Знатный кангюец на охоте
A Noble Kangju Citizen Hunting

Summary/Abstract: The publication is devoted to the discovery, historical, cultural and artistic interpretation of unique artifacts of the art of carving on the horn dated by the time of the state of Kangju I in the 1st century BC — 2nd century AD from South Kazakhstan. For the first time in the archeology of Kazakhstan, in the catacomb burial of the Kylyshzhar burial ground, two median horn overlays were found on the handle of the “M”-shaped reflexive bow with subjects of social and semantic-ritual content, made by highly artistic carving (engraving) on the horn. One of them reflects the hunting scene of a noble Kangju man. It depicts a rider-nomad of oriental appearance in the pose of a low-seated jockey on a horse-mare, who shoots from a bow, hunting argali driven by a long pursuit. The shooter has the regalia of power, is armed with a bow and its auxiliary attributes (reserve bow, solidly lit quiver with a set of combat arrows). Another plot shows a group of argali hunted by a ‘bear-lion’, a mythical polymorphic creature: the animals tend to elude this ‘beast’, which grabbed one individual in a throw and is ready to devour it. Both compositions are united by hunting into a single sacred action, in which a person (a horse rider with high authority in the society of nomads with a status close to a deity) and a mythical ‘bear-lion’ (also a deity) participate — as characters endowed with special social and religious functions — in the hunt for argali, the animals that embody the global deity farn (hvarnah) among the Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia and South Kazakhstan. The archaeological finds that accompany the these plates, as well as the chrono-indicators presented by similar historical and cultural content of the plots, the technique of making artifacts from horn, bone, allow us to determine the chronology of products within the 1st century BC — 2nd century AD.

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