Abstract
The pictorial tradition of the Scythians and subsequent Scythoid cultures abound with mysterious images, where additional meanings are hidden behind the decorative side. The article offers an experience of deciphering patterns of polysemantic images on the example of a golden crown from Tilla-tepe, a horse front stall from the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan, etc. The compositions of the artifacts selected for analysis are based on the mythologeme “Goddess with Animals”. Coding is based on the principle of coincidence of contours and outlines of combined images with the necessary degree of reduction of images. The basic object chosen by the manufacturer, as bearing the main semantic meaning, was supplemented with details representing the image of a secondary character included in a given mythologeme. As a result, an encrypted image was created, the meaning of which remained inaccessible to the uninitiated viewer. Encrypted images should be considered the property of the Scythian and related cultures, since such a phenomenon is not observed in other, synchronous to the Scythian one.