of its grave goods. The earrings are associated with this tomb.
M4 lies in the south of the site less than a kilometer away from a site possibly identified as a settlement.36 Tomb drawings are missing, but it is described as a pit burial with a single supine female corpse with her head to the northeast. Gold objects were the most plentiful among the grave goods, but goods also included ornaments made of silver, bronze, jade, stone, and glass, among them necklaces of amber, agate, crystal, and lapis; dancers, tigers, and dragons fashioned from stone; bronze three-winged arrowheads; and bronze horses. The earrings themselves form part of a more elaborate head decoration placed on the head of the corpse (figure 1).37
FIGURE 1. A reconstruction of the headdress that includes the steppe earrings. After Tian and Guo (1986: pl. 4).
The earrings were made from two ovoid openwork carved jade plaques.38 The plaques are not mirror images of each other, but both show sinuous creatures, one with its head in profile and the other face on (figure 2).39 They are enclosed within a thin gold border decorated with granulation. A loop on the top attaches them to gold plaques, also with granulation around their borders and with inlaid stone moose. Sets of inlaid gold squares joined with fine chains hang to either side. Most of the inlays are lost, but those that have been found include mother-of-pearl, quartz, agate, amber, and glass.40
FIGURE 2. The designs on the jade plaques from which the steppe earrings were made. After A. Kessler (1993: 62, fig. 35).
The gold for the inlaid stones and the moose has been hammered into shape and decorated with beads of gold. Hammering is the simplest method of working gold and is found in both steppe and settled populations well before this time. Granulation—whereby beads of gold are joined onto a surface for decoration—is a more developed technique but is also found along the steppe and in the bordering settled cultures, such as those of the Greeks and the Chinese, well before this period.41 Zhixin Sun has suggested a possible route into China through maritime links with South Asia, based on gold decorative items with granulation found in the tomb of King Zhao Mo (r. 137–122 BC) of Nan Yue, a kingdom on the coast of what is now southern China and northern Vietnam.42 There is evidence of Nan Yue’s maritime links with South Asia—and further west (see chapter 2). However, granulation was used in ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and is also found on the steppe before this period, so there are many possible routes of diffusion.43
M2, like M4, contained gold and silver objects, including a belt plaque (see figure 3) and remains of a horse, a sheep, and a dog skull. The other second-century tombs at the site are not so richly endowed. Their grave goods consist of weapons, tools, and horse tack and decorations, along with animal bones. The presence of surface finds and agricultural implements might suggest a settlement and thus indicate a seminomadic society that also practiced agriculture. The richness of the grave goods in M2 and M4 indicates elite graves, while the lack of such riches in other graves suggests sharp social differentiation.44 As Di Cosmo notes, “The complexity of this later nomadic society is nowhere more visible than at [this] site.”45 The form, materials, and motifs on these earrings and other tomb objects are part of this complexity.
FIGURE 3. The design on the belt plaque from grave M2.
MIRRORS AND BELT PLAQUES: TRADE AND EXCHANGE
The state of scholarship in the field of interactions between and identities of the cultures of the steppe and China is well illustrated by a brief consideration of two types of object found in tombs across the ecological divide—the mirror and the belt plaque. The former has long been associated with the Chinese and the latter with the steppe, but this has recently been challenged, and more complex models have been proposed.
Mirrors were long assumed by most to have arisen independently in the central China Shang (Yin) culture. This assumption has been subjected to careful research, and many scholars now argue that the mirror came to China from Central Asia.46 In this revised scenario, Li Zhang (Jaang) has proposed two early and consecutive routes of influence between the steppe and central China.47 The first had its intermediary in the Qijia culture (ca. 2200–1700 BC) of the Hexi corridor in present-day Northwest China—an important section on the later “Silk Road.” Mirrors arrived here from the Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in northern Central Asia, going north to the Altai and then south along the Ejin River or Etsingol to its source in the Qilian Mountains, which form the southern border of the Hexi corridor. From here the fashion and technology were transferred to the Erlitou culture (ca. 1900–1500 BC), which thrived around present-day Luoyang, just south of the Yellow River in central China.
A new route of influence emerged around the middle or end of the Erlitou culture, which, Li argues, was to supplant the Ejin River route and is called the Northern Zone. This comprised the Ordos region and surrounding areas to the east and south. It was separated from the Ejin River route by a mountain range, the Helan, and Li Zhang further argues that connections between central China and the Hexi corridor, home of the cultures that later gave rise to the Zhou (1046–256 BC), were not very active at this time.48 She sees interaction with central China from across the length of the steppe through the Northern Zone. This interaction is shown by objects that appeared in tombs in this area but also by objects found in central China—namely the bronzes of the Shang. Shang burials, meanwhile, also held objects from the steppe. Mirrors, however, disappeared from central China, only reappearing—but in a different style and again probably introduced from the steppe—in the eleventh century in the Zhou culture that was to succeed the Shang. So we see, not a single transmission, or one route, but changing spheres of influence and diffusion. If we accept this, we also see clear cultural importation from the steppe into central China.
The belt plaque found in tomb M2 is a typical accouterment found in graves across the steppe from the Black Sea to the Ordos and the subject of much continuing scholarly debate (figure 3). The belt made of plaques was particular to no one people of the steppe and, as well as being a practical item of clothing, was widely used as an indicator of social status and much more besides.49 The plaque in M2 is gold and shows a design of a beast of prey attacking another animal, in this case a tiger attacking a wild boar. This theme of animal predation is found in the Scythic-Siberian culture, which spread across the steppe and thrived into the first millennium AD.50 It is usually wrought in gold belt plaques, sword scabbards, buckles, and other portable objects.51 But animal predation is not a theme unique to the steppe. It appears in Egypt in the late fourth millennium BC and then in West Asia a millennium later; the lid of a silver cosmetic box from the Royal Cemetery at Ur (ca. 2650–2550 BC) (present-day southern Iraq) shows a lion savaging a ram.52 From the first millennium BC it is depicted by the empires bordering the steppe in a variety of settings and media: for example, shown in the ninth century BC on an obelisk at the Assyrian city of Nimrud; in gold and silver among the Ziwiye treasure from around 700 BC, on the border of present-day Iran and Iraq; in stone reliefs at the Achaemenid capital of Persepolis from the sixth century BC; and in the fourth century BC on a mosaic at the House of Dionysus, in Pella, Greece, painted in Macedonian tombs, and carved on an Etruscan sarcophagus.53 To see a simple line of transmission is all too tempting. As Ada Cohen notes in her discussion of this theme in the art of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC), “There is an unavoidable impulse to postulate intercultural influence in order to explain its presence in the Greek world.”54 But as Cohen also notes, writers from the time of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) have noticed the universality of the
