine. The type site are the Pazyryk burials of the Ukok Plateau. Many artifacts and human remains have been found at this location, including the Siberian Ice Princess, indicating a flourishing culture at this location that benefited from the many trade routes and caravans of merchants passing through the area. The Pazyryk are considered to have had a war-like life.

The Maykop culture, c. 3700 BC–3000 BC, was a major Bronze Age archaeological culture in the western Caucasus region of southern Russia.

Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky was a Soviet Russian academician, historian-orientalist and archaeologist who studied the ancient civilizations of Urartu, Scythia, and Nubia. He is best known as a key figure in the study of the Urartian civilization of the southern Caucasus. From 1964 until his death, Piotrovsky was also Director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

The Srubnaya culture, also known as Timber-grave culture, was a Late Bronze Age culture in the eastern part of Pontic-Caspian steppe. It is a successor to the Late Catacomb culture and the Poltavka culture, as well as the Potapovka culture.

A drinking horn is the horn of a bovid used as a drinking vessel. Drinking horns are known from Classical Antiquity especially the Balkans, and remained in use for ceremonial purposes throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in some parts of Europe, notably in Germanic Europe, and in the Caucasus. Drinking horns remain an important accessory in the culture of ritual toasting in Georgia in particular, where they are known as kantsi.

The Trialeti culture, is named after the Trialeti region of Georgia. It is attributed to the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BC. Trialeti culture emerged in the areas of the preceding Kura-Araxes culture.

Kurgan stelae or Balbals are anthropomorphic stone stelae, images cut from stone, installed atop, within or around kurgans, in kurgan cemeteries, or in a double line extending from a kurgan. The stelae are also described as "obelisks" or "statue menhirs".

The Noin-Ula burial site consist of more than 200 large burial mounds, approximately square in plan, some 2 m in height, covering timber burial chambers. They are located by the Selenga River in the hills of northern Mongolia north of Ulan Bator in Batsumber sum of Tov Province. They were excavated in 1924–1925 by Pyotr Kozlov, who found them to be the tombs of the aristocracy of the Xiongnu; one is an exceptionally rich burial of a historically known ruler of the Xiongnu, Uchjulü-Jodi-Chanuy, who died in 13 CE. Most of the objects from Noin-Ula are now in the Hermitage Museum, while some artifacts unearthed later by Mongolian archaeologists are on display in the National Museum of Mongolian History, Ulan Bator. Two kurgans contained lacquer cups, inscribed with Chinese characters believed to be the names of Chinese craftsmen, and dated September 5 year of Tsian-ping era, i.e. 2nd year BCE.

The Solokha (Солоха) kurgan is on the left bank of the Dnieper, 18 km from Kamianka-Dniprovska, opposite Nikopol, in eastern Ukraine. It has a height of 19 m and a diameter of about 100 m, dating to the early 4th century BC. It contained two royal Scythian tombs, the central tomb had been robbed already in antiquity, but still contained the remains of a female ruler and two horses in rich attire, while the side tomb was found intact by the 1912–13 campaign by the Russian archaeologist N. I. Veselovski. The tomb is notable because it confirmed the historicity of an account of Herodotus.

Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist, specializing in the history and archaeology of Central Asia. Born in Moscow, schooled in Vologda, studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890. He was the first to excavate Afrasiab, the oldest part of Samarkand, as well as several notable kurgans in Southern Russia and Ukraine, notably the Solokha, Kostromskaya and Maikop kurgans. Some of the finest examples of Scythian art, including the Solokha comb, were discovered by Veselovsky and his team.

Scythian religion refers to the mythology, ritual practices and beliefs of the Scythians, an ancient Iranian people who dominated Central Asia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe throughout Classical Antiquity. What little is known of the religion is drawn from the work of the 5th century Greek historian and ethnographer Herodotus. Scythian religion is assumed to have been related to the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, and to have influenced later Slavic, Hungarian and Turkic mythologies, as well as some contemporary Eastern Iranian and Ossetian traditions.

Arzhan is a site of early Scythian kurgan burials, located in the Tuva Republic, Russia, some 60 kilometers (40 mi) north-west of Kyzyl. Arzhan is situated on a high plateau, traversed by the Uyuk River, a minor tributary of the Yenisei River.

The Aldy-Bel culture is an Iron Age culture of Scytho-Siberian horse nomads in the area of Tuva in southern Siberia, dated to the 7th to 3rd centuries BCE.

Horse burial is the practice of burying a horse as part of the ritual of human burial, and is found among many Indo-European peoples and others, including Chinese and Turkic peoples. The act indicates the high value placed on horses in the particular cultures and provides evidence of the migration of peoples with a horse culture. Human burials that contain other livestock are rare; in Britain, for example, 31 horse burials have been discovered but only one cow burial, unique in Europe. This process of horse burial is part of a wider tradition of horse sacrifice. An associated ritual is that of chariot burial, in which an entire chariot, with or without a horse, is buried with a dead person.

References

Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art, 1st edn. 1982 (many later editions), Macmillan, London, page refs to 1984 Macmillan 1st edn. paperback. ISBN 0333371852
Piotrovsky, Boris, et al. "Excavations and Discoveries in Scythian Lands", in From the Lands of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the U.S.S.R., 3000 B.C.–100 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 32, no. 5 (1974), available online as a series of PDFs (bottom of the page).

Hugh Honour FRSL was a British art historian, known for his writing partnership with John Fleming. Their A World History of Art, is now in its seventh edition and Honour's Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (1961) first set the phenomenon of chinoiserie in its European cultural context.

International Standard Book Number Unique numeric book identifier

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Honour and Fleming, 124

[2] Honour and Fleming, 123

[3] Piotrovsky, 29