Volume 45, Number 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2017 Protohistory of the vara. Exploring the Proto-Indo-Iranian Background of an Early Mytheme of the Iranian Plateau Massimo Vidale Dipartimento per i Beni Culturali: Archeologia, Storia dell’Arte, della Musica e del Cinema, Università di Padova, Italy Email: massimo.vidale@unipd.it In this article I propose, after the original inspiration of a paper by A. Panaino (2012), that a peculiar architectural motif, quite common on a class of carved softstone artifacts produced in south-eastern Iran in the 3 rd millennium BC, mirrors a mythological theme linked to an archaic flood or cataclysm legend. The stone vessels I discuss were funerary in character, and I argue that perhaps they were used to contain and distribute sweets during funerals. It seems that in south-eastern Iran, during the the 3rd millennium BC, one or more versions of flood myths were deeply rooted in the local cultural substrata. In a unknown later moment, a version would have been absorbed into the official Zoroastrian religious literary corpus, retaining important correspondences with the iconography of the middle Bronze age. Introduction Correlating ancient textual sources with iconography and archaeological evidence in general is notoriously a controversial exercise, constantly carried out on endemically slippery grounds. Doctrinal, exoteric knowledge and craft training belonged to separate spheres of individual development and cumulative human experience. Idiosyncratic cultural patterns and technical constraints, while creating similar narratives and images, caused variations, inversions and fragmentation of the same themes and finally obscured the original correspondences. Furthermore, the methodological thread of philology would hardly come to terms with visual interpretation of ancient imagery, that too often remains a quite subjective practice. When iconographic patterns are