Christoph Baumer

Unlike in the profane dwellings, no female figurines were found in the civic cultic complex. In the grave of a man near the step pyramid, archaeologists discovered rich grave goods that presumably had a cultic purpose. Among them was the 7.5cm head of a bull made of pure gold, with horns made of silver covered in gold leaf. The eyes are made of turquoise and a third, crescent-shaped turquoise adorns the forehead. This golden bull's head recalls Sumerian toreutics, especially the bulls' heads on the resonators of the lyres from the royal tombs at Ur. Moreover, the Sumerian moon god Nanna-Sin, who could appear in the form of a bull, was the patron deity of Ur and the large, three-story ziggurat of Ur was dedicated to him. Thus Masson surmised that 'the cultic centre of Altyn Tepe was apparently dedicated to a male god, a local variant of Nanna-Sin, whose multi-story tower so obviously followed the prototype of the ziggurat of ancient Sumer. This means that in Altyn Tepe a private cult of mostly female fertility goddesses, which also protected the hearth and family, coexisted with a public cult of a patron god with roots in Mesopotamia. It is the moment at which male deities began to replace female deities at the top of the pantheon of south-eastern Central Asia. There was, in broad terms, a 'twilight of the goddesses', which heralded the transition from a purely sedentary agrarian society to nomadic trading societies and, before long, to bellicose stockbreeding societies.