British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

After Alexander: Central Asia Before Islam

Animal-legged thrones in Central Asia

Katsume Tanabe

Western Central Asia played a great role for the transmission of West Asian and Mediterranean furniture to Eastern Central Asia, China and Japan. The so-called animal-legged thrones, simple bench-throne (kline) and folding stool (sella curulis) are important from the cross-cultural view-point. In my paper I will treat the so-called animal-legged (bench) thrones.

As for the animal-legged thrones in Western Central Asia, late A.M.Belenitsky published an interesting article in which he surveyed not only the animal-legged thrones but also animal-shaped (zoomorphic) ones depicted in figural arts before Islamic Period (Especially the murals from Warakhsha and Pendjikent), in 1962 (Belenitsky 1962 ). He maintains that these two types of thrones were transmitted from the Kushan and Gandharan Buddhist arts, especially from the lion-legged thrones and lion-shaped ones. However, according to the descriptions of thrones in the Chinese annals and travel-records, among them only animal-legged throne was actually used by the local dynasts but the other zoomorphic one seems to be of purely artistic invention reserved for the deities (for example, the goddess Nanâ).

The peculiarity of West Central Asian animal-legged thrones is the employment of various animals such as ram or goat, winged or non-winged Bactrian camel, winged horse, griffin, bull in addition to lion (on murals and silver vessels). This variety is not attested to in Kushan and Buddhist arts. A.M.Belenitsky attributed this variety of animal decorations to the descendants of the Yueh-Chih still surviving in the 6-8th centuries in West Central Asia. However, we should relate the employment of various animals for the decoration of the legs of throne to Zoroastrianism, especially to the incarnations of the war-god Verethragna. The incarnate animals of this god are thought to bring xvarnah to the human beings and are intimately connected with royal ideology in Sasanian art. Therefore the decoration of the throne-legs by animal-images must be interpreted in the context of xvarnah (every good thing for human beings) and the proposal by Belenitsky should be discarded.

Sasanian cultural influence on West Central Asia might have began with the advent of the Kushano-Sasanian kingdom in this region in the middle of the third century A.D., as proved by silver vessels and coins. This tallies with the fact that in the third-fourth centuries the Chinese started to describe the existence of animal-legged bench-thrones in the West Central Asia in their annals.