Mountains, mounds, and monuments: The shaping of funerary landscapes and ancestral and dynastic cosmologies in Central Eurasia and beyond (Second Millennium BCE–Third Century CE).

Bronze and Iron Age mounds and monuments of Mongolia and Central Eurasia, traditionally ascribed to the ‘kurgan phenomenon’ of the steppe world, have been widely documented in contexts spatially or visually connected with elevated environments. In this chapter, the authors analyse the emplacement of second- and rst-millennium BCE barrows situated in high-altitude contexts or near unique mountain features in the Altai Mountains and neighbouring regions. Their hypothesis is that mountains may have played a central role in these funerary and monumental practices, as well as in the local ancestral cosmologies, which may have widely circulated across Late Prehistoric Central Eurasia, and beyond. In this framework, they also examine the later monumental sites of Nemrut Dağı and Arsameia, commissioned by Antiochos (86–31 BCE) in eastern Anatolia, and Surkh Kotal (second and third centuries CE) in historical Bactria (today Afghanistan). The spatial logic and symbolism underlying the sacred landscapes and funerary geographies of these different chronological and sociocultural horizons could resonate with comparable cosmological perspectives, potentially indicating a persistent link between mountains, ancestral worship, and royal power that was diversely integrated across Eurasia from the late second millennium BCE to the early centuries of the Common Era.