The Deer in Iron Age Art in Central Asia: The Common Trends in Perception of Images

Abstract

In the early Iron Age in the steppes of Kazakhstan and adjacent territories an “animal style” was widely spread, where one of the popular images became “deer.” Honoring deer goes back to the ancient layers of human culture of northern regions of Europe and Asia. Many people's worshiped deer differently; in some cultures it was a sacred animal, in the others it was as a valuable hunting booty. The earliest worships of deer in Eurasia can be seen from archaeological sources, where deer horns have been found during excavations of burials of the Stone Age. They lay on the heads of the dead. On this occasion, many experts believe that according to the ancient people deer was closely related with the world beyond the grave, his role was as a carrier of souls. The cult of the deer remained from Paleolithic times; they were painted in the caves and later engraved on the rocks. Of course, with the emergence of new religious views among different peoples symbolic image of the animal sometimes extinguished, sometimes it expanded and even acquired a new meaning. For some tribes and people, the deer became a totem animal, especially during the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. Honoring deer remained in many nations. For example, Kazakhs and other Turkic-speaking peoples to the present day revered it as a sacred animal. The spiritual and the material culture of these people evidence this, where an image of noble deer was immortalized in different genres.