Odp: Tolos & Kurgan

----- Original Message -----

From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 9:17 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Tolos & Kurgan

For Piotr and Mark,

(If I've posted portions of this to you before, please disregard)

Taken from Lecture 7 of The Alekseev Manuscript:
"In the Caucasus in the pre Neolithic, both caves and stone houses are
used as primitive dwellings.  In the Neolithic, there are houses made of
clay bricks.  These are approximately eight feet in height and called
"tolos".  The tolos is also used as a grave.  As graves, each contain
5-20 bodies.  The "living tolos" (house) is distributed in Iran and in
Turkmenistan and other mountain areas of Central Asia.  They are never
found on the Arabian Peninsula.

In the northern areas of Russia, people are buried in soil fifty
centimeters deep.  In some cases stone markers indicate graves, in other
cases there are no visible markers. In the Tripolie Culture, cemeteries
are located not far from the village i.e. between the village and the
fields.  Graves are marked by stones.  In the Neolithic Period because
of a population increase, single graves are an exception.  Graves range
from 30/40 burials to several hundred.  In the Early neolithic, graves
do not exceed 30-40; there are only two cases where graves contained
more.  The Tripolie settlements are replicated as cemeteries.  In
distinguishing a living tolos from a cemetery tolos, the living tolos
has a larger area and in cemeteries there are no skeletal remains
between toloses.  

Geoksyr is located on the border of Iran and Turkmenistan in a desert
area.  The vegetation is sparse and the only rich time is in spring.  At
Geoksyr there is a hill with a surface height of 11-12 meters and
several tolos with the diameter of 4-5 meters.  There are single
skeletons buried between the toloses.  Thus Geoksyr is a settlement and
not a cemetery.

In southern Siberia, nothing definite is known regarding housing but
much is known pertaining to cemeteries.  There are no local differences
in cemeteries.  The graves are simple, in soil, and very seldom are
marked.  Southern Siberia differs from the north area and shows a
similarity to Mongolia and southern China.  There is much jade which is
used both for art and for small implements such as arrows.  Southern
Siberia is similar to the north in economic development; however, the
only evidence comes from cemeteries.  Little is known about the social
forms of life of the Neolithic people.  Some scholars claim a
matrilineal social form based on the presence of female figurines and
from ethnographic data.  Others claim a patrilineal social form because
husbandry and agriculture require lots of labor; labor by men.  As per
Alexeev: "the New Archaeologist Lewis Binford should believe not only in
fact; he should consider the subtleties about fact".  

[taken from Lecture 8 of the Alekseev Manuscript]
The Pit Grave Culture is located in the southern Russian Steppe area
(Ukraine) and replaces the Tripolie Culture in the mid third millennium
BC.  Its roots are in the Neolithic and continue to the beginning of the
second millennium BC.  We have no knowledge of housing or settlement
patterns, only graves have been found.  There graves reveal a new
tradition burial, the burial mound.

These mounds or kurgans (a Turkic word) are made of stone in mountainous
areas and made of soil in flat areas.  Today kurgans are found both
singly and in groups.  The height of kurgans vary.  In southern Russia
and southern Siberia, these kurgans are never more than 10 meters high,
usually averaging 2-4 meters.  A circle of kurgans may be as great as
one hectare.  In the middle of a kurgan are usually one or two burials
but the number can be as great as fifteen to twenty.  Different objects
and tools are found in the graves.  Bronze is known but is very rare. 
Scholars think this is the beginning of bronze usage.  Also present in
kurgans are bones of domestic pig and horse (no sheep).  Some scholars
think the Pit Grave Culture did not know agriculture.  There is also the
absence of permanent sites; scholars are not sure about settlements, the
size and types of houses etc.

Geographically kurgans have been found from Romania to the Steppe areas
of southern Russia to the Volga with some findings in Kirghizistan.  Now
more than 2,000 kurgans have been excavated many of which contain only
pottery.

Dear Gerry,

 

Here are a couple of supplementary remarks on "tholos" (I'm sure what Alekseev means is a word spelt with th in English) and "kurgan".

 

Tholoses (or rather tholoi -- it's a Greek word) are quite different from kurgans in that they are not earthmounds but circular buildings with domelike roofs. Presumably a tholos could be converted into a kurgan by piling a few meters of soil on top of it, but even if the construction should survive such an experiment, it would no longer be usable as a living-tholos. It could also be overgrown with moss or turf, sink into soil etc. as centuries went by, as I assume the surviving mud-brick huts must have done. The tholoi described by Alekseev are built of brick, but in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece we have large vaulted tholoi built of dry stone, the so-called beehive graves (like the famous Treasury of Atreus or Klytemnestra's Grave, excavated by Schliemann). The name tholos is also applied to some round temples in Greece (such as the Tholos at Epidaurus). Those on the list who know more about archaeology and/or architecture can perhaps provide more examples of tholoi. Perhaps somebody can suggest a connection between the Cretan (Minoan) Greek tholoi and those in the Caucasus and Asia.

 

As opposed to living-tholoi there were no living-kurgans anywhere (and as far as I can see Alekseev makes no such claim, if you read him carefully), just as there were no living-pyramids in Egypt. Turkic qurgan means 'garden', if I remember correctly (perhaps suggested by the lush growth of vegetation on steppe kurgans); the word was borrowed as kurhan into Ukrainian (and from there into Polish) and kurgan into Russian, partly replacing the older Slavic word *mogyla 'kurgan' in those languages or rather making it shift semantically to 'grave, pile of earth covering a dead body'. As a common noun "kurgan" simply means 'burial mound' and is applied to all sorts of round barrows in the Pontic steppe (as well as elsewhere), not only those of the Pit Grave culture but (perhaps most famously) to the much later graves of the Scythian elite.

 

Finally, as for mogyla, it has a well-known but somewhat speculative Iranian etymology (< *magu-ula- "hill of the magi").

 

Piotr