Permian animal style

Permian bronze casts – Permic and Western Siberian animal style cult cast figurines – were the predominant form of Finno-Ugric toreutics of the 3rd–12th centuries CE. It was spread throughout a large area of forests of the north-eastern Urals and western Siberia from the basins of the Kama and Vyatka to the Ob. In the Middle Ages, these territories were inhabited mostly by the Ugrian tribes, ancestors of the present day Hungarians and Ob-Ugrians – the Khanty and the Mansi people. Their style is referred to as the "Permian animal style". The first collections of these works of arts and their scholarly research date back to the end of the 19th century. Despite over a century of research into the field, Perm animal style still remains one of the most mysterious cultural phenomena of Eurasia. This can be explained by the absence of written tradition of its creators and lack of external historic evidence about the creators of the bronze images in the heyday of the animal style. The golden age of cult metallurgy began immediately after the period of the Great Migrations (4–5th centuries CE) and continued in the epoch of the medieval Urals and Siberia of 6–11th centuries CE.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Permian bronze casts”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Permian animal style is bronze casts with religious meanings, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶