Anikova dish
The Anikova dish or Anikovsky dish is a cast silver dish representing armoured cavalrymen attacking a fortress in the Siege of Jericho, and thought to have been created in Semirechye in Central Asia in the 9th–10th century. It was found in 1909 near the village of Bolshe-Anikovskaya, Cherdyn district, Perm province. It is now in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Nestorian biblical scene
The scene on this plate has been identified as a series of episodes from the Book of Joshua related to the Siege of Jericho. 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, and farther up, another Canaanite city has been taken. At the top are the sun and the moon, which at the orders of Joshua have come to a standstill in the heavens.The plate is generally described as having been created by the Nestorian Christian Sogdian colonies of Semirechye, which had fled the Muslim occupation of Sogdia in 722, and were now under the dominion of the Karluks. An identical dish, but crisper in details, the "Nildin dish", was found in Verkhne-Nildino, and is now in the collection of the museum of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. It dates to the 8th – early 9th centuries. The Anikova dish was probably cast, by using clay or gipsum cast as a mold, from the "Nildin dish", which is therefore the 8th century original model, whose designs are therefore attributable to this period.
Another contemporary dish, from the same location and probably the same workshop, shows Syriac Christian scenes and Syriac inscriptions. Several similar plates were also discovered. Syriac was the language of the Church of the East, which converted the Karluk Turks circa 775-800 CE. A Church of the East Metropolitan was established at Kashgar and at Navekat, near the Karlul capital of Suyab. Several churches dating to the 9th–10th century were also discovered in the region. The Karluks would consolidate into the powerful Kara-Khanid Khanate from 840.