Truth or a lie #1

TRUE(almost)

Depending on who you ask, the Alans were Sarmatians or they weren't. It's not a question of "can they trace their genealogy back to older Sarmatian tribes (because they can)- it's a question of where the cultural cutoff is. They were around much longer than the rest of the Sarmatians, so that's to be expected. I haven't learned the details of the differences yet...I have two library books on the Alans sitting on my shelf staring woefully at me while my nose is buried in various paleontology books and papers.
 Anywho, the Sarmatians proper made it all the way from their homelands north of the Caucasus to Britain. They didn't actually choose to go all the way to Britain- it was a single regiment of Iazyges soldiers in the Roman army. The Alans, however went marching all the way to Gaul, where they eventually joined with the Vandals after their king was killed. They then group crossed Gibraltar and went raiding in northern Africa. Another group of Alans traveled eastward and ended up living in what is now Beijing, China as a military attachment in the Mongol army, who then ruled the city. They didn't quite make it all the way to the easternmost part of Eurasia (that would be north of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia), but they still spanned almost the entire continent east-west.
The journeys of various Alan groups are really quite fascinating. They did an awful lot to influence things in western Europe that are never mentioned in world history textbooks. Expect some future posts to give more detailed accounts of their travels and fates.

(Apologies for the lack of references. They'll be added later in April after comprehensive exams are over.)

Happy April Fool's Day!

It’s become tradition, on April Fool’s, for people on the internet to post something untrue and present it as true, then reveal the next day that it was all a prank and they made it up (or else post something true which people believe is false, then the next day revealing that the prank is that it’s actually true, as a clever friend of mine once did). But we all know how the world works- if it’s jokingly presented as truth for the purpose of pranking or for irony, someone will miss the memo and think it fact.

So instead, let’s play a game of “Two truths and a lie.” I’m going to say three things about the Sarmatians and on the 8th, 15th, and 22th I have scheduled the posting of each topic wherein I will explain how and why each is true or false

TRUE OR FALSE?
Sarmatians lived from one end of Eurasia to the other.

TRUE OR FALSE?
Sarmatians had hats that covered their faces.

TRUE OR FALSE?
Dozens of golden deer were found in a Sarmatian king's tomb.

Hiatus

It seems I've taken an unintentional hiatus in my efforts to focus on school. It's comprehensive exams season, so I think it's probably best that I make the hiatus official. I will be posting the results of the tamga class at Bellewode come the end of March, but after that the hiatus will resume until late April.
EDIT: I had forgotten about some posts I wrote ahead of time and scheduled for April. Three of them will be showing up during my hiatus from real-time blogging, so as far as you guys are concerned, it ends at the end of March.

Medieval limp bookbinding

My wedding was very DIY. We designed all the stationary and made the RSVPs ourselves. The RSVP paper was the type made to look like parchment, so I decided I wanted to use it for an illumination project (no point buying the good stuff as a beginner). I enjoy bestiaries and decided that would be a good project which would use all or most of the paper. (For those who don't know, a bestiary is a medieval catalogue of animals. They include ones we now know to be mythical and each entry typically has some sort of moral lesson.)
I'll go into the contents in a later post once I have some pages completed; for now I want to focus on the actual book itself. I decided to make one of my own and stumbled upon this [sadly dead] blog with lots of A&S tips on a variety subjects. The link will take you to her posts on bookbinding.
The style is called "limp binding" because the spine of the book isn't stiff. I've never done bookbinding before and this seemed like an easy place to start (plus we have some scrap leather lying around). I'm not going to go into how it's made or what materials you need because she does such a fantastic job of it.

The one thing she doesn't give is an idea of how far apart the holes need to be. I had found a written how-to which said half an inch from the edges was a good place for the end holes, so that's what I did. The next set in I did an inch away because that roughly seemed to be what she did for her book.

Horizontally, I ended up placing them way too far apart. I only have two signatures of four sheets each in my book and put them about half a centimeter apart. I could probably slip an entire third packet between them, so a quarter of a centimeter apart seems like a good place to start if you make your own.

The flap on mine looks completely different because I only trimmed off the part of my scrap that went beyond overlapping the front cover. It already had an appealing shape, so I decided to keep it.

It's no masterpiece, but it was a fun, worthwhile project. It was really quite easy and only took a single evening to make, so anyone doing an A&S 50 Challenge which could count this, I recommend it.

Heraldic, Scribal, and Dance Symposium 2012

This is a fun event which I attended last year. It's nothing but classes- lectures, discussions, participatory how-tos... It's fantastic for anyone interested in these three broad subjects from the novice to the expert. Even if you're not particularly interested in them, you can take useful classes like Awards and Sumptuary Laws of Calontir, wherein you learn which pointy hats are what rank and how to address them, who wears what color belt, and what each award is for. Last year I taught a participatory class on how to debke. This year I decided to do something related to my persona, so if you're in the neighborhood, why not attend:

 Tamga: The Pre-Heraldic Tradition of Eurasian Nomads

Eurasian nomads used abstract rune-like symbols called tamga in ways much like later standard European heraldry. Some of those funky abstract symbols in Polish heraldry may be later adaptations of them. Basic information about tamga and the particulars of the Sarmatian style will be presented with a Q&A following. 

I'm planning on about 30 minutes of lecture. I'll go over some basic information about tamgas, then switch tracks and discuss the Sarmatian style (like the blurb says). I'll have a Power Point with lots of pictures and provide a handout as well. I'm hoping I can intrigue the audience enough to provoke discussion about how tamga are like Western heraldry and how they differ, and if I'm lucky some discussion on the possible modified tamga in Polish heraldry.
The event takes place in Bellewode (Kirksville, MO) on March 31.

P.S. I haven't gotten my tamga submission together yet, though the incoming new rules seem like they might make it easier to register one. Gathering the materials and writing a convincing academic-sounding argument will take time that I, at the moment, do not have in excess.

*Debke can't without a doubt be traced back to the SCA's period, though there are snippets [that I can't re-find the citations for, grrrr] of information describing a dance that could be debke or proto-debke. It's a least closer to period than belly dance, which is extremely popular in the SCA...but that's a topic for another day.

Ask the Readers: New Year's Day

Post idea stolen from Juturna, who posts questions for writers to think about.
A fun thing to do to develop your persona is to think about what they may have been doing at a given time of year. Would your persona have done anything to celebrate the arrival of a new year? Winter is about to hit full force- what sort of preparations would they be making? What would they do to pass the time indoors?

I have no idea if Sarmatians had any sort of  celebration this time of year. Holidays falling around cross-quarter days, solstices, and equinoxes were definitely tied to agriculture (when to harvest, when to plant...). It's possible they could also be tied to calving and breeding, which would be the more prominent interest of the Sarmatians given their nomadic lifestyle, but I don't recall that being mentioned in my Archaeoastronomy class.
The steppes of Eurasia would have gotten pretty cold in winter. I imagine fur-lined kurtas, pants, and caps would be made and mended right about now if they weren't already, as well as any repairs to the covering of the wagons they lived in. I'm not sure what they would have done to pass the time.

Scytho-Siberian zoomorphic art style as illumination

  This weekend some of us in the Shire roadtripped down to Kansas City for Kris Kinder.  Kris Kinder is mainly a holiday market where craftsmen can sell their wares, but it’s also where a lot of meetings take place. There are meetings for specific offices (chatelaine, chronicler…), and meetings for special interest guilds (fibers, scribes…). The arts & science type of groups sometimes have challenges where the members decide on a thing to make. Members work on their pieces and everyone’s are collected and given to Their Majesties as largess (items they can then give out to people as thank you gifts).

  The Winter Scribal Challenge this year was to decorate a bookmark or card with illumination and calligraphy that you did yourself. The idea was that you would be stretching yourself out of your comfort zone if you normally only do one or the other. The pieces that ended up being collected seemed to come solely from illuminators as most only contained a word of text (and actually none in a couple cases…), and there was some fantastic illumination done. I wrote “Home is where the Heartland is” (the name of our kingdom is Welsh for heartland) and was surprised that I was the most verbose. My calligraphy sucks, so it didn’t look great, but I did try, which was the point of the exercise.

  We were each supposed to do two- one to give to Their Majesties and one to give to another scribe who contributed pieces. I think only myself and one other person ended up taking pieces home, so the rest went to Their Majesties. I saw a style on a couple of the bookmarks that I’ve seen before but know nothing about (tri-lobed ivy leaves with bezants scattered about), so I took one to study and practice from.

  Aside from the one class on bianchi girari I attended, I know nothing about illumination styles, and I have yet to actually try any. I wanted to do something Sarmatian for my first non-pre-print illumination, but Sarmatians didn’t illuminate—they didn’t have a written language around which to paint pretty pictures. They do have a very distinctive zoomorphic art style, however.  They used it in goldsmithing, leatherwork, feltwork, metalworking, and all kinds of stuff that’s not painting parchment or vellum. The closest  to it is their tattoos (which I would love to find some pictures or reproductions of).  So what to do?—take advantage of the “creative” in Society for Creative Anachronism.

  I did my illuminations in the Scytho-Siberian zoomorphic style- one a Scythian variant and one a Sarmatian variant. The first, the Scythian piece, is based on a torse and quiver cover pictured in "From the Lands of the Scythians". The colors I used don’t have any particular significance because the artifacts are all in gold; they’re just what I felt like doing.

  You’ll notice this isn’t zoomorphic so much as straight realism. It's because these pieces were made by Greeks with Scythian themes and motifs for the Scythians. Scythians and Sarmatians love griffins. They also love to have predators attacking their prey. I decided to have my griffin attack the big letter ‘H’. See that fin on the neck and head? That’s something that Scytho-Sarmatian griffins have which Western griffins don’t (likewise with the short fin around the back of the jaw and the lion front limbs). The griffin on the quiver is actually shown pinching a chunk of flesh in its beak, so I replicated that here.

   The floral motif inside the ‘H’ and the border both come from the torse. I didn’t draw any birds strewn amid the flowers like on the torse just to keep it a bit simpler. There are several different types of flowers shown (or at least a couple different views of one and a thing that could be a leaf or a flower which I don’t know the identity of). There’s the main vine with branches splitting inside leaves (kind of like on corn stalks), then there’s the really skinny vines which end in the flowers that wrap around those main vines. 

  The Sarmatian piece is the one which actually shows the zoomorphic style. Both designs come from gold plaques shown in "The Golden Deer of Eurasia". For this piece, I painted both gold, in salute to their origin, with complementary colors filling the white space and closed shapes to make it stand out more.

I picked one of the deer plaques and reproduced it inside the H, once on each side, then added more points to the brow tines (based on a third plaque not pictured here) inside the horizontal bar so it wouldn’t be empty.The shape behind the deer is actually a leg that's been twisted up behind the animal. Twisting limbs is fairly common in this style.

 The saiga antelope is my favorite part from both of these bookmarks. I really like this particular version of the zoomorphic style. It has such nice swoopy curves and shapes. Everything just flows together. I had to make the hindquarters less tall than they were in the plaque in order to have it fill the space better, but it’s otherwise a direct reproduction of the plaque.

After drawing and painting him, I feel really inspired to make an entire scroll illuminated in that style. Someday when I have time…

From the Lands of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the USSR, 3000 BC-100BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol 32, no. 5, 1975.

The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.