Abstract
Rock carvings and inscriptions, drawings that appeared in the Upper Paleolithic era and have come into the modern era, on the one hand, represent an "open-air gallery" reflecting the spiritual soul of the person who painted them, and on the other, they are one of the unprecedented sources for the history of past eras and societies. This is due to the fact that Tamgaly stones provide information related to the daily life, household and profession of our ancestors, religious beliefs and customs, worldview, relations with the environment, tribal identity and other actions. The Kazakh steppes occupy one of the first places on the Eurasian continent in terms of the number of cumulative places filled with such data. One of the most common images in the petroglyphs of Mangystau is the symbol and similar images. The article analyzes sets of symbols, petroglyphs and symbolic images, their cognitive meaning, symbolic function.