Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. These pastoral societies are mostly known to us through the distant echoes on the pages of Classical Greek and Chinese historiographies which mostly paint the nomad as the “Barbaric Other” living in the shadows of sedentary empires. In reality, early Eurasian nomads were capable and independent makers, designers and inventors. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to manufacture the collective memory of reluctant and diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than kinship. Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol, a copying mechanism and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances. The author also argues that animal style was later adopted by sedentary empires to showcase their worldliness and control over the "nomadic Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, Andreeva raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon. She also offers a new perspective on the role of human-animal interactions in the history of art.