The railroad and high-speed highway between Gyzylarbat and Bereket in the Balkan province of Turkmenistan run parallel past the barely visible ruins of the medieval town of Ferava, overlooked by Mount Ezzetdag. Even from afar, from the windows of passing trains and speeding cars, one can clearly see the path creeping up the mountain to the Parau-bibi shrine, showing up white among the rocks. In the misty haze, it seems to float in the air. This monument is built on a high elevated narrow platform on one of the rocky ledges where a spring once gushed. Its water was considered healing. It is not a mausoleum – no one is buried there. It is rather a mosque, as there is a mihrab – a lancet niche in the wall indicating the direction of prayer. And the name of the monument itself is not a proper name. This is a nickname formed from the name of the abandoned town, which in Turkmen pronunciation turned into Parau, with the addition of the honorific ending “bibi”, which means “madam”, “respected”.
“Parau-bibi became the name of the patron saint of women, especially pregnant women or those wishing to become pregnant. Female pilgrims came here not only from neighboring areas but often from other provinces,” ethnographer Sergey Demidov said. The dome room of the shrine has a niche in the wall draped with a carpeted canopy. Narrowing, it seems to go deep into the rock. According to the legend, Saint Parau-bibi hid there, escaping from the enemies of Islam pursuing her. And the Almighty turned them into stones that now lie below at the beginning of the path. “However, it seems that the veneration of this place is older than the time of the introduction of Islam in Khorasan and the establishment of the Ferava fortress by the Arabs. It is based on the veneration of the source, the cult of water, which has always played such an important role among the agricultural peoples. Islam only canonized this place with the construction of a mosque and, consequently, its inclusion in the circle of local Muslim shrines,” Galina Pugachenkova, an architectural historian who studied this monument, noted.
The long echo of paganism lives on today in such places, and there are many of them in Turkmenistan and neighboring countries. Some of them have preserved traces of perhaps the most ancient cult in the history of all peoples, inextricably linked with the idea of procreation and the life-giving power of water. In these places, for many centuries before the Arab conquest, the Zoroastrian Ardvisura Anahita was revered as a water deity associated with fertility who personified the world’s waters. Anahita was considered the patroness of motherhood, the fertile force of nature. Due to its sacred spring, yet long dried up, this “female” basis of the cult at the ruins of Ferava remains in the superstitions of Turkmen women, who continue making pilgrimages to Parau-bibi.
Anahita or Anahid is also the name of the planet Venus in ancient Iranian astrology. Likewise, at that time in Ancient Rome, the goddess of beauty, carnal love, desire, fertility and prosperity was called Venus. The Romans also named the second inner planet of the Solar System in her honor. And when in the 19th century in Europe they began to find unusual small figurines of very obese women with pronounced gender characteristics, carved from bones, tusks and soft stone, they also began to be called “Venuses”. It was not difficult to guess that all these were multifaceted images of the Mother Goddess.
The Great Mother Goddess was a metaphor for nature itself. The oldest images of the Upper Paleolithic period (from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago) are a direct consequence of the deepest belief in the Goddess – the giver of life, the source of all that exists. Around 25 thousand years B.C., her numerous sculptures began to be endowed with exaggerated female forms, emphasizing her reproductive power. Bearing and feeding offsprings – this is the primary model of the image of the Great Goddess.
According to the American researcher of the prehistoric era, Maria Gimbutas, miniature female figurines were neither “Venuses”, although they are often called so, nor “amulets of fertility”. Their role was much more important. In the view of ancient people, they gave life and protected it, brought death and ensured rebirth. The goddess personified all forms and manifestations of the constantly renewing cycle of life.
The iconography of the Paleolithic Goddess was preserved in general terms after the advent of agriculture, in the Neolithic, but in a more developed form. Thanks to the invention of ceramics in the middle of the 7th millennium BC, there emerged coroplastics – production of female figurines from baked clay. There began mass production of figurines, and many of them have survived to this day. They are found where the altars of primitive sanctuaries stood, on platforms near ceramic kilns, in special places for offerings, in caves and tombs.
The archaeological finds prove that ancient cultures in the south of modern Turkmenistan also had a complex symbolic system associated with various manifestations of the cult of the Great Goddess. Her Neolithic images are endowed with large breasts or decorated with symbols close to her – chevrons, parallel or zigzag lines with the same attributes repeated for thousands of years. To understand what all these items meant and why they were made in such quantities, two outstanding archaeologists Vadim Masson and Victor Sarianidi wrote a joint monograph “Central Asian Terracotta of the Bronze Age”. They systematized all the samples of such plastics known before them and supplemented the research with their own striking finds from the ancient settlements of Altyn-depe, Khapuz-depe, Namazga-depe, Anau and other places. Both scholars have clearly demonstrated that this whole multi-faced female pantheon represents a very stable tradition that has been preserved for several millennia.
To all appearances such figurines served as household idols, amulets, charms and, of course, were not anonymous. This is especially evident at the Middle Eneolithic settlement of Yylgynly-Depe in southern Turkmenistan, where an expedition led by the famous Russian archaeologist, Natalia Soloviyeva, has been working for many years. She discovered hundreds of terracotta female figurines, among which the so-called singing priestess with a round mouth stands out. She is depicted in a sitting posture with outstretched legs. She is part of a series of similar figurines of the Neolithic tradition, known in Baluchistan, Iran, Syria. In the Bronze Age, thanks to the fairly well-studied Sumerian mythology, the Great Goddess already had an extant name – Inanna.
In Mesopotamia, this deity of vegetation and fertility became the center of solemn mysteries of an agricultural nature, in which the main place was occupied by sacred marriage – hierogamy. Dumuzi, the deity of cattle breeding, and Enkidu, the deity of agriculture, wooed Inanna. The very name of Inanna is translated as “Lady of the Heavens.” She was considered the daughter of the god of the Moon and the personification of the star Venus.
In the 24th century BC, the Akkadian Kingdom emerged in Mesopotamia, where the faded cult of the Great Goddess was revived and spread to the West and the East. At that time, goddesses “with outstretched legs” suddenly disappeared in southern Turkmenistan, giving way to flat figurines with outstretched arms. Typical examples of small sculpture of the Early Bronze Age depict the goddess in a sitting position with her arms spread wide. The new image, despite its schematism, was supplemented with details that in more ancient times were poorly expressed or absent altogether. This primarily concerns the treatment of the head and face.
By the end of the seventies of the last century, unusual finds began to flow to the West, which were initially treated with some suspicion. They came mainly from northern Afghanistan, where the country of Bactria existed in ancient times. These were the first signs of a previously completely unknown culture that had not yet been clearly defined. It was only after the sensational discoveries of Victor Sarianidi in Margiana that it got the name of Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), or the Oxus Civilization. In addition to silver, bronze and stone seals and amulets with images of a winged woman riding a leopard, with a pair of lions or snakes, numerous stone statues of plump matrons in luxurious clothing were discovered in the lands of Bactria and Margiana. All of them were found in graves, meaning that they served as funerary offerings. Their bodies, hats and hairdos are made of black chlorite, or steatite – a gray-green mineral that is easy to work with, while their heads and elbows are made of white marble. That is why such items are commonly called composite figurines. There are many of them in museums and private collections in the West, where they were brought from Afghanistan, and now, after the discoveries in Margiana, they are available in the museums of Ashgabat and Mary.
The same image of a seated woman wearing a patchwork “kaunakes” garment made of many strips of fabric, widely known from many images from Mesopotamia and the BMAC, is conveyed on a silver pin from Gonur-Depe. Although this image is interpreted as a woman playing a harp, her appearance is still closer to the composite figurines that convey the image of the Great Goddess in a new guise characteristic of the BMAC era.
A whole series of similar figurines were excavated by the Italian archaeologist, Gabriele Rossi-Osmida, at the Adji-Kui settlement in the old delta of Murghab. This monument is located next to Gonur-Depe and also belongs to the BMAC. In addition to female images, there were found many male ones that were not found anywhere else before, based on which it was concluded that the star of the Great Goddess that illuminated the hearts and souls of people for almost twenty thousand years began to fade. It is clear that this was due to some changes in the social structure that gave rise to a new ideology.
A few centuries later, with the establishment of Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid state, Anahita reappeared on the scene. Scholars believe that although her image genetically goes back to the archaic image of the Mother Goddess, she lost many features and functions of her prototype, as well as the status of an uncreated deity. The revival of her cult began after Alexander the Great in connection with the penetration of Hellenistic traditions into the local culture. During the period of the Kushan kingdom, which in the I–III centuries included the lands east of Parthia up to Northern India, images of the naked goddess were replaced by figurines dressed in long robes. However, even having acquired a new look, the female deity retained her main function. She conveyed the idea of motherhood through symbols. The bowl or vessel, a frequent attribute of the female deity in Central Asian coroplastics, obviously had the same meaning as in Greco-Bactria and Margiana, where it symbolized the deity of death and rebirth.
The images of the goddess with a mirror, which appeared in the Kushan period, are associated with the same cycle of beliefs. They were used in funeral rites as a sign of the deceased’s belonging to the religion of the Goddess. Figurines of goddesses with “plant” attributes convey a different meaning. This group of images includes female figurines pressing a shamrock to their chest with their hand and holding a pomegranate fruit in the right hand. Shamrock and pomegranate are well-known symbols of birth, vital energy and fertility in Central Asian cultures. They are still used by the Turkmens and neighboring peoples in ornamental motifs of carpets, embroidery on women’s headdresses and clothes.
With the advent and establishment of Islam, the cult of the female deity did not disappear but evolved into the cult of female saints. Its elements are present in many shrines, such as Parau-bibi. And here one cannot help but recall that in the legends of most Turkic peoples the legendary Umai is believed to be their great progenitor. In the mythology of the Turks, Goddess Umai personifies the feminine earthly origin and fertility. Umai was considered the wife of the supreme god Tangra. Oguzes believed that Umai grants a rich harvest and multiplies cattle and acts as a patron spirit of the baby in the womb of the mother. With the spread of Islam, she began to be identified with Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad and wife of the righteous Caliph Ali. The Turkmens call her Patma-bibi. They also have other female saints, such as Kyz-bibi, Albasty, Garagyrnak, Suvperisi, Yuvha and other mythical characters, in whose images the Great Goddess was reincarnated.