Assembly of the Gods by Euxitheos (potter) & Oltos (painter) 525-475 BCE

December 19, 2022

Assembly of the Gods by Euxitheos (potter) & Oltos (painter) 525-475 BCE

"A second important specificity of the passage of interest to us is the circumstance that it cites in the first place Tabiti - the "Scythian Hestia". In Greece during the classical period, Hestia was perceived mainly as the Goddess of the hearth in the home and she did not play a major role in theology and mythology. However, a comparative-historical study of this image reveals that it is based on the ancient fire God of all Indo-Europeans, which in the mythology of the Indo-Aryans is paralleled by the God Agni, and in the Iranian world - by Atar. It is important in this case that the Greeks identified the fire worshipped by the Iranians again with Hestia. The stable ancient Greek tradition in which every sacrificial rite starts and ends with the sacrifice to be offered to Hestia, and each appeal to the Gods starts by mentioning her name, finds a direct analogy in the Vedic arias: here the mentioning of the Gods is a canonical element; even the Rigveda starts with a hymn to Agni and ends with a hymn addressed to that deity. It is possible to assume common roots of this practice also in the most ancient Indo-European ritual and its reflection may be considered to be the placing of Tabiti in the beginning of Herodotus' description of the Scythian pantheon.

Even these two specificities of this description, which correlate well with the evidence about the different Indo-Iranian traditions, suggest that the structure of the cited passage by Herodotus was not accidental. This allows us to see in it not the findings of the Greek historian, but a sufficiently accurate reproduction of some Scythian text, e.g. of a ritual formula pronounced during sacrifices or during sacral acts. Therefore, attention should be paid here not only to each deity, considered individually, the meaning of his or her name and the significance of the identification with the respective Greek deity, but also the structure of the passage as a whole. For example, three "levels" can be clearly identified in the pantheon described by Herodotus: Hestia-Tabiti is worshipped "higher than the rest" or "above the rest", "besides that" or "after that" - Zeus and Gaia, "after them" or "later" - the remaining four deities."

-Dmitri Raevski, Scythian Mythology