Sabazios left almost no surviving literature explaining his own cult in the worshippers' own words, but he left an unusually distinctive body of material evidence: dozens of bronze votive hands, cast in the gesture of blessing, their surface crowded with small figures, a pinecone, a coiled serpent, a thunderbolt, a ram's head and other symbols among them, arranged with enough consistency across finds from Anatolia to the western Roman Empire that they are clearly a recognised devotional object type rather than one-off curiosities. The hands are usually understood as having been mounted on poles and carried in ritual procession, though the precise sequence and meaning of that ritual use is only partly reconstructed from the objects themselves, since no detailed liturgical text describing their function has survived.
The wide geographic spread of the hands, found from the god's Phrygian homeland through Greek and into Roman contexts, is itself a kind of evidence for how far the cult travelled and how long it retained a recognisable material identity even as its theology was absorbed into, and blurred with, Greco-Roman religion around it. In a case like this, where textual sources are thin and largely external, the objects worshippers actually made and carried do some of the interpretive work texts would otherwise do, giving historians a durable trace of ritual practice even where the beliefs behind it can only be inferred.