This rectangular belt buckle was made of bronze. An openwork plate depicting two figures of standing bulls was framed around the perimeter with a floral leaf ornament. Scientists attributed this artifact to the Tes archaeological culture, which was developing over several hundred years starting from the 2nd century BCE.

Russian archaeologists Margarita Nikolaevna Pshenitsyna and Sergey Vladimirovich Khavrin noted in a 2015 paper that the Ai-Dai treasure, among the artifacts of which this object was found, belonged precisely to the “Tes period and may date back to the turn of the eras.” They pointed out that the rest of the earlier items of the treasure trove could serve the caster as a source of metal.

A large number of such buckles are chance finds. This product with bulls was discovered among the objects of the Xiongnu-Sarmatian era in a suburban area in the city of Sayanogorsk in 2002.

Large openwork belt buckles, decorated in an animal or geometric style, are the brightest examples of decorative and applied art of Central Asian nomads. The casters created them mostly from bronze, but highly artistic gold specimens are also known. Sometimes they were encrusted with semi-precious stones.

At the turn of our era, the appearance of the archaeological cultures of steppe Eurasia began to change almost everywhere, and quite significantly. The new era was called Xiongnu (Hunni)-Sarmatian. Delicate bronze buckles, plaques, and pendant rings began to appear as part of the Xiongnu military plate-decorated belt. The first two types of objects were decorated by local craftsmen with stylized, ornamented images of ungulates and predatory animals, syncretic fantastic predators, and fighting scenes.

Animal figures were executed in static or expressive poses, with elaborate ornamental details. When a pair of animals was placed on an object, they were depicted symmetrically. The Xiongnu art was characterized by the image of the animal’s torso in profile with its head turned full-face, as well as the portrayal of the amble movement of hoofed animals, that is, with a pair of outstretched and a pair of bent legs.