Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia

Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia

Vinogradova A. G. Dancing. Canvas. Oil.

Russia is a country of eternal change and is completely not conservative, and a country beyond conservative customs, where a historical time lives, and does not part with rituals and ideas. The Russians are not a young people, but the old ones - like the Chinese. They are very old, ancient, conservatively preserved all the oldest and do not refuse it. In their language, their superstition, their disposition, etc., one can study the most ancient times. Victor von Hyun. 1870.

Zharnikova Svetlana Vasilievna

Archaic motives of North Russian ornamentation

(To the question of possible Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian parallels).

Specialty 07.00.07-ethnographic

Abstract of dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences.

Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Order of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Order of Friendship of Peoples Institute of Ethnography. N.N. Miklouho-Maclay. On the rights of the manuscript. Moscow. 1988.

1. General characteristics of the work

This work was carried out as part of research conducted at the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences and aimed at studying the ethnic history and ancient ties of the East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples (Aryans, or Aryans).

The relevance of the topic is due to: firstly, the ever-increasing versatile Soviet-Indian contacts and the desire of the peoples of the two countries to get to know each other better, to find the origins of traditional Russian-Indian friendship; secondly, it is due to the growth of ethnic identity that has been universally observed in recent decades and often takes on such ugly forms as nationalism and racism. In light of this, regional ethno-historical research is currently gaining special scientific acuity, as knowledge of ethnic history helps modern people to free themselves from the narrowness of the nationalist view of the world, to understand the role and significance of the contribution to the common treasury of human culture of all peoples, to realize that humanity is one.

On the pages of this work, for the first time in Russian science, the most ancient Proto-Slavic-Indo-European relations (and possibly an ethnogenetic relationship?). Received coverage from the standpoint of a comparative analysis of the most ancient, which survived until the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. Both Indo-Iranian and East Slavic peoples have geometric and plot ornamental patterns, the addition of which goes into the depths of the Eneolithic, Neolithic and even Paleolithic of Eastern Europe.

The author of this work considered it necessary to pay attention to the following aspects of the problem:

1. Historiographies of the issue of the ancestral home of Indo-Europeans, Indo-Iranians and Pre-Slavs and the modern conclusions of Indo-European studies on this range of issues.

2. The question of archaeological cultures of the Eneolithic era - bronze and early iron, identified with the Indo-Iranian and Pre-Slavic ethnic massifs, testifying to the oldest contacts of the Pre-Slavs and Indo-Iranians in the vast territories of Eastern Europe.

3. The question of the oldest population of the north of Eastern Europe during the

Paleolithic-Bronze Age, in the light of the latest data from archeology, anthropology and paleoclimatology.

4. An analysis of the archaic geometric ornamentation of textiles, preserved among East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples until the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, as an ethnic differentiator and a peculiar indicator of the movements of Aryan peoples in Eurasia over a long historical period.

5. The question of the possible common sources of some images of archaic mythologists, preserved in the Rigveda and Avesta, on the one hand, and in the North Russian ornamental tradition, on the other.

6. Analysis of archaic ornamentation in trihedral-notched wood carvings and possible semantics of motifs of this carving among Indo-Iranians and Pre-Slavs.

7. An analysis of the evidence of the Rigveda, Mahabharata and Avesta about the ancient northern ancestral home of the Indo-Iranians and modern data from archeology, anthropology, paleoclimatology, confirming the possibility of northern localization of the oldest territories of the formation of the Indo-Iranian ethnic group.

2. The content of the work and methodological base. Sources and historiography.

This work consists of an introduction, which reveals the relevance of the topic, historiographical essay, three chapters devoted to the analysis of the development of East European ornament over a huge time period from the Upper Paleolithic to the turn of the XIX - XX centuries and its role as an indicator of ethnomigration processes associated with the movements of the Indo-Iranian peoples, in the middle of II - beginning of I millennium BC and conclusions.

The historiographical essay analyzes various hypotheses related to the problems of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, Indo-Iranians and great Slavs. A huge role in solving these issues is played by the data of comparative Indo-European linguistics. So one of the earliest, formed back in the middle of the XIX century is the hypothesis of the Central Asian ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, which is currently abandoned by the vast majority of researchers. One of the largest Soviet linguists B. V. Gornung rejected not only the concept of the “Asian ancestral home” and the e-e, but also all versions of the “Central European and South Russian-Caspian ancestral home” (From the prehistory of the formation of the common Slavic linguistic unity. M. 1963. p.11-12). The prominent Bulgarian linguist V. Georgiev also believes that the ancestral home of I.-E it is necessary to search only in Europe, restricting their habitat to areas of Eastern and Central Europe (Studies in comparative historical linguistics. M. 1958). In 1984, the work of V. V. Ivanov and T. V. Gamkrelidze, “Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans” (Tbilisi, 1984), was published, where the authors put forward a new hypothesis and I.-E. Ancestral home in the territory of Asia Minor. However, most researchers see the ancestral home of I.E. peoples precisely in the territories of Eastern and

Southeast Europe.

Based on this, a conclusion is being made at the present time about the ancestral home of the Indo-Iranian peoples. One of the most widespread and most heavily argued is the point of view according to which the Indo-Iranians in the era preceding their advance to the territory of Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan and North-West India, lived in the south of Eastern Europe (in the Northern Black Sea region). As for the most ancient period of formation of the Indo-Iranian ethnic massif, at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, an outstanding Indian researcher B. G. Tilak put forward a hypothesis according to which the most ancient territories of the formation of the Pra-Hindoirais were the circumpolar regions of Europe. He proved his hypothesis using the evidence of the oldest monuments of Indo-Iranian mythology - the Vedas, where knowledge of such arctic phenomena as a year divided into a light and a dark half, aurora borealis, a freezing sea, the Pole Star and the Big Dipper high overhead and much more is recorded... Due to the fact that modern paleoclimatological data indicate that in the period from the VI to the end of the II millennium BC the climate of the north of Eastern Europe was much warmer and milder, and where the tundra is currently located, mixed forests and pine forests grew, it can be assumed that B. G. Tilak's concept is quite viable, and that part of the population of the north of Eastern Europe could advance into South Russian steppes at the turn of the 5th - 4th millennium BC when these territories, due to increased moisture content, lost their former semi-desert character (Berg L. S. Klimat i zhizn. M. 1947). Probably, the emergence in the steppe zone of Eastern Europe at the turn of the 5th - 4th millennium BC is connected with this movement of a part of the population from the European north to the south. Yamnaya culture, which many researchers consider Indo-Iranian. E. E. Kuzmina believes that it was in the steppe and forest-steppe zone in the IV-III millennium BC, and possibly somewhat earlier, that the wild horse was domesticated (Kuzmina E. E. The spread of horse breeding and the cult of the horse among Iranian-speaking tribes Central Asia and other peoples of the Old World. Central Asia in antiquity and the Middle Ages. M. 1977). From here, as E.A. Grantovsky (Early history of the Iranian tribes of Western Asia. M. 1970) and I. N. Pogrebava (Iran and Transcaucasia in the early Iron Age. M. 1977), as well as a number of other researchers, began in the middle ... II millennium BC distribution on the territory of the Northern Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Iran, as well as in the steppe of Kazakhstan and Southern Siberia of the Aryan peoples, who advanced at the end of II - early. 1st millennium BC to the oases of Central Asia, Afghanistan and India. With the Indo-Iranian tribes of the 2nd millennium BC at present, many Soviet researchers (S. P. Tolstov, I. A. Itina, I. M. Dyakonov, V. G. Gafurov, N. D. Chlenova, E. E. Kuzmina, B. A. Litvinsky, Khю A. Zadneprovsky, E. A. Grantovsky, A. L. Mendelstam and others) connect the representatives of the Abashevskaya, Srubnaya and Andronovskaya ethnocultural communities genetically related to Yamnaya and widespread in the 2nd millennium BC in the vast territories of Eurasia from the Lower Danube in the west to the Minusinsk Basin in the east, and from the Pechora in the north to northern Afghanistan in the south. This huge area in its western part was in close proximity, and often simply overlapped on those territories that a number of Soviet researchers (S. S. Berezanskaya, V. A. Ilinskaya, A. I. Terenozhkin, O. N. Trubachev, B. V. Gornung and others) are associated with the ancestral home of the Slavs. In light of the question of a possible Proto-Slavic-Indo-Arab contact (kinship?), this circumstance plays an important role.

The problem of localizing the ancestral home of the Slavs is no less controversial than Indo-Iranian. B. V. Gornung considers it possible to connect, the primary the area of formation of the Proto-Slavs with the carriers of the Trypillian Eneolithic culture of its middle stage.

At present, Soviet teachings are more and more confidently localizing the ancestral home of the Proto-Slavs in the Dnieper region and the Carpathian region, and associating the Trzhynec-Komarov culture with them II millennium BC (S. S. Berezanskaya, B. A. Rybakov, V. Danilenko, O. N. Trubachev, I. K. Sveshnikov, T. K. Alekseeva, A. I. Terenozhkin, V. A. Ilyinskaya and others). Archaeological materials testify that the connections, recorded at the level of the Eneolithic Yamnaya and Trypillian cultures, continue in subsequent historical periods, and that the Tschinetsko-Komarovskaya, Abashevskaya and Srubnaya cultures to a certain extent have common origins. The relative stability of the population of the Dnieper region and the fact that its ethnogenetic roots go back to antiquity are evidenced by anthropological data, “allowing us to trace the history of the physical ancestors of the East Slavic peoples to the Bronze Age” (V. P. Alekseev. Paleoanthropology and history. VI. 1985. no. 1.p. 35), i.e. until the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The stability of the Slavic population on the Proto-Slavic territory is also evidenced by the fact that, as B. A. Rybakov notes, the boundaries of the Proto-Slavic Trzynets culture of the 2nd millennium BC completely coincide with the area of the Slavic Przeworsk and Zarubinets cultures of the 3rd century BC - III century AD (Herodotova Scythia. M. 1979. p. 206). Since the territories of the formation of Indo-Iranian peoples are currently recognized by most researchers in Eastern Europe and there were no historical reasons that, as noted by N. R. Guseva about the territory under consideration” (Hinduism. M. 1977. p. 43), and became one of the components in the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, whose original ethnic area was in close proximity to the Indo-Iranian, one can conclude about the ancient contacts of the Pre-Slavs and Indo-Iranians. Many acts testify to these ancient contacts. These are data from anthropology, linguistics, onomastics, the proximity of sacred vocabulary, many mycological plots and images of folk art, common among the East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples.

One of the exceptionally valuable historical sources that make it possible to trace the significant antiquity of the Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian ties is folk ornamentation and, in particular, the deeply archaic geometric and plot ornament of North Russian embroidery, weaving, lace and woodcarving, since, according to S. V. Ivanov, “parts or groups of a disintegrated tribe often disperse and lose contact with each other, but the ornament, continuing to preserve ancient traditions, testifies to the ancient commonality of these groups” (Folk ornament as a historical source. SE. 1958. No. 2. p. 18).

The first chapter of this work is devoted to the analysis of the formation and development of the East European ornament over many millennia and the identification of both in the East Slavic, and in particular, the North Russian ornament, and in the ornaments of modern descendants of the ancient Indo-Iranian peoples, common origins, dating back to ancient times. But before turning directly to archaic Eastern European ornamentation, the author considers it necessary to dwell on an extremely important issue - modern scientific data on the time of human settlement in the north of Eastern Europe. O. N. Bader believed that due to the continentality of the climate in northeastern Europe there was no glacier, and already in the Mousterian epoch (about 100 to 40 thousand years ago) the settlement of Neanderthals covered vast areas in the north. Probably at this time, the first meeting of people with the Arctic Ocean in northeastern Europe took place (O. N. Bader. From the depths of the Paleolithic. VI. 1976. No. 2. p. 126-127), which is confirmed by the presence of the Krutaya site on Pechora The mountain, the lower layer of which is about 70 thousand years old. The presence of Paleolithic sites in the north of Eastern Europe is noted by V. S. Stokolos and K. S. Korolev in their work "The Archaeological Map of the Komi ASSR" (M. 1984). Moreover, such of them as the Byzovskaya site, located not far from the Krutaya Gora, in its inventory has much in common with layers of the same age with it (25 - 29 thousand years) of the Don site of Kostenki I, XII. During the Mesolithic period in northern Europe, the number of human sites increases, as evidenced by archaeological research by S. V. Oshibkina, V. S. Stokolos, G. M. Burov, V. I. Kanivets, and the influx of population comes from the southwestern regions of the Volga-Oka and Baltic-Dnieper (Stokolos V. S., Korolev K. S. 1984), and "traces of the resettlement of the Mesolithic population from the Ural regions have not been found" (Oshibkina S. V. Mesolithic Sukhona and Eastern Prionezhie. M. 1983. p. 284). The Neolithic period in these territories was also not a time of depopulation. So, only in the basins of Pechora, Vychegda, Mezen, about two dozen Neolithic sites were discovered on the shores of watershed lakes and in river valleys, and this despite the fact that the Russian North has been very little studied archaeologically (Stokolos B. C. 1984). G. M. Byrov notes the proximity of the Neolithic Kargopol pottery widespread in the north of Eastern Europe from the Middle Volga and Dnieper-Donetsk mid or late 5th - mid 4th millennia BC (Bypov G. M. Archaeological cultures of the north of the European part of the USSR. Ulyanovsk. 1974, p. 93). At the same time, the coincidence of the ornaments of Kargopol Neolithic ceramics with patterns on wooden items of the Mesolithic age (VII millennium BC) from the same northern territories was noted (Burov G. M. 1974. p. 93), which gives grounds to consider the Neolithic the population of the north of Eastern Europe is ethno-genetically close to the Mesolithic that preceded it - firstly,and secondly, it allows us to raise the question of whether the origins of the common material culture of Northwestern Ukraine, the Middle Volga region and the North of Eastern Europe, repeatedly noted by researchers of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age of these regions, lie in the depths of the Paleolithic - Mesolithic. Probably, B.V. Gornung was right, who believed that the belief that the Indo-Europeans, whose composition must be sought in the depths of the Stone Age, in their movements in Europe met various numerous non-Indo-European substrates is not true and that: “such an overestimation the role of these substrates and the widespread search for them are not justified ", ie:" Indo-European tribes in their migrations of the second half of the 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC often... they walked the same way, following each other, so to speak "catching up with each other" (Gornung B.V. 1963, p. 41). We can assume, based on the data of archeology, anthropology and other related sciences, that the substrate population of the north of Eastern Europe before the beginning of the movement here in the first half of the 1st millennium AD of the Slavs was largely (if not the overwhelming majority) Indo-European, related to language and culture to those who went to these lands from the lands of Novgorod and lower Russia. The preservation of elements of folk culture in the Russian North at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, often more archaic not only than the ancient Greek ones but also recorded in the Vedas, can probably be explained by the fact that the population of these places was largely descendants of the ancient population that had formed here back in as a result of advances up to the Bronze Age, i.e. at a time when, possibly, many social structures, mythological schemes and those ornamental schemes that were common for the vast Slavic-Indo-Iranian region and survived in relict form until our days, were taking shape.

Many ornaments that are components of complex geometric compositions of North Russian branched weaving, embroidery and lace, on the one hand, and Central Asian, Iranian, North Indian ornamental complexes, on the other, have their origins in the ornamentation of such Upper Paleolithic cultures of Eastern Europe as Kostenkovskaya (rows of oblique crosses ) and Mezin (rhombo-meander pattern). These ornaments, which have no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe, served V. A. Gorodtsov in his proposed division of the European Upper Paleolithic cultures of the Madeleine time (20-25 thousand years BC) into three separate areas - Western European, Central European and Eastern European (by the nature of the monuments of art) - the basis for highlighting the last (Eastern European) region. Complex swastika-meander ornaments, which continue to exist on various products of the Neolithic and Eneolithic period in Eastern Europe, in particular on the monuments of the Tisza and Trypollian cultures, appear in other parts of the Old World only in the Bronze Age, being a kind of indicator of the ways of the Eastern European Indo-European population habitat. B. A. Rybakov, exploring the development paths of the ancient rhombo-meander ornament in the Neolithic, noted the stability of this complex and difficult pattern, its undoubted connection with the ritual sphere, calling it a connecting link between the Paleolithic, where it first appeared and modern ethnography, which gives an incalculable the number of examples of such a pattern in fabrics, drinking and weaving” (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981. p. 158).

Rhombo-meander and swastika ornaments are constantly found on the cult vessels of Tripollya and the Proto-Slavic Zashchinets-Komarovskaya and Abashevskaya, logging and Andronovo cultures inheriting from it, which a number of researchers associate with Indo-Iranians. This ornamentation is especially diverse in the carpet decor of the Andronov cult ceramics, which, as a rule, are in burials, which gave grounds for a number of researchers (S. V. Kiselev, G. E. Zdanovich, M. D. Khlobystina) to believe that these ornaments were symbols of genus, and the study of the number and combinations of their constituent elements can play a role in understanding the structure of each community (Khlobystina M. Some features of the Andronovo culture of the Minusinsk steppes. SA. 1973. No. 4. c. 61). Probably, being a symbol of the tribal and ethnicity of a person, the Andronovo ornament performed on ritual dishes placed in burials, the functions of a talisman, supposed to protect the spirit of the deceased on the way to another world or ask the gods for mercy. Being a kind of ethnic indicator, the non-Andrian-Svaetic and "single-file" ornament decorating utensils, weapons, etc., spreads across the territory of Eurasia together with those Indo-Iranian tribes, bearers of these ornamental symbols, which were recorded in the second half of the 2nd - early 1st millennium BC in the North and Central Caucasus and in the Transcaucasia (Armelia, Azerbaijan). M. N. Pogrebova believes that the white-encrusted ceramics of Iran, which appeared in the Eastern Transcaucasia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, surprisingly similar in ornament to the Andronovo one, testifies to the advancement of a new population into Iran from the Volga and Ciscaucasia. A similar picture is noted by researchers in Central Asia. The steppe bronze culture discovered in the southern Aral Sea region and in the Akcha-Darya delta of the Amu-Darya, named by S. P. Tolstov as Tazabatyab, has molded ware with a geometric ornament of the Andronovo type. M. A. Itina believes that not only archaeological material makes it possible to record the advancement of pastoralist tribes from the northwest, but anthropological data also record a wide advancement of people of the Andronovo type to the south (Steppe tribes of the Central Asian interfluve in the second half of the 2nd - early 1st millennium BC. SE. 1962, No. 3). V. I. Sarianidi draws the same conclusion about the advancement of north-western pastoral and agricultural tribes to the territory of Central Asia and further to Afghanistan and India, and among other archaeological sources confirming this conclusion; he considers the ornament to be a very important indicator.

The author of this work, referring to the North Russian textile ornament, notes that it is here that ancient compositions that are absolutely identical to the Andronov ones have been preserved, and their convergence is amazing, from which one can draw a conclusion about the genetic relationship of the Andronov pottery ornamentation of the 17th - 9th centuries BC and decor of North Russian textiles (up to the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century). Raising the question of which ethnic groups were the bearers and keepers of this ornamental tradition for more than 3500 years, the author of this work rejects the assumption that such a bearer of the Andronov tradition could be the Finno-Ugric population of the north of Eastern Europe, who allegedly took this tradition in ancient times from their own Indo-Iranian neighbors and preserved it up to the middle of the 1st millennium AD, i.e. until the period when the presence of Slavic settlements is archaeologically recorded in these territories. The impossibility of such a solution to this issue is convinced by a number of facts. So, most researchers of Finno-Ugric ornamentation, and in particular of fraudulent weaving, postulate very late (mid-19th century) the appearance of such ornaments in the decor of these peoples, as a result of their contacts with the Russian population (Kosmenko A. P. 1977, 1984, Klimova G. M. 1984). In addition, in the light of modern data from archeology, paleoclimatology, linguistics, and anthropology, the conclusion that a significant one has entered the population of Novgorod, Vologda, Yaroslavl and Kostroma lands (the Finno-Ugric substrate seems extremely problematic, if not unlikely. But since the North Russian ornament retained a huge number of Andronovo archetypes, which are often not found in other East Slavic regions, it can be assumed with a significant degree of confidence that these ornamental complexes survived in the Russian North due to the fact that the population of these territories was mostly descendants of the ancient Indo-European (possibly proto-Aryan) population.