“...MY CHARIOT IS GILDED FOR AND MY HORSES ARE STOUT...” (ON SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF BURIALS WITH ANCIENT PSALIA IN STEPPE EURASIA)
The article analyzes the inventory of burials with psalia in the cultures of the Bronze Age of steppe Eurasia. The collection, where the first version of this article was submitted, had not been published for several years. During this period the authors continued to monitor the situation, noting both the new studied complexes and the new literature. A long-prepared collection has recently been released, but the accumulated data has allowed to propose an expanded version of the article, which is based on the information from 106 burial complexes. Based on the collected complexes, the authors attempt to determine the social status of the people buried with psalia. Information about the burials with psalia of several cultures (Sintashta, Petrovskaya, Potapovskaya, Alakulskaya, Pokrovskaya, Don-Volga Abashevskaya) or cultural entities (Nurtai complexes, Zeravshan version of the Bactrian-Margian archaeological complex) was collected by the authors. Throughout the new version of their work, the authors verify which of their conclusions have passed the test over the time period, however short it may be, and make adjustments in their earlier assumptions. After an analysis of the obtained information the authors concluded that the more burials with psalia are introduced into scientific discourse, the more questionable is the hypothesis that these artifacts primarily mark the carriers of military function who fought on chariots. The harness located in the grave was a token of a high social status of the deceased, but the person did not necessarily belong to a military function.