(Modern) Mongolian horse herder
Photo: P. Enkhtuvshin

So far, all we have on the Botai culture of 3700 BC is the archaeological evidence  documented in this link and prior posts 104, 145, 146, 147 and 148 and the previously cited Carnegie sites and Wikipedia articles.

• 90% of their meat diet was horse.
  • 10% was moose, red deer, aurochs, saiga antelope, and domestic dog.
• Congregated in a permanent settlement of up to 160 houses in their primary site: Botai.
  • Individual houses in rows with streets and around plazas.
• Houses constructed with:
  • floors dug out to hip height,
  • walls of sod  or mud brick,
  • roofs constructed of saplings, covered with clay, and insulated with horse dung.
  • most with corners oriented north, south, east and west.
• Domesticated horses:
  • milked them, and fermented milk into koumiss as their alcoholic beverage,
  • rode or used them as draft animals based on evidence of bit wear to teeth and tentative changes in morphology. 
  • kept them in corrals.
  • would have herded them to feed on favored Artemisia and feathergrass, likely assisted by dogs.
• Domesticated dogs like samoyeds which helped with herding and hunting horses, and as meat in a pinch.
• Leather products:
  • Wore horsehide clothing.
  • Dressed rawhide ropes, reins, straps, and laces.
  • Used horse jaw tools to stretch and smooth leather.
• Made rope from tree branches.
• Made lightly fired ceramic bowls, in which traces of mare’s milk were identified.

I cannot make justifiable statements about the Botai religion or spiritual beliefs in the Steppes based upon the Wikipedia articles on Proto-Indo-European Religion, Proto-Indo-Iranian Religion, Prehistoric Religion, Zoroastrianism, Rig Veda and others. After all, going back 5,800 years, 800 years earlier than the first records written by mankind, is a bit of a stretch for nonmaterial artifacts.

I was discouraged, but I refused to quit looking, and searched for what is known about the religion of people in the Steppes, especially further east. As it says in the Bible, “He who searches will find,” and after a little prayer, I did.

The first two bullets in the first section overview of the religion of a wide ranging array of existing tribes (Altaians, Tartars, Turks, Mongols, Burjats and Yakuts) of the steppes east of the ancient Botai culture, provide my answer. Therein lies enough to use in my novel:

• Their universe is divided into three spheres:
  • upper world is sky,
  • middle world is earth,
  • lower world is hell.
  • each world is divided into layers, the top world having seven or nine layers.
• Steppes people looked up for their good gods into multi-layered heavens,
• At the top layer of the sky exists the supreme God whose name is “the Sky” or “the Creator.”
• The sons and messengers of “the Creator” occupy the lower levels of the sky with decreasing status.
• We live in the middle world, and you and I have our own ideas about that, and can construct our own layers.
• We’ve each heard about hell, and we can each divide it into layers that fit our beliefs.

This spiritual framework is enough for me to structure the spiritual side of my novel’s earthbound steppes characters and their spirit worlds above and below.

Interestingly, the Sky god played the key role in the earliest Sumerian creation myth (see Posts 73 and 74). This “coincidence” likely tracks back to their Ubaid predecessors, and I will now factor that plot twist into play in my upcoming novel. Wow! A twofer. 

When I started this post, I did not have an answer to the pressing questions underlying my characters’ beliefs, and needed it now, because the issue has been coming up in the plot, and I’ve been struggling with how to deal with it. Writing this post has been an eight-hour real-time record of my search for the spiritual world in which my characters are set. For those of you who do research, I offer this as proof that you will find what you search for, if you don’t give up.

Thanks for visiting,

R. E. J. Burke