Little Guest
Such finds are not anticipated. They come from a fairy-tale land and are always unexpected, especially under underwater conditions with a muddy bottom — almost unbelievable. This is about a beautiful large black chalcedony bead. The bead was so well polished that no sediment could accumulate on it. It seemed as if it had just recently been dropped into the lake. In reality, its age is measured in millennia.
The bead is a long cylinder with a slight thickening towards the middle. Its feature was the ornament — a white wavy zigzag and a chain of circles on a black field.
In ancient times, such beads with ornamentation were produced in large quantities in India. From there, they spread to all corners of the oikumene. In Central Asia, they are not found so rarely. However, at Issyk-Kul, our bead is the first find. It indicates the economic ties of ancient herders with distant India.
The secret of applying the ornament to the stone (so that it appears as a completely natural, organic pattern) was revealed to us by the great thinker of the Middle Ages, al-Biruni. In one of his works, he noted: “On stones for rings, [carved] from chalcedony, they write what they wish, using a solution of 'potash and ammonia'; then the stone is brought close to the fire, and the writing becomes white.”
The great Khwarezmian recorded an amusing story about the use of the technology of applying inscriptions on stones by Muslim preachers, not so much for strengthening faith as for profit. One of the Shia sheikhs persistently questioned al-Biruni and finally extracted the secret of writing on gemstones. “And he inscribed on them (the stones — Ed.) the words: Muhammad, Ali, and similar ones, without caring about the accuracy and beauty of the writing. And he passed them off as natural, [saying] that they were obtained in such-and-such a place. And thus he received a lot of money for them from the Shiites.”
In our days, this ancient recipe has been simplified. For such exercises, a simple solution of baking soda is used.
The Sarybulun bead is the first evidence of economic ties of the Pre-Issyk-Kul region with distant India.
They were hardly regular in the 1st millennium BC, but they already existed.
Stone Tools of Sarybulun