The Map of the Manichean Routes in Central Asia: South-North

Absztrakt

The Yenisei iconography of the South of Siberia was discovered by the Finnish expedition led by I.R. Aspelin (1887) and the monuments of the expeditions of 2000-2010 in the same area along the rivers Black and White Iyusy (Northern Khakassia) are taken into consideration. On the basis of the new iconography in the period of military expansion of medieval Kyrgyz in the northern Mongolian steppes (840), the Kyrgyz administration came in contact with the representatives of other syncretic religious groups on the Yenisei. The complex image is embodied in one person who was a Buddhist monk, a Manichaean envoy and a Central Asian spiritual leader. The Uighur Manichaean factor (8th century) was, to some extent, a cultural and historical impulse in the advancement of the syncretism on the Yenisei. Symbolic epigraphy: Buddhist stupas, swastika, endless crosses, cosmic signs accompany figurative reproduction of alien elements. Moreover, these reproductions are conjugated with a similar kind of epigraphy witnessed by researchers of the 20th century in the Chiglit area (Northern Ladakh). The crossroads of the Sogdian trade routes in Southern Turkestan and the northern end of trade routes on the Yenisei
indicate a Manichaean route unknown earlier.