Nanaia, Anāhitā and the 'Goddess on Lion': Iconographical and Religious Matters

Abstract

By their nature, religions produce beliefs that assimilate distinct divine figures. Nonetheless one wonders whether scientific interpretations, which adventure sometimes beyond any religious imagination, did not arrange dubious divine intersections into historical and religious certitudes. This might be the case that considers Ištar to be the same as Nanaia in Mesopotamia (or vice versa) and Nanaia to be the same as Anāhitā in Iran (and for the “transitive relation”, Anāhitā to be the same as Ištar). Due to the fact that Hellenism transforms the millenary religious order of Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia, is it reasonable to consider the goddess Nanaia who makes her first appearance within the Neosumerian pantheon of the queen Šulgi-simti to be the same as Nanašao of the kuṣāṇa coins, named Nana in the Bactrian inscription of Rabatak, portrayed while seating en-amazone on the lion in the Sogdian Northern temple of Pendjikent? The only pre-Hellenistic iconography of Nanaia, shown on the kudurru of the Kassite king Melishipak, is an image apart from the canonical post-Hellenistic representation of the goddess. This does not prevent scholars from Ancient Near Eastern and Iranian studies from taking for granted that, being Nanaia a much-revered goddess in Elam, her iconography is taken as model by the Persians with the intent to provide the aniconic Arədvī Sūrā Anāhitā of Yašt 5 with the figurative experience that matures into the Anāhitā of Artaxerses II. Some new considerations are proposed on these issues.