Tapati, who is she, and why is she significant?
Well, first, she is a river goddess, but daughter of the sun god, Surya. However, her name means the hot one, the burning one. Interestingly enough, her name is tied to the river she's said to rule over - HOWEVER, language time.
Agni, a vedic fire god, has a scythian counterpart similar in name (and the scythian's are the older culture that broke off to form the vedic, indo iranian/iranian, and levant people as well as others - mixing, breeding, invading).
Her name is cognate with the Scythian supreme fire goddess, Tabiti. Very interesting.
Tabiti is the supreme goddess of all things in the Scythian culture, primordial, the first flame, and much like Ianna (from Summerian mythology I talked about later) went on to inspire entire god/goddess roles, and had mantles inverted as interestingly enough, there's evidence some first/supreme deities were feminine, later flipped to male as cultures evolved - their places/roles attributes assigned to male gods and their places changed - made wives, daughters, so on a similar sort of flipping happens out of the Scythian culture/ proto Indo Europeans (that I've talked about) where the root word for a divine (doesn't mean good just divinely powered) being evolved along languages the ahura, asura, and asir (Norse) come from an older proto Indo-European/Scythian word.
In the Vedic stories, the daevas are good, the asura evil. In the Avestan and Iranian texts...the ahura/asura are good, and the daevas are evil.
We know the Norse asir and vanir warred also very interesting. And interesting how gods/goddesses are changed, subsumed, adopted and more, no? Tabiti was never represented in/by art, btw. Her representation was always an actual fireplace -- a flame. That's what you used.
There's historical written evidence in places of Agni's animal form being both referred to as a bull, AND a cow in places - different genders. And his flame being referred to as female in places.
In the Hindu bronze age, Agni had way more of a prominent role as fire did before later dwindling...as fire does (ooooo symbolic - okay that's just cuz of time and shifting priorities), but there are more similarities of these things in Baltic cultures -- but oh why?
(Why am I hopping around? Cuz gods/goddesses, archetypes, beats, stories all do too - all connected you muppets).
Well, did you know the closest cognate to Sanskrit is Lithuanian? It's kept so much of its proto Indo European roots.
Wait, a South Asian language and Baltic European language are cognates? YUH. WEIRD.
Almost like they both derived out of an older culture, language, their practices, beliefs and more.
And most of human history is just migrating, fucking, invading, and settling in new places and staying long enough until your features continue to change due to bow chicka wow wowing and environment.
Here's some Scythian clothing (oh btw, women were warriors/could be too - congrats you learned that).
Does this style look familiar? Yeah, you can see the evolution/adaptation from this to later styles (bearing similarities) in Iran, India, Mongolia, the Baltics.
Cuz....y'know, that's where the proto Indo Europeans went about their biz and got jiggy with it and settled. Wow-wow-wee-wah! Okay now I'm done. Circular ish convo to get there but started with a fire goddess, it's relevant, but it all comes back to this.
Btw, this is also an important lesson for fantasy authors.
Because of all these connections and how old a bad ass fire goddess is, many of the oldest cultures are regarded as fire worshippers (like the Zoroastrians) did you know some keep an eternal burning flame? -- one is in Udvada Gujarat in India.
This flame has been said to have been kept burning for 1,500 years.
And again, while most of the surviving Indo Iranic sun gods are male, there is evidence the ORIGINAL sun deity (including in/from the German, Baltic, and Slavic religions) was FEMALE.