Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea - by Petya Andreeva (Paperback)

About the Book

Explores the zoomorphic imagination and image-making of Eurasian nomads and their dynamic interactions with neighbouring sedentary empires

Book Synopsis

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia.

This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon.

Review Quotes

Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea is an academic text and Andreeva makes few concessions to the lay reader; nevertheless, her descriptions and comparisons are so clear, that even a quick read will make the next museum visit that much more enriching and comprehensible.--Peter Gordon "Asian Review of Books"

In this stimulating book, Petya Andreeva puts forth a ground-breaking paradigm for interpreting "animal-style art" of the first millennium BCE. Her fine-grained analysis of visual tropes and design concepts challenges previous scholarship. The animal motifs of deer, ibex, horses and fantastical creatures become a visual language that transforms the Eurasian world.--Claudia Chang, Sweet Briar College and New York University

Overall, this is an important and timely volume that offers a new perspective on the ways in which animal imagery formed a powerful "visual language" among Iron Age populations inhabiting the northern Eurasian region and thus played a crucial role in social identity, collective memory, and political networking.--Bryan K. Hanks, University of Pittsburgh "Journal of Asian Studies"