Unique Masterpieces: stone mosaics of the Bronze Age
August 19, 2017 | 16:00 |394
The recently opened exposition of the works of art of ancient Margiana, which was significantly supplemented with new exhibits, has opened in the Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan, making us once again turn to the topic, which was devoted to the article "Margiana in the epicenter of disputes". (https://orient.tm/en/2017/06/28/170.html) This story began long ago, in 1972, when the famous archaeologist Victor Ivanovich Sarianidi together with his colleagues discovered a hill, abundantly dotted with shards, in the Karakum Desert. A scattering of broken ceramic ware is a sure sign that once there was a city or other settlement here. Local shepherds called this hill Gonur-depe. The name of this monument very soon became well-known first for a narrow circle of archaeologists, and now it has truly gained worldwide fame.Ruslan MURADOV
In four decades of hard work of dozens of archaeologists and hundreds of workers, the ruins of the largest city were discovered among almost two hundred settlements of the Bronze Age in the old delta of the Murgab River. One can only guess the name of this small country, cut off from the rest of the world by mountains and deserts. But today it is customary to call the finding the country of Margush (or Margiana by the version of ancient Greek geographers).
The excavations led by Victor Sarianidi made it possible to prove the highest level of development of the culture of the population of the Murgab oasis in the Bronze Age, giving scientists reason to assert that in this region there was one of the earliest centers of the ancient Eastern civilization.
It would seem that the boundaries of the city are outlined, its architecture is clarified, and it became visible that it consisted of a palace and many sanctuaries; a collection of valuable and unique items was excavated, but every year Gonur's research brought more and more discoveries.
First of all, this is a mass of well-made ceramic dishes, magnificent products of bronze, silver, gold and stone, now stored in the museums of Ashgabat and Mary. Among them are some items that such huge repositories of world values, such as the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, can envy.
Brilliant results were achieved in excavations of the Gonur royal necropolis, where eight tombs of the rulers of the country of Margush were found. All of them are miniature underground models of real dwellings with all their attributes - foci, niches in the walls for household items, narrow couches and hiding places for treasures.
Ancient people believed in life after death, so they left in the graves as funeral gifts not only whole sets of tableware made of ceramics and metal, but also all kinds of jewelry made of gold, silver, bronze, copper, precious stones, as well as various cult figurines and personal seal-amulets. Alas, all found mausoleums of this type were looted back in antiquity and archaeologists got mostly only occasional remnants of former luxury, but they amaze the imagination with the high level of art of the masters of the Bronze Age. (see here for more detail: https://orient.tm/en/2017/07/23/919.html)
But there are things that thieves could not carry with them, such as decorations on the walls of underground crypt houses and large wooden boxes - "tabernacles". Nowhere and never have scientists found such extraordinary creations of human hands. In the royal necropolis of Gonur, panels were revealed, adorned with skillfully executed ornamental and plotted multi-figured compositions. Their main part was picturesque, and individual elements are executed in the technique of mosaic. Nothing of the kind was ever encountered on the premises of the previously excavated palace of Gonur. Obviously, "houses" for the otherworldly existence of rulers or priests were considered more important than their lifetime dwellings!
Mosaics were present in all the tombs found, but only in two of them they were preserved as whole compositions. In others there were only some elements that once formed wall panels. Nevertheless, even the little that we have today allows us to look into the world of legends, myths and rituals of the inhabitants of Gonur and the entire country of Margush.
Griffins and winged lions, snakes swallowing argali, scenes of dragons fighting with snakes demonstrate, as Professor Sarianidi repeatedly noted in the materials on seals and amulets of Bactria and Margiana, one of the leading ideas of that time was the struggle between Good and Evil. Of course, there are similar motifs in the art of the Ancient East, but real and fantastic animals are shown in Gonur samples much more professionally, with much more expression and naturalism.
In the beginning, even specialists were far from clear on what colors and what kind of stones were used to make Gonur mosaics. On what, on which basis and how were the details put together? It was also unclear how these compositions were created - right on the spot, or in a separate workshop?
Of course, over time it was possible to clarify many issues, but still far from all questions have been answered. After a series of laboratory analyzes, it was possible to establish that the images were created using only a few organic dyes: coal (black), ultramarine obtained from lapis lazuli (bright blue), cinnabar (bright red color). The most important, spectacular details - the heads and torsos of predators, birds, fish, griffins, other animals, feathers, elements of geometric patterns - were made of stone.
Among the dozens of stone tools of Gonur masters, archaeologists have managed to find incisors specially prepared and ground at such an angle, which allows cutting out the necessary mosaic figures. This proves that the master-stone-cutters and the artists of antiquity created their work on the spot, and did not bring ready-made panels from anywhere. Raw materials were also local - minerals were mined in the Kopetdag mountains.
Priceless information for understanding the technique of making mosaics was given by restoration work, with the support of the "The Ambassadors for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage" of the US State Department. Experienced professionals from Moscow from the State Research Institute of Restoration of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation Natalia Kovaleva and Galina Veresotskaya, as well as Tatyana Shaposhnikova from the State Museum of the History of Religion (St. Petersburg), were invited to work in the museum. With the participation of their Turkmen counterparts Mekan Annanurov and Annamurad Orazov, they recovered three large fragments from a massive chest - "tabernacle" - and several decorative panels from the walls of the royal tombs.
The pattern of the recovered mosaics is geometric, strongly reminiscent of carpet ornaments. It consists of triangular, square and rectangular-linear elements. The space between these large parts and inside them between the individual small blocks is colored black or red. Despite the apparent simplicity of the figure, it turned out that a variety of very often complicated methods were used to obtain it.
According to Natalia Alekseevna Kovaleva, the composition of the ornament was made up of parts made separately using standard shapes. These square, triangular and linear elements could lie in pre-manufactured sets and, if necessary, were applied to the wooden substrate with the help of special mastics. There were a lot of disputes among restorers about the method of production of the mosaics. Of course, the simplest and most popular way is to apply a plaster composition onto the wooden plate and insert the prepared mosaic details into it, according to the available sketches.
But it is quite possible, Kovaleva believes, that the ancient masters did otherwise. According to her, for the creation of such individual elements, uniform, possibly wooden or ceramic frame shapes could be used - triangular, square, oblong, the depth of which corresponded to the thickness of the layer of lime-quartz base.
This form could be put over a sample pattern, made out of fabric, leather or parchment. The drawing, in turn, was covered with a transparent, slowly drying adhesive, for example honey or other astringent, readily soluble in water. This picture was first glued on thin yellowish mosaic plates, then - bright white "cubes", and then hot black mastic covering and leveling this area was applied.
That's why such an even black edge formed along some contour, especially well-preserved zigzag lines of white "cubes". After that, the whole form was filled with a common layer of a non-shrinkage mixture of lime and quartz, in some places - with the addition of gypsum. And only after the solution dries and the glue residue is removed from the face of item, the "blanks" on the front side are painted in red and black in accordance with the sketch.
Strength and hardness of the details of the mosaic decor, made in this way, could compete with stone. They could be mounted on a prepared wooden base with the help of glue made from some kind of natural resin.
Restorers modeled the most likely technology of mosaic making, and then from a variety of disparate parts tried to at least partially restore the old panels - both in ornament and plot.
The fragments found were overwhelming! The figures of winged dragons and lions, masks of tigers, snakes, fish, birds, argali, deer with branched horns, fragments of some relief images that are now impossible to identify, a series of almond-shaped eyes with round pupils and the only, but very expressive, female portrait.
We do not know what such compositions meant or why they were placed in tombs, but one thing is certain: these mosaics, as a mirror, reflect the spiritual world of people who lived almost four thousand years ago. It was so long ago, so beyond the capacity of collective memory, that, perhaps, it is almost impossible to imagine such a distant past human consciousness.
Inventing the calendar and chronology, people have learned only to count the past mathematically. But this is the same abstract knowledge as the calculated distance to distant planets and stars - we are sure that this is the case, however, no one is physically able to overcome such an unthinkable distance. One can approximately count how many generations have been changed on earth since the time when civilization flourished in the delta of the Murgab River. If one century on average accommodates the life of three generations, then 35 centuries that have passed since the middle of the second millennium BC, add up to over a hundred generations.
And what does modern man remember about his immediate ancestors? At best, the names of great-grandfathers. The further in time we go, the denser the fog of oblivion becomes.
And now, through this seemingly impenetrable gloom, when everything has long been forgotten - both the language and the name of the people who lived here, when the names of the abandoned cities have completely disappeared, - suddenly we get the fragments of messages from fellow countrymen who are older than us by three and a half thousand years! They walked in the same place where we now walk, saw the same silhouettes of mountains and, most importantly, did not differ in any way from us in their appearance and consciousness. In other words, they were the same people as us. And this leaves us a chance to understand the image of their thoughts and the logic of action.
Scientists are still only at the beginning of the path to comprehend the symbolic or narrative meaning of images on the Gonur panels, but the very uniqueness of these mosaics, the artistry of their creators, will attract those experts who know the myths and legends of the Ancient East. There is no doubt that on the way to their knowledge, more than one mystery of civilization, genetically related to the culture of modern Turkmen, but hidden for millennia under the sands of Karakum, will uncover its secret.
