Cholpon-Ata Petroglyphs: Rock Art and Ritual Landscapes beside Issyk-Kul

What did the people who herded and hunted around Issyk-Kul three thousand years ago think worth recording, and where did they choose to record it? On the northern shore of the lake in Kyrgyzstan, the answer lies scattered across a slope of dark granite boulders above the town of Cholpon-Ata: mountain goats with sweeping horns, deer with patterned bodies, hunters, camels and riders, pecked into the rock over some two thousand years. The Cholpon-Ata petroglyphs are among the most studied rock-art sites on Issyk-Kul’s northern shore, and they are a visit on both our small group tour through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and our Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent.

Where the Cholpon-Ata petroglyphs are

Issyk-Kul lies in a long basin in northeastern Kyrgyzstan, held between the Kungey Ala-Too range to the north and the Teskey Ala-Too to the south. The 2011 thematic study of rock art in Central Asia, edited for ICOMOS, the advisory body to UNESCO, describes a band of rock-art sites running for about 60 kilometres along the foothills of the northern shore, near villages such as Chok-Tal, Tamchi, Kara-Oy, Sary-Oi and Ornok and the town of Cholpon-Ata. What sets them apart is their setting. The images are pecked into the patinated surfaces of granite boulders lying on the great alluvial fans that mountain rivers have spread across the coastal plain, and among them stand burial grounds, settlements, altars and stone statues of other periods.

At Cholpon-Ata itself, at about 1,700 metres, the study identifies three groups close together: a central one on the northwestern edge of the town, a southern one near the airport and a northern one near Bezhayevka. In 2002 to 2004, documentation for UNESCO’s Central Asian Rock Art Database project recorded some 1,200 stones bearing petroglyphs. The lake and the wider route along its shore are the subject of our article on Issyk-Kul and the northern Silk Road; this article stays with the stones.

Reading the images: a sequence of peoples

The boulders were not carved at one time. The ICOMOS study sets out a sequence. The earliest images are a small group of predators and goats made with abraded grooves and drawn in a style also seen at Saimaluu-Tash, the great high-altitude rock-art site in the Fergana range. The study treats these as the earliest images. Saimaluu-Tash’s own images are mostly Bronze Age, the period when, the study notes, the Issyk-Kul basin was home to tribes of the Semirechye variant of the Andronovo community.

Most of the images date to the Early Iron Age. From this period come large contour figures of goats and deer with ornamented bodies in what the study calls the Saka zoomorphic style, along with camels, dogs, boars, some predators, archers and images of the short sword known as the akinak. The most numerous group belongs to the period of the Usun, or Wusun: single and paired goats, rows of goats, hunting scenes and animals set face to face. The latest are Turkic: simplified goats, horse and camel riders, camel caravans, hunting scenes and tamgas, the clan marks of later nomad groups.

How the images were made

The carvers worked with what the glaciers and rivers had left them. The images were pecked into the patinated surfaces of granite boulders, which the National Geographic journalist Paul Salopek, writing in 2017, describes as lying on a glacial moraine along the shore, and the ICOMOS study places on the great alluvial fans of the mountain rivers. The ICOMOS study notes that the technique followed the stone: fine, dense pecking on smooth surfaces, and coarser, sparser pecking on rough ones. The earliest group differs again, cut as abraded grooves rather than pecked.

The same surfaces were worked again centuries later. The study records palimpsests, stones with layers of images from different periods, and older figures refreshed by later hands, so the record on a single boulder can span several cultures.

How old are the Cholpon-Ata petroglyphs?

They span roughly two thousand years or more, from the Bronze Age to the Turkic period. The ICOMOS study places the earliest small group in the Bronze Age and the majority in the Early Iron Age and Usun period, with Turkic images and tamgas later still. Published estimates vary. Salopek gave about 3,500 years for the oldest drawings and placed most between the ninth century BC and the first century AD, consistent with the study’s emphasis on the Early Iron Age and Usun periods.

Ecology on the rock

The animals on the stones are animals the carvers knew. Mountain goats, or ibex, dominate the stones, alongside deer, wild boar, camels, horses, dogs and wolves. Salopek also described argali sheep and birds, and a large boulder on which hunters pursue ibex with the help of what appear to be tamed snow leopards, a scene he reported as an estimated one to one and a half thousand years old. Whether as prey, livestock or companions, these were the creatures that people in the basin hunted, herded and lived among.

Their setting reinforces the point. The boulders lie on the alluvial fans and foothill slopes between the lake shore and the mountains, part of the country that herders around Issyk-Kul have long moved through: a case study of herding on the lake’s southern shore describes a yearly round from winter camps near the lake coast, through foothill pastures in spring and autumn, to high summer pastures, the pattern described in our article on Son-Kul and the high pastures of Kyrgyzstan.

A ritual landscape?

Why carve here? The petroglyphs share the slope with burial grounds, settlements, altars and stone statues of different periods, and that association has led some, including our Stans itinerary, to read the site as a sacred landscape rather than a gallery. Our Stans itinerary describes the figures as engraved in profile and suggests there are grounds for thinking the site was a kind of open cult temple, a place where ancient nomadic people worshipped. At neighbouring Ornok, the ICOMOS study records a sun-headed figure and solar signs among the images.

Caution is still needed, because the images alone cannot settle what the site was for. What they do show beyond doubt is that particular boulders were returned to, added to and refreshed by people of different cultures, which suggests that the place itself mattered to each of them.

Neighbours in stone

Cholpon-Ata belongs to a wider world of rock art. Saimaluu-Tash, at about 3,200 metres in the Fergana range, has been on UNESCO’s Tentative List for Kyrgyzstan since 2001 and has more than ten thousand decorated stones, most of the images dating from the Bronze Age. Across the border in Kazakhstan, our article on Altyn-Emel National Park and the Ili River corridor describes Bronze Age petroglyphs on the same Stans route, and our guide to the Gobustan petroglyphs describes another great rock-art landscape, on the Caspian shore of Azerbaijan, where hunting scenes and wild goats recur.

A fragile record

The petroglyphs face pressures that older rock-art sites in remote mountains do not. The ICOMOS study notes that the northern shore of Issyk-Kul is Kyrgyzstan’s main resort area, that many sites lie in a narrow coastal strip close to or within settlements, and that over the past fifty years a significant number of carved stones have been lost to road and housing construction, with modern graffiti often found on others. Experimental conservation was carried out at Cholpon-Ata in 1990 and 1992 and again in 2002; in 2005, conservation experts working under the UNESCO project reviewed the 2002 work and judged it negatively. Petroglyphs in the town form the open-air archaeological museum of the Issyk-Kul State Historical and Cultural Museum-Reserve. Cholpon-Ata and several neighbouring petroglyph sites are on Kyrgyzstan’s list of sites of national importance, though the study notes that no protection zones had been set up around them.

The site has been studied for a long time. The ICOMOS study notes that research on the Issyk-Kul petroglyphs has gone on for more than 150 years, that expeditions of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences surveyed and excavated sites regularly from the early 1950s, and that archaeologists from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia studied the northern-shore rock art in the 1970s and 1980s; by 1986 Cholpon-Ata was the most studied and documented site. Most of the findings, the study adds, had not been published when it appeared in 2011.

Which tours visit the Cholpon-Ata petroglyphs, and when?

Both the Stans and Silk Road tours visit, from different directions. On the Stans tour, the group reaches the lake on Day 17 from Bishkek by way of the Burana tower, described in our article on Burana and the medieval Chuy Valley, and visits the Petroglyphs Gallery of Cholpon-Ata on Day 18 on the way to Karakol. On the Silk Road tour, the group arrives on Day 16 over the Dolan Pass from Naryn, visits the Cholpon-Ata bazaar and makes an excursion to the Petroglyphs Museum the same afternoon.

Is the petroglyph site walked on foot?

Yes: the images are on boulders spread across an open, uneven slope rather than displayed in a building, so expect to walk between them. The Stans tour is rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging: participants must be in excellent health, extremely mobile and live an active lifestyle, and activities may include up to six hours a day of continuous strenuous, moderate to fast-paced activity over varied terrain. The Silk Road tour is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground.

Reading the stones on the Stans route

On the Stans tour, Cholpon-Ata comes between Burana and the high pastures of Son-Kul, so the rock art is seen between a medieval Silk Road town and a living landscape of herders and yurts. For country-level practicalities, our answers to common questions about Kyrgyzstan cover the essentials, and our four-country journey through the Stans sets this stop within the whole route.

The stones above Cholpon-Ata reward slow looking. Goats with spiralling horns, deer with patterned bodies, archers, caravans and clan marks were added over two thousand years by people who knew the same lake and the same mountains, and returned to the same boulders. Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you have the chance to read them in place. If you would like to study the route’s landscapes and history in that way, our 28-day Stans tour visits the petroglyphs on its way around Issyk-Kul.