Rostov engraved bone dragon

Source term: Подвеска зооморфная (дракон)

A flat bone dragon, no longer than a finger, narrows from its head to a rounded end. The head is the thick end, with relief eyes and ears and a hole bored clean through its jaws from side to side. Below, the polished body is engraved on one face only: tiers of dotted, scale-like arcs, then a net of dotted diamonds. Archaeologist Andrei Leontiev read the diamonds as signs of earth and the arcs above them as signs of heaven, a rare trace of the pre-Christian beliefs of Rostov’s first townspeople. It lay in a late-tenth-century layer, deposited just as Rostov became a Rus’ town. The Finnic Merya had long lived on this shore of Lake Nero; now a new town rose over their settlement, its earliest dated timber felled in 975, and in 988 the chronicle gave Rostov to Prince Yaroslav. The dragon’s three-lobed head matches carved ladle handles from Novgorod; its dots and arcs also decorate Merya bone scoops.

Вполне возможно и ее сакральное значение.

Its sacred significance is also quite possible.

A. E. Leontiev, Сообщения Ростовского музея III (1992), p. 129

Particulars

Object

Engraved bone dragon, 7.4 × 1.5 cm, with a shallow plano-convex body, thicker head and a 0.2 cm transverse bore through the mouth. The narrow body has dotted arc and scale patterns.

Function

Not recorded.