From the Upper Indus to the East Coast of China: On the Origin of the Pictorial Representation of the Lotus Sūtra
Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | January 30 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker/Performer: Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber, Peking University
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
In Chinese Buddhist art, there is an image of two sitting Buddhas, Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna, which can be traced back to the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra. Because (until 2012) no image of the “Two Sitting Buddhas” had been found outside China, it has been assumed that the depiction of this pair of Buddhas is of Chinese origins. Drawing on four images that have been discovered since 2012, this talk will argue that the depiction of the “Two Sitting Buddhas” originated in the ancient Indian cultural area and then spread along the Silk Road to China.
Trained in Indology and Buddhist Studies in China (Peking University, MA) and Germany (Göttingen, PhD), Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber has held professorial appointments, teaching and serving as research scholar at the universities of Freiburg, Copenhagen, Vienna and Erfurt. She has also been visiting scholar in France, Japan and China, and she has served as Professor-at-large at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, Shandong-University (China). Recently she has served as senior researcher at Shenzhen-University (China), and currently she is attached in the same capacity to the Center of Buddhist Studies, Peking University.
Mongol ‘Translations’ of a Nepalese Stupa: Architectural Replicas and the Cult of Bodnāthe Stūpa/Jarung khashar in Mongolia
Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 21 | 5-6:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker/Performer: Isabelle Charleux, CNRS, Paris
Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Mongolia Initiative, Center for Buddhist Studies
The cult of the Nepalese stupa of Bodnath (Tib. and Mo. Jarung Khashor) was very popular in 19th and early 20th century Mongolia and especially in Buryatia, as testifies the translation into Mongolian of a famous guidebook to Bodnath, a corpus of Mongolian oral narratives, the many thang-kas and amulets depicting the Bodnath Stupa along with a Tibetan prayer, and the existence of architectural replicas in Mongolia, probably to create surrogate pilgrimages to Bodnath. I will focus on these architectural replicas and try to explain how the Nepalese architecture was ‘translated’ to Mongolia, and try to understand whether the differences between the original and the replicas are due to local techniques and materials, to the impossibility of studying the original, or to the distortions induced by their mode of transmission. Has the original building been reinterpreted to the point of transforming its meaning? Is the replica of an architecture accompanied by the replica of possible cultic practices associated with it?
Isabelle Charleux is director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris) and deputy director of the GSRL (Group Societies, Religions, Laicities, National Centre for Scientific Research – Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes-PSL, Paris). Her research interests focus on Mongol material culture and religion. She published Nomads on Pilgrimage. Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940 (Brill, 2015) and Temples et monastères de Mongolie-Intérieure (Paris, 2006), as well as scholarly articles on various topics such as miraculous icons in in Mongolia, Inner Mongolian mural paintings, and visual representation of past and present figures of authority in the Mongol world.
Points of Transition: Ovoo and the Ritual Remaking of Religious, Ecological, and Historical Politics in Inner Asia
Conference/Symposium: Center for Buddhist Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 22 | 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Ovoo, the structures of stones, trees, scarves, skulls, steering wheel covers, and a staggering array of other objects that are ubiquitous across the landscape of contemporary Mongolia, Buryatia, Inner Mongolia, and Qinghai, have long marked sites where ritual, though often highly spontaneous, practices invoke the presence of immanent relations. Built and maintained by various publics, gatherings at ovoo have over past centuries been major sites of political action, where the identities of and relationships between more and less local shamans, lamas, imperial officials, businesspeople, bureaucrats, politicians, and nonhumans are narrated, contested, and re-defined. At the same time, ovoo are often engaged individually, by travelers engaging roadside ovoo or at places generally unspoken of to others and not visible on the wider landscape, that are especially significant to an individual or intimate group. Scholars from the US, Europe, and Asia will be discussing such issues as how these sites are useful in juxtaposing historical and political narratives, ecological and environmentalist movements, religious practice, and the productive logics of households, businesses, and states.
Calculation and Cosmography: Formal Continuities in Buddhist Art along the Gansu Corridor, from Dunhuang to Labrang Monastery
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 13 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker/Performer: Jon Soriano, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies
While the art history of the overland silk road seems distinguished by its continual flux, as disparate visual regimes flowed in and out over the centuries, the art in question is also marked by strong formal continuities specific to its regions, as well as certain adaptations to global paradigms. This talk adopts Kublerian concepts of 'shape' and 'sequence' to identify a formal series instantiated by a range of Buddhist objects and sites, a series structured by an underlying drive toward exactitude. Objects in this series are concatenated from recent fieldwork at a variety of sites along the silk road in western China, primarily around Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. These sites include early and later Dunhuang caves, the 18th century architecture at Labrang Monastery, and various places in between. Positing such a continuity may help shape a larger concept of Buddhist art history.
Jon Soriano is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art department at UC Berkeley, working with his advisor Pat Berger on a dissertation regarding the material culture of the Kālacakra tantra between the Gelugpa Gaden Phodrang and the Qing court. Jon has master's degrees in Asian Studies and Ethnology, and has worked for the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Berkeley Art Museum. He is the current recipient of the Dallan and Karen Leong Clancy Fund for Silk Road Studies, as well as funding from the Dunhuang Foundation.
Visual bilingualism and the funerary space: Keys to understanding the spatial semiotics of Central Asian tombs in 6th century China
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | April 17 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker/Performer: Pénélope Riboud, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
The dominant religion of pre-Islamic Sogdiana was a local form of Zoroastrianism, and this has led most scholars to assume a correlation with the religious beliefs and practices within the Sogdian community settled in China. And indeed, many aspects of these tombs show that Central Asian funerary practices were maintained. However, some aspects of “Sino-Sogdian” tombs, such as the treatment of the corpses, the spatial organization of the tomb and the visual repertoire remain puzzling within the frame of any specific religious belief. These “discordances” have often been interpreted as compromises, and mere consequences of the need to adapt to a complex cultural environment. This talk will investigate these hidden funerary riddles, in order to understand what they tell us about the tomb’s owner, his beliefs and moreover, what were the deliberate strategies engaged to build a bilingual iconographic program that fits in both Chinese and Sogdian narratives of the after world.
Pénélope Riboud, an Assistant Professor of Chinese History and Art History at Inalco in Paris, is a historian and an art historian who focuses on the society and visual culture of Medieval China. She was trained in France as a historian and an archaeologist at Université Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne, then as a sinologist at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco-Langues’O) in Paris where she received her PhD in 2008. She is currently spending a year as Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
New Discoveries in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology
Panel Discussion: Center for Chinese Studies: Center for Korean Studies: Center for Japanese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies: Center for Southeast Asia Studies | April 29 | 3-5 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speakers: Peter V. Lape, Anthropology and Curator of Archaeology, Burke Museum, University of Washington; John W. Olsen, Regents’ Professor Emeritus & Executive Director, Je Tsongkhapa Endowment for Central and Inner Asian Archaeology, Anthropology, University of Arizona
Panelist/Discussant: Gyoung-Ah Lee, Anthropology, University of Oregon
Moderator: Junko Habu, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Department of Anthropology, Archaeological Research Facility, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)
This event celebrates the publication of the Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology by inviting two editors of this volume, both of whom are prominent scholars in the field of Asian Archaeology. Prof. John W. Olsen (University of Arizona) will talk about his recent archaeological expeditions in Mongolia and Tibet with a focus on Paleolithic archaeology in these regions. Professor Peter V. Lape (University of Washington) will discuss social change in Island Southeast Asia over the past 5000 years.
Mithra, Buddha, and Mani Walk into a Desert...: Indo-Iranian and Sino-Iranian Encounters in Central Asia
Conference/Symposium: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | May 3 – 4, 2019 every day | 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies
All panels held at 180 Doe Library (*except where indicated)
Friday May 3, 10am–12:00pm
Introductory Remarks
Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley
Changing Vocabulary of Manichaean Visual Syntax in Uyghur East Central Asia
Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Northern Arizona University
Manichaean Official Documents in their Central Asian Context
Adam Benkato, UC Berkeley
Manichaean Evidence for Kushan Buddhism
Jason BeDuhn, Northern Arizona University
Friday, May 3, 1:30–3:30 pm
Buddhist Sogdian Interconfessional Space: Remarks from Art and Textual Evidence
Barakatullo Ashurov, Harvard University
Indo-Iranian, Perso-Buddhist, and Sino-Iranian Entanglements: Imaging Religion and Royal Power at the End of Antiquity
Matthew Canepa, UC Irvine
Itinerant Kingship, Buddhist Monasteries, and the Making of a Kushan Royal Cult
Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley
*Friday, May 3, 5:15–7:00 pm
SPECIAL EVENT IN COLLABORATION WITH CAL PERFORMANCES AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE
Morrison Room, Doe Library
Heroes Take Their Stands: Milestones on the Silk Road
Ahmad Sadri, Lake Forest College
Sug-e Siavosh (Mourning for Siavosh)
Soroor Ghanimati, UC Berkeley
Electra, a Sonic Heroine
Duncan MacRae, UC Berkeley
Saturday, May 4, 10:00–12 noon
Wind and Fire: Some Shared Motifs in Indo-Iranian and Sino-Iranian Settings
Jenny Rose, Claremont Graduate University
Greek Helios or Indian Surya?: Evolution of the Sun God’s Iconography from India to Bamiyan and Dunhuang
Osmund Bopearachchi, UC Berkeley
Two Ascetics between Gandhara and Dunhuang and Back: Transformations in the Depiction of the Śyāmaand the Dīpaṃkara Jātakas
Jessie Pons, Ruhr-University Bochum
Saturday, May 4, 1:30–4:00 pm
Recent Fieldwork at the Site of Kuh-e Khwaja, Sistan, Iran
Soroor Ghanimati, UC Berkeley
Khotan and Rawak Vihara on the Southern Silk Road, 3rd to 8th Centuries
Ulf Jäger, University of Leipzig
Non-Buddhist Religious Icons in the Mural Paintings of Early Buddhist Caves in Kucha and Dunhuang
Satomi Hiyama, Kyoto University
Iconography without Texts in Yulin Cave 3
Michelle McCoy, University of Pittsburgh
Ancient Amazons: Warrior Women in Myth, Art, and Archaeology
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 2 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker/Performer: Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
Fierce Amazons are featured in some of the most famous Greek myths.
Every great hero, from Heracles to Achilles, battled these powerful warrior queens.
But were Amazons real? Join Adrienne Mayor as she recounts tales of women warriors and uncovers some realities behind the myths. Archaeological discoveries of battle-scarred female skeletons buried with weapons now confirm that warlike women were not mere figments of the Greek imagination. Combining classical literature and art, nomad traditions, and archaeology, this illustrated lecture reveals how historical horsewomen-archers of the steppes influenced ideas and images of the warriors known to the ancient Greeks as Amazons.
Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in the Classics Department and History and Philosophy of Science Program, Stanford University. Her books include The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World; The First Fossil Hunters; a biography of Mithradates, The Poison King (National Book Award nonfiction finalist); and Gods and Robots.
Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textile Images
Lecture: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 7 | 5 p.m. | 180 Doe Library
Speaker: Mariachiara Gasparini, San Jose State University
Moderator: Joyce Ertel Hulbert, Textile Conservator
Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative
In her book "Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles," author Mariachiara Gasparini investigates the origin and effects of a textilemediated visual culture that developed at the heart of the Silk Road between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. Through the analysis of the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and more than a thousand textiles held in collections worldwide, Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the rich cultural entanglements along the Silk Road, between the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mongol Empire, from the Tarim to Mediterranean Basin.
Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media from Central Asian caves to South Italian churches, the author depicts and describes the movement and exchange of portable objects such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments across the Asian continent and across the ages. Gasparini’s history offers critical perspectives that extend far beyond an outmoded notion of “Silk Road studies.” Her cross-media work shows readers how
certain material cultures are connected not only by the physical routes they take but also because of the meanings and interpretations these objects engage in various places. "Transcending Patterns" is at once art history, material and visual cultural history, Asian studies, conservatory studies, and linguistics.
MARIACHIARA GARSPARINI received a Ph.D. in transcultural studies and global art history from Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research focuses on Central Asian material culture, wall painting, artist’s praxis, and Sino-Iranian and Turko-Mongol interactions. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Asia. Since 2015 she has been teaching Asian art in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Life at the Border: Farmers and Nomads at the Edges of the Bukhara Oasis during Antiquity
Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 22 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker/Performer: Sören Stark, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies
The oasis of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan was a major node in the network of ancient and medieval communication lines across Eurasia, located at an important crossroad where routes between eastern Iran and Samarqand met with routes which ran between Bactria/Tokharistan (and India) and Lake Aral and further on to eastern Europe. Archaeological and historical studies on this region have long focused on its urban centers. In his lecture, Professor Stark will instead highlight rural society at the border of the oasis, drawing attention to those who sustained and complemented urban centers in the oasis during antiquity. For this he will draw from the results of ongoing fieldwork at a number of sites in the ancient border zone of the Bukhara oasis dating to the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period. They show a dazzling picture of economic and social interactions evolving in complex agro-pastoral lifestyles. And they show that the seemingly 'small' world of communities at the edges of the oasis was nonetheless well connected with the big world of the ancient “Silk Roads.”
Sören Stark received his doctorate in 2005 with a study on the archaeology and history of the pre-Muslim Turks in Central and Inner Asia. Hi current research interests are, among others, on Hellenistic and Late Antique/Early Medieval Sogdiana and the archaeology and history of nomadic groups close to oasis territories in Western Central Asia. His publications include a monograph on the archaeology of the 6th-8th century Türks in Inner and Central Asia, an exhibition catalogue on Early Iron Age kurgans from Kazakhstan, and numerous articles and book chapters on the history and archaeology of Sogdiana between the Hellenistic and the Islamic periods. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (at Brepols) and is currently co-editor of Brill's Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8: Uralic & Central Asian Studies (HO8).
2019 Annual Tang Lecture: Over Mountains and Steppes: Tracing ancient tracks of Asia’s Silk Roads
Lecture: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | November 15 | 5-7 p.m. | Alumni House, Toll Room
Speaker/Performer: Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis
Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies
For over a century, the Silk Road was depicted by camel caravans crossing barren deserts, transporting exotic commodities to oasis cities across Central Asia and beyond. The harsh grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and the soaring peaks of Inner Asia were seen as barriers to this flow of Asian commerce — risky regions to be crossed quickly or avoided altogether. Yet new archaeological research in the steppes and highlands of Central Asia has suprisingly changed this canonical picture, showing far greater antiquity of human interaction and interregional connectivity than ever known, and tracing the earliest links along the proto-Silk Road to 5000 years old sites in the mountains of Kazakhstan. This paper traces nearly 20 years of archaeological fieldwork by the author, highlighting new site discoveries and the high-tech methods used at sites from the Bronze Age and later historical periods that reshape our understanding the Silk Road from its earliest formation to the time of its decline.
Michael Frachetti is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His work addresses how economic and political strategies served to shape inter-regional networks across Asia as early as 3000 BC (the Early Bronze Age) and how those networks laid the foundation for the later Silk Roads. He conducts archaeological field research in Eastern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (UCPress, 2008) and a forthcoming book entitled Ancient Inner Asia (Cambridge Univ. Press).
First Step(pe)s: The Silk Road from a Steppe Perspective
Lecture: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | December 4 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker/Performer: Ursula B. Brosseder, Bonn University
Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)
Numerous, far-reaching migrations and contacts have taken place during prehistory across the vast Eurasian steppes, reaching from Eastern Europe or the Near East to Inner Asia and present-day China. However, the intensity and speed of connectivity between East and West changed profoundly in the late first millennium BC. Traditional narrative holds that this change was initiated by the travels of Zhang Qian in 138 BC which is seen as the “foundation” of the Silk Roads. In the present lecture I will dive deeper into the dynamics of power politics in the steppes of that time period and show how archaeology reveals existing steppe networks and how they contributed to the East-West exchanges we know from the literary sources. Integrating archaeological and textual sources leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the processes and dynamics of interaction across Eurasia.
Ursula B. Brosseder received her PhD in 2001 from the Freie Universität in Berlin on the Early Iron Age in Europe. After a research stay with a fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Novosibirsk, Siberia, she shifted her research focus on Eurasian Archaeology and the Archaeology of Mongolia in particular where she has been conducting fieldwork since 2005. She is a specialist on Xiongnu Archaeology and their contacts and connectivity across the Eurasian steppes during the late Iron Age ("Silk Roads"). Her work has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she was a member in the School for Historical Studies in 2013/2014.