Cross-Legged Sitter in Minusinsk Rock Art: Attribution and Analogies

The rock art of the Minusinsk Basin has a long academic history; however, it still brings about new fascinating discoveries. Some petroglyphs of the Tesin period show people sitting cross-legged on the floor in the so-called Oriental fashion. These images have not yet received special scientific attention. Such images are most often single; they are to be found on such petroglyph sites and mound stones of the Minusinsk Basin as Oglakhty, Kamenka, Togr-Tag, Abakan-Perevoz, Tepsei, etc. The present analysis of their legs made it possible to describe the variability of the sitting posture. Their arms are symmetrically arranged, the hands being devoid of any attributes but for one exception: the cross-legged sitter on a mound stone in Tepsei is holding a snake. Ancient Oriental art has no iconographic patterns for the Snake-Holder. In some cases, the Snake-Holder is depicted kneeling. The Early Iron Age art renders a certain analogy to the Snake-Holder from Tepsei, i.e., the horned deity from the Gundestrup cauldron. The earliest images of an anthropomorphic creature sitting cross-legged on the floor belong to the Neolithic Age (Crete) and Bronze Age (Harappan civilization). The archaeological and ethnographic analysis revealed the polyvariant character of the cross-legged sitter. The images from the Minusinsk petroglyphs demonstrate obvious similarities with the art of the Early Iron Age and the early Middle Ages. Multiple variants of the cross-legged sitter appeared in ancient art of different peoples across the world. However, the similarity hardly indicates borrowing: the universal conditions of human routine and religious practices rendered similar body postures captured in art.

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