{"id":57,"date":"2006-10-03T20:50:21","date_gmt":"2006-10-04T00:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=57"},"modified":"2011-04-22T07:29:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T11:29:37","slug":"sphinxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/57","title":{"rendered":"Sphinxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updated below<\/span>.
\nAnother good intersection in my web surfing and book reading travels… I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a history of the silk road. In it was a picture of three sculptures Aurel Stein<\/a> excavated near Turfan:<\/p>\n

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I also noticed in prepping this post that there are digital versions of Stein’s (and other’s) books here<\/a>! More serendipity! But, to matters at hand – the monsters rang a bell, but I couldn’t figure out why. Cut to yesterday, when I was doing some Pazyryk<\/a> surfing. I ran across a detail from a felt wall hanging that I’d seen before – in Sergei Rudenko’s Frozen Tombs of Siberia<\/span> – now I can’t find the color version, but here’s a line drawing of a sphinx-thing battling a griffin-thing:<\/p>\n

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Maybe it’s just me, but the critter in the middle of Stein’s trio could be the Pazaryk beastie’s second cousin. In any event – good visuals from parts of the world I’d like to see.<\/p>\n

Update – I found a color version of the Pazyryk wall hanging here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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along with a map (reproduced, I think, from Rudenko’s book). With the map as a reference, I did a little messing around with Google Earth and produced placemarks for Turfan<\/a> (now Turpan) and my guess at where Rudenko excavated the kurgans<\/a>. If you have Google Earth installed, you should be able to click the links, open with Google Earth and fly to the placemarks. The Turpan placemark already exists within Google Earth – it just took me some hunting to find it, so I thought I’d tee it up. Pan back and take a look at the Turpan Depression – impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Updated below. Another good intersection in my web surfing and book reading travels… I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a history of the silk road. In it was a picture of three sculptures Aurel Stein excavated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-creatures"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sdqxx-sphinxes","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3780,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/3780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}