The hinged belt pendant from the museum’s collection is a decoration of a horse harness. A craftsman of the 12th–13th centuries made it from iron. It consists of two rectangular plates with a W-shaped end, as well as ribbed borders along the edges. The tips of the plates were made in a teardrop shape, their upper part is straight.
The craftsman decorated the front side with artistic metalworking. He performed taushing, creating teardrop-shaped notches (burrs) over the entire surface area, and made an appliqué with a thin yellow foil. In addition, the creator of the decorative item made a pin used to attach these plates with a hinge-shaped top. The craftsman attached the hinges to the plates with rivets: one on each.
The state of the Yenisei Kyrgyz — the ancient Khakass state, or, as it is also called, the Kyrgyz Khaganate — arose around the 6th century CE. By the middle of the 9th century, it occupied a huge territory for that time: from the Orkhon River in the east to the Altai in the west; in the north the border ran along the Angara River, in the south it reached the Sayan. It was a state of fortified cities and highly developed culture.
The period from the 6th to the beginning of the 9th century is characterized by scholars as the epoch of the formation of the Yenisei Kyrgyz culture. In the second half of the 1970s, the Soviet archaeologist and orientalist Leonid Romanovich Kyzlasov proposed to distinguish three independent cultures on the basis of the Kyrgyz antiquities, which followed one another: Chaatas in the 5th–9th centuries, Tyukhtyat in the 9th–10th centuries, and Askiz in the 10th–14th centuries.
