Sun, Moon and Stars on Kievan Rus Jewellery (10th - 13th Centuries)

The principalities of Kievan Rus, a state formed by the area that covered the Western Bug to the Volga between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, legated numerous earrings and medals shaped as a sun, a star, or a moon crescent, probably a reminiscence of Slavic paganism. Unfortunately this abundant material has not been satisfactorily analysed in studies of the Rus cosmological worldview, even though the information provided by these jewels is essential to complement the documents alluding to the heavens. Indeed, the Slavonic translations of Byzantine patristic texts with cosmological contents, or descriptions of astronomical phenomena in chronicles, deal only with a more restricted – literate – audience in Rus. Furthermore, on the basis of such written sources, one would easily conclude that the Rus showed but very little interest in the stars: it did not produce any original speculation on the heavens, and most of its material was copied or imitated from Byzantine models. The study of jewels indicates that, on the contrary, the sky and its celestial bodies fascinated a broad range of the Rus population. Despite the limited interpretations one can offer to these sources, which do not provide a coherent picture of the cosmos, the frequent solar, lunar and stellar motifs on jewellery reveals a representation of heavens specific to the Kievan period. Indeed, they appeared in the region in the late eighth and early nineth centuries and disappeared almost completely in the thirteenth century, after the Mongol invasions. My presentation focuses on two aspects of this material: the origin of these jewels and their role in Rus society. In fact, if these motifs seem to be typical of the Rus, comparable designs were found also in Byzantium and among Finno-Ugric tribes. It is thus essential to determine in what measure these neighbouring states and tribes influenced Rus crafts. More puzzling is the sudden end to their production in the thirteenth century, which could be explained by political and economic factors, or its coincidence with a stronger implantation of the Christian faith in the Rus. This, as such, would reveal radical changes in the consideration of heavens at that period.