Silver Vessels from the Maykop Barrow (Oshad)

In 1897 Russian archaeologist N. I. Veselovsky excavated an Early Bronze Age burial mound on the eastern outskirts of Maykop town. He found some silver vessels covered with images, made by the technique of contour embossing. Although the landscapes, flora and fauna on these objects, most likely performing a ritual function, were conveyed with a high degree of reliability, the original meaning of the images still remains a subject of controversy. The total floristic and faunal composition of the drawings is quite extensive: two species of plants, three species of birds, eight species of mammals. Most of the researchers who previously dealt with this issue spoke about the impossibility of considering these images as ordinary drawings, believing that they have a deep meaning. The joint circular movement in the sun is considered an extremely favorable magical effect for most of the peoples of Eurasia. The large wild animals are important intermediaries between humans and gods. For example, in ancient Hittite and Siberian mythology, they represented the sacred totems “beasts of the gods” or “patron spirits”. Most likely, the drawings on the vessel “with the landscape” make up a single semantic composition, the plot, perhaps the simplest map-scheme: a bear guards the World Tree growing far in the north at the foothills of the World Mountain, where the two sacred rivers originate from

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