The sacrifice of dogs in the context of ancestor veneration in the Bosporan kingdom (on the example of the settlement Belinskoe in the Eastern Crimea)

Yartsev Sergey Vladimirovich, Shushunova Elena Valeryevna

The article deals with the complex topic of ritual burials of dogs in the Bosporan Kingdom in ancient times. In addition to the traditional protective function the authors suggest that the sacrifices of these animals played an important role in the cult of the ancestors of the of the ancient state. In authors’ opinion the ritual killing and burial of dogs were directly related to the purification of the soul of the dead. Sacrifices were committed during worshiping the goddess Hecate. In Belinskiy settlement they occurred primarily on the North-West exit of the fortress, through which local residents carried their dead relatives passing by buried dogs, thereby performing a special ritual designed to purify the soul before burial and to provide it with an unobstructed path to the afterlife. The concentration of ritual burials of animals in this place of the settlement also allows to assume that it was the place where dogs provided communication with the underworld and, first of all, with the souls of ancestors, ready to help in the strategic area of the fortress defense. Later chthonic traditions of the North-Western departure from the settlement did not lose their importance even in spite of changes in the ethnic composition of the population of the Bosporus settlement.

Keywords:the Bosporan Kingdom, ancestor worship, Greek mythology, the goddess Hecate, the sacrifice of dogs, ritual burial, the afterlife.