Ceramics, ritual hearths, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic clay sculptures, as well as black-glazed vessels with depressed grooved ornaments are the main monuments of the so-called Shengavit culture (Shengavit, where a 4th-2nd-millennium BC settlement was discovered, is today within Yerevan).
The drawings composed of depressed grooves with uneven width and depth on the ceramics haven’t been deciphered.
At the base of the compositions, there is either a horizontal groove (“tray”, the plane of the ground) or a trapezoid with its wide part facing upwards (possibly, portraying a boat).
Several upward-directed grooves, of which one almost certainly has the appearance of a broken ear or stem, resemble a flower bouquet growing out of a boat.
This symbolic image can be interpreted as a tree of life due to the prevalence of plant forms.
Hripsime Galstyan
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