the possibility of a different form of casting for the belt plaques and pointing out that the Chinese characters were added after casting.
62. On discussion of the M2 plaque and this technique, see Bunker, Watt, and Sun (2002: 20, 27–28 and figs. 42, 43) and Bunker (1988).
63. Linduff (2009: 94).
64. Bunker (1988: 29) notes that there is no evidence that the Xiongnu knew the technique of mercury gilding (also referred to as fire or chemical gilding) but that it was developed in China in the fourth century BC by alchemists seeking to make gold. It was also found to be used in Greece around the same time.
65. Proposed by Bunker (1983), and discussed further by Linduff (2009), in relation to ceramic molds for belt plaques found in tombs in Xian.
66. Of course, it is possible that the people in central China with a taste for these had steppe ancestry and that some peoples in southern China developed a taste for this “foreign” style. It can be argued that Chinese is as much a term denoting a political alliance as is Xiongnu and that it incorporates as much, if not more, diversity.
67. Di Cosmo (2002: 85). See also Di Cosmo (2013).
68. Di Cosmo (2013: 43).
69. See chapter 8 for reference to the Chinese silk.
70. Erdenebaatar et al. (2011: 311–13).
71. Possible reasons for this development are discussed in Di Cosmo (2013: 44–45). Brosseder (2011: 247–80) suggests that the cause is the split of the Northern and Southern Xiongnu in AD 49.
72. Nephrite is a dense form of actinolite or, sometimes, tremolite. The other jade mineral, jadeite, was later sourced from Southwest China and present-day Myanmar.
73. Glass was also used, possibly to emulate jade—see the belt plaques of the king of Nan Yue, chapter 2.
74. The bi is also sometimes made of glass (see chapter 2).
75. Rawson (1992: 61) points out the paucity of ritual jades listed in classical texts and found in burials, suggesting that it might not have been considered appropriate to bury them. She notes the presence in tombs of jade pendant sets, belt ornaments, and body shrouds in addition to the ritual objects.
76. It is 6 (nephrite) or 6.5 (jadeite) on the Moh scale.
77. See Wang Binghua (1993: 167).
78. The use of food terminology perhaps also reflects the importance of cuisine in the culture.
79. Bunker, Watt, and Sun (2002: 134, cat. 106).
80. Ward (2008: 304).
81. Bunker, Watt, and Sun (2002: 134, cat. 106).
82. Bunker, Watt, and Sun (2002: 133).
83. Kuehn (2011: 4).
84. Illustrated in Borovka (1928: 72C) and with a line drawing in Yetts (1926: 181).
85. Bunker, Watt, and Sun (2002: 135). She describes a similar motif used on a different piece as a “coiled feline” (25, fig. 24). Such pieces could as validly be described as representing “tigers with a dragon-like body.” We do not know how, if at all, they were labeled in their time.
86. Wang Binghua (1993: 167).
87. Jing Zhichun et al. (1997: 376–81).
88. For a Han burial suit from Nan Yue in southern China, see J. Lin (2012).
89. It has been suggested that one of the primary functions of defensive walls—from Rome to China—was to defend roads. This was the view taken by Aurel Stein (1921: 18) when he surveyed the Chinese Han walls at Dunhuang, a point noted by Psarras (2003: 63).
90. Linduff (2008: 194).
91. Sergey Miniaev (2015) argues that the steppe accouterments belonged to her attendants.
92. Rubinson (2008: 53), quoting McHugh (1999: 14).
93. She identifies some objects, such as glass in one of the graves, as “represent[ing] the exotic and the rare” and thus as reflecting the elite status of the individual (Rubinson 2008: 57).
94. A. Kessler (1993: 62). Genghis Khan: Treasures from Inner Mongolia, exhibited at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (March 6–August 14, 1994). I have not been able to find any prior exhibition history.
95. The exhibition then traveled to the American Museum of Natural History, New York (September 10–November 27, 1994), the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville (December 17, 1994–March 5, 1995), the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria (March 25–September 10, 1995), and the Royal Alberta Museum (March 22–July 6, 1997). See A. Kessler (1993).
96. See Jacobson (1995) for a summary of the interest in and scholarship on Scythian art (20–26).
97. Bunker, Chatwin, and Farkas (1970); Piotrovsky (1973–74); P. Harper et al. (1975).
98. Reeder and Jacobson (1999); Aruz et al. (2000).
99. Some of these items had been excavated in lands, such as Ukraine, that were by now independent, and this did not go without notice. An article in the Ukrainian Weekly, for example, criticized the MMA show as being driven by politics rather than scholarship: “It seems that the only purpose of the Russian-inspired show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was to take the shine off the Ukrainian exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It is a sad example of an august museum fawning to the interests of a fading political star” (Fedorko 2000). The tension continues: in late 2016 a Dutch court ruled on objects still being held in Amsterdam following the takeover of Crimea by Russia during the course of a 2014 exhibition, Crimea: Gold and Secrets from the Black Sea, organized with Ukraine. The court held that the objects belonged to Ukraine and not to the loaning museums in Crimea (Allard Pierson Museum, “The Crimea Exhibition,” press release, August 20, 2014, www.allardpiersonmuseum.nl/en/press/press.html).
100. The Arthur M. Sackler Collection and the Eugene V. Thaw Collection respectively: the latter was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum (Bunker 1997; Bunker, Watt, and Sun 2002).
101. The Beijing World Art Museum had an exhibition, Huns and the Central Plains: Collision and Mergence of the Two Civilizations, in 2010. An exhibition in Korea, Xiongnu, the Great Empire of the Steppes (National Museum of Korea, 2013), concentrated on recent archaeological finds from one site in Mongolia. A small exhibition The Huns was organized as part of the 2005 Europalia festival in Belgium, showcasing finds from Russian collections (Nikolaev 2005).
102. Gledhill and Donner (2017: 120). As the authors also show, this has been accompanied by an enormous growth in museums, including private ones: from 14 in 1949 to 1,215 in 2005 to 4,510 in 2015 (119).
103. Routes across the steppe had been included as part of the 1988 UNESCO project “Integral Study of the Silk Roads: Roads of Dialogue,” probably in part as a result of the 1957 report of the Japanese National Commission to UNESCO ( Japanese National Commission 1957; Whitfield 2018b).
104. Whitfield (2009: 57, cat. 27).
