One suggestion is that the imagery served an apotropaic function — that depicting threatening creatures in a controlled, formalized space was a way of managing or containing their power symbolically.

Another suggestion connects the animal imagery to shamanic or ritual practices in which practitioners mediated between the human world and the animal world.

A third line of interpretation notes that specific animal species are associated with specific enclosures or pillar groupings in ways that may suggest group identity — each enclosure’s distinctive animal emphasis perhaps marking it as the territory or symbol of a particular social group within the larger community.

None of these interpretive frameworks is definitively confirmed by the available evidence.