Tashtyk Culture

The Tashtyk culture is an archaeological culture of the Khakas-Minusinsk basins on the upper Yenisei, the land of the later Yenisei Kirghiz. Its best-known remains are graves in which the dead wear painted plaster masks.^[1] Tashtyk is the archaeologists’ name for the culture. It is not the name of a people in any text of the period.

Dates and area

One study places the culture from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE, in the basins of the Middle Yenisei, the Abakan and the Chulym.^[2] A periodization of the masks sets the Tashtyk ground cemeteries in the second to fourth centuries CE and the Tashtyk crypts in the fourth to seventh centuries. The earlier Tes graves, which also have masks, are dated from the second century BCE to the second century CE.^[1] The end of the culture is therefore dated differently, to the fifth or to the seventh century.^[3]

The Kokel culture of Tuva, which belongs to the time after the Xiongnu, has the Tashtyk culture on its northern and western limits.^[4] The Khakas-Minusinsk basins are the home of the culture, and the article on the Minusinsk basin describes the land.^[1]

Graves and masks

The study of the masks began in 1883, when A. V. Adrianov opened a Tashtyk vault near Minusinsk.^[5] The mask graves of the basins fall into three groups. In the Tashtyk ground cemeteries, thin plaster masks lie on the faces of mummies. In the Tashtyk crypts, thick masks were moulded on dummy heads of leather that were tied to the cremated remains of the dead.^[1] In the earlier Tes graves, plaster covered clay heads that had been modelled on skulls.^[1]

From the third century, according to one study, masks of burial dolls were part of both burial and cremation rites in the Tashtyk culture.^[6] Before them, mummies wrapped in grass or birch bark, with the skull opened by trepanation, are known from the late Tagar burials of the second and first centuries BCE. These used neither clay nor plaster.^[5] The same study says that there is no clear account of why these rites arose and how they developed.^[7]

An older Turkish work describes the graves at Oglakhty on the Yenisei, 60 kilometres from Minusinsk. They had log walls and a roof of poles with a clay coat. The dead were mummified, their faces covered with a silk shawl and a red mask, and their braided hair was chestnut brown.^[8] Chinese fabrics are among the finds. The work identifies them as the first Chinese fabrics found in southern Siberia.^[9] The article on silk in the steppe treats the trade in silk.

Grave 1/2021 at Oglakhty

A joint expedition of Tomsk State University and the Hermitage dug grave 1/2021 at the Oglakhty cemetery in the district of Bograd in Khakassia. The grave belongs to the Tashtyk culture and dates to the second to fourth centuries CE.^[10] It held a log frame of 2.26 by 1.7 metres, wrapped in birch bark. On the floor lay a woman of 45 to 55 years, her head to the west. Her skull had been trepanned after death.^[10] In the north of the frame lay the cremated remains of a second person, probably an adult man. They were probably placed in a burial doll, a life-size figure of leather dressed in the clothes of the dead.^[11] The grave lay in rock at a depth of 1.5 to 2 metres, and the bark-wrapped frame kept the air out. Wood, birch bark and textiles survived.^[11]

The woman’s mask had fallen from her face and broken when her head rolled in the empty chamber. Two large fragments of the forehead were found near the skull.^[11] The mask carries spirals in relief, painted in dark red and pink.^[12] A study of 2024 found cinnabar and hematite as the main pigments, millet husks as an additive in the plaster, and imprints of plain silk at the eye sockets.^[13]

Origin of the mask custom

The plaster masks of the Yenisei resemble the sculptures and wall paintings of Central Asia from Hellenistic times to the early Middle Ages, which also used a plaster ground.^[10] The authors of a study of 2024 know of no other plaster work of the Tes and Tashtyk people. They therefore ask whether the technique arose in southern Siberia or came with itinerant craftsmen or a new population.^[1] A study of the Tes masks holds that the tradition came from the west. It finds a close conceptual likeness only in the plaster funerary masks of Roman Egypt.^[5] A Turkish work cites an older view that took the masks for Iranian and Parthian influence. It adds that the custom of masking the dead also existed in China, so that the view needs caution.^[9]

The Tashtyk culture and the Kirghiz

Three accounts connect the culture with the early Kirghiz and the peoples around them in different ways.

In the first reconstruction, that of L. R. Kyzlasov, the Turkic Jiankun and the Dingling lived side by side. The Jiankun are the ancestors of the Kirghiz, and the Dingling are the bearers of the Tagar culture.^[14] After the Xiongnu attacked in 201 BCE, some of the Dingling were pushed north and mixed with the Jiankun.^[14] The Tashtyk culture of the Minusinsk basin is the result.^[14] In this reconstruction, the Jiankun and the Xiongnu brought the cremation of the dead.^[14]

The second account has the Turkic-speaking Jiankun, whom it equates with the Yenisei Kirghiz, meet the Dingling in the second and first centuries BCE.^[2] It identifies the Dingling as speakers of partly Ugric and partly South Samoyedic dialects.^[2] It sees the Tashtyk culture and the Shurmak culture of the Upper Yenisei as marks of this meeting.^[2]

The third account separates the two. It regards the Tashtyk tribes as vassals of the Kirghiz, among them Europoid people.^[15] The Kirghiz subjected these tribes and pushed them into the taiga of the Minusinsk basin. In the state of the Yenisei Kirghiz they were dependants, called kyshtym.^[16] The article on the Kyshtym treats this status, and the article on the Kirghiz origin debate sets the positions side by side.

References

^ a b c d e f Pankova 2024, p. 1693
^ a b c d Sapashev 2025, p. 624
^ Sapashev 2025, p. 624; 1693; Pankova 2024, p. 624; 1693
^ Sadykov 2021, p. 4
^ a b c Bogdanov 2024, p. 106
^ Bogdanov 2024, p. 106–107
^ Bogdanov 2024, p. 107
^ Ögel 1984, p. 86
^ a b Ögel 1984, p. 87
^ a b c Pankova 2024, p. 1694
^ a b c Pankova 2024, p. 1695
^ Pankova 2024, p. 1696
^ Pankova 2024, p. 1692
^ a b c d Golden 1992, p. 177
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 113
^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 114

Literature

Svetlana V. Pankova; Marina V. Bogma; Irina A. Grigor'eva; Natalia A. Vasilyeva; Elena P. Stepanova, Plaster Mask from the Oglakhty Cemetery Grave no. 1/2021: Comprehensive Study Experience (2024)
E. S. Bogdanov, Clay-Plaster "Masks" from Mound-Vault Skalnaya 5, Khakassia (2024)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Oraz S. Sapashev; Samat K. Samashev, Tradition of Continuity in State Standards and Weaponry of the Saka, Huns and Turks (2025)
Yu. S. Khudyakov; A. Yu. Borisenko, Localization of the Kyrgyz Residence Areas in Southern Siberia and Central Asia within the Periods of late Antiquity, Early and High Middle Ages (2021)
Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
Timur Sadykov; Gino Caspari; Jegor Blochin; Sandra Lösch; Yulija Kapinus; Marco Milella, The Kokel of Southern Siberia: New data on a post-Xiongnu material culture (2021)