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(MNA)
-- A
brick bearing bas-reliefs of two naked winged goddesses was
unearthed at the 3000-year-old site of Rabat near the town of
Sardasht in Iran's West Azarbaijan Province, the Persian service of
the Cultural Heritage News (CHN) agency reported on Saturday.
Last
week, the team of archaeologists working at the
site had discovered a brick bearing bas-reliefs of
four winged goddesses.
“This
is first time such motifs (naked goddesses) were
discovered in an archaeological site of the
country. The importance of the discoveries created
a worldwide media frenzy,” said Reza Heydari, an
archaeologist of the West Azarbaijan Cultural
Heritage and Tourism Department.
“The
discovery of naked winged goddesses in the region
has astounded everyone. The goddesses are lean.
Thus the archaeologists believe that they are not
goddesses of reproduction and fertility,” he
added.
“Naked
goddesses have frequently been seen in ancient
Greek art, but the goddesses, which are wingless,
are considered symbols of fertility. The newly
discovered goddesses have two wings leaning toward
below. They have also two arms opened
horizontally. The bodies of the goddesses are
white and one of them has some rings on her belly.
The wings have been colored yellow and white. Both
of the images are headless and one of them is
legless. The archaeologists have not been able to
determine what the naked goddesses symbolized or
how the colors were produced and used in the
region during that time,” Heydari explained.
In
its higher strata, Rabat dates back to some time
around 1000 BC. It is one of the richest
archaeological sites of northwestern Iran.
Archaeologists had estimated the site covered only
a four-hectare area, but new studies have extended
the area to 25 hectares.
The
team of archaeologists working in the region
believes that Rabat Tepe was the seat of
government of Musasir about 3000 years ago.
Musasir
was a semi-independent buffer state bordering
Mannai between Assyria and Urartu. It was a vassal
state of Assyria yet Urartu had some claims over
it.
Experts
believe that it was an ancient city probably
located near the upper Great Zab River between
Lake Urmia and Lake Van in Anatolia. Musasir was
particularly important during the first half of
the 1st millennium BC and is known primarily from
reliefs and inscriptions obtained during the reign
of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who captured it in
714 BC. According to the inscriptions, Sargon
first plundered the palace and storerooms that
belonged to Urzana, the king of Musasir, and then
seized the even richer contents of the temple of
Haldi, the god of the ancient kingdom of Urartu.
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