Pages:  27-55 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.55086/sp2532755

About 40 years ago I discovered the presence of “rattle mirrors” in nomadic barrows. There are now known 6 musical mirrors of the 5th —4th c. BC found in the Altai and Urals: Pazyryk, Lokot-4a, Rogozikha-1, Mechetsai, Middle Urals, Yakovlevka-2. Rattle mirrors are composite structures of two riveted bronze disks and a side handle mounted on a flat pin extending from the disks. Between the disks, in the cavity of the rollers, there were pieces of metal that rattled when shaken. On the ribbed disk between the rollers, there was an ornament: geometric figures, images of people, animals, birds, and flowers.
The proposed study complements the information obtained from both visual observations and the study of mirror manufacturing technology. The drawings on the mirrors suggested that the filling of the ornamental belts, identified with the form of musical notation for the Pazyryk, shows changes from the perfect to the degradation, where the earliest is the Pazyryk specimen, and the latest is the Rogozikhinsky one. Elements of dance compositions, with the presence of a “bindi” (a small dot on the forehead) on the “portraits” of women on the mirrors from Yakovlevka and the Middle Urals, allow us to associate the objects with the Indian dance “kathak”, the roots of which lie in the narrative traditions of Northern India, and to recognize the North Indian origin of the musical mirrors. These items may have been trophies of nomads.

Keywords: rattle mirrors, Pazyryk, Lokot-4a, Mechetsai, Middle Urals, Yakovlevka-2, Rogozikha-1, dances, India, nomads

Information about author:

Tatiana Kuznetsova (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dmitry Ulyanov St., 19, Moscow, 117292, Russian Federation
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID: 0000-0001-7926-2721