Odp: Tolos & Kurgan

From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Message: 1746
Date: 2000-03-02

----- Original Message -----
From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 9:17 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Tolos & Kurgan
-----------------------------


Tue, 29 Feb 2000 16:12:32 from "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...>
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

Hello Piotr,
Thank you for providing me with the correct spelling for "tholos". I
will immediately make the change in the manuscript.

QUESTION: what is a living tholos? Did folks use the same structure for
both burial and house? I am also recalling one of the excavations in
the Altai where a "house-like" structure was unearthed. The report was
entitled Scythian Tombs at Ak-Alaka and Kuturguntas and it was a
translation I did with Raisa Tarasova of an excavation report written by
Polosmak. The tombs were carefully constructed with interlocking
timbers and contained human burials, grave goods, and remains of
horses.

You are correct when you state that there were no living kurgans, and
no, Alekseev never made that claim. Thanks for your etymology of the
word *mogyla* or earth mound. The term is used today in skiing parlance
for a "snow mound" or bump.

Gerry
--

Gerald Reinhart
Independent Scholar
(650) 321-7378
waluk@...
http://www.alekseevmanuscript.com