Ceremonial pectorals from the Tuvan Valley of the kings

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The article examines in detail two pectorals from elite burials in Tuva, namely from grave 5 in Arzhan-2 and grave 9 in Chinge-Tey I burial mounds. The images on these ceremonial objects and their morphological features were compared. The general patterns of the ornament and, to some extent, the iconography of the animal figures are extremely similar on both subjects. However, a detailed examination of the pectoral from Chinge-Tey I reveals quite a lot of differences from the Arzhan one. On both pectorals, the animals are located along the spiral-vortex pattern, but oriented in opposite directions. Despite the general similarity of the decor, probably due to the semantics of this item in culture, the animals on the pectorals were executed in a different manner. While on Chinge-Tey I pectoral the loops for passing beads were soldered along the edges of the plate, the loops on the Arzhan pectoral were located on its inner surface and only along the outer edge, but later they were cut off. The comparison reveals that these products certainly had the same semantic loading in the culture of the Central Asia nomads. Other finds in grave 9 of Chinge-Tey I suggest that a male was buried with his trophies obtained in a long-distance military campaign. Accordingly, the ceremonial pectoral may well be brought from afar. Thus, soldered loops with chains at the ends are associated with the Urartu products and are not typical for the nomad ones. It is possible that the mythologeme embedded in these items (perhaps reinterpreted by nomads) should be sought in the areas of agricultural civilizations of the Middle East, but the pectorals themselves, judging by the stable ornamental patterns, were made by craftsmen associated with closer regions, perhaps with Xinjiang. Such assumptions were made earlier in relation to the pectoral from Arzhan-2, but the discovery of another similar attribute in the grave of the Chinge-Tey I burial mound makes the hypothesis of distant western connections of the nomads of Central Asia even more plausible.