Ordos culture

The Ordos people were located at the doorstep of Qin China, and were just east of the Yuezhi in the 3rd century BCE.

Bronze statuette of a man, Ordos, 3-1st century BCE. British Museum. Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen notes that the statuette displays clear Europoid features.^[1]

The Ordos culture was a culture occupying a region centered on the Ordos Loop (modern Inner Mongolia, China) during the Bronze and early Iron Age from the 6th to 2nd centuries BCE. The Ordos culture is known for significant finds of Scythian art and is thought to represent the easternmost extension of Indo-European Eurasian nomads, such as the Scythians.^[2] Under the Qin and Han dynasties, from the 6th to 2nd centuries BCE, the area came under at least nominal control of contemporaneous Chinese states.

Background

Equestrian nomads occupied the area previously settled by the Zhukaigou culture from the 6th to the 2nd century BCE before being driven away by the Xiongnu. The Ordos Plateau was covered by grass, bushes, and trees and was sufficiently watered by numerous rivers and streams to produce rich grazing lands.^[3] At the time, it contained the best pasture lands on the Asian Steppe at this time.^[4] However, it has now mostly turned to the Ordos Desert through a combination of overgrazing and climatic change, with modern interventions by the government of China being especially harmful.

Characteristics

The Ordos are mainly known from their skeletal remains and artifacts. The Ordos culture of about 500 BCE to 100 CE is known for its "Ordos bronzes", blade weapons, finials for tent-poles, horse gear, and small plaques and fittings for clothes and horse harness, using animal style decoration with relationships both with the Scythian art of regions much further west, and also Chinese art. Its relationship with the Xiongnu is controversial; for some scholars they are the same and for others different.^[5] Many buried metal artefacts have emerged on the surface of the land as a result of the progressive desertification of the region.^[6]

According to Iaroslav Lebedynsky, they are thought to be the easternmost people of Scythian affinity to have settled here, just to the east of the better-known Yuezhi.^[7] Because the people represented in archaeological finds tend to display Europoid features, also earlier noted by Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen,^[1] Lededynsky suggests the Ordos culture had "a Scythian affinity".^[8] Other scholars have associated it with the Yuezhi.^[3] The weapons found in tombs throughout the steppes of the Ordos are very close to those of the Scythians, who known on the Asian Steppes as the Saka.^[9]

Contact with neighbouring peoples

While the ethnolinguistic origins and character of the Ordos culture are unknown, the population appears to have been significantly influenced by Indo-European cultures. However, the art of the Ordos culture appears to have influenced that of the Donghu people (Chinese: 東胡), a Mongolic-speaking nomadic tribe located to the east, suggesting that the two had close ties.^[10] (The Donghu may also have been connected to a people known as the Di (Chinese: 氐) in Chinese annals.)

The Ordos population was also in contact – and reportedly often at war – with the pre-Han and Han peoples. The Ordos culture covered, geographically, regions later occupied by the Han, including areas just north of the later Great Wall of China and straddling the northernmost hook of the Yellow River.

To the west of the Ordos culture was another Indo-European people, the Yuezhi, although nothing is known of relations between the two. (The Yuezhi were later vanquished by the Xiongnu and Wusun, who reportedly drove them westward, out of China; a subgroup of the Yuezhi is widely believed to have migrated to South Central Asia, where it constituted the ruling elite of the Kushan Empire.)

Appearance of the Xiongnu

Horse attacked by tiger, Ordos, 4th-1st century BCE

In Chinese accounts, the Xiongnu first appear at Ordos in the Yi Zhou Shu and Classic of Mountains and Seas during the Warring States period before it was occupied by the states of Qin and Zhao. It is generally thought to be their homeland; however, when exactly they came to occupy the region is unclear and archaeological finds suggest it might have been much earlier than traditionally thought.^[11]

As the Xiongnu expanded southward into Yuezhi territory around 160 BCE under Modun, the Yuezhi in turn defeated the Sakas and pushed them away at Issyk Kul. It is thought the Xiongnu also occupied the Ordos area during the same period, when they came in direct contact with the Chinese. From there, the Xiongnu conducted numerous devastating raids into Chinese territory (167, 158, 142, 129 BCE).^[12]

The Han–Xiongnu War began with Emperor Wu of Han, and the Han colonized the area of the Ordos as the commandery of Shuofang in 127 BCE. Prior to this campaign, there were already earlier commanderies established by Qin and Zhao before they were overrun by the Xiongnu in 209 BCE.^[13]

Artifacts

Ordos bronzes from the British Museum (Asian Gallery):

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  Bronze pole top, Ordos, 6th-5thCentury BCE.

• 

  Silver horse, Ordos, 4th-1st century BCE.

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  Belt buckle, Ordos, 3rd-1st century BCE.

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  Ordos bronze horses, 5th-3rd century BCE.

References

Citations

1. Maenchen-Helfen 1973, pp. 369–375
2. Lebedynsky 2007, p. 131
3. Hanks & Linduff 2009, p. 284-286
4. Beckwith 2009, p. 71
5. Compare this and this account, both from the 1970s. Bunker, 200, sees them as the same, or rather the Ordos people as a subgroup of the Xiongnu.
6. Bunker, 200
7. Lebedynsky 2007, p. 125 "The Mongoloid types of the Transbaikal area and Central and Eastern Mongolia are strongly contrasted with the Europoid type displayed at the same time by the Scythian nomads occupying Western Mongolia and their predecessors of the Bronze age."
8. Lebedynsky 2007, p. 125 "Europoid faces in some depictions of the Ordos, which should be attributed to a Scythian affinity"
9. Lebedynsky 2007, p. 127
10. Lebedynsky, p.124
11. Ma 2005, p. 220-225
12. Lebedymsky p131
13. Ma 2005, p. 224

Sources

• Beckwith, Christopher I. (16 March 2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press. ISBN 1400829941. Retrieved February 18, 2015.
• Bunker, Emma C. (2002). Nomadic art of the eastern Eurasian steppes: the Eugene V. Thaw and other New York collections (fully available online). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9780300096880.
• Hanks, Brian K.; Linduff, Katheryn M. (August 30, 2009). Social Complexity in Prehistoric Eurasia: Monuments, Metals and Mobility. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521517125. Retrieved March 13, 2015.
• Lebedynsky, Yaroslav (2007). Les nomades. Éditions Errance. ISBN 9782877723466.
• Maenschen-Helfen, Otto (1973). The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. University of California Press. ISBN 0520015967. Retrieved February 18, 2015.
• Ma, Liqing (2005). The Original Xiongnu, An Archaeological Exploration of the Xiongnu's History and Culture. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia University Press. ISBN 7-81074-796-7.