The Sculpture of Goddess Durga from the Gold Mines of the South Urals: Issues of Attribution and Provenance

Abstract

This article considers issues of attribution and provenance of a sculpture of the Hindu goddess Durga found in one of the Ural gold-bearing mines in around 1850 near the city Troitsk, Orenburg Province. This fact was recorded in Zapiski Ural’skogo Obshchestva Lyubitelei Estestvoznaniya , the most famous 19 th century Ural scientific journal. In the journal, the artifact was identified as “a Buddhist idol” and described in detail by O. E. Kler, chairman of the Ural Society of Natural Sciences Amateurs. Additionally, the journal published a photograph of the sculpture and preliminary analysis of the composition of metal of the sculpture was carried out. In 1876, the sculpture was exhibited in St Petersburg during a congress of orientalists. Presently, the whereabouts of the sculpture are unknown. Except for providing a more detailed iconography, the article contains arguments about the time and place of its creation (the Himalaya region of India, 11 th –14 th centuries) and the main versions regarding how the sculpture came to the Urals. The author provides arguments supporting the idea that the sculpture arrived in Russia fairly early in history through the trade routes of the Caspian Sea and along the Volga, Kama, and Ural Rivers used for the transportation of oriental goods. In this way, the author considers issues of cross-cultural connections and exchange of artistic ideas between countries having no common borders in the vast territory of Eurasia in the times of antiquity and the Middle Ages, providing a number of examples of the “remarkable discovery” of oriental artefacts very far in the north of Eurasia. For the time being, a detailed study of the Durga sculpture found not far from the town of Troitsk, Orenburg Province in the 19 th century is impossible, but it is important that this material be actualised as it may help find it in Russian or foreign collections in the future.