Lara Fabian, PhD

Assistant Professor of Iranian Archaeology

Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

UCLA

Abstract:

Tamgas are markers of identify, ownership, and authentication known from steppe contexts. They are attested from the middle of the1st millennium BCE and continued in use well past antiquity. Most research on these symbols has focused on their appearance within pastoralist communities, emphasizing their wide and variable patterns of use across the steppe.

Tamgas, however, quickly move beyond the steppe. Appearing on Achaemenid glyptic, Arsacid coins, and Sasanian reliefs, they become a regular—if intermittent—feature within the visual repertoires of non-steppe societies in Western Asia, particularly those connected to the Iranian world.  Their presence in these contexts complicates conventional distinctions between “steppe” and “sedentary” spheres and suggests the existence of shared or overlapping semiotic fields across these domains.

In this paper, I explore the evidentiary and interpretive challenges involved with studying the tamga phenomenon, both in the steppe and beyond. Even in the face of these challenges, I argue that these simple linear signs point to the need to reconsider how relationships between sedentary empires and the steppe are conceptualized, and to expand our understanding of the density, durability, and material grounding of connections across putative cultural borders.

Bio:

Lara Fabian is an assistant professor of Iranian archaeology in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA whose work focuses on Southwest Asia in the Iron Age and later. Her current book project considers the material imprint of empire in its afterlife through an examination of the post-Achaemenid world. Her scholarship is informed by historiographic and reception studies on the development of thought about antiquity and the question of Iran and the Caucasus in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Eurasia. As part of this wider research, she has co-directed collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork in Azerbaijan since 2016. Before starting at UCLA, she worked on the “Beyond the Silk Road” ERC project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.