Pass a kurgan — a burial mound on the steppe — and you will usually see a line of stones running east of the mound. They stand between half a metre and two metres tall. Some are just a rough stone set upright; others have a face: almond eyes, a moustache, a cup in one hand, a knife at the belt.
These are balbals.
What they are is argued over
There are two main readings, and both look at the same evidence.
First: killed enemies. Chinese sources write of the Göktürks that when a man dies, a stone is set beside his grave for every enemy he killed in life. The stones run east in a row. Some kurgans have hundreds, and that says how great a warrior the dead man was. In the next world those men will serve him.
Second: ancestors. Some balbals hold a cup, and it is an offering cup. You do not give an offering cup to the statue of an enemy. On this reading the balbal is the dead man himself, or his ancestor; it keeps the grave and receives the respect of passers-by.
Both can be true. Drawing one meaning out of a tradition spread across a thousand years and a geography reaching from the Black Sea to Mongolia would have been suspect anyway.
Why the name sits on a mahjong game
The answer is entirely visual.
What is a row of balbals? Stones with marks carved into them, set side by side. What is a mahjong board? The same thing.
The tiles were drawn on that logic: each face carries a mark, and the marks come from Turkic myth — the sky, birch and tamga suits, four elements, three spirits. When you take a tile you are breaking a row.
The Barrow floor builds that view directly: dusk, long shadows turning slowly, stone clicking. Its skeleton is a mound silhouette too.
Where to see them
Balbals stand today in open-air museums and where they were found. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and southern Siberia are the densest areas. There are none in Turkey — the practice was left behind before Anatolia.
The best collections are near Almaty and around Ulaanbaatar. Some are still standing in the middle of a field with nobody guarding them in particular. For fifteen hundred years.
The word itself
The origin of balbal is argued over too. One reading ties it to baba (father); another relates it to the Mongolian barimal, a sculpture. What is certain is that the word appears in the Orkhon inscriptions, and there it means a stone that has been set up.
So the name comes not from the stone but from the act of setting it.