The distribution of the Nestorian Christianity among the Turkic speaking nomadic groups of the Sayan-Altai and the southern Ural regions in the 6th-11th centuries

Abstract

The subject of the article is the Nestorian Christianity creed, which had a strong influence on the formation of the nomadic culture appearance, as well as the mentality of both the Turkic and the Mongol nomadic groups. The object of the study were the discovered during the archaeological studies of the 9th-11th century burial site Uelgi three cross-shaped silver plates which had no analogues in the contemporaneous sites of the neighboring regions. A brief description of the finds was provided. A significant role in the Nestorian Christianity distribution among the Turkic speaking population was played by the Sogdians who by that time had colonized Eastern Turkestan and were engaged in active trade along the Great Silk Road. The Nestorian Christianity introduced the nomads of the Great Steppe to the culture and the religious and philosophic ideas of the Mediterranean civilization. The article demonstrates that the Nestorian Christianity was also a political factor. A particular attention is paid to the Turkic groups religious beliefs, which played a significant role in their relations with other countries including the Sasanian Iran, Byzantium, and later the Islamic states. Thus the penetration during the 9th-11th centuries of the religious symbolism of Nestorian Christianity, Buddhism, Manichaeism -was an historically predetermined process of the early state formations evolution of the Medieval nomads. The nomads mostly assumed only the external ritualism, whereas it was difficult for them to follow all the rules of the religion, nonetheless, a certain heathen pantheism of the nomadic community in addition to the expansion of the pantheon also provided some foreign policy preferences to the early state formations of the nomadic communities. In the Uelgi belt fittings the cross-shaped plates reflected more than just a blind borrowing of the religious culture symbols, but rather represented a quite complicated and multidimensional process of cultural and political transformations in the depth of the cultures of Central Asia.