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Page 7

Gueghamian many picture-groups have their astral symbols which apprise that unimorphic or polymorphic animals were luminary bodies. The ancient Armenians also figured out that the firmament was such. The riddle says "The kurd wearing a white turban and standing amidst a herd of sheep, day and night looks at the world". Here the sheep represent the heavenly bodies, whilst the shepherd (the Kurd) represents the sun or the moon. In the prehistoric rock-carved pictures, as also in the above mentioned riddle, together with the herds of animals are represented anthropomorphic, large, prominent figures, with wide-extended arms, a crescent like or radial unfolding, sometimes entirely lying in the glow of lightning rays, which reveals that they are solar, lunar or lightning deities. The above-mentioned celestial divinities are often represented together in the rock-carved pictures, as the sun and the moon are very frequently mentioned together as "brother and sister" in the Armenian riddles. Many of these god-images are depicted with an accentuated male organ, even in the magic process of fertilizing the earth, as if to emphasize once more the natural tie existing between the sun and fertility. In some other cases, the anthropomorphic deities of the sun, the moon and the lightning are represented as forces protecting the animals and leading agriculture to flourish; their analogue is represented in the European rock-carved pictures with a sickle in the hand, as the Armenian goddess of fertility, with its "sickle-bearing" or "bull-herder" surnames. The importance of these pictures (profoundly significant as to their composition and their semantic role) was so great, that they continued to be carved until the late-bronze and early-iron period and decorated the walls of the sacred earthenware of Dvin (9 - 8 centuries B. C.) and unsequently spread throughout Urartian glyptic and Ancient art in the form of bronze statuettes or incised "ornamentations". Very interesting is the fallic image of the anthropomorphic sun-deity, with radiant extremities, or that of the life-tree and of the radiant celestial Pegasus, which is represented in the role of land-fertility (and not animal fertility) destower.
On both faces of another Urartian seal are represented, on one side, the thunder-lightning deity standing on a bull with its "radiating" arms upholded, on the other - the anthropomorphic figure of the "radiating" sun god kneeling before the winged disk of the Sassouryan sun deity. This second glyptic figure shows that in Urartian religion the elemental divinities are not only conceived and depicted as reciprocally related (as in the rock-carved pictures), but also wear traditional "rock-carved" picture forms, together with genuine Urartian or Assyrian additions. The difference lies in that the thunder-lightning "walking" deity of the local races here is riding a bull and is named after the Minor Asian god of the elements, Teshoub, while the equally ancient, local sun-deity is known under the Moussassyrian name of Ardin. The semantic affinities or Urartian glyptic art with the rock -carved pictures are also revealed by other comparisons of seal-incised, linear figures of dragon-snakes, reindeers, goats, mask-wearing archers surrounded by pictographic and ideographic stellar symbols.
Among the late bronze age and Urartian monuments of art and worship the analogues of the rock-carved pictures of the Gueghamian mountains clearly indicate the homogenous character of the land cultivating-animal breeding ideology that progressed on the basis of millennial traditions, upon a background of socio-economic, political and ethnical changes Absolutely identical images of solar and elemental divinities, endowed with astonishing vitality, are met everywhere - in Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, in Azerbaidjan, Central Asia, Siberia, in many countries of Europe and Africa, in the contemporary African creations of art and on the Armenian earthenware of the 19th century.


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