Secrets of the ancient Aries. Digest of articles

At the turn of 4—3 thousand BC the role of agriculture is weakening and the importance of animal husbandry is increasing. As the authors of «Eneolithic USSR» note: «It was the development of livestock breeding in its mobile forms (distant pasture, semi-nomadic, and further nomadic) that sharply limited or even excluded the possibility of simultaneous agricultural practice… mobile livestock breeding is very productive in the first periods of development, it provides a surplus product faster and easier than agriculture… Collectives of mobile livestock breeders grew rapidly. Their herds grew accordingly, which required a constant expansion of „production areas“ – pastures. This expansion proceeded much faster and on a large scale than among the farmers… The conditions of feather grass and wormwood steppes, passing in their extreme southern limits into the semi-desert, sharply limited the possibilities of agriculture. The forage base necessary for the development of cattle breeding was practically unlimited here… in different landscape zones, cattle breeding took different forms. In the forest-steppe settlements marked by a strong settled settlement and the presence of even limited agriculture, it was clearly of a local nature. The herd was dominated by large domestic animals and a pig, respectively. To the south, in the steppes, the most productive and adapted animal to the specifics of this zone was the sheep. Sheep breeding was the decisive economic factor in the development of steppe areas».

This is where, in my opinion; one should look for the origins of the legend about the farmer Cain and Abel – «the shepherd of the sheep.» Speaking about the weakening of the role of agriculture and the significant strengthening of cattle breeding at the turn of the 4th-3rd millennia BC, when the «agricultural Eneolithic period with its equality of the» Golden Age «ended, B. A. Rybakov emphasized that «the struggle for these herds, their alienation and uneven distribution, the ability to move together with property in carts (carts (rattle cars)) over considerable distances under the protection of mounted warriors, the development of exchange -all this radically changed the established agricultural order, introduced into it is social inequality, and the military principle, and the relationship of domination and subordination within each tribe. The agricultural Eneolithic with its equality of the «Golden Age» did not leave us any traces of forced burials …The culture of battle axes, the culture of mobile and warlike horse shepherds gave birth to a new social phenomenon that consolidated the immeasurably increased power of tribal leaders and governors – the custom of violent ritual murder of the closest subordinates of the leader at his grave and a joint burial with him».

The millennial era of matriarchy has ended. The era of patriarchy has begun – the era of war and murder. The Ancient Mother Goddess ceded her place to God the Father.

But not everywhere and not always!

And where the ancient traditions of agriculture were born and preserved, the Mother Goddess remained not a Warrior-Virgin, but Mother Earth, Great Foremother, Owl – Mother-in-law.

The riddle of Vologda patterns

«Listen, yes people are kind,

Will I tell you yes to the old man»

(from a folk song)

The famous translator of the hymns of the Rig Veda, the oldest part of the Veda (rig – spoken, Veda – knowledge), into Russian T. Ya. Elizarenkova writes: These advantages are determined as a greater degree of correspondence between Vedic and Russian due to the better preservation of archaisms in it than in the Slavic languages, and the greater proximity of the Russian (Slavic) mythological and poetic tradition to the Indo-Iranian one.»

One of the largest modern American linguists P. Friedrich believes that the Proto-Slavic language preserved its Indo-European system of tree names better than all other Indo-European languages, from which he concludes that the ancestors of the Slavs in the common Slavic period lived in such a natural-climatic zone that corresponds to the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, and «after the Slavic period, the speakers of various Slavic dialects to a significant extent continued to live in a similar area.»

It must be said that the outstanding linguist of the first third of the twentieth century A. Meye was convinced that the Old Slavic language is one of the most ancient in the common Indo-European family and continues «without any interruption the development of the common Indo-European language: it is impossible to notice in it those sudden changes that give such a characteristic appearance of the languages Greek, Italian (especially Latin), Celtic, Germanic.

The Slavic language is an Indo-European language, generally retaining the archaic type.»

The Soviet linguist B. V. Gornung believed that the ancestors of the Aryans (Indo-Iranians) at the end of the 3rd millennium BC settled in northeastern Europe and were located somewhere near the Middle Volga, and another prominent Soviet linguist V. I. Abaev writes: «Through a number of centuries the Aryans carried the memory of their ancestral home and its great river Volga.» Back in the 1920s, Academician A. I. Sobolevsky said that in the vast expanses of European Russia, right up to the northern regions, names dominate, which are based on some kind of ancient European language. He wrote in his work «Names of rivers and lakes of the Russian North» (1927): «The starting point of my work is the assumption that two groups of names (rivers and lakes) are related to each other and belong to the same language of the Indo-European family.»

And there is nothing surprising in the fact that academician N. Ya. Marr believed that the ancient foundation of Slavism exists far in the north, «in those places that until recently were considered by no means Slavic and occupied by the Slavs already at the dawn of the so-called historical time.» Ancient ethnic groups of the East European North, preceding Slavization and Finnization, N. Ya. Marr sometimes called the «Northern Sarmatians» or, what is even more interesting, «the Russians».

In the second millennium BC Tribes of pastoralists and farmers, who call themselves «Aryans», which means «noble», come to Northwestern India from their Eastern European ancestral homeland. Some of the Aryans, and not a small one, left their ancestral home in search of a better life, but, as the indologist N. R. Guseva, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which the entire population of a significant part of Eastern Europe would have left it. Most likely, such a situation is simply impossible, because «no historical reasons have been identified that could cause their (the Aryans) obligatory withdrawal from their the ancestral homeland. «Probably, part of the Aryan tribes stayed at home, in the vastness of Eastern Europe, to become the ancestors of the future peoples of this land.

From this native land for them, the Aryan tribes left (for reasons unknown to us) thousands of years ago to find a new homeland in Iran (correctly – Aryana, the land of the Aryans) and India. They left and took with them their legends, fairy tales, myths, beliefs, rituals, their songs, dances, their ancient gods. On a new land for them, among other peoples, they sacredly kept the memory of their past, of their ancestral home. Preserved our and our memory! Low bow to you, distant brothers and sisters, for the fact that through the millennia you have carried our common shrine, our common past, our common memory! For keeping the golden keys from the bygone times, and today we are opening the treasury of the past of our people with them. Do we need it?

This question was answered back in 1911 by the outstanding researcher of the Russian North A. Zhuravsky: «In the» childhood «of humanity – the basis for the knowledge and direction of the future paths of mankind. In the epochs of» childhood of Russia "– the paths to the knowledge of Russia, to the control knowledge of those historical phenomena of our time, which seem to us fatally complex and not subordinate to the ruling will of the people. But whose roots are simple and elementary, like the initial cell of a complex organism.» The embryos of social «evils» are in the personal of each and every one. And we are obliged to take full advantage of the experience of the hoary past, and the closer we get to the embryos of this past, the more consciously, faithfully and confidently we will go «forward» … It is the history of the «childhood of mankind», it is ethnography that will help us to learn the logical laws of natural progress and consciously, and not blindly, go «forward» ourselves and move «forward» your people, for ethnography and history are the paths to the knowledge of that «past», without which it is impossible to apply the knowledge of the present to the knowledge of the future.

«Humanity» consists of «nations» and, first of all, it is logically necessary that the nation is a definite mutual whole, so that it appears to us not in the third person of the plural – «they» – but in the first – «we». Russia, on the other hand, less than any other nation, can know itself without the help of knowing the roots of its past; and without knowing oneself, it is impossible to cognize others and take into account one’s position among others, just as without correcting oneself, it is impossible to correct others… The embryos of many beliefs and ideals perished – let us look for their imprints on objects until they perished for centuries. This is by no means «interesting» or «curious», but also vitally important, necessary.»

No, we do not have a thousand-year history, as it is customary now to write and speak, but many thousand years. One thousand years can be said only in relation to the adoption of Christianity. Indeed, until this year, our ancestors did not live in caves and did not dress in skins.

Not all of a sudden, the word Gardarika («Country of Cities») as the name of Rus came into use in the European world. These cities were on our lands, and they were not born in one day, but took shape and developed over the course of many centuries.

Prince Oleg Novgorods, seizing power in Kiev in 885 and uniting Russia around this center, went to war against Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, and brought this empire to its knees. And at the beginning of the 10th century, Prince Igor, the son of Rurik, sent 500 ships to the Khazars, who were trying to suppress Russia, with 100 people on board. And they fought to the south of the Caspian Sea. This Russia was feared by other peoples, they reckoned with it, they paid tribute to it. Such strength and unity took shape long before Christianity, and, therefore, our history is incalculably ancient.

In the cities of Rus flocked goods produced by villagers – the townspeople needed not only food and building materials, but also things produced by artisans – fabrics, clay and metal products. The cities themselves became centers the production of many goods and especially luxury items for the growing stratum of the nobility. Judging by the data obtained during numerous excavations, and carefully processed by archaeologists, the Slavs since ancient times have been engaged in exchange trade with other countries, and this required an increase in the qualifications of people employed in any industry. The settlements, the embryos of the ancient Slavs’ cities were also known in the eastern countries: the fact that the Arabs and Persians had known them for a long time is mentioned in the works of Abu Reikhan Biruni (10th century) and Ibn Fadlan (9—10th century). The latter describes the arrival of Rus merchants to Itil (the Volga) and speaks of their ships, weapons, jewelry chains made of precious metals, pearl and beaded necklaces, as well as large wooden houses, which they immediately build on the shore upon arrival and live in 10 – 20 of them with wives and slaves; he also writes that the Russians knew money and at that time they were already selling, and not only changing their goods; he describes both their idols and the rite of burning the dead, in which the wife is killed (or she kills herself) and burned along with the body of her husband (note here that a similar rite is described in ancient Indian literature, which lived in India until the 19th-20th centuries); it is said that «Russian kings usually keep 400 brave warriors (squad) with them in their castle or town… These 400 are sitting below on a large Royal sofa, decorated with precious stones …, he (the King or Prince) has a governor, who leads the army…»

All these data are presented by N. M. Karamzin in the book «History of the Russian State», v.1. So what is the beginning of statehood, and indeed our history can be dated to just one millennium? There were cities, there was class stratification, there were historical traditions, and all this took shape from ancient times.

So, in these cities of the Russians with large wooden houses, we repeat, artistic crafts developed, dating back to time immemorial. Gradually, over the centuries, technology has changed, improving, but the themes of images, drawings and signs applied to handicrafts were protected by tradition. They were not changed, because they all carried a semantic load, had a certain meaning, often magical, incantatory, and were a reflection of the concepts of life and death, the acquisition of offspring, the preservation of property, the reproduction of livestock, the ripening of the crop. It was scary to change them, since magic played a leading role in the beliefs of the pagans, and these drawings and these signs had to be sacredly protected, as evidenced by at least the simple fact that they have survived in folk art to this day. The plot language, the language of symbols, in this art aroused heightened interest, but the main attention in the works of scientists is paid to identifying and explaining images of a female and male deity, found even in late Russian embroidery – this is a clear relic of paganism. It is interesting that such a female deity (and perhaps this is a praying woman) is almost exactly repeated in Russian embroideries and on Indian fabrics and ritual objects, which is not a simple coincidence (N. R. Guseva. Deep roots. Sat «Roads millennium» M. 1991). Since ancient times, in Russian and other Slavic embroideries, there are many geometric motifs, which, along with other themes, also lead us into deep antiquity, which means that some lines of history can be traced along them.

Russian folk embroidery has been attracting the attention of researchers for over a century.

At the end of the last century, a number of brilliant collections of this type of folk art were formed, and the first attempts were made to read complex «plot» compositions, especially characteristic of the folk traditions of the Russian North.

There have appeared many interesting works devoted to the analysis of the plot-symbolic language, the peculiarities of technology and religious differences in Russian folk embroidery.

However, most of these works focus on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images, archaic three-part compositions that include, as already mentioned, a stylized and transformed image of a man – a female (more often) or male (less often) pre-Christian deity. Geometric motifs of North Russian embroidery stand somewhat apart, usually accompanying the main detailed plot compositions, although very often in the design of towels, belts, hemlines, sleeves and shoulder shirts, it is geometric motifs that are the main and only ones, which are extremely important for researchers. By the way, the analysis of the patterns of local traditional laces also deserves a lot of attention from this point of view. About archaic geometry in Russian ornamental art and the need for its careful study Academician B. A. Rybakov and in his works of the 60s – 70s, and in his profound work on the paganism of the ancient Slavs, published in 1981, the idea of the invariable depths of popular memory, which preserves in itself and carries through the centuries in the images of embroidery, carving for wood, toys, etc. the most ancient ideological schemes, rooted in unknown millennia.

In this regard, the collections of the museums of the Russian North are very valuable, i.e. those places where one can say the eternal remoteness from state centers, as well as a relatively peaceful existence (the Vologda region, for example, in its northeastern part, practically did not know wars), an abundance of forests and the protection of many settlements by swamps and impassable roads – all this contributed to the preservation for an immeasurable a number of 40 centuries of the most ancient forms of life and economy, respect for the faith of fathers and grandfathers, and, as a direct consequence of this, the preservation of ancient symbols encoded in embroidery ornaments, in patterns of fabrics and lace.

Of particular interest are embroideries that «survived» to the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, which originated from the northeastern regions of the Vologda and neighboring areas of the Archangelsk region. Many scientists wrote that these were the lands of the Finno-Ugric tribes, but the place names indicate something completely different – the overwhelming majority of toponyms here are Slavic, and many of them are very archaic. So, in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region, out of 137 settlements, both large and small, only six have pronounced Finno-Ugric names. It is in these areas that the traditions of ornamental patterns of ancient origin, as we will trace below, are best preserved. The ornamental compositions, which will be discussed and which were reproduced in Vologda embroidery until the 30s, adorned only sacred things. B. A. Rybakov speaks very accurately about this process: «the deposition of very early layers of human religious thinking in embroidery… is explained by the ritual nature of those objects that were covered with an embroidered pattern… Such are the wedding kokoshniks of brides, shirts, capes for a wedding carriage and A special ritual object, long ago isolated from its household counterpart, was a towel with rich and intricate embroidery corner, on the towel the „pious“ put icons.» (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981) It is these sacred ornaments that are presented in the local history museum of Vologda, and they will in the future be the main comparative material in our attempt to identify ornamental parallels between the most ancient patterns of North Russian embroidery and ornaments created by those peoples who lived later in different historical epochs in the vast territories of the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppe and spoke Indo-European languages, including those that belong to the Indo-speaking and Iranian-speaking branches of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language (or a certain number of dialects of the tribes, which entered the science under the general name of the Aryans).

So, among the peoples of Eurasia, one of the most ancient motifs of geometric-type ornaments was a rhombus or rhombic meander (the meander was explained by many as a conditional image of the top of a wave wrapped in right angles). The meander is found even on things dating back to the Paleolithic, for example, and various bone products found at the Mezina site in the Chernihiv region. Paleontologist V. Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, broken meander stripes and rhombic meanders on objects from the Mezin site arose as a repetition of the natural pattern of mammoth tusks (article «On the origin of the Mezin paleolithic ornament», Soviet Archeology, No. 1, 1965). From this, she concluded that such an ornament for the people of that era was a kind of symbol of the mammoth, the main object of hunting. It could have a magical incantatory meaning, aimed at the success of the hunt, and at the same time reflect the idea of people about wealth.

The meander pattern in its various combinations and modifications continues to exist for many millennia, spreading more and more widely among neighboring Indo-European peoples and diverging beyond their territories during the movement of the Aryans to the southeast.

We meet it as a symbol of good luck and a kind of amulet against misfortune on cult objects and ceramics (that is, in storage facilities of food and drink that are very important for people’s lives) and in later cultures.

It should be noted that already on the bone products of the aforementioned Merzin site, one can trace how the outlines of a swastika, another ornament characteristic of all Indo-Europeans, grow from a strip of a double meander depicted moving from right to left. This element is depicted in its basic form – in the form of a chair with ends bent at a right angle, and being complicated by new elements in the form of additional branches.

The swastika has taken one of the leading places in the ornament. This word is Sanskrit and in other languages it has no other meanings. It consists of two parts: «su» – good, happy and «asti» – is (third person singular from the verb «to be»); according to the rules of grammar, «y» before the vowel «a» is replaced by «b» and the result is «swasti», to which the suffix «k» and the ending «a» are added: swastika. This sign means «bestowing all good things, bringing happiness.»

If you place a dot in its four «sections», it will be a symbol of a sown field and at the same time a plea for a good harvest. By the way, if you put two swastikas one on top of the other with the top rotated by 45 degrees, you get the ancient Slavic sun sign «Kolovrat», that is. a rotating wheel (circle) with eight spokes with clockwise curved ends. The sign of the swastika, since ancient times, the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans began to designate light, the sun as a source of life and prosperity. This sign can be traced from Archangelsk to the lands of India, where it is seen everywhere – it is used to decorate temples, houses, clothes and, of course, many items related to the wedding.

Until now, people are outraged by the ugly use of the swastika by the German fascists, who at all costs tried to liken themselves to the Aryans («Aryans»), attributing to these ancient tribes of pastoralists, and then pastoralists-farmers, the features of some devilish conquerors. At the same time, speculation on a relatively small number of similar words in German and Sanskrit looks bad – there are many more such words in Slavic languages. All the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples developed in the deepest antiquity in the process of historical contacts a certain volume of similar vocabulary, but the ancestors of the Germans and other European peoples belonged to the western group of Indo-Europeans, while the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans belonged to the eastern, much more mutually close. The so-called Aryan swastika can still be seen in the handicraft works of the Slavs. Especially the northern ones: many works of folk art are decorated with it, including patterned knitted mittens (readers can see this in the magazine «Slovo», No. 10, 1992).

There are other elements of patterns that can be traced consistently in time from the north of our country to the Black Sea, and then further along the routes of the Aryans migrating to new lands. And the fact that they have been carefully preserved in folk art suggests that great importance was attached to them in the worldview of people, especially among the ancestors of the Aryans and Slavs.

A peculiar transformation of the meander motif appears to be characteristic of Tripillya ceramics – a figurative ornament consisting of so-called «jibs».

In general, it is possible to determine the circle of ornamental main motifs with which, focusing on Tripoli, as a certain set of them, we will compare the materials of subsequent cultures. This is a meander and its varieties, meandrous spiral, intricate cross, swastika, «jibs».

In search of analogies closest in time, we naturally turn to the ceramic complexes of those cultures that existed at different time intervals on the territory of Eastern Europe and the Urals with the Ural lands. The traditions of ceramics ornamentation, which include an amazing variety of meander and swastika motifs, are found among the closest neighbors of the «Srubniks» – the population of the Andronovo culture, created by Indo-Iranians and genetically related to the Srubnaya. Synchronous in time, these two cultures existed for a long period in very vast territories of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. We have every reason to talk about the spread among the Slavs, or, more precisely, the Eastern Slavs, of the ornamental schemes described here. As in all Andronovo ornament, in North Russian folk embroidery and abusive weaving, the composition is divided into three horizontal zones, with the upper and lower ones often duplicating one another, and the middle one bears the most important patterns from their point of view in terms of significance. We do not know what the forms of ornaments on things made by people in the era of the most ancient Indo-Iranian (pan-Aryan) unity would have been, but we believe that the described elements of the ornamental patterns were hardly born overnight in the minds of the same Andronovites, but are rooted in genetically related them the culture of their common ancestors.