The Divine Bird On The Crown Of Ancient Mongolia Steppe-A Preliminary Study Of Bird-Ornamented Headdress Of The Northern Ethnic Groups

The main researching object of this paper is bird-shaped headdress,a special headdress that was popular on the grasslands of ancient Mongolia.The so-called bird-shaped headdress refers to the three-dimensional sculpture or plane relief of the bird image as the decoration on the top of the headgear,highlighting the special cultural symbols of the grassland people about birds.This type of headdress was popular among the Pazyryk culture and the northern peoples of the Xiongnu-Xianbei period during the Warring States to Han Dynasties.After a blank period,it appeared in the aristocratic cemeteries of the Turkic Khanate and the mural images of the western Uighurs in the Tang Dynasty.They were widely distributed in tombs of the Liao Dynasty as accessories for metal mourning clothes,and a small number of high-class bird-shaped gold-inlaid jade ornaments and extremely exquisite phoenix-shaped head crowns were found sporadically in museums across Inner Mongolia.This article attempts to sum up the evolution process of bird-shaped headdresses in the Mongolian grasslands under the framework of combining archaeological research with ethnic history and ethnography.Through this process of understanding,it is preliminarily clarified how the ancient nomadic tribes from different regions of the Mongolian grassland in various historical periods,designed bird-shaped decorative symbols that can represent their own cultural characteristics under the guidance of similar traditional beliefs and world views.Besides,according to what ideology they hold,it is decorated on the head clothes of female shamans,tribal leaders,khans,princesses and other special status.The structure of this paper is divided into three chapters according to the period of Qin and Han,Sui;Tang and Five Dynasties;and Liao-Jin-Yuan Dynasties.The bird-shaped headdresses of the ancient ethnic groups in the Mongolian steppe are explained in accordance with the history and ethnic cultural context of each period.In particular,we focuses on the traditional beliefs of the northern peoples(including the worship of birds of prey and the worship of the messenger bird on the world tree)for the shaping of the cultural symbols of birds,and uses this as evidence to try to demonstrate why the peoples of various periods wear the shape of birds on important parts of their head.It is based on a similar shamanic cultural foundation,but it also interacts closely with other ethnic groups or civilizations around the Mongolian grassland in different era,resulted in their morphological diversity and transformation of users.