South Russian Steppes

В статье рассматриваются исследования, затрагивающие проблему монгольского нашествия на земли Южной и Юго-Западной Руси. В последние годы предлагаются новые гипотезы, базирующиеся, преимущественно, на привлечении малоиспользуемых или новых в контексте данной проблематики источников; проводится ревизия уже устоявшихся взглядов на основе новых данных и переосмыслении хорошо известных специалистам материалов.
The author examines the latest researches concerning problem of Mongol invasion on the lands of South and South-Western Rus. The newest research topics, defined in the last few years, based principally on the sources, which were not used in the context of denoted problematics, are analysed. Hardened beliefs concerning this subject are analysed with the usege of new materials as well.

Eurasia's exuberant linguistic diversity can best be seen through the lens of the 'core' Eurasian linguistic regions: the Steppe, the Caucasus, and the Himalaya-Pamir-Tian Shan mountain ranges. They also present citation examples of how geography affects the distribution and evolution of language families: spread-zones vs. residual zones.

Encyclopedia article for International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology

When Chokan Valikhanov died of TB in 1865, aged only 29, the Russian Academician Nikolai Veselovsky described his short life as “a meteor flashing across the field of oriental studies”. Set against his remarkable output of official reports, articles and research into the history, culture and ethnology of Central Asia, and more importantly, his Kazakh people, it remains an entirely appropriate accolade. Born in 1835 into a wealthy and powerful Kazakh clan, he was one of the first ‘people of the steppe’ to receive a Russian education and military training.
Soon after graduating from Siberian Cadet School at Omsk, he was taking part in reconnaissance missions deep into regions of Central Asia that had seldom been visited by outsiders. His famous mission to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan that began in June 1858 and lasted for more than a year saw him in disguise as a Tashkent merchant, risking his life to gather vital information, not just on current events, but on the ethnic make-up, geography, flora and fauna of this unknown region. Journeys to Kuldja, to Issyk Kol and to other remote and unmapped places quickly established his reputation, even though he always remained inorodets – an outsider to the Russian Establishment. Nonetheless, he was elected to membership of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and spent time in St Petersburg, where he was given a private audience by the Tsar. Wherever he went he made his mark, striking up strong and lasting friendships with the likes of the great Russian explorer and geographer Petr Petrovich Semenov Tian-Shansky and the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Despite his remarkable insights, Valikhanov is not well known in the English-speaking world. This is the first collection of his writings translated into English since four essays were published in 1865. It includes several of his most important works, including the report on his visit to Kashgar and a number of essays on the history and genealogy of the Kazakh people. These fill an important gap in the literary history of Central Asia and hopefully will stimulate further interest in this remarkable man.

This book is the first attempt at a biography of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson. It is limited in scope, discussing only the first two or three years of their travels into the vastness of the Central Asian steppes, in an area that is today located largely in Kazakhstan. Until it was conquered by the Russians – a process that lasted the best part of 40 years in the second half of the nineteenth century – Central Asia was made up of a number of independent khanates. Bokhara, Khokan, Samarkand, Merv and others were the fiefdoms of numerous petty princes and tyrants. Thomas’ arrival in Russian coincided with the first attempts by Russia to seize the northern steppes that stretched all the way from the Urals to China and to attempt to bring some kind of control to this wild region. This almost exactly mirrored similar events taking place in North America at the same time, where the US Cavalry and newly-arrived settlers were used to seize the traditional hunting lands of the plains Indians.
As Thomas declared in the introduction to Oriental and Western Siberia: “Neither the old Venetian nor the Jesuit priests could have visited these regions – their travels having been far to the south; nor am I aware that they brought back any pictorial representations of the scenes through which they wandered. Even the recent travellers, Huc and Gabet, who visited ‘the land of grass’ (the plains to the south of the great Desert of Gobi,) did not penetrate into the country of the Kalkas; and the illustrations to their works were evidently fabricated in Paris.”
In contrast, Thomas made three substantial journeys into Central Asia, on the second one of which – by far the longest – he was accompanied by Lucy. Using copies of Thomas’s own watercolours and sketches – he brought back to England more than 560 sketches and completed watercolours of his travels - together with modern-day photographs and other illustrations, this book tells the story of those three journeys. The Atkinsons were certainly the earliest European visitors to much of eastern Kazakhstan and their writings offer us a unique window into conditions and life on the steppes at this time. They met many of the leading khans and sultans on their journey, offering us tantalising glimpses into a way of life that has long disappeared. Their accounts provide some of the only descriptions of the people and places that existed prior to the arrival of the Russians.
And they are witnesses to history. As the Russians sent a Cossack expeditionary force of around 500 men south in the summer of 1848, along the line of the Tien Shan Mountains which marked the border with the Celestial Chinese Empire, Thomas and Lucy were only a few weeks behind, residing in their most southerly and remote bastion at Kopal for almost nine months. That was where in November 1848 Lucy gave birth to their son, named Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson, after the nearby mountain range and a sacred spring on the steppes close to the base of the mountains. This, then, is the epic story of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson’s pioneering journeys into the Kazakh Steppes, then one of the remotest points on earth.

Резюме
В работе рассматриваются бронзовые литые котлы без поддонов позднесарматской археологической культуры Нижнего Поволжья и Южного Приуралья в сравнении с похожими хуннскими экземплярами, обнаруженными на территории Южной Сибири и Северного Китая.
Анализ морфологических и технологических особенностей изделий позволяет автору утверждать, что в первые века нашей эры в Евразийской степи существуют два независимых способа изготовления котлов, один из которых является развитием савромато-сарматских традиций литья, а другой – северокитайских.
Поэтому отрывать группу позднесарматских котлов Южного Приуралья от идентичных экземпляров, обнаруженных на территории Нижнего Поволжья и Подонья, и рассматривать их в контексте развития хуннских котлов Южной Сибири и Северного Китая, как делают это некоторые исследователи, неправомерно.

Metal rings with sculpture images of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic types are known from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries amongst findings in Sarmatian burials of “Golden Cemetery” burial ground in the region of the Kuban river. These days they present a distinctive feature of the material culture of the Zubovsky-Vozdvizhenskaya group sites. Some analogous artifacts were found in mounds of the Volga river and Don river regions. There is no single definition for the functional use of such rings. The main reason for that is the fact that they had been found mostly in graves plundered in ancient times. The researchers assume them to be finials for some wooden structure, supports for vessels or elements of horsey harness. The hypothesis concerning harness seems to be better justified. In his first reports about findings of the rings with sculptured images N.I. Veselovskiy mentioned some fragments of leather remaining around the rings. Since in many cases those findings form pairs, it seems reasonable to assume them to be some symmetrical distributors of the belts for the horsey head harness.

Болотина Н.Ю., Иванюк С.А. ДОКУМЕНТЫ СЕНАТА О ЦАРИЦЫНСКОЙ КРЕПОСТИ  В 30-е гг. XVIII ВЕКА // Военно-исторические аспекты жизни Юга России XVII–XXI вв.: вопросы изучения и музеефикации: III международная научно-практическая конференция (2021; Волгоград): [материалы]. – Волгоград: Сфера, 2021. – С. 516-523.

Palaearctic grasslands encompass a diverse variety of habitats, many of high nature value and vulnerability. The main challenges are climate-change, land-use change, agricultural intensification and abandonment. Many measures are in place to address these challenges, through restoration and appropriate management, though more work is necessary. We present eight studies from China/Germany, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. The papers cover a wide range of grassland and steppe habitats and cover vegetation ecology, syntaxonomy and zoology. We also conducted a systematic search on steppe and grassland diversity. The greatest number of studies was from China, followed by Germany and England. We conclude that the amount of research being carried out on Eurasian grasslands is inadequate considering their high levels of biodiversity and vulnerability. We hope to encourage readers to address current major challenges, such as how to manage grasslands for the benefit of diverse taxa, to...