The leading ornamental motif koshkar muyiz in Kazakh ornamentation: in search of the primordial

Abstract

The ornamental motif of Koshkar Muyiz – the legacy of the Ancient times – remains key in the traditional art of felt craft. The horn-shaped figures of the Kazakhs had been a centerpiece of scholarly discourses of Kazakh, Russian and Soviet science over the entire 20th century. The first attempts to find their meaning were made by the German ethnologist R. Karutz (1911), the Russian researchers S. Dudin (1928), B. Kuftin (1926), E. Schneider (1927), and others. The horn-shaped motif had been reviewed in the works of archaeologists, art historians and ethnographers since the second half of the 20th century. Scientists determined the time of its origin, its geography, and attempted to translate its semantic content. It was found that the curvilinear motif had not appeared earlier than the New Stone Age, but in the Bronze Age, it had developed in the form of various styled designs. This motif obviously played a key role in the ornamental complex of the Turkic-Mongol peoples.Based on the interdisciplinary approach, the author offers a number of reasons to explain its viability, including the internal form of the word - name of the ornamental motif, which is epic in nature since it can cause a special aesthetic reaction in viewers. The ornamental motif seems to play the role of a “figure of memories” and have the status of a “substantiative past”. It is preserved as a linguistic objectification (name) in an extra-linguistic format as well, in the form of an Iconic Model of a transcultural anagram that reproduces the ancient ideological content with symbolic and magical scope. Acting as a canon, the Koshkar Muyiz motif is a sort of a “Signature of the Era” with its artistic charm and is constructively based on the line called the “Line of Beauty” by William Hogarth