A nearly 3,500-year-old burial site was discovered in Istanbul's Beşiktaş district during excavation work for a new metro project connecting Kabataş, Beşiktaş, Mecidiyeköy and Mahmutbey districts.
Istanbul Archaeology Museum Director Zeynep Kızıltan said that the cemetery was a burial mound, known as 'kurgan,'[1] adding that it was the oldest known burial site in Istanbul could possibly belong to the northern Black Sea region's ancient Turkic and Altai cultures.
Kurgans are a type of burial place usually characterized by earth and stones heaped over a burial chamber. They were characteristic of Bronze Age peoples, and have been found from the Altai Mountains to the Caucasus, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Kurgans were used in the Ukrainian and Russian steppes, and their use spread with migration into eastern, central, and northern Europe in the 3rd millennium B.C.Kızıltan believes the results of an anthropologic analysis of skeletons will help learning the origins of the oldest Istanbulites.
A number of containers with burnt bones were also found at the site, which indicated that people used cremation[*] at that time. According to x-ray examination of the bones, dead bodies were burnt at temperatures from 700 to 800 degrees Celsius.
Kızıltan assumes that the burial site belonged to Turkic people of Central Asian culture from the northern Black Sea region, adding that radiocarbon and DNA analyses will confirm current conjectures.
[*] MB Note: Certain burials of the Beshkent-Vakhsh Culture also included standardised fire ... in southern Tajikistan signs of burning were found under the largest kurgans
Mavi Boncuk |
Kurgan: oldTR: [ Orhun Yazıtları, 735] amga korgan kışlap yazıŋa oguzgaru sü taşıkdımız [Amga kalesinde kışlayıp baharda Oğuz yanına ordu sevkettik] Kipchak TR: [ Codex Cumanicus, 1303] kurgan - GE: ein gihoft grab [höyük mezar] Tartar TR: [ Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Lehce-ı Osmani, 1876] kurgan: Türkîde hisar. from oldTR korıġan hisar, kale from oldTR korı- korumak +(g)An → koru- ; protection; fort.
Yatır: Tartar TR: [ Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, c.1683] Bre ˁazīz, ne yatırsuŋ [ne yatarsın]? şu ḥāli görsene [ Milli Mecmua (dergi), 1929]Yatır, türbelerde evliya diye tanınan ölülere denir.
Burial mounds are complex structures with internal chambers. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, elite individuals were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horses and chariots. The structures of the earlier Neolithic period from the 4th to the 3rd millenniums BC, and Bronze Age until the 1st millennium BC, display continuity of the archaic forming methods. They were inspired by common ritual-mythological ideas.
In English, the archaeological term kurgan[1] is a loanword from East Slavic languages (and, indirectly, from Turkic languages), equivalent to the archaic English term barrow[2], also known by the Latin loanword tumulus[2] and terms such as burial mound. These are structures created by heaping earth and stones over a burial chamber, which is often made of wood. The term kurgan is the standard term for such structures in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.
The noun курга́н (Kurgán) is first attested in Old East Slavic (also known as "Old Rus'ian"), which borrowed the word from an unidentified Turkic language or languages. The modern Turkish word is kurgan, which means "fortress" or "burial mound". Following its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of archaeology.
The earliest kurgans date to the 4th millennium BC in the Caucasus and are associated with the Indo-Europeans. Kurgans were built in the Eneolithic, Bronze, Iron, Antiquity and Middle Ages, with ancient traditions still active in Southern Siberia and Central Asia. Kurgan cultures are divided archeologically into different sub-cultures, such as Timber Grave, Pit Grave, Scythian, Sarmatian, Hunnish and Kuman-Kipchak.
The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) or steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia.[note 1] It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курган), meaning tumulus or burial mound.
The Kurgan hypothesis was first formulated in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various cultures, including the Yamna, or Pit Grave, culture and its predecessors. David Anthony instead uses the core Yamna culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.
Marija Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper-Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium BC had expanded throughout the Pontic-Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe.[3]
Three genetic studies in 2015 gave partial support to Gimbutas's Kurgan theory regarding the Indo-European Urheimat. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the Russian steppes, along with the Indo European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo European Languages.[
[1] kurgan (n.) 1889, from Russian, originally a Tatar word.
[2] barrow (n.2) "mound, hill, grave-mound," Old English beorg (West Saxon), berg (Anglian) "barrow, mountain, hill, mound," from Proto-Germanic *bergaz (source also of Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German berg "mountain," Old North bjarg "rock"), from PIE root *bhergh- (2) "high," with derivatives referring to hills and hill-forts. Obsolete by c. 1400 except in place-names and southwest England dialect; revived by modern archaeology. Meaning "mound erected over a grave" was in late Old English. Barrow-wight first recorded 1869 in Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris's translation of the Icelandic saga of Grettir the Strong.
In place-names used of small continuously curving hills, smaller than a dun, with the summit typically occupied by a single farmstead or by a village church with the village beside the hill, and also of burial mounds. [Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names]
[3] tumulus (n.) ancient burial mound, 1680s, from Latin tumulus "hillock, heap of earth, mound" (see tomb).
tomb (n.) c. 1200, tumbe, early 14c. tomb, from Anglo-French tumbe and directly from Old French tombe "tomb, monument, tombstone" (12c.), from Late Latin tumba (also source of Italian tomba, Spanish tumba), from Greek tymbos "mound, burial mound," generally "grave, tomb." Watkins suggests it is perhaps from PIE root *teue- "to swell," but Beekes writes that it is probably a Pre-Greek (non-IE) word. He writes that Latin tumulus "earth-hill" and Armenian t'umb "landfill, earthen wall" "may contain the same Pre-Greek/Mediterranean word," and suggests further connections to Middle Irish tomm "small hill," Middle Welsh tom "dung, mound." The final -b began to be silent about the time of the spelling shift (compare lamb, dumb). Modern French tombeau is from Vulgar Latin diminutive *tumbellus. The Tombs, slang for "New York City prison" is recorded from 1840.
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