May 19, 2015 Kurgan
stelae are
anthropomorphic stone stelae, images cut from stone, installed atop, within or
around an ancient burial mounds. The stelae are also described as "obelisks"
or "statue menhirs". Spanning more than three millennia, they are
clearly the product of various cultures. The earliest are associated with the Pit
Grave culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (and therefore with the Proto-Indo-Europeans
according to the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis). There are Iron Age specimens
are identified with the Scythians and medieval examples with Turkic peoples. Such
stelae are found in large numbers in Southern Russia, Ukraine, Prussia,
southern Siberia, Central Asia and Mongolia.
Anthropomorphic stelae were probably
memorials to the honoured dead. They are found in the context of burials and
funeral sanctuaries from the Eneolithic through to the Middle Ages. It was
proved by historians that Kalmyks revered kurgan obelisks in their country as
images of their ancestors, and that when a bowl was held by the statue, it was
to deposit a part of the ashes after the cremation of the deceased, and another
part was laid under the base of the statue. When used architecturally, stelae
could act as a system of stone fences, frequently surrounded by a moat, with sacrificial
hearths, sometimes tiled on the inside.
There are few such stelae in the
back yard of Poltava regional museum. They attract many tourists who would like
to touch a statue created by our ancestors thousand years ago.
