Regalia Untranslatable - Part Two

The Nine Royal Heirlooms, which is to say the Tibetan Imperial Regalia.

By way of introduction:  In today’s blog, Part Two of a three-part series that began with Part One, I intend to say a little bit about what regalia means, but my main aim is to establish for those who may be in doubt that a number of items imported from distant lands are indeed associated with the Tibetan imperial period. This background will help open the way for the objects that will be the subject of Part Three. Otherwise it is likely the conclusions would be regarded as, quite literally, going too far. Remember that what you have here are rewritten notes for a lecture, and not the lecture itself (I may put a link to an audio version later on), and this blog is bound to undergo revisions in the future. I expect and hope that some knowledgeable readers will offer suggestions for understanding the more obscure Tibetan terms used in the description of Tibetan regalia you see in the slide reproduced above...  Click on any slide if you wish to enlarge it.

So... What does regalia mean? One of its most common usages today is to refer to fancy ethnic clothing.  To give an example, “The local Tibetans showed up in full ethnic regalia.”* Often, even more jokingly, people speak of ‘academic regalia.’ Here we mean by it something more technical and more technically correct. Regalia are heirlooms strictly for royalty, passed down via the royal succession, perhaps also handed over (or made use of) as part of a coronation rite. They “stand for” royal power. That is about as succinct and generally applicable definition as I can come up with for regalia, so I will leave it with that.

(*More frequent are references to ethnic clothing of Native Americans or to the ritual accoutrements of Masonic orders.)

Referring back to the frontispiece, we will not get much further than discussing no. 1 on the list (to be discussed more in Part Three)... which is unfortunate because... well, some things in it are so far simply unintelligible. For myself, at the moment, the most problematic bits are in nos. 2 and 6-9, and I would love to hear your ideas about them!  No. 5 is quite clearly a silver ladle (or serving spoon) with stag [heads] decorating it. It is the one thing most often mentioned in the sources. No. 2 looks like an object called gud-sa that has ivory [or tusks] (following a parallel text reading ba-so instead of bang-so), but what is the gud-sa?  Is it Sanskrit gutsa? At the moment, my best guess is that it's the chowrie (yak-hair fly whisk) used as royal insignia in the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere.  Loma-gutsa would be the more complete Sanskrit for a hair whisk (gutsa alone means a bunched-up bundle of any kind of thing). And the fact is that many chowries do have handles made of ivory, so this, too, seems to fit. Perhaps we've found the answer to this one?  No. 3  — since gold image having water design doesn't seem to fit the context or even make very good sense — I'm thinking may require a minimal emendation so as to read gser-skud chu-ris-can, with the meaning gold thread[ed brocade robe] having water design.

Guntram Hazod, in his short essay, studies several sources for the lists (including the one in our frontispiece), but never ventures to translate or discuss in any detail possible meanings of the members of those lists. Given the difficulties, there is no wondering why. But note that translations for the less difficult items (in a much later list that is parallel to ours, but with a lot of variants) are indeed found in the main body of the book (in the translation of the 15th-century work itself, at pp. 27-28).  To quote from this section, minus the footnotes:

"...banner with a golden legend of the Ratnakūṭa-sūtra (dkon mchog brtsegs pa gser gyi ba dan can), a smooth-polished golden throne (gser khri phyi dar can) and an ivory bsdus pa ba so can.  As adornment of their body they gave [the parents] a coat [called] gsol ber byi skad can and a necklace of turquoise, whose stones had a spiral pattern (mgul g.yu 'khor mig can), as gifts of weaponry they gave them a hand-spear with magic eyes (phyag mdung 'phrul mig can) and a [stick called] rno bal chod can.  It is said these two were the hand-spear and the stick of the [royal] ancestor Mes-ag-tshom.  [Finally] they gave them a golden scoop with the image of a stag (gser skyog sha ba can) and a silvery scoop adorned with [the image of] the gna' wild sheep (dngul skyog sna ba [=gna' ba?] can)."

Rhyton from the Cleveland Museum.

I just want to emphasize here that some objects associated with Tibet’s imperial lineage are indeed foreign luxury items, like this rhyton, of Greek conception and possibly manufactured somewhere in between (Sogdian? Persian? Scythian?). The associated cup has an inscription that reads phan shing gong skyes kyi sug byang. I believe this indicates a "finger certificate" of a person with the proper name Phan-shing Gong-skyes, since there are typical elements of an Old Tibetan name. The last two syllables may be correctly read as sug byad, but in any case it appears to mean something like sug rgya, the ‘finger seals’ used in lieu of signatures in the Dunhuang documents. (The inscription has three circles with a set of three vertical lines next to them, probably together indicating the amount of metal it contains. For more discussion see Amy Heller's article of 2013...) These observations help verify its status as a valuable object that existed in the Imperial Period, even if it was owned by a some unknown person.

By now, what we see in this next slide has to be regarded as the most amazing and celebrated such foreign luxury object to survive from the period of empire. Moreover, it is associated with one of the most famous emperors in all of Tibetan history, Songtsen the Wise.

Emperor Songtsen's Beer Dispenser.

Tibetans nowadays seem to know this as Chang-snod Rta-mgo-can (beer vessel having horse head; notice how remarkably close this is in syntactical/metrical structure to most of the names of the nine regalia listed in our frontispiece), although it’s very clearly a camel head, and camel headed vessels are associated with Emperor Songtsen the Wise in the Kathang De Nga (Roberto Vitali is said to be the ultimate source of this reference, however I've managed to locate another reference in Eric Haarh, Yar-luṅ Dynasty, G.E.C. Gad's Forlag [Copenhagen 1969], p. 354:  dkor-cha rin-po-che dngul-gyi bum-pa rta'i-mgo-can gsum. Here it says the three horse-headed vessels of silver were among a large number of items placed in a tomb mound.  Haarh even makes a drawing showing their placement on his p. 355!)

Closeup of one side of Emperor Songtsen's Beer Dispenser
(click for an even closer look).

A bearded old man is rather tipsy, unable to stand on his own feet, after a night of serious drinking, so two young men are helping him find his way home.

I’ve been wondering about the material substance of this vessel, which appears to be silver with parcel-gilt figures.  As Amy Heller points out, the figures were cast separately before being attached to the silver vase. So perhaps these figures are made of electrum, a naturally occurring combination of silver and gold? And is electrum the thing Tibetans called phra-men, a term that causes translators a lot of headaches? (See this recent discussion. Manganese is another suggestion.) I’m as of now unsure whether parcel-gilt silver or electrum would be the true meaning of phra-men, but I do think it was one or the other or (less likely) both. One strong argument in favor of electrum is that it would fit into a list otherwise composed entirely of distinct metals (as we find in the list of official ranks in the Old Tibetan empire). Depicted below is an amazing early Greek-made electrum vase. I’m not sure if you will agree, but I see some remarkable similarity in the figure of the drunken old man and the figure you see here of a man stringing his bow. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It may be an illusion.

Kurgan means a burial mound, one for a Scythian king and his queen.
Although believed to be of Greek manufacture,  it depicts Scythian warriors, as well as an ancient dentist treating a patient for toothache, and one of a man helping another man tie up his boots. What you see here is an archer stringing (or “bracing”) his bow.

I’ll close this blog with few more words about regalia worldwide: The Yoruba in Africa have a myth of royal descent in which particular objects descend with Oduduwa from the sky (but here the objects perform a role in the very creation of the world). Myths of royal descent from the sky occur here and there in Eurasia, perhaps most remarkably in Japan. In Indian Buddhism we have an account of a set of five objects, royal insignia that represented the kingship of Prasenajit, namely his crown, parasol, sword, yak-tail fan and embroidered shoes (and similar or identical lists of "five insignia of royalty" may appear in some accounts of the Buddha's life). When he lost them he lost his kingship to his son. It may indeed pay to compare power symbolism (regalia?) seen on coins of Roman Emperors Caesar and Nero that might include jug, staff (lituus), cup (culullus), sprinkler (aspergillum), ladle (simpulum), tripod and libation bowl (patera), as well as such weapons as the knife and axe.  Some of these items were originally associated with various priesthoods. We should also note the nine regalia, known in quite ancient Chinese history, in the form of nine cooking tripods used for offerings to heaven. These nine Ding are sometimes said to be able to cook by themselves without the help of any fire. This is often true of other regalia in other cultures, that they are regarded as capable of performing their functions on their own (in fact, one list of Tibetan regalia is almost entirely made up of such self-acting objects), as if automated — they may in fact deserve a place in the history of automation. It’s interesting, too, to see that some of these power symbols are connected with the kitchen and with food serving, like the ladles (Tibetan, Roman) and tripods (Chinese, Roman). According to the list of the Nine Can, the first king while still in the sky inherited from his mother a ladle, a copper vessel and another obscure item. Not explicit but implied: these objects must have come down together with him. Let’s leave it at that for now.

For a small essay on Caesar's use of power objects, look here.

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(continued here)

For more on foreign luxury goods — primarily of silver and of Greek/Iranian or Hellenistic origins — that are associated with the Tibetan imperial period:

Martha L. Carter, “An Indo-Iranian Silver Rhyton in the Cleveland Museum,” Artibus Asiae, vol. 41 (1979), pp. 309-325.  —— Three Silver Vessels from Tibet's Earliest Historical Era: A Preliminary Study, Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, vol. 3 (1998), pp. 22-47. 

Stanislaw J. Czuma, “Some Tibetan and Tibet-Related Acquisitions of the Cleveland Museum of Art,” Oriental Art, vol. 38, no. 4 (1993), pp. 231-248.  —— Tibetan Silver Vessels (Beaker, Rhyton & Vase), Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 80, no. 4 (1993), pp. 131-135.

Phillip Denwood, “A Greek Bowl from Tibet,” Iran, vol. 11 (1973), pp. 121-127. Denwood here describes a "libation bowl" acquired from an aristocratic family from Lhasa by Snellgrove, that may very well be identified as one of the patera mentioned above (this idea merits close examination, I would say, especially since Denwood mentions the Greek name for the same object, phiale).

Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, “Iran to Tibet,” contained in: Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett & Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, eds., Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, Ashgate (Farnham 2011), pp. 89-115 and plates 4.1 to 4.17.

Dorothy G. Shepherd, “Two Silver Rhyta,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 53 (1966), pp. 289-311.

There is something very interesting about these items in a book edited by Dorothea Arnold entitled Ancient Art from the Shumei Family Collection.  Perhaps you can get to the page by clicking here.

I much recommend another very recent article by Amy Heller: “Tibetan Inscriptions on Ancient Silver and Gold Vessels and Artefacts,” published in the maiden issue of Journal of the International Association for Bon Research, vol. 1 (2013), pp. 259-91.  A PDF can be directly downloaded at this link. Here you will also see amazing photographs of a number of these objects.

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On Japanese ideas about the Three Regalia (mirror, sword and jewel), as well as the Ten Sacred Treasures, there is a remarkable new essay by Kadoya Atsushi, "Myths, Rites and Icons," contained in: Bernard Scheid & Mark Teeuwen, eds., The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion, Routledge (London 2006), pp. 269-283.

On Chinese ideas about regalia (but not on the nine tripods we have mentioned here), see the chapter ‘Ritual Robes and Regalia’ in William Edward Soothill, The Hall of Light: A Study of Early Chinese Kingship, Lutterworth Press (London 1951), pp. 194-204.

On two of the Roman power objects, see Roberta Stewart, “The Jug and Lituus on Roman Republican Coin Types: Ritual Symbols and Political Power,” Phoenix, vol. 51, no. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 170-189. These may have been meant to serve as regalia in some sense, yet in their origins they were objects associated with various priesthoods. When compared with the nine regalia of Tibetan lore, the Roman set lacks precisely the objects from the father — the court-display objects of seating and attire — although otherwise the objects from the mother and brother are remarkably comparable.

A "water design" in a Chinese robe, called chu-ris in Tibetan;
the motif is common in Tibetan art, too.

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Added comments:

1. DanMonday, April 03, 2017

   In 2015, Joachim Karsten posted an article at academia.edu and opened it for discussion. Just for the record, I put up the title here: “A Notice on an Alleged ‘Silver Seal’ of the Srong-btsan sgam-po Emperor of Tibet.” He prefers to call the jug a carafe, and promises yet another article on the subject. We'll be on the lookout for it. May peace increase!

   
   
2. 
   DanFriday, May 03, 2019

   Just now in Japan and in coming days in Thailand, royal coronations are taking place, so the press has been paying some attention to the 3 Japanese regalia that came down from the sky, as well as Thai regalia that in fact closely correspond to the regalia of Prasenajit, as mentioned in this blog. For the Thai regalia, look at this BBC story:
   https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47931922

   
   
3. 
   DanFriday, May 03, 2019

   PS: But surely the BBC story is in error when it says that the crown was a European concept introduced in recent times. Really? They have no idea about the use of crowns and diadems in India in the distant past? A little imperial ethno-narrowness on display here, you think?

   
   
4. 
   DanTuesday, October 22, 2019

   Now, in 2019, a series of investiture and enthronement ceremonies are taking place for the new Emperor of Japan Naruhito. You can see a fascinating video lecture (part of a series of Evans-Wentz lectures) by Helen Hardacre on the history of Japanese enthronement rites and their changes through history here:
   
   https://youtu.be/ZuTLG7sC8W4
   
   You can see in a video within the Hardacre video of the May 1, 2019 presentation of the regalia: a boxed sword, a set of jewels in a square box, and also two velvet bags containing official seals.