Bronze bowl with cone from the Lower Ob region

A bronze bowl was discovered in the Lower Ob Region about 400 km south of Salekhard during the work of the Circumpolar Ethnographic Expedition in the summer of2023. The most distinctive element of this bowl was a hollow cone at the bottom of the vessel and two relief bands encircling it. There are no known parallels to this bowl in Northern Eurasia. At the same time, the bowl combines the features of three types of objects: 1) forged bowls of high-tin bronze with cones from India and Thailand of the second half of the first millennium BC, 2) "Indian” rattle-mirrors of high-tin bronze from the Urals and Altai of the 4th century BC, and 3) cultic bronze discs with cones and bands, which imitated rattle-mirrors but were different in their function. The supposed sacredness of bowls with a cone and bands is confirmed a granite bowl with a cone surrounded by two circular bands on the bottom from a Buddhist temple in Taxila in Northern Pakistan. The bowl with a cone from the Lower Ob region could have been brought to the north from that region. However, the craftsmen who made it seem to have been familiar with mirrors and cultic discs, which is indirectly indicated by the coincidence of diameters of the bowl and rattle-mirrors (about 14.5 cm), as well as complete correspondence with small cultic discs in size and design. It can be assumed that all three groups of artifacts with the sacred structure of cone encircled by bands (a kind of Buddhist mandala), were produced in the northwest of Ancient India. Rattle-mirrors and cultic discs which replaced them since the 3rd-2nd centuries BC were intentionally brought to northern regions.