Bone Sleeve with Aramaic Letters from the Sakar-Chaga 3 Burial Ground and the Problem of Contacts of Central Asian Nomads with the Civilizations of Western Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After excavations of the mound Arzhan-2, the main burial of which dates back to the second half of the 7th century BC, the scholars could not help but raise the question of the contacts of its creators with the civilizations of the Near East. In order to determine the main circle of contacts of Arzhan-2 in the Near East, it is necessary to summarize all the facts that may indicate the existence of such ties. The presence of coriander in the burial mound, as well as jewelry decorated with grain and enamel, made using the true cloisonne technique, proves that the connections of Arzhan-2 in the southwestern direction reached at least Western Iran. The influence of the cultural traditions of Western Asia on the material complex of the Arzhan-2 mound was facilitated by the Sakas of the Aral Sea region. The discovery in the Sakar-chaga 3 burial ground bone sleeve with the image of two opposing wild boars, the closest analogies of which are found in the Arzhan-1 and Arzhan-2 mounds, and the Aramaic letters yod, he and waw, belonging to the last quarter of the 8th – 7th centuries BC, allows us to assert that the Sakas penetrated as far as the state of Mannea, in which the Aramaic script was used, and jewelry decorated with grain and cloisonne (a treasure from Ziwiye) are also known. Moreover, these campaigns could be made only before the formation of the Median kingdom at the end of the 670s BC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".