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In 2018, some tombs that belonged to early Tibetan-related elites at the site of Dulan (Qinghai, China) were disturbed by looters' activity. One of the gold objects confiscated by local police officers displays a curious composite creature that could be called a winged ichthyocentaurus or triton. This creature includes the torso of a dressed man with a beribboned crown holding a rhyton -like horn and a coiled fish tail. This article discusses the possible function and meaning of this type of composite creatures that appear also on some artifacts from Central Asian archaeological sites and Sino-Sogdian funerary monuments. The iconography of the hybrid creatures seems to be rooted in Greek art. Sogdians possibly transmitted it to the Tibetan Plateau along the so-called Silk Road in the 7th-8th cc. The horn held by the creature is reminiscent of one attribute of the ancient Chinese wind god "Feng Bo" (风伯, "Master of the Wind") that has been depicted in the funerary milieu since the Han period (202 B.C.-220 A.D.) because of its association with immortality. This object could allow us to identify the iconography of the Sogdian wind deity Weshparkar (Avestan Vayu) who sometimes had a "wind blowing horn" like in the Dulan gold plaque. The study of this specific detail could help to shed light on the multicultural background of early Tibetan societies that definitely had contacts with Central Asia and China along the Silk Road trading network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at discussing the possible origin and meaning of winged fantastic creatures, which appear quite often in the 6th century A.D. Sogdian funerary monuments in China and specifically on the Shi Jun 史君 one (580 A.D.). It cannot be ruled out that composite creatures like the one on the Shi Jun funerary monument originated from the Greek ketos and hippocampus that were introduced into Persia, Central Asia and northwestern India after the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great. The impact of Chinese cultural elements on this little investigated group of funerary monuments contributed to create a long forgotten unique and still enigmatic artistic production that scholars called "Sino-Sogdian". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]