English: Anikova Plate, a silver and gilt plate showing the siege of a castle, Sogdian, 9th–10th century. Found in 1909 near village of Anikova, Perm Province, Russia.

The scene on this plate has been identified as a series of episodes from the biblical book of Joshua. Reading from the bottom up, the harlot Rahab peers out the window above a door through which she lets Joshua’s spies into the Canaanite city of Jericho. Above, in the center of the plate, priests blow trumpets as the Israelites’ Ark of the Covenant is held aloft (Joshua 2 and 6), and farther up, another Canaanite city has been taken. At the top are the sun and the moon, which at the orders of Joshua (the warrior on horseback in the upper right of the plate) have come to a standstill in the heavens (Joshua 10:12–13).

Although the plate was found near Malaya Anikova in the region of the Ural Mountains in Russia, it was probably made in and for a Sogdian Christian community located in Semirechye (southeast Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan). Situated along trade routes leading east, the region had been settled by Nestorian Christian Sogdians, whose communities survived into early Islamic times.

See more: THE SOGDIANS, Influencers On the Silk Roads: Anikova Plate

State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, S-46