It was said that the Golden Woman was made from pure gold. No one had the right to see her. No one had the right to enter her cave, full of treasures. The exception was made for hereditary Guardians, who wore red clothing and collected presents brought to the taiga idol by local tribes.

How did the Ob-Ugrians come to possess their sacred Golden Woman? Early rumors had it that she was made in Rome, and was brought to their land by the Ob-Ugric warriors who had participated in a military campaign of Alarich, the king of the Visigoths captured and sacked Rome in 410, and he died the same year. The warriors brought the idol with them to the far-away Arctic Ocean. However, such hollow statutes were not manufactured in Rome. It did not look Roman, too, judging by descriptions. It is quite possible that the statue's origins were in ancient India or Sumer…or beyond.

The Ob-Ugric mythology is very complicated; the deities have many names, and different characteristics, depending on the location in the Ugra the believers dwell in.

Kaltesh-Anki is Myg-imi, or Mother Earth. Some Khanty believe that she is actually the wife of Numi-Turum, and was cast down from Heaven by her spouse. The reason for this was her sexual liaison with another deity.

Numi-Turum (turum means god in the Khanty language), who created the world and human beings, inhabits the seventh floor of the Upper World. He is detached from mere mortals, and to contact him, humans must do so through a lesser deity. The Mansi believe that Numi-Turum created the first human being from clay, and that Kaltesh-Anki gave the soul to this human. Luminous and bright is how some of the Ob-Ugrians called their God of heavens.

The deity closest to the humans is the World Surveyor Man (or The man who looks on the World), Mir-susne-Xum to the Mansi, and Sorni-iki to the Khanty, the seventh son of Numi-Turum. He is the heavenly horseman, and his steed can move around the sky at the speed of light. The steed has eight wings. This is according to excellent research published by Estonian scientist Anzori Barkalaja in Estonian magazine Pro-Ethnologia (Arctic Studies 3), Issue 8, and other research papers of Russian and Estonian scientists.

This deity helps humans contact his father, Numi-Turum; he is the chief mediator or intermediary. But he serves the same role between the humans and Kaltesh-Anki, who keeps accounts of people's lives and determines how long they will live. Mir-susne-Xum, thus, is similar to the deity of the Scandinavians, god Odin. In Indian mythology, Indra, the god of Thunder, and Dyaus, the sky god, existed separately, just as Numi-Turum and his seventh son in the Ob-Ugric myths. Dayus or Dyaus was the Hindu creator and sky god and father of Surya the sun god and Agni the god of fire.

Furthermore, some Mansi believed that Numi-Turum's appearances were accompanied by rumbling sound in the heaven.

Did the creators and the guardians of the Zolotaya Baba speak Sumerian?

Ancient Sumer came to mind upon reading the name of the Ob-Ugrian goddess of fertility and childbirth. She is Kaltesh-Anki (also Kaltash, and Anki-Pugos), the daughter of the sky deity, Numi-Turum; she keeps the account of the length of human lives. Other researchers see a connection. Estonian scientist, Aado Lintrop, published a number of excellent articles about the Ob-Ugric culture. One of them, The Great Oak and Brother-Sister, was published in Volume 16 of Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), Tartu, Estonia, 2001. Linthrop does not claim a direct connection to the mythology of Sumer, but stresses the principles and phenomena that "very probably have been universal". Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war, was the daughter of Ani, the sky god.

In the Hungarian mythology the goddess Boldog Asszony is the goddess of birth, fertility and harvests. Hungarian scientists, Dr. Ida Bobula and Fred Hamori, concur that it was not Inanna, but the old Sumerian goddess BAÚ as the ideal counterpart of Boldog Asszony in both name and in function. The Sumerian deity (also known as BABA, and GULA) was at one time the third in rank among the ancient Sumerian gods. It is probable that Sumerian word BABA and Russian baba have the same meaning; it was probably a mere coincidence, but in the future, as the Ob-Ugric mythology becomes the focus of a comprehensive international research, scientists might discover an alternative explanation. Reflecting upon Kaltesh-Anki, it is worthwhile remember that the Sumerian BAÚ was believed to be the goddess of bounty, a healer, and a provider of harvest and food, giver of birth and fertility, and the life giver (midwife) who helps bring life into the world.

There is more to the BAU correlation as supported by relevant research.

Dumuzi was a harvest god of ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian god of vegetation and the underworld. Famous for his horned lunar crown, he was the son-husband of the goddess Gula-BAU. Interestingly, he was depicted as sitting in front of the serpent in a relief "Goddess of the Tree of Life" ca. 2500 B.CE. The Ob-Ugric people had a concept of the World Tree, as reported by an Arabic traveler and missionary Al-Garnati. Aado Linthrop has brilliantly analyzed this Tree and parallel similar Trees of other cultures, in his article mentioned above. Suffice it to say other ancient cultures had similar myths.

BABA or BAU was a Sumerian goddess of the city of Lagash, approximately 70 kilometers north of Ur, and patroness of the king. She is also a mother goddess and a goddess of healing. Baba is the daughter of the sky god Ani, and consort of the fertility god Ningirsu. She was often called mother Baba, and she was identified with the goddess Gula. One of the sources of healthcare for the Sumerians was the Temple of Gula. Gula was one of the more important gods of healing. These temples were sites for the diagnosis of illness, as well as libraries that held many practical medical texts. Gula was earlier known as BAU, or Ninkarrak, in Mesopotamian religion, city goddess of Urukug in the Lagash region and, under the name Nininsina, the Queen of Isin, (city goddess of Isin), south of Nippur.

Back in 1990, archeologists working in Iraq discovered the remains of a gigantic temple (around 1300 BCE), dedicated to the ancient goddess of medicine, Gula.

Valentin Krapiva, a paranormal phenomena researcher in Ukraine, has researched stories about the Golden Woman of Ugra, as well as the Ob-Ugric mythology and asserts that she strongly resembles the goddess Kaltesh. He published his Tayna Siyayuschey Zhenshini article in an Odessa magazine Zagadki Sfinksa in 1992. Krapiva finds a number of similarities between Yumala and the deity Kaltesh. Like N. S. Trubetskoy, a famous Russian ethnographer and founder of structural linguistics, he believes that Yumala was originally from India. Yumala was how the Norsemen called the Golden Woman.