Among the various handicrafts found in the Urartian centers of Armenia, there are objects brought here from various countries of the ancient East. An important place among them is occupied by the glyptic-this most mobile and most easily entering the new world part of material culture. Assyrian seals were found in three Urartian centers: Erebuni ¹ and Argishtikhinili ², built by King Argishti I in the eighth century BC, and Teishebaini ³ , built in the seventh century. B.C. by Tsar Rusa II. In Erebuni in 1955, during excavations of the great hall with columns in the temple of the god Khaldi, I. M. Loseva found a cylindrical seal made of light yellow steatite (Fig. The seal is kept in the Armenian History Museum in Yerevan. The surface of the seal shows a man shooting at a wild goat, and a bird flying over the goat. A small man with long hair and a wedge-shaped beard. He is dressed in short, fringed clothing. Seals depicting a king, a god, or a hunter shooting an animal with a bow are common in early Assyrian glyptics. Under her influence, this story also appears on Babylonian late-Assyrian seals at the end of the second millennium BC. The seals of the Middle Assyrian period have images of a kneeling archer aiming at a fleeing horned animal or a fantastic Naass character. Especially often seals with this plot are found in the New Assyrian period, at the end of the IX-beginning of the VIII century BC. ⁴ The shooter either aims at a fallow deer at full speed, then hits a winged demon, then chases a fantastic horned creature with the body and head of a horse or a character with the head of a bird. Especially close to the print from Erebuni is the print from the Berlin Near East Museum, which shows a kneeling archer drawing a bowstring. Despite the different materials from which all these prints are made and the different quality of execution, the images on them have common stylistic features: the figures of people are elongated, the contours are drawn very clearly, the details are conveyed in parallel straight lines, as on the print from Erebuni. Together, they can be dated to the 8th century BC.

The hunting scene is also decorated with a cylindrical bone seal originating from the citadel of Erebuni. It shows a masked man, a wild goat, two dogs attacking her, and a tree ⁵ . Another hunting scene is depicted on a faience seal found by B. B. Piotrovsky and Teishebaini: a man shoots a bow at a serpent, above which a crescent moon is placed. Between the figures of a man and a snake is a highly stylized image of a tree. Several seals with similar images were found in Ashur.

Among the Assyrian seals of Teishebaini, the faience seal depicting the struggle of a man with a goat is of particular interest ^.6 Another beautiful print made of faience shows the struggle of a kneeling man with a mythological four-legged winged creature with a human head. A similar scene is often found on Assyrian cylinder seals. The third faience seal shows a man with a bow in his hand, shooting at a horned animal standing in front of him. Between the figures is a stylized image of a tree above an animal figure - an ideogram of the god Ninurta. The ceramic seal depicts the symbol of the god Ea - a fantastic character with a goat's front body and a fish's back. In front of him stands a rooster, above which are placed a star and a crescent moon. The carnelian seal depicts two figures of walking birds with human heads, with a star and a crescent moon above them. The steatite seal depicts two goats in front of a tree; a plot that is very common in real life, has come to symbolize fertility. On another, badly damaged steatite seal, there are remnants of images of a horse, foal and bush. Cca-

^{Loseva I. M.} 1 Excavations of the Urartian fortress of the city of Irpuni (Erebuni) on the Arin-berd hill / / St. 1955. N 3. pp. 144-150; Oganesyan IL. Arin-berd I. Yerevan, 1961.

^{Martirosyan A. A.} 2 Argishtikhinili. Yerevan, 1974.

^{Piotrovsky B. B.} 3 Karmir-Bloor, L., 1970.

^{Delaportc L.} 4 Catalogue des cylindres orientales Musee du Louvre. I-II. P., 1920-1923.

^{Khojash S. I., Trukhtanova N. S., Oganesyan N. L. 5 Erebuni.} Architecture, monumental murals. Khudozhestvennoe crafto [Art craft], Moscow, 1979.

^{Piotrovsky B. B.} 6 Karmir-Bloor I. Yerevan, 1950. pp. 77-80.

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Rice. Assyrian seal from Erebuni depicting a hunting scene. Light yellow talcum powder. Height 3.7 cm, diameter 1.3 cm. Yerevan, State Historical Museum of Armenia.

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benno is interested in the chalcedony seal with the image of the goddess Ishtar sitting on a throne between two standards, in front of her - a king or priest, behind-a mythical creature, above which a star and a crescent are placed. The image of the goddess of fertility sitting on the throne was consonant with Urartian myth-making. From Van comes a bronze statue of the goddess Arubani in a long dress and a scarf thrown over her head. Similar two images of the goddess in the coinage technique-on a silver medallion from Van and a silver medallion from Teishebaini - were identified by I. M. Loseva as images of the goddess Arubani7 .

Along with Assyrian seals, samples of Egyptian glyptics were also found in the Urartian centers of Armenia: seals and scarabs. One of the latter shows the sphinx and the hieroglyphs "Men-kheper-ra". The scarab may have belonged to a high priest of that name who lived during the XXVI dynasty. Several scarabs from Teishebaini depict an altar ⁸ . According to B. B. Piotrovsky, Egyptian objects came to the Ararat Valley through Syria or the Main Caucasus Mountain Range ^.9 It is interesting to note that an Urartian seal with an image similar to that on one of the Egyptian amulets was found in Teishebaini. Is this a coincidence, or did the Urartians specifically choose an amulet with symbols close to them? There is no doubt that the Urartians used a faience Egyptian amulet with the head of the god Bes, found in the urban settlement of Erebuni, for its direct, protective purpose ^.10 Judging by the iconography, the amulet dates back to the XXVI dynasty.

It should be noted that the Urartians were the first consumers of foreign glyptics in the territory they occupied: several centuries before them, an Egyptian seal with the name of the Babylonian king Kurigalzu, a contemporary of the pharaoh of the XVIII dynasty Amenhotep III, got into the Metsamor burial ground ¹¹ .

FOREIGN GLYPTICS IN THE URARTIAN CENTRES OF ARMENIA

S.I. Hodjash

A Hittite seal representing a hunter in a mask and an Assyrian seal representing a hunter shooting at a long-horned goat were found in the Urartian fortress of Erebuni (8th с. ВС) by K. Oganesyan, I. Loseva and S. Hodjash. A number of Assyrian seals with the images of a man shooting at a snake, a man wrestling with a billy- goat, a man wrestling with a mythological winged creature, a man shooting with a bow and an arrow, Goddess Ishtar, God Ea, birds and human heads, two billy-goats, a horse and a stallion were found in Teishebani by B. Piotrovsky. The tradition to use foreign glyptic objects was very deep there, for a cylidrical seal of the 15th с. ВС with a cuneiform inscription, a hieroglyphic text and the names of Kassite King Kurigalzu and Egyptian Pharaoh Amenophis III was found in Metzamor by Е. Hazizyan.

^{Loseva I. M.} 7 Nekotorye urarticheskie zhirnevye izdeliya s izobrazheniem ritualnykh sksen [Some Urartian jewelry with the image of ritual scenes]. Drevnyj mir. Sb. art. v honore akad. V. V. Struve. Moscow, 1962. pp. 309-311.

^{Berlev O., Hodjash S.} 8 Catalogue of the Monuments of Ancient Egypt from the Museums of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Bielorussia, Caucasus, Middle Asia and Baltic States (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 17. Series Archaeologica). Fribourg, 1998. P. 242. N 5-6.

^{Piotrovsky B. B.} 9 Drevneegipetskiye podoby, naidennye na territorii SSSR [Ancient Egyptian objects found on the territory of the USSR]. SA. 1958. N 1.P. 20.

^{Khodzhash S. I.} 10 Amulet of the God of the Demon from Erebuni //Ancient East. 1. Moscow, 1975, pp. 145-156.

^{Khinzidyan E., Piotrovsky B.} 11 Cylindrical seal with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription from the Metsamor burial ground // Historical and Philological Journal. Yerevan. 1984. N 4 (107). pp. 59-65.

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