February Lecture: A Kurgan and a Khan in Southern Ukraine

Speaker: Renata Holod

The original excavation of Chingul Kurgan was conducted in 1981 near the village of Zamozhne in the Zaporizhska oblast of southern Ukraine. It uncovered the grave of a nomadic khan, the leader of the Turkic steppe people known in Slavic sources as the Polovtsy, as Qipchaks in Islamic sources, and as Cumans in Greek and Latin texts. This people dominated the steppe zone of western Eurasia from the end of the eleventh century until the Mongol invasion of the 1230’s. The Polovtsian khan’s burial was inserted into a kurgan, or burial mound, of the late Bronze Age, which was reused and enlarged for the purpose. The body of the khan, along with his arms, armor, and other grave goods, was placed in a large wooden sarcophagus in the heart of the mound. Along with the body itself, the kurgan contained the remains of five horses, four of which wore elaborately decorated saddles and bridles, and ten sheep sacrificed as part of the burial rites.

Supported by a Collaborative Research Grant from the Getty Foundation, the Chingul Project is a collaborative effort of specialists in archaeology, history, and the history of art. Their research is geared towards understanding how this impressive array of works of art arrived in the possession of a steppe nomad and how they might have been used and interpreted as expressions of power of a leader on the borders between the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds. The project website is at www.chingul.org.ua

Renata Holod is professor of Islamic art, architecture and archaeology in the Department of Art History, and Curator, in the Near East Section of the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. In recent years, she has also overseen an ongoing scholarly exchange between the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Archaeology, Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. She has recently won grants from the 1984 Foundation and the Ukrainian Studies Fund, and served as Clark Professor at the Clark Art Institute and Williams College. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondation Van Berchem, Geneva. Her current work includes the progressive publication of Jerba Studies, the report on the archaeological and archival survey of the island of Jerba, Tunisia, and she is co-author and co-editor of the forthcoming volume The City in the Islamic World (Leiden, 2006).

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