SARMATIAN GODDESS WITH TWO HORSES

Abstract

The golden handle of the Early Sarmatian mirror from Mayerovskii III east from Volga River has an image of a goddess and two horses. The details of iconography of this personage and accompanying animals, their analogues in the Scythian and Sarmatian times are analyzed. Functionally close to her are the Scythian Snake-footed Goddess and the Yuezhi goddess on the headdress in grave 3 of Tillya Tepe. The analogues of this personage in recent times were Dzerassa in the epic of the Alans-Ossetians and Jestak of Kalash people. In the 2nd - 1st cc. BCE the Sarmatians of the European Steppe had three variants of its iconographic embodiment. Against this background, the iconography of the goddess from Mayerovskii III due to the change of ethnopolitical dominance in the region of her find is in many ways unique and it had no continuation.