A small, irregular oblong stone is one of the very many and varied things that can exemplify art. his stone has been extensively worked. Set at an angle to the rectangle of the mottled face is an incised rectangle enclosing a design. It also has two gouged depressions beside one another along one of the longer edges, outside the incised rectangle. Along a short side of the stone on this face, a section of the edge has been worked away to form part of a funnel. Within the rectangle, also incised, is a stylized animal. A similar, though less deeply carved design, is to be found on the opposite face. his stone is a mold.98 An unfinished or rejected perforated bronze plaquette in a private collection representing an animal helps us to ascertain the purpose of the mold, for it was derived from one that must have been very similar.99 he animal is what is generally described as a griffin. Griffins are characteristic of the metalwork of the Avar people from at
54. Carved out of limestone and taking the form of a griffin, this mold is for casting openwork metal ornaments, perhaps for a belt. It belonged to an Avar metalworker living in the Balkans in the mid - to late seventh century. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M.
Sackler Museum.
Least the second half of the seventh century and onward. Our stone is an Avar metalworker’s mold, probably from the mid - to late seventh century.
Who were the Avars? What was the griffin-embellished metal pla-quette used for? It is in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, but is such a thing properly an artwork? Even if the bronze piece might be art, what about our mold? Is it not merely an antiquarian curiosity, not even to be dignified with archaeological status, having been severed from the context of its site, which remains unidentified? Yet it exhibits aesthetic qualities resulting from human action: a complex set of grooves and indentations to form not only the matrix from which another object could be made, but a representation. hat carving is an ambitious attempt to convey the likeness of a creature forming part of an unknown mythology, suggesting an entire life of the imagination and a narration far beyond the bare function of whatever the object might be.
He mold might serve as an example of metallurgy, so it would be fitting for categorization in science and medicine, or anthropology and archaeology. Yet if its aesthetic qualities command attention, the stone might be thought to belong in an art museum. his is when philosopher Nelson Goodman’s terms come into play, as he asks the question “When is art?” as opposed to “What is art?”100 Whether it is art or not in an ontological sense, it functions as art. In practical, even if not in philosophical terms, we can acknowledge it to be art.
More than 5,000 graves at Avar sites have been excavated in Hungary and neighboring countries. Among the most conspicuous finds have been belt fittings. Wealthy Avars wore elaborate belts, sometimes more than one, adorned with bronze, gilded bronze, or gold fixtures. Some of these fixtures were in large part decorative, but some also allowed useful objects, such as an arrow quiver, to be attached.101 Who were the people who made and wore such things?
Little is known about the Avars in comparison with other migrating peoples of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe.102 In 558, Avar envoys caused a stir in Constantinople. hey were a Mongol horse-riding, nomadic people who had come from the eastern steppes. he men wore their hair in long, beribboned plaits. A late seventh - or early eighth-century gold flask in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, derived from Persian Sassanian silver prototypes, gives some idea of their idealized self-image.103 It depicts a mounted, spear-bearing warrior clutching a prisoner who is on foot by the head. It also indicates the skill in goldsmiths’ work fostered in a society that had acquired various provincial Byzantine characteristics. As warriors, the Avars were not only spear-bearers, but mounted archers, like the Huns who had irst so troubled Europe some 150 years previously. hey introduced an innovation that was to make a huge difference to mounted warfare, giving them an immediate advantage over their adversaries: iron stirrups. A pair of iron stirrups in the Balatoni Muzeum, Keszthely, Hungary, is inlaid with silver wire, once again giving an indication of the Avars’ metalworking skills and love of embellishment.104 heir dedication to their horses and their perceived need for them in the afterlife are suggested by the burials of wealthy men with their mounts.105 Unlike most other migrant peoples, they never adopted Christianity, either Catholic or Arian, and only a few inscriptions of indecipherable characters on various objects indicate fragments of a (still unknown) written language. We are dependent on Byzantine, Lombard, and Frankish chronicles, and on archaeological evidence for our knowledge of the Avars.
In 567, they allied with the Lombards to destroy the Gepids, a people then inhabiting the central Carpathian basin in the northern Balkans. Successive Byzantine emperors had tried to play the three groups off against one another while paying them subsidies in gold. Justin II (r. 565578) cut of subsidies to the Avars and prepared to support the Gepids against the Lombards. he Gepids’ center was the old Roman city of Sirmium.106 When the Avars and the Lombards attacked the Gepids, Justin intervened to retain control of Sirmium. After the Gepid defeat, the Germanic Lombards, notionally Arian Christians, perceived the danger they were now in from their recent allies, and in 568, moved into northern Italy, leaving Norricum and western Pannonia deliberately devastated to deter Avar pursuit.
Between 573 and 626, Constantinople sent no fewer than four-and-a-half million solidi (about 44,000 pounds) of gold to the Avars as subsidies and ransoms. In 626, the Avars attacked the city. heir siege failed, and they retreated into chaos as Slavs and Bulgars revolted in the rear. his was the end of Byzantine gold tributes, and any mention in Byzantine chronicles. he Avars retained the ability to intervene periodically in western European affairs until the future Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (r. 768-814), then king of the Franks, invaded their lands along both banks of the Danube in 791. Within five years, the Franks had destroyed the internally fragmenting Avar realm, and, as the phrase has it, they “disappeared from history.”
Of course, the Avars did not disappear physically. hey disappeared in a political and cultural sense. Yet what might ever have been authentically Avar? Was the maker of our mold undoubtedly a descendent of a Mongol people who had ridden down from the steppes to cross the Danube in the middle of the sixth century? he physical anthropologist Pal Liptak has collated an analysis of the skulls from innumerable Avar period gravesites and found that only 17 percent can be described as Mongol. he Carpathian basin was inhabited by a considerable variety of ethnic types during the 230 years of Avar ascendancy. Even if the people Liptak describes as Mongol were prevalent, though far from exclusively so, among the skeletons identifiable by grave objects as belonging to the top ranks of Avar society, the population as a whole included what must have been peoples of Mediterranean, Germanic, Slav, and Bulgar origin at least.107 he maker and user of our stone mold might have been from any of these groups.
In the wake of recent conflicts in the Balkans that involved appeals to notions of “nation” and “people,” the historian Susan Reynolds has cautioned us that such gatherings are not finally racially determined, but may exemplify what the social anthropologist Benedict Anderson has termed “imagined communities”: communities that are principally politically defined and united, first, by shared laws and customs, and, second, by myths of common descent.108 Such groups were not necessarily stable and, as Reynolds remarks, “groups that are now perceived as the founders of modern nations were not always more cohesive than those whose names have disappeared.”109 he name of the Avars has not disappeared, but much of what distinguished them—including language—has.
Even exemplary Avar forms, such as our mold, must be regarded as the product of what the Martiniquan literary theorist Edouard Glissant calls metissage: cultural intermixture that stresses the value of reticulation—a network of relationships—rather than filiation or lines of descent.110 Our stone, itself literally a matrix, becomes the matrix in another sense, not of cultural authenticity as it is understood to pertain to a classical ethnic social entity—the Avars narrowly construed—but of an ever-shifting network of cultural processes that exists only in terms of ever-shifting relations among people over both space and time. What Glissant terms relation is the key to the aesthetic and historical comprehensibility of this matrix, indeed, of this stone. his stone, so superficially negligible, becomes the mode of entry into an entire world of cross-cultural and cross-temporal relation, taking us from the Balkans in late antiquity to the Harvard Art Museums and to Tangible hings, by means of a poetics that is the very stuff of historical understanding.
World History
