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Offering Gifts, northern wall of room 8 of sector VI.
Sogdian mural from Panjakent, 6th-8th Centuries.
Watercolour
Drawing
Plates IX and X. Offering Gifts. Painting from the northern wall of room 8 of sector VI.
A relatively large fragment of the painting was preserved only at the western end of the northern wall (Pl. IX, X).
The paintings on the north wall are arranged in two different-scale registers and the lower register is a relatively short frieze. The upper register of the painting is given on a large scale, which is common for paintings in other rooms of the Pyanjikent buildings. In this respect, the painting of room 8 is close to the painting fragment discovered in room 7 of sector III.
The state of the frieze is not very satisfactory. Here, only faint contours of images of two animals (a predator and a monkey?) and a human figure are caught, the plot connection between which is unclear.
On the upper register of this fragment, four figures have survived, with only the middle part remaining of the extreme right (the head and legs are missing). The plaster with a part of the image of this figure broke away from the rest of the painting in antiquity and shifted. The figure painted in blue paint (the body itself) is depicted nude to the waist. It is placed on some kind of seat, from which the spirally curved armrests (?) have been preserved. A sling decorated with a lush bow and a hole, hung with bells of a spherical shape with a slit on the bottom, are crossed on her breasts. The bells found during excavations have exactly the same shape. In addition, a large bell is suspended separately from the neck of this figure. To the left of this character are three female figures in rich clothes, kneeling and holding necklaces and other objects in outstretched hands, probably intended as an offering to the “blue figure”.
Source: pp. 17-18 Akademiya Nauk CCCP, Skulptura i Zhivopis Drevnego Pyandzhikenta (Moscow 1959)
