A Central Asian Silver Dish with a Greek Mythological Scene found in Dulan (Qinghai)

One metal dish from Reshui royal Tibetan graves (Dulan, Qinghai Province) recently entered the collection of the Dulan County Museum after being confiscated by Chinese police. The scene on the dish is not easily distinguishable because of the bad state of preservation of this metalwork. The present short paper discusses the possibility that this scene could be identified as an episode of the Trojan War that included Ajax and Cassandra.</jats:p

On an Enigmatic Deity with a Dragon on a Chorasmian Silver Bowl from Dagestan

At least five specimens constituting the small group of Chorasmian silver vessels present an image of the Mesopotamian goddess Nana who was very popular in pre-Islamic Central Asia. One silver bowl found in Dagestan at present kept in the State Hermitage Museum is embellished with the image of a deity sitting on a dragon whose identity is not clear. Scholars considered this deity to be a woman because of her clean-shaven face, long hair and garments. However, Kushan rulers had been representing on their coins one Zoroastrian god as a woman since the 2nd century A.D. He was Tir, the god of the planet Mercury who had connections to the Avestan rain god Tishtrya. Despite the problematic associations between Tir and Tishtrya, Central Asian peoples had superimposed this Zoroastrian god to Mesopotamian Nabu who was the patron of scribes and the original “husband” of Nana. Nabu’s symbolic animal was a dragon that is very similar to the one on the Chorasmian bowl from Dagestan. Most likely, Chorasmian artists kept reproducing on their metalwork iconographic elements that originated in Mesopotamia after adapting them to their own religious and cultural sphere.</jats:p

The Spread Wings Motif on Armenian Steles: Its Meaning and Parallels in Sasanian Art

AbstractThis paper is a study on the so-called “spread wings”—a particular element of the Sasanian art that is attested also in other regions of the Persian Empire in Late Antiquity, including the western coast of the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus. The spread wings can be observed on Sasanian coins above the royal crowns, which are considered specific for every Sasanian sovereign, supporting astronomical elements, like the crescent, star, and, possibly, the sun. The Arabs and the peoples of the Caucasus who adopted Christianity used the spread wings element as a pedestal for the cross. In Armenian literature, there are some connections between those spread wings and glory, so that a kind of pedestal could be considered a device to exalt or glorify the element above it. The floating ribbons attached to Sasanian crowns had possibly the same meaning and were adopted also outside of proper Persia. In the same way, it could be considered correct to identify those luminaries on Sasanian crowns as divine elements connected with the religion of pre-Islamic Persia. </jats:sec