During my recent travel to Siberia I was able to visit many sites of prehistoric cultures.
Aitmatov, Chinghiz "Jamila" (Russian: Джамиля - Jamilia) - 1958 This is a very interesting story by a writer from a country we don't know that well, he is from Kyrgyzstan but writes in Russian, as far as I know. I read the translation ;-) The novel describes village life in Central Asia and the disappearance of Central Asian cultural traditions in the USSR. The main character is a painter who had painted a picture at the time that his sister-in-law, Jamila, and Daniyar, a village outsider, had fallen in love and left the village. He remembers and describes the summer of 1943, when he lost both his friends. This is one of the best love stories I ever read. It's not a very long one and I read it quite a while ago, yet, I still recall the feeling the story invokes. Great novel! From the back cover: "Jamilia's husband is off fighting at the front. She spends her days hauling sacks of grain from the threshing floor to the train station in their small village, accompanied by Seit, her young brother-in-law, and Daniyar, a sullen newcomer to the village who has been wounded on the battlefield. Seit observes the beautiful, spirited Jamilia spurn men's advances, and wince at the dispassionate letters she receives from her husband. Meanwhile, undeterred by Jamilia's teasing, Daniyar sings as they return each evening from the fields. Soon Jamilia is in love, and she and Daniyar elope just as her husband returns. Translated by James Riordan." See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2023.
Kazakh eagle hunter and his golden eagle in the Altai Region of Bayan-Ölgii in Western Mongolia. www.davestamboulis.com
A népszerű hagyományőrző rendezvény idén március 3-8 között került megrendezésre. A látványos felvonulás mára már egy idegenforgalmi látványossággá nőtte ki magát, amire évről évre többen kíváncsiak.
The elaborate tattoos were found on a Siberian princess named Ukok and two warriors it is believed were buried close by to protect her in the afterlife. Researchers found each had tattoos on their left shoulder.
The famous frozen tombs of the Altai are in Kazakhstan now, and the treasures coming from excavations over the past few decades have ended up in Kazakh museums. A traveling exhibit of treasures from the tombs has come to New York, and the Times has a slide show. Above, an ornament in the form of an argali, a kind of mountain sheep, ca. 700 BC. A horse ornament in the form of a cat face, made of wood covered with paint and gold leaf, ca. 300 BC. Ornament in the form of a snow leopard face, formed from two ibex heads, ca. 700 BC. Embroidery of a winged bull, from a horse blanked, ca. 300 BC. A gold ornament in the form of a seated raptor, ca. 600 BC. The Times slide show is great, but the accompanying article is not. It is full of stuff like this: these nomads were looked down on — the other often is — as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town. But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past. These excavations dispel notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones. Because, you know, the first historian to treat nomads as more or less the equals of settled people was Herodotus, in about 450 BC. Europeans have been fascinated by Scythian, Sarmatians, and other nomadic peoples ever since. Yes, some settled Europeans looked down at nomads, but others looked up to them, and the settled people of eastern Europe found themselves ruled by nomads on several occasions. Some historians are so caught up in the fantasy of overturning old orthodoxies that they can't imagine any other way a discovery could be interesting. These objects are cool, ergo, they must overturn old ideas about nomads! Why else would anyone care about them? Sigh. (More wondrous objects from central Asian tombs here, here, and here.)
For anyone apart from the most ardent movie buff, the enduring cinematic image of Kazakhstan is probably what was presented in Sacha Baron Cohen's movie "Borat," which lampooned Kazakhs as ridiculously backward and ignorant. But this may change thanks to a new blockbuster movie from the state-administered Kazakhfilm studio.
We have had a photo session in Seishouen of Higashi-Honganji. Maiko Mameyuri 豆ゆり
A 2015 study showed that ten other men have a lot of descendants. The paper is just one of several genetic studies revealing the secrets of descent
