RUJA POPOVA

THE CULT OF SABAZIOS IN THE NORTH BLACK SEA VIA THRACE?

Who is Sabazios, mentioned in ambiguous reports of ancient written tradition? According to the
Orphic hymns (Orphei Hymni 48.1-6; 49.1-7), he is the father of Dionysus. For Aristophanes (Schol. in Ar.
Av. 874) his Phrygian origin is undisputable (IIT I 159). According to the scholiast of the Wasps (Schol.
in Ar. Vesp. 9) the Thracians give Dionysus the name Sabazios and call their priests Sabios (IIT I 156).
For Alexander Polyhistor (=Macrob. Sat. 1.18), in Thrace the Sun (=Apollo) and Liber (Dionysus) are one
and the same deity Sabazios.1 In the reports of Diodorus Siculus (4.4.1), long before the birth of the
Greek Dionysus, another Dionysus was born to Zeus and Persephone; some people called him Sabazios
and celebrated his birth with secret sacrifices at night.2
Lately, the cult of Sabazios is being examined quite thoroughly, in particular the problem of his
origin as well as of the different manifestations of his cult, although modern historiography has not
found a solution to the contradictions in the reports of the ancient authors. The reason for this
should be sought in the inability to clarify the special features of this cult for the whole area of its
dissemination. The following text deals partly with these problems, its main task being the
clarification of the course of movement of the cult of Sabazios from Asia Minor to the North Black
Sea territories, where there is serious evidence of the presence of this cult during the first decades
of the 1st millennium AD. Well-known is the opinion that the idea of Sabazios came directly from
Asia Minor. The question is whether it is possible that this movement was accomplished through
Europe, i.e. through the territory of Thrace, in view of the peculiarities in the manifestation of that
cult practices in the North Black Sea region. The purpose of this text is not to clarify the origin of
the cult but, based on concrete evidence, to follow its course of movement and its adaptation to a
certain environment according to indigenous needs. It is an attempt to observe the Pontic area as a
zone of ethno-cultural contacts between settlers and indigenous populations, the cult of Sabazios
being a characteristic phenomenon. It is true, that the religion of the settlers who enter into close
relationship with the autochthonous population of this vast area and especially those living in the
Bosporus, cannot be isolated from the influence of the local cults, the Eastern Asia ones and the
official western roman cults. This religious conglomeration will find its place here on the North
Black Sea lands, the cult of Sabazios being one of its manifestations.
The Sabazios hand in the so called benedictio latina, charged with multiple attributes, is
undoubtedly one of the most important and most popular symbols of the divine presence in the
period between the early Roman Empire and the 4th c. (Fol 1999, 80). The hands of god found so far
display a number of similarities and differences.
In 1900 the Emperors Archaeological Commission bought the bronze hand discovered in
Ekaterinoslav (mod. Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, situated on the bank of the river Dnieper (ancient
Borysthenes), whose first publisher was B.V. Farmakovsky (1902, 118-21; CCIS III, 26-27). The hand is
delicate in form, which led the author of the publication to the conclusion that it was a female
hand. It is in the typical gesture of benedictio latina with a strobile attached to the thumb. Multiple
relief representations, some of which seem obscure, are piled up upon the hand. On the one side,
inside a niche, a lying woman is depicted with a child and a bird hovering above them, possibly an
eagle or some other bird of prey according to Farmakovsky. Near the root of the thumb, an amphora
1
2

It will be necessary to refer to the same evidence later.

The evidence gathered from the written tradition and the interpretation of the source, see Fol 1994, 44-184.

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493

(according to Farmakovsky) or a wine crater (according to this writer), a branch, a frog and a lizard
are piled up. Under the forefinger there are scales, a caduceus, a snake wrapped around the folded
fingers, and a tortoise. Under the little finger, Farmakovsky sees most probably some musical
instruments like two flutes, a syrinx and a cymbal. For Farmakovsky, who is aware of other bronze
hands and a hand with a votive inscription to the Phrygian Sabazios, the reliefs and the gesture of
the hand from Ekaterinoslav refer to women who had given birth to a child. Quoting his
colleagues, who dealt especially with such hands and supported the view that all the pictured
objects should be considered as , Farmakovsky admits this character for the bird, the
strobile, the amphora/crater, the branch, the caduceus and the scales. Only in the musical objects
does he see relations with the eastern orgiastic cults, widely spread during the late Roman Empire,
and he explicitly relates those objects to the Bacchic cult. However, this fact does not change his
opinion concerning the apotropaic character of the hand, while the piling up of the objects was
attributed to the perception that, if they are more numerous, then the protective forces of the amulet
are stronger. Farmakovsky dates the find on stylistic grounds as early as the late Roman period.
According to images familiar from Thrace and Moesia, as well as others supposed to come from
Thrace (such as the stone relief presently in the British Museum), Sabazios is dressed in the typical
Phrygian garments, has a beard and is very often represented raising his hand in the benedictio latina
gesture, holding a sceptre or a strobile, i.e. in the iconographic type of the so called Phrygian god.
Most often he is pictured among animal figures, symbols and cult objects with a distinct solarchthonic meaning. The same animals and attributes are found on Sabazios hands as well.3 Far be it
from me that each attribute in the imagery should be explained in relation to Sabazios, since it
has been proven that in the rite (and the Thracian Sabazios is god of the rite; Fol 1994) some
inventions appear only incidentally only to fade away at a later date.
The ritual nature of all types of musical instruments is indisputable. Indisputable is also the
snake a basic zoomorphic image of the deity reincarnated for new life, as described in the rite by
Demosthenes (18.259-60). The so called Anatolian/Phrygian stasis of Sabazios represents his most
popular identification with the snake (again according to Demosthenes). On the one side, the snake
unites Sabazios and Zeus, thus influencing the iconographic image of Zeus-Sabazios. On the other
hand, it ushers him into the literary Orphism with the horned snake mythos and Clemens of
Alexandreia (Protr. 2.15.1), who equates him to Dionysos-Zagreus. The snake remains a divine
identification in the realm of the unwritten, which springs up from the roots of non literary
Orphism. Except for the bronze hand from Ekaterinoslav, we see the snake also in the relief from the
British Museum facing the bearded rider. The iconography of a hand found in Gradnitsa, and dating
as far back as the 2nd-3rd c.4 is very close to the one from Ekaterinoslav: there is a snake winding
around the wrist and rising to the little finger with its head kept on the palm of the hand,5 and a
similar piling up of imagery: a strobile upon the thumb, a branch, part of an eagle, the head of a ram,
present also in the relief from the British Museum (the ritual sacrifice),6 a tortoise, a frog, a lizard or
a crocodile (?) as in Voysil (chthonic attributes of the deity, but in no case his zoomorphic
expression). The strobile and the branch/tree are indisputably phallic signs/symbols and the bird of
prey most probably suggests the idea of the presence of the Great Goddess.7 In the reliefs of both
hands the caduceus of Hermes appears. The connection with Hermes is attested in the remarkable
relief from Philippopolis (Conev 1954, 15-20; Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 267-70; Fol 1994, 286-88), where
Pan is also pictured. Hermes (as well as Pan) is one excellent indication of the connection with
3

Catalogue, see CCIS; commentary in Lane, CCIS III, 23-37.

About the hand from Gradnitsa see in detail Milchev 1975, 48 ss.; Milchev 1977, 58-76; Tacheva-Hitova 1980, 49-73;
Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 271-73.
5
About the snake as an almost obligatory image for that type of monuments see Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 271.
6
About the ram as a substitute, see Fol 1994, 279; about the ram upon the hand from Gradnitsa, see Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 272.
7
About the predatory birds as companions of Cybele, see Lane CCIS III, 26-27.
4

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death, death itself as a chthonic idea, which is a way to immortality.8 This monument dating back to
the 3rd c. and is unprecedented in the imagery of Sabazios, in which the story appears in two
figurative fields: re-confirmation of the chthonic-solar transition in the Heros with the
Phrygian hat and the strobile in the hand on the lower level, while the upper level is organised
around the Phrygian (according to iconographic indications) Sabazios, crowned with strobiles.
The chthonic deity is moving from death towards new life, moving upwards in the semantic fields,
and occupies the highest place, becoming a Uranic deity, the Thracian god Cosmocrator (a better
definition of Tacheva-Hitova relevant to that age; Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 270). The reading of this
expressive text recalls the report of Alexander Polyhistor (cited by Macrobius) concerning the
honouring of Apollo and Dionysos in dual Sabazios. He was celebrated with magnificent religiosity
(magnifica religione celebrant), while on the Zilmissus peak a round temple was built with an opening
in the middle of the roof. This quotation takes us back to Herodotus 7.111 mentioning the sanctuary
of Dionysos, kept by the Bessi, also known from later authors. The questions concerning the
attempts in fact the impossibility to identify that peak are faced with one problem: the Zilmissus
peak most probably is not an oronym, but a doctrinal position of the dual deity. Somewhere
between the 4th c. BC (when the long age of profanation of the orphic doctrine and its gradual
hellenisation began: Fol 1991, 207-08) and the 1st c. BC the Thracian orphic doctrine transforms its
Duality and attains Unity (not oneness) in the name of Sabazios (Penkova 2004, 314). This is the
Sabazios encompassing the solar and chthonic hypostasis of the dual God-Son, the seen and the
unseen world, brilliantly witnessed by Alexander Polyhistor (Fol 2000, 185, 216).
The monument from Philippopolis bears evidence of the existence of a direct connection (so
dynamically discussed in the research works about Thracian religion) between the cults of Sabazios and
the Heros in ancient Thrace (Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 269-70; Goeva 2003, 84-90; cf. Boteva 2003, 91-99;
Goeva 2005, 193-200), along with the ivory hand from the village of Krassen (Dobrich region; cf.
Bobcheva 1965, 35 ff.; Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 258-62; Gorbanov 1985, 233-36; Boteva 2003, 94-95; Penkova
2004, 314), where the miniature image of the rider is located inside a nutshell.
The two monuments, the bronze hand from the Bosporan kingdom (Ekaterinoslav/
Dnepropetrovsk) and the one from the heart of Thrace region of Augusta Traiana (mod. village of
Gradnitsa), so similar in the iconographic sense, show attributes which could find a Sabazios
translation; they also show analogies with other monuments dedicated to the same cult. The exact
function of the Sabazios hands has not been explained so far. In some of them sacrificial gifts were
seen, placed in temples and sanctuaries (Macrea 1959, 328 ff.); some of them are believed to have
been used in cult practices considered, like the hand from Krassen, which is thought to have
crowned the sceptre of a priest of Sabazios, represented in the way the deity is represented in the
relief from Copenhagen (Gorbanov 1975, 13-18; Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 259; Boteva 2003, 94); hands
similar to those of Sabazios put on an altar as objects-mediators/ were pictured on votive
plaques from Ampurias in Spain; some researchers attribute a sacral function to some of them, as
for example to the hand from Gradnitsa (Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 291), hence also to the one from
Ekaterinoslav/Dnepropetrovsk.
Having compared one monument from the heart of the Bosporan kingdom and the series of
monuments related to the cult of Sabazios from Thrace and Moesia Inferior we identified many
similarities and analogies, while the differences are insignificant and not so important for the
interpretation of the manifestation of the cult. It is now time to examine the manifestations of
religious rites of Sabazios in the North Pontic lands, as well as the historiography attitude there.
According to Rostovtzeff, the cult of Sabazios in the Bosporan kingdom, which he connects with
the collegia and decorations on tombs in Panticapaeum (mod. Kerch), was born under Thracian
influence; it syncretises the ideas of the Iranian solar cult and the Jewish monotheism in the cult of
8

Cf. Tacheva-Hitova 1982, 293 about Hermes Psychopompos.

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495

(Rostovtzeff 1914, 428-34; 1922, 179). The observation of tombs belonging to the
geometric style gives him grounds for that. In them he discovers explicit attributes of the deity,
including the eagle, which he claims to be not only the most typical, but also bigger in size,
compared to other attributes, and closer to the deity (Rostovtzeff 1914, 429). The association of
Sabazios with the vine is completely understandable since no clear distinction was made between
the Thracian Dionysus and Sabazios. He adds the strobile to the mentioned attributes we
constantly encounter this main symbol of the deity on objects of the cult (Rostovtzeff 1914, 430).
The appearance of Sabazios in North Black Sea tombs is attributed to the faith of the followers of the
cult in the eternal life of Beyond. The tombs from 1894 and 1901 are of special interest for him because
of the ships pictured in outline, with or without a crew. According to Rostovtzeff, together with the
armaments, they are most probably related to the daily routine of the deceased, but he presumes that
they could also be related in some way to the symbolic parts of the decoration (Rostovtzeff 1914,
434). The sketchy outline of the ships, as well as the whole decoration located under vine-garlands as if
following some archaic tradition with a code rather than an aesthetic meaning, and the solar signs
above them, recalls monuments from an earlier period with pictures of the solar boat.
Blavatskiy sees the paintings in some tombs as an evidence for the existence of a synod of the
followers of Sabazios (Blavatskiy 1964, 200). He connects the terracotta figures with movable limbs
and phalluses from Kerch (Shkorpil 1911, 62-63) with this same cult and defines it as the the cult
that gives power (Blavatskiy 1964, 200). In the context of and its place in the religion
of the Bosporan kingdom, Blavatskiy defines the main deity as emerging upon the foundations of
the cult of Zeus and closely related to the Thracian cult of Sabazios and probably also of the
Sarmatian God-Rider (Blavatskiy 1964, 197).
Vyazmyatina sees the Thracian cultural influence in the penetration in the spiritual life of
certain cults like the one of the rider, of Sabazios, of Asklepios and Hygieia, and qualifies it as a
typical influence (Vyazmyatina 1969, 121).
Krykin (1993, 165-78), who deals with the Thracian presence in the North Black Sea lands,
explicitly declares that the cult of Sabazios mentioned literally in all the North Pontic regions
(Krykin 1993, 166) penetrates directly (my italics R.P.) into the North Black Sea lands from Asia
Minor without any mediation of Thrace (Krykin 1993, 178).
Ustinova is not that categorical in her claim about the Anatolian origin of the cult which
penetrated in the North Pontic regions; she claims that there is no direct evidence related to the
presence of this cult in the Bosporan kingdom (Ustinova 1999, 166). She makes a clear distinction
between the two cults the one of Sabazios and the one of , and on that basis she
denies Rostovtzeffs interpretation of tombs of the followers of Sabazios, because she discovered
no direct evidence for their existence. The authors opinion is that the cult of Sabazios was indeed
very popular in Thrace and could have possibly exercised some influence on the of
the Bosporus, but there is no proof that such an influence existed. (Ustinova 1999, 166).
The author has not taken into account the bronze hand from Ekaterinoslav/Dnepropetrovsk. The
two cults the one of Sabazios and the one of (Fol 2004, 126-27), and their explicit
distinction need reconsideration and reinterpretation. Very often in the inscriptions from this
region an anonymous supreme deity appears, whose presence is only alluded through epithets. But
the categorical relation of such epithets to one or the other deity is illegitimate, since in most of the
cases they are common for both of them.9
In the dissemination of the cult of Sabazios one should take into consideration also the religious
communities from ethnic enclaves along the coast of the Euxine Pont. These communities were
formed through population movements from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The penetration of

See for example the inscription from Kytaia, CIRB 942.

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elements of Thracian culture into this region is recorded as early as the 7th c. BC (Vyazmyatina 1969,
79; Melyukova 1969, 119 ff.; Marchenko 1974, 149 ff.).
In conclusion, evidence in Herodotus 4.80 indicates the kinship and dynastic relations between
Scythians and Thracians. Most researchers acknowledge the Thracian origin of the Spartocids,10 rulers
of the Bosporus from 438 BC to the end of 2nd c. BC, whose role in religious life should not be
underestimated. A more significant role for the Thracisation of religion in the Bosporus is attributed
to the dynastic relations during the first centuries of the new millennium until the very end of the 3rd c.
In spite of the opinion expressed for the lack of distinct evidence of a cult of Sabazios in the
Bosporus on the one hand, and of the certain presence of the Anatolian cult on the other, I can well
imagine the possibility that this cult moved from/through Europe, from the nature of the Thracian
Orphism into the zone of ethno-cultural contacts between Thrace and Scythia (V. Fol 2000, 48-49).

10

Blavatskiy 1964, 55-56, who connects the Thracian name of the founder of the dynasty with the autochthonous
inhabitants of the Asian shore of the Bosporus; Vinogradov 1980, 97, n. 185; ShelovKovedyayev 1985, 83-84, who
explicitly joins those scientists, who acknowledge the Thracian origin of Sparadocus and not only consider the name to
be Thracian, but also typical of the ruling dynasty of the Odrysians.

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Boteva, D. 2003. Bears Hunt on the Consecrated Relieves of the Thracian Rider (bulg.). Bulletin of the Dept. of
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Blagoevgrad 1: Power and Society. In honorem Prof. Margaritae Taeva, 91-99.
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Fol, Al. 1994. The Thracian Dionysus. Book two. Sabazios. Sofia.
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Goeva, Zl. 2005. ber manche Probleme in der Ikonographie des thrakischen Reiters. Thracia 16: 193-200.
Gorbanov, P. 1975. On the Character to the Figural Monuments of Sabazios and Some Aspects of his Cult
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Gorbanov, P. 1985. The Ivory Hand from the Village of Krasen, Tolbuhin District (bulg.). In Severoiztochna
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Milchev, A. 1975. On the Cult of Sabazios in Lower Moesia and Thrace (bulg.). AUSof. 66 (1972-1973): 35-77.
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1a. The Sabazioss hand from Ekaterinoslav

2. The Hand from Gradnitza

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1b. The Sabazioss hand from Ekaterinoslav

3. The relief of Philippopolis

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5. The Tomb of Sabaziastai in Kerch (according to Rostovtzeff)

4. The Hand from Krasen

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