Nanâ in Dunhuang (1)

Text
The Sogdian community of Dunhuang, in Central Asia preserved many ancient iconographic features till the ninth and tenth centuries CE. In a picture showing two full-faced young female goddesses seated opposite each other, one of them being a four-armed goddess, seated on a wolf and holding four attributes: the solar and lunar disk, a snake’s tail and a beetle, is a reminiscent of Nanâ, originally a Mesopotamian goddess, whose career in Central Asia seemingly began in the wake of either the Achaemenian or Greek conquest, although concrete archaeological information is not extant. She was later rejected by Sogdian Manichaeans who considered her cult, which probably included violent lamentations, to be a corruption of original Zoroastrianism.

Bibliography

Andrea Piras

URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000733.php