Russian Archaeologists have unearthed a silver medallion depicting the Greek goddess Aphrodite (Roma Venüs) in a 2100-year-old grave of a priestess on the northeast coast of the Black Sea.
The unique medallion depicts ten rather than the known twelve signs of the zodiac and provides insight into religious practices at the time of its creation.
In the opinion of archaeologists, the discovery raises the possibility that the buried woman was an Aphrodite priestess, the goddess of beauty and love. The rings, silver earrings, and other grave goods dedicated to the goddess led to these conclusions.
The grave is among several unique finds unearthed this summer at a site near the shore of the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia, east of the Crimean Peninsula and between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
According to the Oleg Deripaska Volnoe Delo Foundation’s spokesman Ruben Bunyatyan, archaeologists Nikolay Sudarev and Mikhail Treister discovered the woman’s grave during the Phanagoria archaeological expedition’s 2022 summer season.