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Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organised around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term "animal style", this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia.
This book shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbours to showcase worldliness and control over the "Other". In this study of enormous geographical scope, the author raises broader questions about the place of nomadic societies in the art-historical canon.
Petya Andreeva is Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at Parsons School of Design, The New School. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Andreeva has broad research interests in the arts of ancient and medieval China and Central Asia. She is the recipient of several international awards, including the UNESCO Silk Road Research Grant, Getty-ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, and a dissertation distinction from the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS). Her recent work has appeared in Early China, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Fashion Theory, Orientations, Dongyang Misulsahak, Sino-Platonic Papers, and several National Museum of Korea volumes. She is also the editor of the recently published volume The Zoomorphic Arts of Central Eurasia (2021).
