A Research On Deer Symbology Of The Bronze Age Of Mongolian Plateau

The deer worship tradition of Mongolians has developed from the ancient time influencing by their beliefs, thoughts, totem symbols, everyday life, tradition, nature, climate, geographical region etc. This religious belief was represented in ancient stone pictures, deer stones, monuments and findings and eventually was inherited to us through the influence of intellectual culture such as traditional oral talks, legends, stories, riddles and games. Therefore these are the source to prove that Mongolians have always worshiped deer as a symbol of totemism that have positive characteristics.Although these resource materials have been analyzed from the aspect of many kinds of scientific fields such as archeology, history, ethnography, linguistics, literature there isn't any research that analyzed them from the aspect of fine art theories and principles. We tried to fill out the space by making the first steps to research the area.By conducting the comparative analyses on the characteristics of deer description patterns of the historical and cultural monuments that belong to the bronze-age we tried to explain the deer description method, time correlation, origin, traditional features from the aspect of principles and theories of fine art. We compared different deer drawing patterns on stone pictures, deer stones, monuments, findings and tried to analyze the structure of composition, form, symbolic relation. Furthermore we tried to conduct analyses on the model of abstraction of the artists of the ancient time.Our research work consists of five main parts.In the first part we tried to analyze the differences of the pattern of the deer descriptions on the stone pictures, deer stones that belong to bronze-age.In the second part we had a comparative analyzes on the deer stones that belong to the end of bronze-age and beginning of the metal-age and tried to explain deer description using the principles of fine art such as action, configuration and proportion.In the third part, the analyses were conducted on the small or half elevated bronze sculptures of Ordos that belong to bronze-age.In the fourth part, we tried to compare all the characteristics of deer descriptions of the sculptures and monuments that were presented in the previous parts and studied the pictures as the expression of the way of thinking of the artists. We concluded that the deer drawing is one of the vital representations of animal describing forms of nomadic arts.In the fifth part, the description of deer in other historical and cultural inheritance such as legends, customs, and games was compared.Our research work has been expending the frame of the fine art and art research area in a certain way and if the farther research is held in the base of previous materials classifying the geographical region, the characteristics of composition, meaning, context, symbolic meaning, sense of abstract thinking, beliefs it would be significance in science.