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The "bird-woman", the "birthing woman" and the "woman of the animals" : a consideration of the female image in petroglyphs of Ancient Central Asia

[article]

Année 1997 52 pp. 37-59
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Page 37

Esther Jacobson

Uni\ersity of Oregon

Department of Art History

School of Architecture and Allied Arts

Eugene, OR 97403, USA

The 'bird woman,'

the 'birthing woman,'

and the 'woman of the animals':

a consideration of the female image

in petroglyphs

of ancient Central Asia

A full-bodied female figure-a quintessential Venus-has become, in our century, a distinctive sign of European and Siberian Paleolithic art. Frontal, with enlarged breasts, pubic region, and thighs, and with small, inarticulate head and arms, she has been understood as a fundamental sign of an archaic belief system centered around concerns with clan origins, fertility, death, and renewal.1 Beginning several decades ago and accelerating in recent years, there has emerged a virtual industry in the study of the Paleolithic woman's descendants.2 For the most part, these studies have drawn on traditions supported by written texts from the ancient Near East and Egypt, from the European pre-Christian world, and from India. By contrast, the artistic traditions of Siberia and northern Central Asia,3 unsupported by contemporaneously recorded texts, present a blank wall for one who would try to understand the evolution of the female image through the Neolithic period, the Bronze Age, and into the early Iron Age. It is true, of course, that little relevant material in three-dimensional sculptural form survives from those periods and that vast region.4 Our primary representational sculptural traditions from the two thousand years of the late pre-Bronze, Bronze, and early Iron Ages are petroglyphs; that is, images carved on stone. Rendered on thousands of surfaces comprising hundreds of thousands of representations, these images would appear to offer an extraordinary archive for one who would trace the transformation of the Siberian image of the woman since the Paleolithic period. But where one would expect a wealth of material one finds only silence: to judge from the many studies of Siberian and northern Central Asian petroglyphs, the image of the woman essentially disappeared after the Paleolithic period, her place taken by hunters and warriors, by herdsmen, and by horned or masked images so often referred to as 'shamans.' Lonely exceptions are the occasional representations of women said to be in the act of childbirth ('birthing women') or women as part of what is euphemistically referred to as an 'erotic pair.'

Perhaps relevant imagery has simply disappeared, the inadvertant victim of time and the seasons. But there also remains the possibility that the images of women have been

considered too lacking in interest to be recorded by researchers working in the field. The clumsy frontal figures, many with legs drawn up as if in childbirth, others characterized by a graceless and static frontality, may have simply been set aside in the process of copying thousands of images in various states of disintegration.5 Their ungainly forms appear to resist the attribution of artistic value and to thwart a rigorous dating by style.

In the following pages, I will use petroglyphic imagery from the Altay Mountains of Central Asia6 to argue that the image of several significant and probably related female types emerged well before the period referred to as Bronze Age: that is, earlier than representations of social organization and pastora- lism. These types continued into a much later date, across the second and well into the first millennia b.c.k. Their character and quality indicate the persistence of a significant female element within the native belief systems of cultures spanning approximately 2000-3000 years. On the basis, also, of materials gathered in recent field seasons and hitherto unpublished,7 I will propose that the female image was actually far more significant a part of Bronze and early Iron Age art than published studies to date would lead us to believe. It is possible to propose that 'she' was associated with ideas and signs of regeneration, such as birds, feathers, and birth; and with wild deer and cattle and with the success of the hunt. I will argue that these female figures may be dated provisionally by a consideration of the images which surround or overlay them; they, in turn, radically amplify our understanding of contemporary cultural impulses. I will also propose that the relative paucity of female imagery in existing documentation may have less to say about actuality and more about perception: it may indicate a lack of attention by those who have undertaken the study of Central Asian and South Siberian petroglyphs and a lack of interest in what frequently appears to be primitive rather than heroic, a static sign rather than a vital figure.

The petroglyphic site of Kalbak Tash I is relatively small but it includes some of the oldest and most interesting carved images to be found in the Altay Republic.8 Among these the most striking are representations of large, frontal women.9

Arts Asiatiques, tome 52-1997

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