Fabulous Creatures from the Taklamakan Desert: Shanpula Textiles at the Abegg-Stiftung

By Emma C. Bunker

Recent excavations along the fabled Silk Route at Shanpula, a small oasis town near Hetian in the southwest of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, have revealed important new information for the study of ancient Central Asian textiles. Shanpula was a true meeting point of cultures; the extraordinary finds are a perplexing mix of distant Iranian and steppe elements and are evidence of contact with metropolitan China. They highlight the important role played by textiles in the transmission of artistic features between West Asia and China.

Tapestry band from Shanpula, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, c. 8 BCE-c. CE 234 Wool Abegg-Stiftung, 5138

The Abegg-Stiftung is a Swiss research centre in Riggisberg specializing in the history and conservation of ancient textiles. The centre's Shanpula-type textiles are on show until 4 November in a ground-breaking exhibition, `Fabulous Creatures from the Desert Sands: Central Asian Textiles from 2000 Years Ago'. The opening celebration on 28 April was attended by numerous scholars from China, Europe and the United States (Fig. 1). The superb installation expertly demonstrates how the majority of the textiles were originally woven and worn (Fig. 2).

The show is accompanied by an important publication produced by the Abegg-Stiftung in conjunction with the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural and Historical Relics and Archaeology, and the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi (Emma C. Bunker et al., Riggisberg, 2001). It includes introductions by Du Gencheng of the Xinjiang Museum, Zhang Yuzhong of the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology and Dominik Keller, Chairman of the Abegg-Stiftung. There are also excavation reports by Xinjiang archaeologists Wang Bo and Xiao Xiaoyong; a discussion of the site by myself; a detailed technical assessment and catalogue of the textiles by Regula Schorta and Regina Knaller of the Abegg-Stiftung; and an analysis of the dyes by the renowned Dutch chemists Judith H. Hofenk de Graaff and Maarten R. van Bommel.By combining carbon-14 dates taken from the Abegg-Stiftung textiles and pieces of burial debris, such as reeds, wood and charcoal from Shanpula, the site can be roughly dated between the third century BCE and fourth century CE. To date, no textiles remotely similar to the Shanpula type have been reported from any other Central Asian site, so their analysis has been a scholarly challenge.

The most distinctive Shanpula textiles in the Abegg-Stiftung collection are wool tapestry bands that originally adorned women's woollen ankle-length skirts. The colours of these bands have remained bright although almost 2,000 years have passed since they accompanied their dead owners into the dry desert earth, preserved by the fearsome aridity of the Taklamakan. These tapestry bands are decorated with pictorial scenes of deer, horses, camels, people, butterflies and mythological animals walking in single file, often punctuated by stylized mountains, trees and flowers, while birds flutter overhead.

The major pictorial scenes depicted on the Shanpula tapestry bands are pre-Buddhist in subject-matter. They appear to reflect the little-known beliefs of the Saka-related Iranian-speaking people who had given up their nomadic way of life and penetrated the Hetian region from the Pamirs by the last quarter of the first millennium BCE. Although the textiles found at Shanpula are archetypal examples of cultural exchange along the Silk Route, the people who lived there were pastoralists with a sedentary village base. It has been conjectured that their society was matriarchal, since the women carried the visual symbols of their local beliefs.

Among the highlights is a wool tapestry band, with a C-14 date of between 8 BCE and CE 234, depicting a hunting scene (Fig. 3). It is identical in design to a fragment recently excavated at Shanpula. A mounted hunter with drawn bow pursues a winged goat with a horned human head adorned with peacock feathers. He wears flowered baggy trousers which fit snugly at the ankles and a long jacket belted at the waist. Above him flies a raptor, his hunting partner in falconry, a popular sport with a long history in the Tarim Basin region.

Hunting scenes abound in the art of West Asia. They must have had complex meanings associated with kingship that ultimately resulted in later representations of the `royal hunt' found on silver plates of the Sassanian period (224-651). Mounted hunters also enhance artefacts from the Eurasian steppes. A fourth century BCE wooden cup, which was recently excavated at Filippovka in the southern Urals of Russia, has golden handles engraved with a scene of a hunter pursuing antelope (Joan Aruz et al., The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, New York, 2000, cat. no. 24).

The face with a large nose and moustache in the Shanpula hunting scene is almost identical to a human-headed goat depicted on a silver plaque from a fourth or third century BCE Saka grave at Issyk in Kazakhstan (see So and Bunker, fig. 30). The goat-man image can be traced back to the fourth millennium BCE in West Asia. It was a mythological motif which was used over a long period of time.

One Shanpula textile fragment shows a man leading a Bactrian camel toward a tree (Fig. 4). This scene has obvious Iranian overtones that hark back to a fifth century BCE relief on the wall of the audience hall of Darius (r. 521-486 BCE) and Xerxes (r. 486-65 BCE) at Persepolis. Eventually the same scene was imitated in silk by Chinese weavers during the Six Dynasties period (317-589) and used as a face cover at Astana, a Chinese burial site near Turfan.

Other Abegg-Stiftung textiles with excavated Shanpula counterparts display deer with flamboyant antlers walking in sequence to the right (Fig. 5). One example has a C-14 date of 265 to 40 BCE. The antlers appear to have brow tines, suggesting that the cervid intended is a reindeer. This must have survived in the mythological memory of the settled Saka people buried at Shanpula, as reindeer were never native to the Tarim Basin. The emphasis on the antlers reflects their distant steppe ancestry and can be found on numerous artefacts excavated throughout the Eurasian steppes, especially those recently discovered at Filippovka (see Bunker et al., fig. 41).Stepped mountain forms and trees are found between animals on several of the Shanpula textiles (Fig. 6). Such landscape elements are not found in the art of the Eurasian steppes, but occur often as stage props in the art of the ancient Near East, especially in glyptic scenes. These mountains may represent Haraysa, the World Mountain mentioned in the Avesta, the major Mazdean text of Zoroastrianism. This was the religion practised in the Hetian region before the introduction of Buddhism. Such stylized stepped mountain forms were also transmitted eastward, where they enriched landscape scenes of the Han period (206 BCE-CE 220) in China.

Although initially attributed to the nomadic cultures of southern Siberia, the Shanpula textiles display none of the zoomorphic symbolism associated with the Eurasian steppes, such as `animal combat', antlers that terminate in raptor heads, and animals' hindquarters twisted 180 degrees. Instead, the pictorial art of Shanpula can be traced back to traditions more common in ancient West Asia. However, the immediate artistic sources on which Shanpula weavers based their scenes remain unidentified. It may be that the two-dimensionality of Shanpula scenes are tantalizing glimpses of a long-lost Central Asian painting tradition about which little is yet known. For example, a well-known tapestry fragment from the Urumqi Museum depicting a standing warrior holding a spear beneath the figure of a centaur blowing a flute was first conceived in painting and then translated into a woven design (see Susan Dewar, `Book Review', in Orientations, March 2001, p. 134). The warrior-and-centaur textile was obviously woven farther west and the possibility that it may reflect Parthian mural painting should not be dismissed.

Textiles were a major Silk Route commodity and were frequently used for barter and as currency throughout the ancient world. Easily portable, they played a major role in the transmission of pictorial designs and decorative motifs from one place to another. How else can the surprising appearance of a human-headed goat on the handle of a third century BCE bronze qin (zither) tuning key from China be explained? (see So and Bunker, cat. no. 71)The Abegg-Stiftung tapestries and their excavated counterparts from Shanpula are exciting discoveries for the study of ancient weaving. Scholars will be kept busy for some time deciphering their meanings and stylistic relationships, and assessing their place in the later technical development of kesi, the famous silk slit tapestry of China. Answers to these and a myriad other questions raised by the Abegg-Stiftung publication await further scholarly discoveries. It is hoped that the exhibition and publication will stimulate others to search for answers to the questions posed. This important research venture between the Swiss and their Chinese colleagues should serve as a model of international scholarly cooperation.