Scabbard fitting with kneeling human figures

1.  (Jenny F. So, February 1998) This is an extremely rare object.  As one of the five comparable (intact) scabbard ornaments known, it ranks among the best in condition, and most importantly, has the most interesting motif (the kneeling human figure).  (See "Related Objects" field, comment #1.)

2. (Jenny F. So,  <u>Beyond the Legacy: Anniversary Acquisitions for the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery<e>, pp. 220-221)  Daggers and short swords are perfect weapons for the mobile life of hunters and herders.  They can be kept close at hand, hung from a belt, for hunting and for personal defense against wild animals or hostile foes.  Favored among pastoral peoples across ancient Eurasia, such weapons were rare in contemporaneous Chinese contexts.  Simple scabbards made of leather or wood protect the blades when not in use, but ones made of an expensive material such as bronze, as this example, may symbolize the owner's status or the weapon's ceremonial function.  Most ornamented scabbards from Bronze Age China accompanied distinctly non-Chinese weapons and implements, indicating that they may have entered China through contact with foreign peoples. 

 This ornament for the front of a scabbard is distinguished by flowing, interlacing ribbons that terminate in budlike forms on the upper half of its U-shaped frame.  Pairs of small holes along the frame's edge would have allowed the ornament to be attached to its leather or wooden sheath.  When the scabbard ornament was first published in 1970, nothing comparable was known, and it was given a conservatively late date in the Bronze Age.  Since then, excavations in north China have supplied both a geographical and a chronological context.  A total of six closely similar scabbard ornaments have been excavated from late-eleventh- to early-tenth-century B.C. burials in northwest and northeast China.  Four of these ornaments, from Baicaopo, Lingtai Xian, Gansu Province, were found with ritual bronze vessels that belonged to ministers of the Zhou court in western China.  Two more were excavated at Liulihe, Fangshan, south of Beijing, located on the eastern edge of Zhou domain.  The tombs also contained inscribed bronzes associated with the marquis of Yan, a feudatory of the Zhou king.  Both burials are located on the fringes of the Zhou realm, which is still populated by an ethnic and cultural mix of Chinese and non-Chinese origins.

 An extraordinary decorative element on this scabbard ornament -- two kneeling human figures whose profile heads rise prominently above the top of the ornament -- points further to its ties with ancient foreigners on China's borders.  Each head shows distinctly non-Chinese features, such as a large, almond-shaped eye, broad nose, thick lips, and wavy hair gathered into a bun at the back.  Of the six excavated examples discussed above, only one (that from Liulihe) displays similar human figures at the top.  Their facial features are obscured by heavy incrustation, but their hairstyles are clearly similar.  Representations of human figures in any context were extremely rare in ancient China.  The strikingly non-Chinese figures on scabbard ornaments not only add to early China's meager store of human images, but they also rank among the earliest portraits of foreigners who were at China's doorsteps by the end of the second millenium B.C..

 This scabbard ornament and its excavated counterparts from northwest and northeast China are the earliest surviving objects of their kind known to date.  Later examples, excavated from tombs in Rujiazhuang, Baoji Xian, Shaanxi Province, dating to the tenth and ninth centuries B.C., accompany similar daggers and display the same shape, but they carry simpler designs.  Related to this latter group is a second scabbard ornament in the Freer Gallery of Art, which is distinguished by its design of a spider over its web, an eccentric motif with no counterpart in conventional Chinese bronze designs.  Even though scabbards with an ornamented front appeared on the northern edge of China at the beginning of the first millenium B.C., they never quite penetrated China's mainstream tradition of bronze production.  This custom of using daggers and scabbards continued to be favored by peripheral peoples, who, by the third and second centuries B.C., semed to have converged in southwest China, around modern Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces.

3.(Jenny F. So, 24 February 2000) Title and Object name changed from "Scabbard ornament," to "Ornamental front of Scabbard."

4. (S. Allee 12 November 2008) Changed Title from "Ornamental front of Scabbard" to "Scabbard fitting with kneeling human figures." Changed Medium from "Metalwork: Cast bronze" to "Bronze."

5. (R. Anderson per J. Smith, Oct. 29, 2010) transfer of remark from Provenance Field: "1. (Jenny F. So, 3 March 1998)  The donor, Erwin Harris acquired it in the 2 June 1994 auction at Christie's, New York (lot 42) as part of the estate of Blanchette Rockefeller."