Iconographic Similarities Between Permian “Goddess Plaques” (Ural Region, 7-8th Centuries CE) and Horus Cippi (Egypt, 8th Century BCE-2nd Century CE)

The iconography of the Horus cippus, an amulet popular in Egypt from the late Third Intermediate Period to Roman times (8th century BCE 2nd century CE), is unexpectedly recapitulated in bronze “goddess plaques” of the 7-8th centuries CE made by Permian peoples – Finno-Ugric groups from the Ural region of northern Eurasia. The likely explanation is that both templates are descendants of the widely-diffused “Master of Animals” motif, which originated in Mesopotamia during the Ubaid period (6-5th millennium BCE). Transfer of the Master/Mistress of Animals motif from the Near East to the Ural region probably occurred via the Scythians of the 1st millennium BCE.


Introduction
The "Master of Animals" motif, which originated in Mesopotamia in the 6-5 th millennium BCE, diffused widely in the course of subsequent millennia 2 , spawning derivative forms in Egypt, the Ancient Near East, the Mediterranean world and beyond. This paper identifies a motif in the animal art of the Western Eurasian steppe from the 1 st millennium CE, namely Permian bronze "goddess plaques", that is particularly close to a popular Egyptian embodiment of the Master of Animals known as the Horus cippus.

Master of Animals
The Master of Animals motif, which originated in Mesopotamia during the Ubaid period (5700-4000 BCE) 3 , became common on stamp and cylinder seals from the Ancient Near East (e.g., Fig. 1). It also appeared in Predynastic Egypt, most notably on the Gebel el-Arak knife handle (Naqada II/III, ca. 3300-3200 BCE) ( Fig. 2) 4 , and on a stone vessel from Iran (2600-2400 BCE) 5 . Additionally, it is found on some Minoan artifacts (1700-1300 BCE) 6 .
In Egypt of the 2 nd and 1 st millennia BCE, the Master of Animals motif clearly underpinned some depictions of the dwarf-god Bes 7 and the well-known iconography of the magical Horus cippus 8 , in which the Horus figure -Horus-the-child, or Harpokrates in Greek 9 -is actually surmounted by the face of Bes (Fig.  3) 10 .   That Horus is shown standing on the back of a fierce animal not only demonstrates his power over such beasts but also accords with the visual convention for deities of the ancient Near East 11 . The Horus cippus remained a popular apotropaic and/or curative aid in Egypt from the late Third Intermediate Period to the Roman Period (8 th century BCE -2 nd century CE) 12 ; in particular, drinking water that had been poured over a cippus was believed to heal the sting or bite of a noxious animal 13 . Most Horus cippi took the form of small portable _____________ 11 Paul Y. Hoskisson, "Aaron's Golden Calf", FARMS Review 18, no. 1 (2006): 380. The cippus scheme typically has Horus standing on two animals, an innovation perhaps anticipated by the composition on the Gebel el-Arak knife handle (Fig. 2). 12 "Horus Stelae", University College London, published 2003, accessed April 14, 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/art/horusstelae.html; British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, s.v. "Horus" by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson. Originally the cippi depicted a young saviourgod named Shed, who was later identified with Horus-the-Child. For Shed, see Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses ,s.v. "Shed",by George Hart. 13 Marina Escolano-Poveda, "Ancient Egyptian Amulets: Cippus", Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, accessed April 14, 2020, http  In the meantime, the Master of Animals motif had continued to diffuse widely outside of Egypt, reaching as far afield as north-western Europe 19 . In addition to featuring on cylinder seals from the neo-Assyrian empire (9-7 th century BCE) 20 and Achaemenid Persia (5 th century BCE) 21 , the motif appears in Luristan bronzes (e.g., _____________ 27-28 (1997): 139-54. The flask shown in Fig. 6a is described by Christiane Lyon-Caen, "Pilgrim flasks", Louvre, E 24445, accessed April 14, 2020, https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/pilgrim-flasks. The flask shown in Fig. 6b  H. Föll, "Master of Animals", accessed April 14, 2020, https://www.tf.unikiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_b/advanced/ab_1_2d.html 21 7 th century BCE) and in Celtic metalwork (6-5 th centuries BCE) 22 . Related imagery appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a silver vessel found in Denmark (2 nd century BCE -3 rd century CE) ( Fig. 7) 23 , and the motif appears twice on the Sutton Hoo purse-lid, an artifact from Anglo-Saxon England (7 th century CE, contemporary with the Permian bronze "goddess plaques") ( Fig. 8) 24 .
The Master of Animals motif also diffused southward into Africa, where it was incorporated into the royal iconography of pre-colonial kingdoms in Nigeria, Cameroon and elsewhere 25 . Examples of the motif can be seen in Yoruba ivories, the Benin bronzes of the Edo people (16-17 th centuries CE) and wooden lintels carved for Bamileke kings 26 .

Permian animal art
The Perm area lies in modern Russia and is part of the Ural region, which is considered a western part of the Eurasian steppe. The core settlements of the Permian cultural bloc lay to the west of the Ural Mountains but its scope also extended from the northeastern Ural Mountains to western Siberia 27 . From the 3 rd century BCE to the 13 th century CE, it served as the homeland of several Finno-Ugric groups, such as the Zyrian Komis, Permian Komis, Ob-Ugrians and Udmurts, whose settlements were concentrated on the Kama, Komi and Volga Rivers 28 . Permian metallurgy is known for its wealth of zoomorphic images. Permian animal art began in the Scythian/Sarmatian world at the beginning of the 1 st millennium CE, and flourished after the great migrations of the 4-5 th centuries CE 29 . It reached its zenith in the 6-9 th centuries CE and disappeared in the 14 th century CE 30 . _____________ 22 Föll, "Master of Animals". 23 "The Gundestrup Cauldron", National Museum of Denmark, accessed April 14, 2020, https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-early-iron-age/thegundestrup-cauldron/ 24 "Purse", British Museum, 1939Museum, ,1010 Eero Autio, Kotkat, Hirvet, Karhut: Permiläistä Pronssitaidetta (Jyväskylä: Atena, 2000). 30 Autio, "Permian Animal Style", 162.  Permian bronzes have been recovered from cemeteries, settlements, places of sacrifice, strongholds, treasure caches, and caves 31 , with many finds coming from the graves of commoners 32 . Permian animal bronzes are the subject of a monograph in Finnish, published in 2000: Eero Autio's Kotkat, Hirvet, Karhut -Permiläistä Pronssitaidetta ["Eagles, Deer, Bears -Permian Bronze Casts"] 33 . A distinctive -indeed, probably unique -feature of Permian animal style is the human-bird-elk hybrid called the sulde 34 . Vera Ivanova claims that Permian animal plaques (as opposed to bronze bird or animal figurines) have been found only in settlements -mainly at cultic monuments, altars and sacred places 35 . Within the plaque corpus, which consists of complex compositions of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures, is the type of special interest here: the "goddess plaques" dominated by the frontal representation of a female anthropomorph surrounded by (or merged with) animals and/or birds. Most of the known examples date from the 7-8 th centuries CE. There is general agreement amongst scholars that the figure must represent a goddess 36 .

Visual overlaps
In view of the vast geographic range enjoyed by the Master of Animals motif, as outlined in Section 2, it should perhaps not come as a great surprise to find iconography derived from it on the Permian bronze "goddess plaques" introduced in the previous section. Three examples of these bronzes, which Harald Haarmann and Joan Marler term "Mistress of Nature" plaques 37 , are shown in Figs. 9-11 38 .

_____________ 31
Ibid., 165. 32 Andreeva, "Fantastic Beasts", 265. 33 Autio, Kotkat, Hirvet, Karhut. 34 Autio, "Permian Animal Style", 162 and 163 (including Fig. 8).    anthropomorph who subdues the animals is female 40 . These include depictions of Beset -the female counterpart of the dwarf-god Bes -on Egyptian ivory knives from the Middle Kingdom period (20-17 th centuries BCE) 41 , and Egyptian(ized) depictions of the Semitic goddess Asherah from the New Kingdom period (ca. 14 th -century BCE) 42 . In later times, the Potnia Theron was a Mistress of Animals motif in which the heroine became identified with the Greek goddess Artemis (Fig.  12) 43 . Like the Permian goddess in Fig. 10, the Potnia Theron is often winged 44 ; examples of this kind include a Celtic pitcher adornment from Switzerland dating from the 6 th century BCE (Fig. 13) 45 . The vertical juxtaposition of forward-staring heads on two of the Permian bronzes (Figs. 10-11) is particularly reminiscent of the placement of Bes' face above that of Horus in Egyptian cippi and of Pazuzu's head on Lamashtu amulets. Indeed, it is common in Permian examples for some sort of grotesque head(s) to appear above that of the forward-facing goddess (Figs. 9-11, and elsewhere 46 ). We might note in passing that the wearing of an animal-head headdress is not unique to Eurasian shamanism; on some cippi, not only is the head of Bes present but Horus wears a gazelle protome on his forehead (Fig. 5a) 47 . In the Permian plaques, the long "sidelock of youth" of the Horus figure seems to be preserved in the prominent long hair strands/braids of the goddess, now symmetrically disposed on both sides of her face. The two vertical quadrupeds grasped by Horus in Fig. 3 have counterparts in the two vertical quadrupeds connected to the hands of the goddess in Fig. 11. They also have counterparts in the two vertical quadrupeds (rodents?) flanking the head of the goddess in Fig. 9 48 ; indeed, on closer examination, two vertical animal heads also seem to dangle directly from the hands of the goddess. In what may be a further instance of continuity with the ancient prototype, the tall avian standards flanking Horus in the cippus (one surmounted by a falcon, the other by a feather; Fig. 3) are replaced by long-necked birds in one of the Permian plaques ( Fig. 9) and by diminutive humans atop the goddess's wings in another (Fig. 10). In Fig. 11 the left and right boundaries are provided by long vertical snakes, recapitulating the vertical snakes grasped by Horus (Fig. 3) and Lamashtu (Figs. 4 & 5b) in their respective amulets.  At the base of the plaques one often finds the goddess standing on two chthonic animals facing opposite directions 49 -for example, lizards/bears ( Fig. 9) 50 or spiders (Fig. 10) -just as the cippus has Horus standing on the back of two crocodiles facing opposite directions. Sometimes there is only one mount for the standing goddess (e.g., the single lizard of Fig. 11), or the bodies of the two animals may fuse to form a single Janus-like creature (Fig. 9). _____________ 49 Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", 17, observes that the mounts are always in profile. 50 Autio, "Permian Animal Style", 171 and 179-81, for lizards; Haarmann and Marler, "The Goddess and the Bear", 69, for bears.

A cultural conduit
Although they have long been recognised as cultic items 51 , and Near Eastern or Iranian influences have been suspected since the early 1900s 52 , Permian bronzes have -as far as I am aware -not previously been linked with the Horus cippus or with the Mesopotamian Master of Animals motif that is presumably ancestral to both 53 . As mentioned in Section 3, Permian animal art began in the Scythian/Sarmatian region at the beginning of the 1 st millennium CE, but its roots extend back to the 1 st millennium BCE 54 . The Scythians were a nomadic people of Iranian origin 55 . Scythian art of the mid-1 st millennium BCE drew upon the iconography of the Ancient Near East, reflecting the domination and occupation of Western Asia by the Scythians prior to their defeat by the Medes at the beginning of the 6 th century BCE 56 . As the nomadist M.I. Artamonov observed in an article published in Russian in 1968, "The return of the Scythians from Western Asia at the beginning of the 6 th century was marked by a flooding of the Northern Black Sea Region with plots and forms of ancient [Near] Eastern origin, only partially reworked by Scythians in their own style" 57 . In consequence, "Both the North Black Sea and Siberian art of animal style equally go back to the art of [culturally] Iranian tribes, which developed in the Near East on the basis of the ancient [Near] Eastern heritage. In the Northern Black Sea region, this art came still burdened with Mesopotamian-Urartian plots and forms" 58 .
Artamonov did not make any specific mention the Master of Animals motif. However, given the existence of a cultural conduit linking the art of the Ancient Near East to that of northern Eurasia via Scythia, a visual template that was widespread throughout Greater Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world -as the _____________ 51 Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", 14-16. 52 A. Spitsyn, Shamanskie Izobrazhenia (Saint Petersburg: Russian Archaeological Society, 1906). 53 For example, neither template is mentioned in Autio, "Permian Animal Style" or Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", or Andreeva, "Fantastic Beasts", nor in the various publications of Haarmann and Marler cited in the present paper. 54 Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", 20, says that "according to the almost unanimous opinion of the majority of researchers of the Pechora, West Siberian and Perm animal styles, all these styles grew up on a unified cultural and ideological basis, which was formed in the Urals in the 1st millennium BC" (author's translation). However, he sees the traditions as purely indigenous to the region, and Permian art as Ugric in origin. Master of Animals motif certainly was -could readily have made its way into the Permian art repertoire.
Luristan animal bronzes (ca. 1000-600 BCE) are a western Iranian art-form closely related to Scythian animal bronzes 59 , not least because the Scythians occupied Luristan in the 8-7 th centuries BCE 60 . Notably, the head-over-head motif common to the Horus cippus (Fig. 3) and the Permian plaques (Figs. 9-11), as discussed in Section 4, is preserved in the Master of Animals corpus from Luristan (e.g., Fig. 14) 61 . The same concept probably underpins the Permian mask-on-chest ornament (compare Fig. 14 with Fig. 10). The cippus motif in which two animals facing opposite directions serve as mounts for the forward-facing anthropomorph (Fig. 3) is also preserved in some Master of Animals casts from Luristan (Fig. 15), just as it is in some Permian plaques ( Fig. 9-10).

Literature on Permian art
A review of Autio's Finnish monograph on Permian bronzes identifies the "goddess plaques" as the highlight of the corpus: "Most interesting are three-part compositions, with bird or elk motif in the upper part, an anthropomorph in the middle, and in the bottom part a lizard, or more rarely, a fish or other zoomorphic image" 62 . Harald Haarmann and Joan Marler take what they call the "Mistress of Nature" anthropomorph to represent "a kind of collective personification of protective spirits" drawn from "the imagery and mythology of pre-agrarian Eurasia (which has continued into the historic era)" 63 . As witnessed by Figs. 9 and 10, "She often has zoomorphic features, with arms like birds' wings, legs with bears' feet,hands like eagles' claws" 64 . With the shift to farming in southern Eurasia, the southern embodiment of the Mistress of Nature is thought to have transformed into the Earth/Grain Mother 65 .   There are numerous examples of female goddesses riding hybrids. In some cases, animal heads or junctures protrude out of the female figurine's head. Occasionally, the female goddess is enclosed within the body of a large predatory bird. In yet other cases, the personage stands on a horse or two reflective images of horses and in others, she is raised on a platform made of deer heads with raptor beaks. In several plaques, the deity is flanked by two male anthropomorphic figures whose heads terminate into raptors with curved beaks recalling the bird images from the early Iron Age tomb complex in Arzhan in Tuva. Two main features stand out in the designs of these plaques: the anthropomorphic figure is always placed in the center and the visual tokens of hybridity are added to form a circular enclosure around the personage. One observes the relative lack of diversity in the depiction of animals; most of the animals represented in Permian metalwork are either horses, elks or birds with exaggerated beaks.
Enclosure of the central front-facing personage, one might note in passing, is also a feature of larger Horus cippi, as exemplified by the booth outline _____________ 66 Andreeva,"Fantastic Beasts",266. surrounding Horus in the well-known Metternich stela (Fig. 16) 67 . But let us return our attention to the Permian plaques, whose symbolism is explained by Andreeva as follows 68 : Several competing interpretations regarding the Perm animal style have been put forward by Russian scholars. One possibility includes the concept of "totemism" […] Researchers have suggested that these casts were made to contain the souls of the tomb occupants, and as such, they were the final resting places of the spirit. […] Despite the large geographic distance from the Alai mountains [of Kyrgyzstan / Tajikistan], the imagery represented in the Permian animal style plaques indicate a return to the familiar Iron Age concept of animal syncretism. Here, the local people offer a slightly different take on this decorative approach as they also incorporate female images in most of the metalwork thus making even more complicated visual narratives of hybridity.
[…] Animal (and human-animal) hierarchy coupled with the concept of metamorphosis and transition between realms is indubitably present in the art of the people who inhabited the southern Urals from the early [1 st ] millennium CE to the 13 th century CE.  Fig. 3). 68 Andreeva, "Fantastic Beasts", 270-72.
As with Artamonov, and for that matter with Autio or Marler and Haarmann, it is worth noting that Andreeva makes no mention of a possible Mesopotamian / Egyptian origin for any of the Permian designs or of the resemblance of the Permian goddess plaques to the Master/Mistress of Animals motif. A Finnish commentator has recently associated the winged goddess in one Permian bronze plaque (similar to that in Fig. 10) with the winged female in the British Museum's Burney Relief (the "Queen of the Night", whom he identifies with the Mesopotamian demoness Lilith), but his proposal is that both artifacts portray descendants of the Neolithic bird-goddess 69 .

A break in transmission?
Moving beyond mere silence on the topic, a recent paper claims that 1 st -millennium BCE animal art from the Eurasian steppe is essentially devoid of Mesopotamianderived Master/Mistress of Animals iconography. In a paper subtitled "Human-Animal Symbolism and Mastery among Early Eurasian Steppe Societies", which appeared in the conference volume Master of Animals -Old World Iconography, Bryan Hanks agrees that the Master of Animals motif did reach the north coast of the Black Sea. He attributes this to northerly Greek expansion in the mid-5 th century BCE rather than to the Scythian withdrawal from the Ancient Near East at the beginning of the 6 th century BCE (the mechanism favoured by Artamonov). More importantly, he claims that the motif did not then diffuse north to the Eurasian steppe. Specifically, Hanks states that: the Master or Mistress of Animals also are known from the Greek colonies along the north coast of the Black Sea.
[…] While the appearance in the Black Sea region of the Master of Animals iconography can be traced to Greek expansion and colonization, this style of iconography did not spread into the Eurasian steppe zone in any perceptible form 70 .
[… Rather,] processes of mastery over the form and symbolism of animals in Eurasian animal-style art […] appear to be more deeply connected to the ancient roots of human-animal symbolism that emerged independently in the Siberian region (Jacobson 1983(Jacobson , 1993 71 .
[T]he steppe region is largely devoid of similar iconography connected with the Master/Mistress of Animals theme dealt with in other papers in this volume […], which raises the important question as to why such differences may exist. [… S]teppe animal-style art and the human-animal relationships it portrays suggest a The indigenous Siberian forms alluded to in the central quotation include an animal/human hybrid "Animal Mother" who had evolved by the early to middle Bronze Age into a "Mother of Animals" 73 -a female life-source who replaces animals taken in the hunt 74 . Her manifestations, which survive in naturalistic petroglyphs, include a birthing woman, a woman at the margin of a hunt, and a woman in a sexual embrace with a man 75 . By the Late Bronze Age / mid-2 nd millennium BCE, her importance had been usurped by the male hunter-hero and the Mother of Animals gradually disappeared from the visual repertoire 76 . Her iconography has little or nothing in common with the Mesopotamian/Greek Mistress of Animals motif, so the two should not be confused.
There is no mention of Permian animal art in Hanks' paper, most likely because his temporal focus is the Iron Age and Permian animal art did not begin until the early 1 st millennium CE, peaking in the 6-9 th centuries CE. In the prologue to the book, the editors assess Hanks' contribution as follows 77 : [T]he Master of Animals, usually represented as a humanoid figure exerting control over one or more animals, and the Animal Master, who may combine within his person both human and animal elements (Lot-Falck 1953:174); typically one or both of these manifestations of mastery are found in post-Neolithic Old World societies. However, the absence of the two most common Old World Master of Animals figures in the pastoral Iron Age societies of the steppe region (Hanks, this volume), in spite of its links to areas that did develop such a symbolic complex, suggests that further study of its distribution is necessary.
It would be most interesting to extend the temporal scope of this analysis to include the mid-to late 1 st millennium CE, when designs resembling some embodiments of the Master of Animals motif do become evident in the bronze art of the Eurasian steppe, at least in that of the Perm region (Figs. 9-11).
The other reason why Permian plaques such as Figs. 9-11 might have escaped recognition as descendants of the Master/Mistress of Animals motif is that the central figure no longer grasps the flanking animals or fights with them. There has been a shift in composition, such that the front-facing anthropomorph no longer dominates and subdues the animal forms but is aligned and even integrated with them. The meaning of the scene has changed. Despite the composition's visual overlap with the Horus cippus, it no longer depicts divine/human subjugation of the   Arnold and Counts,"Prolegomenon",[15][16] chaotic animal realm; Haarman and Marler's "Mistress of Nature" is in fact the "Protectress of Animals" 78 .
Such changes in the meaning of the original motif are not at all unprecedented. For example, in Aegean depictions of the Mistress of Animals from the 2 nd millennium BCE, the flanking animals seem to revere the central female 79 ; unlike the later Greek form of the Mistress, who follows the Mesopotamian template, the Minoan/Mycenaean goddess seems to enjoy an affectionate relationship with her beasts 80 . A related but even more radical repurposing took place in the royal tombs of Ramesside Egypt (13-11 th centuries BCE), where the Mistress of Animals motif was recruited for the sky-goddess Nut in her guise as the "Mysterious Lady" (Fig.  17) 81 ; with the Mistress now acting in concert with the animals that surround her, "the scene serves as a concise representation of the solar journey" 82 . Hieroglyphic captions explain that the head of the goddess is "'in the Upper Duat, while her two feet are in the Lower Duat' […] where the Upper Duat is equivalent to the height of the daylight world, and the Lower Duat is synonymous with ḥtmy.t, the 'Place of Annihilation' […] where the Damned are punished" 83 . We shall see in the next section that a cosmological interpretation of this kind is often applied to the Permian goddess, too 84 .

Local meaning
As one might expect from the scholarly reluctance to acknowledge foreign influences (Sections 6 & 7), most analyses of Permian bronzes interpret the "goddess plaques" solely in terms of indigenous Finno-Ugric mythology 85 . In this idiom, compositions such as Figs. 9-11 are taken to depict a three-tiered cosmology: at top, the heavens (symbolised by the sun, birds, heads/faces); in the centre, the terrestrial world (the domain of people and animals, ruled by the goddess who dominates the space); and, at bottom, the lower earthly or invisible subterranean world (symbolised by land-animals under the feet of the goddesslizards, pangolins, bears, elks, horses or reptilian hybrids) 86 . This tripartite division Ibid., 254-55. 84 There is, of course, no suggestion that images in the Valley of the Kings exercised any influence on what happened in many centuries later in northern Eurasia; the Mysterious Lady is mentioned solely to show how profoundly the Master/Mistress of Animals motif can be reinterpreted within a new cultural context. 85 E.g. Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", regards the art as purely Ugric. Autio, "Permian Animal Style", 169, observes that "At the beginning of the 1950s, the opinion that most motifs are of Permian origin, started to become the canon in the Soviet Union"; perhaps this stance has continued as the norm amongst Russian scholars. of the cosmos aligns with the "sacred trinity" of Eurasian symbolism identified by Haarmann and Marler as the bird, the goddess, and the bear 87 . Although the creators of the Permian bronzes left no written records of the plaques' meaning or purpose 88 , local or regional myths have been recruited to interpret the compositions; some of these have been documented by Eero Autio 89 . In an extension of the associations already given, Autio identifies the reptile(s) at the bottom of many Permian plaques (equivalent to the crocodiles of the Horus cippus) with the underworld, the domain of the dead 90 . Ibid., 179. Belavin, "Etnicheskoy", 17, also identifies these mounts with the underworld.
Specific interpretations have been offered for many of the plaques by a Permbased website and virtual museum named "Perm Animal Style" 91 . Those for Figs. 9-11 are mostly based on Khanty mythology. For Fig. 9, we are informed as follows 92 : The goddess is surrounded by storks on the "spirit of the bear-cubs". The storks are guides of souls, holding five souls from above on their beaks. Another soul on the cubs is the protagonist of the amulet. The patient's soul is in trouble, it has almost crossed the line between the world of the living and the dead. By the order of the goddess, the "spirit of the cubs" is sent in the form of a mouse to the Lower World and returns the soul to the patient. The goddess stands on spiders weaving a web, along which the souls of the dead should pass over a boiling resinous river. The waves of this river we see below the composition. People pray to the goddess, they are in trouble. The goddess with wings is the ancestor of the clan (a mask is on her chest) and an intercessor for people before the supreme deity. The amulet is of special strength, it was addressed when misfortune (epidemic, invasion) threatened the whole people. On the braids of the goddess are birds facing the solar deity. In the hands of the goddess are fur animals. Snakes: the rivers of the universe flowing from the Lower World -from the lizard -to the Upper World.
For the most part, the plaques are being interpreted as apotropaic and curative devices intended to aid individuals or groups who are sick or in danger. Of course, this is precisely the function held by the Horus cippus in ancient Egypt and the Lamashtu amulet in the ancient Near East. The following extract from one of the hieroglyphic incantations on the Metternich Stele, whose cippus window appears in Fig. 16, leaves no doubt as to its purpose 95 : It is your [i.e., Horus'] formulae which come from your mouth, […] to make your guard, to repeat your protection, to seal the mouth of every serpent, of those in the sky, those on the land, those in the water, to make people live, to make the gods content, to transfigure Ra in your glorifications. Come to me quickly today as you have made a boat sailing. Repel for me every lion on the desert slope, every crocodile on the river, every biting mouth in their cavern. Do it for me like the stone of the desert mountain, like the sherd edge in the street. Remove for me  Ibid., overlay for goddess 8, author's translation. 94 Ibid., overlay for goddess 6, author's translation. 95 University College London, "Horus Stelae". the poison of the bite which is in every limb of the patient, so that your words are not rejected on account of it. See, your name is called today.
[…] May you cause the sufferer to live for me, so that adoration is given to you by the populace.
The Perm Animal Style website says that the genre to which it is devoted was "born of the Ural civilization in dialogue with the great cultures of the world" 96 . It adds that the cult of the "goddess on the reptile" is older than that of the birdhuman hybrids and that known examples of the former predate the heyday of the Permian animal style by several centuries 97 . The present paper develops and extends these observations by proposing that the origin of Permian goddess plaques lies in the Ancient Near East and/or Egypt. Other forms of Permian animal art may well be largely or entirely local in concept and design.
The assimilation of a cippus-like Master of Animals template into Permian art would parallel the integration of the Master of Animals into Anglo-Saxon art (Fig.  8). Of course, once it had been co-opted into the Permian visual repertoire, the motif would then be free to morph into derivatives with ever less resemblance to the original -descendant designs carrying new meanings appropriate to their Finno-Ugric cultural context. The transformation of the Mistress of Animals motif into a solar-cycle vignette within Egyptian royal funerary texts (Fig. 17) offers a salient glimpse of just such an acculturation process in action. The Mesopotamian (re)appropriation of the Egyptian Horus cippus, and its rapid transformation into an amulet against the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu (Fig. 4), offers another. The Coptic adaptation of the Horus cippus to represent St. Menas "as a standing orant figure […] between the two kneeling camels that carried his body to Abu Mena" (Fig. 6) provides a third 98 .

Other influences
The Master of Animals motif preserved in the royal art of medieval Africamentioned in Section 2 of the paper -is a rather minimal form of the original Mesopotamian design. The template has also undergone some shifts in composition: the legs of the protagonist have often become snakes (Fig. 18a) 99 , creating an overlap with the anguipede Abrasax, a hybrid deity/archon/aeon popular on amuletic gemstones from the Mediterranean world of Roman and Late Antique times (Fig. 18b)    The Master of Animals motif was presumably carried from Egypt to Nubia in predynastic or pharaonic times and then diffused southwest to Cameroon and Nigeria. If the Horus cippus was one of the intermediaries of this intercultural transfer, then its embellishments were diluted and lost en route to the west coast 101 . As already mentioned, other traits were gained; at some point in its African journey, the core motif appears to have become influenced by the Abrasax figure, which also travelled widely in its role as a magical agency.
North of the Mediterranean, snake-legged depictions of the Earth Mother were common in Scythia 102 -the culture from which Permian bronze art arose. However, anguipede templates seem to have exercised little or no influence on the Master/Mistress of Animals motif during its transmission to northern Eurasia.

Conclusion
While many types of Permian bronze animal plaque may indeed be purely local in concept and design, "goddess plaques" of the type exemplified by Figs. 9-11 seem to have their roots in the Ancient Near Eastern template known as the Master/Mistress of Animals. Their similarity to the popular Egyptian derivative known as the Horus cippus -a template known to have percolated back into the Ancient Near East, including northern Mesopotamia and Anatolia, -is particularly strong. Transfer of the Master/Mistress of Animals motif from the Near East to the Ural region is likely to have occurred via the Scythians of the 1 st millennium BCE; among bronzes of the appropriate period from Luristan are many Master of Animals motifs with cippus-like features.
If the proposal advanced in this communication is correct, then the Permians coopted a version of the Master of Animals motif into their visual vocabulary; they would probably have been the most northerly population to do so. While not doubting the validity of Finno-Ugric interpretations of the goddess plaques for the peoples of the western Urals, it may be useful to recognise that these striking artworks are potentially derived from a well-travelled template of exceptional antiquity -one with a distant southern origin.