The Ideology Of The Ninth And Tenth Centuries 119
zoomorphic companions.474 D. Dudko presumes that this depiction represents
a goddess sitting on two horses or birds.475
Examining the images of a tree and deer on a pottery series, dated from
the sixth to seventh century and found in the Urtseki hillfort in Dagestan,
L. Gmyria accepts the theory of A. Golan that they depict “the Holy Triad”, in
which the tree is the symbol of the Great Goddess.476 According to S. Tolstov,
the early form of the Khwarezmian tamgas consists of a simplified “image of a
female figure with the tendency of transforming into a tree, merged with two
horse protomes with their heads bent outward”.477 He sees the composition of
a woman with horses (horsemen) as a central politico-religious symbol of the
Sarmatian tribes.478 From this point of view, the assumption of V. Flerova that
the bident and trident signs, often found in Khazaria, could be graphically sim-
ilar to the above-cited composition, seems logical. They resemble an anthro-
pomorphic figure with raised arms—not the whole composition, clearly, but
only the central part of it. These symbols could also be interpreted as a depic-
tion of a supreme deity. Such symbols have been found on clasps from com-
plexes associated with Great Bulgaria, but the most developed tamga system
of bident and trident symbols is found in Sassanid Iran. It could be assumed
that the Saltovo tamgas are in fact a simplified version of the Iranian ones,
which symbolize sacralized sovereignty and are associated with temple work-
ers. As was already mentioned, the trident and bident were known as symbols
of the ruling family among many peoples in Eurasia and in particular (in the
preceding period) among the Khwarezmian Siyavushids and the dynasty of
Bosporan kings (first to third century). The tamgas from the Sogd region, of
474 Flerova 2001a, 63–64; according to Aksenov 1998, 8, “among many peoples, depictions of
horses with bodies, curved in opposing directions, or only their heads were drawn on
objects possessed by women, since they were associated with the cult of the fertility god-
dess, the mother of all living things”.
475 Dudko 2004, 37–40.
476 Gmyria 2008, 22. A certain similarity with the Dagestan pottery images of the world tree
can be found in the Oghuz molded pottery from the settlement near Samosdelka (proba-
bly Itil?), dated from the tenth to the eleventh century (Gmyria 2008, 26). The hillfort near
Urtseki is one of the possible locations of the city of Varachan, described in the sources
as an administrative and religious center of the Caucasian Huns. On the Holy Triad, see
Golan 1993, 159–164.
477 Tolsov 1948a, 185.
478 Tolsov 1948a, 186.