National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

guidance. The centre for the Inner Asiatic rock carvings is the Sayan mountains,
i. e. Uryangkhai (Tanu-tuwa) and the South Siberian district of Minusinsk. Ac-
cording to Tallgren's map the nearest rock picture to that of Quruq-tagh is situ-
ated some 700 km. to the north of it at Kurchum in southern Altai. To the south-
west none has been found nearer than Ladakh 1300 km. away. To the east, a group
of rock carvings which I studied in Lang-shan lies about 1700 km. away (Bergman
1935 a, Fig. 6). The nearest is situated about 360 km. to the SSE and was dis-
covered by Dr. Hedin in 1901.¹

The Quruq-tagh rock carving therefore occupies a most important geographical
position, forming a link between rock pictures at tremendous distances.

The main features of the topographical position which might have any bearing
on the carving are the following: proximity to water, vegetation and good hunting
grounds. The water now washes the very rock, the vegetation is luxurious but, as
the valley is narrow, insufficient to feed any large heards. The hunting in Quruq-
tagh is good. Another important feature is that a road or at least a path passes the
place. Most of these characteristics are also typical for the rock-pictures in N.
Mongolia and S. Siberia. If we turn to the subject-matter of our petroglyph we also
find analogies on many other Asiatic rock pictures.

As already mentioned, the animal representations form the major part of the
Quruq-tagh petroglyph, and most of the figures no doubt represent wild animals
such as ibex, antelope, deer, i. e. members of the local fauna. It is somewhat uncer-
tain if the camels are meant to be wild or domesticated, especially as the eastern
Quruq-tagh is one of the few places where wild camels exist. As the humps are
drawn very high, indeed, exaggeratedly so, and wild camels never grow fat enough
to develop anything like erect humps, the pictures most likely show domesticated
camels. Only one or two of them have a rider.

Most of the horses have riders. Among the confusion of separate figures with-
out any obvious connection there may be a couple of real scenes: the two riders
with dogs (or colts?) following, the mounted man driving two horses (below the
trees) and the two men each clutching the tail of a goat-like animal. There are no
love scenes such as abound on e. g. Scandinavian rock pictures, only one man is
ithyphallic, and only one has his sex marked in the same way as several figures of
the Sulek engraving (Tallgren 1933, Fig. 11; this part of the Sulek rock picture
shows several analogies with the older facies of our petroglyph though the number
of men and beasts are in inverse proportions).

The trees are possibly the tree of life or the tree of the world, the hands, the feet,