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. Other examples of metalworkSogdian Metalworking Learn more about Sogdian metalwork, such as the bronze censer (or thurible) found near Samarkand , are further evidence of the vitality of Christian communities in Sogdiana; Fig. 1-3. Because the “Joshua Plate” was formed by casting instead of the usual method of fashioning decorated metalwork at the time, the Russian archaeologist and metalwork specialist Boris I. MarshakBoris Marshak Learn more about the Russian scholar Boris Marshak suggested that it had been copied from an earlier piece. He had observed that such engraved details as the weapons and armor were from the 9th–10th centuries, but the castle was typically 8th-century in style. Indeed, an almost identical cast–silver gilt plate was subsequently found in a Shamanic shrine near Verkhne-Nil’din , in northwestern Siberia.