The third death

This statuette with a tattooed face and a bone mask was found in the mass burial of people from Bronze Age Odinov culture in Vengerovsky district of Novosibirsk region, Western Siberia on the 01 October 2020...

The clay figurine was perched on shoulder of a woman laid to rest about 4,000 years ago...

The woman was laid to rest on top of a man, lying on her front so that she faced him.  The two of them were wrapped in a cocoon of birch bark, which was set on fire before the burial...

The little statuette had a stripe going along its face, which symbolised a tattoo. It was placed on its tummy, and then its head was broken off and turned upside down so that it ‘looked up’ in a ritual yet unseen by Novosibirsk archeologists...

There was a deepening (slash) in the middle of the clay statuette, which had a bronze plate and also some organic substance inside it. Further chemical tests are needed to establish what exactly was placed inside that deepening.

The bone mask made of a horse vertebrae that covered the statuette’s head depicted a bear’s muzzle, archeologists believe.

"...Interestingly, our anthropologists and genetics found that the Odino people were Mongoloids, yet the face of the figurine had clear Caucasian features. We don’t see the gender of the figurine, which is unusual...' said archaeologists who discovered the figurine...

Here is the best bit 🙂 "Given that the discovery is 4,000 years old, you can imagine how important it is to understand the beliefs of the ancient people populating Siberia" said the archaeologists who discovered the figurine...Well if they only asked the locals...

Apparently, the Chuvash people who live in the area, bury a doll into a grave if two people from the same family suddenly die (close) together. This is done to "fool Death" so that it doesn't take anyone else from the family, as if two die close together another one will follow

What we have hear is the same ritual performed by the people living in the same area for 4000 years...Another proof that folk traditions, beliefs and rituals could be thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of years old...And could help us understand archaeological finds...

The other day I wrote in my article "One for the road" about how Serbian folklore funerary rituals involving water, could help us understand Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age funeral practice of burying ceramic vessels with the dead...

In my article about "Bactrian snakes and dragons" I wrote about how Slavic folklore about snakes and dragons can help us understand the meaning of Bronze Age Bactrian seals...

In my article "House of bones" I talked about how some Serbian beliefs and ritual related to the dead could help us solve a mystery of the missing Hittite royal bones and some weird Assyrian reliefs depicting prisoners being forced to grind the bones of their ancestors... 

The other day, in my article about "Cock bashing" end of harvest ritual in Sorbia, I wrote about how cockerel sacrifice was among Serbs used as a replacement for human sacrifice performed at the end of the harvest...

Also in my post about "New house" I talked about obvious replacement of the human sacrifice with a sacrifice of a cock...

"It was believed that someone from the family will soon die after they move into the new house, because every house wants to have its protective spirit, which is the spirit of the first person to die in the house.  To prevent this from happening, the man of the new house would kill a cockerel on the house doorstep (the seat of the dead) and would sprinkle all four corners of the house with its blood..."

Interestingly, Serbs have identical ritual to the one performed by the Siberian Chuvash people when two members of the family die close together. Except that Serbs then bury "a live cockerel" with the dead "to fool Death" or more precisely "as a replacement for the third death"...

So another proof that cockerel was seen by Serbs as a replacement for people, and another proof that these beliefs and rituals were once (Bronze Age, Neolithic, Even Earlier???) possibly common across Eurasia...

Or maybe we should just dismiss all this as just a coincidence. And we should continue to ignore our folklore and continue to "wonder what could possibly be the belief system of our Bronze Age ancestors"...