Saimaluu-Tash

Why this is extraordinary

Saimaluu-Tash, “embroidered stones,” lies high in the Fergana range, in Jalal-Abad. The tentative World Heritage listing counts about 10,000 stones with pictures, the earliest placed in the 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE, the Eneolithic and Bronze Age, and says the place stayed in use as a sacred site from then into the Middle Ages and, in some accounts, to the present. Hunters, herders, and early farmers are the people the listing names. The pictures include animals, people, ploughs, and light chariots. Ploughs and chariots are a problem of place. They belong in valleys and on plains. They do not plough a glacial pass. An introduction to these high petroglyphs says the meaning of those vehicles is likely to sit in story or rite, not in a scene of work done on the spot.

Sun signs are a large part of the panels. A study of the solar imagery lists simple rings, rings with a dot, rings with a cross, and crosses or rings with 6, 8, or 12 rays, sometimes inside a circle. There are solid discs on legs, swastika-like turns, and “spectacle” signs, two rings joined by a line. Horns of bulls, deer, or goats are sometimes drawn as a ring with a dot, so the animal carries a sun. People are drawn with a rayed disc for a head, eyes and a mouth in the disc, arms up or out. A composition puts a sun-headed figure over pairs of tailed people with raised arms and bent knees, then a spectacle sign, then another sun-headed figure. The readings of the rayed heads do not agree. Some take them as the sun itself, some as solar deities, some as beings that are only like the sun. The same study says a field of dotted rings may be a starry sky, and that the tailed dancers are a rite for the sun, perhaps also a stack of worlds. Those are readings of shapes. No inscription at the pass says which one is right. How a sun sign is observed, in this kind of art, is the disc you can see any clear day, plus counts. Six, eight, and twelve are numbers a year or a season can be split into. They are also numbers a design repeats. A fit is not a proof that the pecker was counting months.

The rock helps the pictures last and helps them be made. A materials study of Saimaluu-Tash I describes arkosic sandstone with a dark skin. The weathered face is much softer than fresh stone, about 0.6 gigapascals against about 2.8, which is why a tool could bite the surface. The contrast between the dark skin and the light groove is strong. That is visibility, not a date. Nothing in the sources used here gives a radiocarbon age for a particular groove. The earliest millennium is a style date.