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The problem of the origin of writing
Андрей Тихомиров
The problem of the origin of any social phenomenon, including writing, can be correctly solved only if we take into account the fact that any social phenomenon arises on the basis of a certain social need. When it was necessary to reveal the origins of a qualitatively specific social phenomenon, it was first of all necessary to find out on the basis of what social need this phenomenon is formed.
Андрей Тихомиров
The problem of the origin of writing
Formation of writing
To understand the essence of a particular social phenomenon, it is necessary to find out its origin. This provision is especially important to take into account when it comes to such a complex social phenomenon as writing. The understanding of historical interaction largely depends on the interpretation of its genesis.
That is why the problem of the emergence of writing necessarily includes the question of the origins, origin, formation at the earliest stages of human development.
Although many aspects of the problem of the origin of writing in primitive society remain debatable, various opinions and judgments are expressed on them. This is quite understandable, given the fact that scientists still have a very limited amount of archaeological data relating to the oldest period of human history. Our knowledge of anthropogenesis and the early stages of the development of primitive society is constantly updated and changing in connection with new archaeological finds. It is enough in this connection to mention the archaeological discoveries of Louis and Mary Leakey in East Africa, which forced a radical revision of previous ideas about the initial stages of the emergence of mankind. In addition, many archaeological finds can be interpreted in different ways. All these circumstances make disputes and discussions on various issues of the formation of human culture not only natural, but also inevitable.
The problem of the origin of any social phenomenon, including writing, can be correctly solved only if we take into account the fact that every social phenomenon arises on the basis of a certain social need. When it was necessary to uncover the origins of a qualitatively specific social phenomenon, first of all it is necessary to find out on the basis of which social need this phenomenon is formed. For example, finding out the causes of language, K. Marx and F. Engels wrote: "…language arises only from the need, from the urgent need to communicate with other people" (Marx K., Engels F. Essays, Moscow, 1955, volume 3, p. 29). Here it is also necessary to determine what are the specific social needs that have brought this social phenomenon to life. Without this, neither the essence nor the social functions can be understood. It is also important to take into account that a certain social need is realized in a particular system of people's activities. After all, society is not an independent entity or substance that exists outside the interaction of individual individuals. On the contrary, society, as a specific system, really exists only as a product of the interaction of its constituent people. Therefore, any social need is simultaneously a need of people interacting in society and is realized in this interaction, that is, in their activities.
A complex, but very important question for understanding the problem of the origin of writing is the following: is each specific social need realized from the very beginning in a special, qualitatively specific type of human activity, or can several fundamentally different social needs be realized initially in one type of activity? When answering this question, it should be borne in mind that in primitive society, differentiation and specialization of types of human activity was just emerging and was only to a very weak extent fixed by the emerging gender and age division of labor. What were the beginnings of differentiation of activities in the tribal society for about 10-20 millennia BC? First of all, the hunting of large animals (mammoth, bison, cave bear, deer, etc. P.), having become the exclusive business of adult men, separated from the gathering and hunting of small animals that women and children were engaged in. So there was a rudimentary division of labor in the production sector. But in addition to the actual labor, productive activity in the tribal society, there was also a sphere of non-productive activity of the primitive community. It included, in addition to consumer activity, the beginnings of spiritual activity, which found their objective, objective expression in rituals. It was ritual actions that were the type of activity in which several qualitatively heterogeneous spiritual needs of the primitive community were simultaneously realized: emotional-expressive, cognitive, aesthetic, magical (religious).
While agreeing that it is necessary to clearly identify the specific social needs that gave rise to writing, at the same time, it should not be assumed that the difference in these needs excludes the possibility of a syncretic integrity of art and religion in the primitive era. The possibility of such an undifferentiated unity is determined, in particular, by the fact that specifically artistic and specifically religious activities have not yet branched off from such a syncretic formation of the primitive epoch as ritual actions were.
In the primitive epoch, when mental labor had not yet separated from physical labor, the consciousness of primitive people was directly connected with their activities, and above all with the activities of labor, production. It is in the sphere of labor, industrial activity of people that the origins of both the rudiments of their artistic activity and their original religious beliefs lie.
The formation and development of human consciousness, as is known, took place in unity with the development of such a material means of human communication as language. And this applies equally to artistic and religious consciousness. The beginnings of both found their material, objective embodiment not only in sound speech, but also in images, dances and songs, which initially, apparently, acted as elements of an integral ritual complex.
Religion is not eternal, it is a historical phenomenon, and arose only at a certain stage in the development of human society. The emergence of religion was preceded by a pre-religious period of human development.
Meanwhile, the question of what the pre—religious epoch was, how to interpret it, is far from an idle question and is very important for explaining the conditions and causes of the emergence of not only religion, but also other elements of primitive culture.
For example, the skulls of cave bears were used by Neanderthals in the process of some kind of hunting witchcraft rituals. Apparently, the Neanderthal did not have any formalized and clear system of religious beliefs, but he had the rudiments of religiosity in the form of elementary magical beliefs and witchcraft actions.
As for the rudiments of artistic activity among Neanderthals, the facts indicating its presence have long been known. In the Mousterian layers of the La Ferracy cave (France), pieces of red and yellow mineral paint (ochre) were found, and some of them show traces of scraping with a flint tool or erasing their edges. In the same cave, a stone slab was found with the remains of transverse stripes and spots applied to it with red ochre. In the same place and in the cave of Le Moustier, fragments of animal bones with carved transverse lines were found, forming, as it were, the rudiment of an ornament. Similar or similar finds were made in Europe: Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic.
All these findings indicate that Neanderthals made the first attempts to use the substances of nature surrounding them for pictorial activity. These were the beginnings of artistic imagination and artistic activity, which subsequently led to the formation of writing. The inhabitant of the La Ferrasi cave, A. P. Okladnikov writes: "He did something unprecedented and unthinkable before: he deliberately smeared paint on a tile of wild stone… Not even just "smeared" the paint, but painted the tile with it, held a number of transverse stripes on it symmetrically and proportionally… Millennia of labor activity of primitive man, in the process of which his thinking also developed, his psyche was enriched, finally led to the fact that it became possible to go beyond the practically useful, necessary. A man-made object appeared, which was not intended either for digging the earth, or for killing an animal or butchering hunting prey. The only real need that he satisfied was the need for a materialized expression of a person's inner experiences, his feelings and ideas, his creative imagination—images that arose in his brain" (Okladnikov A. P. Morning of Art, Leningrad, 1967, pp. 27-28).
The Late Paleolithic occupies a key position in the Stone Age. Firstly, at the turn of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, the evolution of fossil hominids ends and a "real" man appears – Homo Sapiens.
Secondly, the variety of stone and other tools increases abruptly, composite ones appear: inserts, tips, sewn clothes.
Finally, the main social innovation of the Lower Paleolithic was exogamy – the exclusion of the closest relatives from marital relations. The prohibition of incest (incest) required social regulation of marriage, the genus and family appeared.
The replacement of the evolutionary type of development with the historical one brought such radical changes in a rather short time compared to the pace of anthropogenesis, which can be defined as a Paleolithic revolution. The product of this revolution was the fundamental anthropological, psychophysiological, psychosocial, spiritual unity of mankind, which will be preserved in history despite the differences in the economic, political, social, linguistic, and everyday development of human communities.
Therefore, the Upper Paleolithic is the epoch when humanity, in addition to biological and species uniformity, acquires that level of integrating ties, which is called culture. Culture is born at the end of the ancient Stone Age as an established system, whereas at the starting point of anthropogenesis we can only talk about individual zones of cultural behavior. The specificity of Paleolithic cultural studies is that its typologies are based on very local and limited material, and the universal laws that emerged from the late Stone Age belong to the deepest, amorphous, dark constants of cultural existence. The archaic basis of civilization is perceived as a collective unconscious formed from a number of discoveries, including the secret of using fire – in South Africa a million years ago. A person used fire earlier than he learned to deliberately extract it. Archaeologists find traces of the use of fire during excavations of the sites of the ancestors of man – a synanthrope and a Neanderthal. Initially, natural fire was used, which arose from spontaneous combustion of dead leaves and grass, from volcanic lava, lightning, etc. Human ancestors, having learned to evaluate the useful properties of fire, preserved it by throwing combustible material into the fire, or in special pits with an angle. The arbitrary production of fire dates back to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. There are several ancient ways of producing fire: scraping, drilling and sawing, based on the friction of two pieces of wood against each other (this is how the cross, revered since ancient times, was formed in ancient Egypt, the cross ankh "symbol of life", the shape of which was preserved in the Coptic cross, was placed with the deceased in the coffin), later – carving fire from flint , etc . Scraping is probably the oldest method. Drilling is the most common method of making fire in the past among the peoples of Asia, Africa, America, Australia. Sawing was known to the peoples of West Africa, Indonesia, the Philippine Islands and Australia. The production of fire by carving from flint from the beginning of the Iron Age was improved with the help of flint and existed until the invention of phosphorus matches and, later, lighters in the 19th century. The significance of fire for man is enormous. The ability to make fire "for the first time gave man dominance over a certain force of nature and thereby finally separated man from the animal kingdom" (Engels F., Anti-During, 1953, p. 108). The fire was used for protection from the cold and predatory animals, for lighting, cooking, during round-up hunting of animals. Later, a person learned to use fire for various technical purposes: for firing pottery, when making boats, etc. Among many peoples, getting fire, as well as borrowing someone else's fire, and preserving it is associated with a number of prohibitions and ritual restrictions. The fire became an object of ancestral and later family property. The family cult of the fire of the "sacred hearth" among many peoples was associated with the cult of ancestors.
In ancient mythology, a significant place is occupied by legends about the training of people to produce fire or stealing it from the gods by the heroes of the folk epic, for example, the Georgian Amirani, the Greek Prometheus. The veneration of fire is one of the elements of the religion of Zoroastrianism, in Christianity the Holy Fire is also an object of worship – the descent of the Holy Fire on Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The origin of the "grace fire" is associated with the self-ignition of a mixture that is specially made to form a flame with increased access of heat from people in a closed room who are waiting for the "grace fire". Under certain conditions that are reached during this waiting period, temperature, pressure and heat dissipation, heat does not have time to be transferred to the surrounding space, as a result of which the temperature in the reaction zone of the mixture increases. Self-ignition depends on the chemical composition of the mixture and on the conditions of heat transfer (chain-thermal spontaneous combustion is also possible). Fire was also of great importance in many funerary cults.
The veneration of fire as one of the main forces of nature was widespread in primitive society among almost all peoples of the world – everything falls to the ground, only the smoke from the fire (an option is to burn incense, from Greek. I burn, smoke) rises up, this meant, according to ancient people, that God feels smoke and fire. In one place, the fire was burned for many centuries and those who allowed the flame to fade, and these were mostly women, were killed. In Russia, the caretaker of the fire was called an ognishchanin (from ognishche – pechishche), in the 10th -12th centuries the chief steward of the princely house was a patrimony.
Gehenna is hell, a place of eternal torment, where, according to the teachings of the Christian Church, the soul of a sinner falls after his death. The word goes back to the Hebrew gehinnom, formed from the name of the valley near Jerusalem Geben Hinnom (literally "Garden of the Sons of Hinnom"), where sacrifices were made to idols, after the establishment of Judaism, the former idols were destroyed here and a fire began to burn constantly, destroying the garbage and refuse of a large city, so that this place would not become sacred to non-Judaists again.
Hut on chicken legs – the figurative name comes from those wooden log cabins, which in the old days, in order to protect them from rotting, were placed on stumps with chopped roots and fumigated with smoke from insects. One of the wooden churches in old Moscow, placed, due to the topiness of the place, on such stumps, was called "Nikola on chicken legs". From the Slavic word "smoking", which originally meant burning incense resin or a mixture as a sacrifice, as well as the incense mixture itself, is now used only in the meaning of smoking tobacco. Here are some old Russian games.
SMOKING ROOM. The players sit down next to each other, light a thin splinter and, when it flares up, extinguish it. While the fire is smouldering, the splinter is passed from hand to hand until it stops smoking. Whoever has it extinguished must fulfill some order. While the splinter is being passed, they sing:
Once upon a time there was a Smoking room,
Once upon a time there was a strangler.
Already at the Smoking Room,
Already at the strangler
The legs are small,
The soul is short.
Don't die, Smoker,
Don't die, strangler!
Already at the Smoking Room,
Already at the strangler —
The legs are small.
The soul is short.
Alive, alive
Smoking room,
Alive, alive strangler.
BURNERS. The players form pairs and become a string. Ahead by two steps, "burning" ("gorelytsik", "goryun", etc.) is the one who drives. He is forbidden to look back. The players sing – shout:
Burn, burn clearly,
So that it doesn't go out.
Stay hemline —
Look in the field.
Trumpeters are going there.
Yes, they eat rolls.
Look at the sky —
The stars are burning,
Cranes are screaming —
Goo, goo, goo, I'll run away.
One, two, not a crow,
Run like fire.
The "burning one" has to look at the sky, and meanwhile the rear pair separates and runs – one on one side of the string of pairs, and the other on the other, trying to connect again in front of the "burning one". If the couple succeeds, then the "burning" continues to drive, if not, and the "burning" catches someone, then the one left without a pair drives – becomes "burning". A new pair takes a place directly behind the new "burning" – and the game continues.
Eternal flame is a symbol of eternal memory. The veneration of fire as one of the main forces of nature was widespread in primitive society among almost all peoples of the world – everything falls to the ground, only the smoke from the fire (an option is to burn incense, from Greek. I burn, smoke) rises up, this meant, according to ancient people, that God feels smoke and fire. In one place, the fire was burned for many centuries and those who allowed the flame to fade, and these were mostly women, were killed. In Russia, the caretaker of the fire was called an ognishchanin (from ognishche – pechishche), in the 10th -12th centuries the chief steward of the princely house was a patrimony. Read more in the book by Tikhomirov A.E. When and why did man arise? LitRes, Moscow, 2023
Consciousness, speech, religion, and art emerged approximately simultaneously as a result of a powerful upheaval that ended the evolution of hominids. The epochs of a reasonable man live by the consequences of this event. Therefore, all people are cognizable to each other, and all human communities within 30-40 thousand years are contemporaries. The humanitarian search is aimed at establishing the kinship of civilizations, which has a lower limit in the Paleolithic revolution. The question of where to start a culture, from Australopithecines or Cro-Magnons, three million or thirty thousand years ago, is solved by itself when they move from speculation to interpretation. Culture begins where symbolic tradition extends, where there is still material for human understanding.
Recognition of the find testifies to the similarity of the psychic constitutions of the interpreter and his counterpart. The past changes us, but we also change it. The circle of contacts, in the perimeter of which the means of communication are being established, is called culture in the humanitarian meaning of the word. On the periphery, it is blurred and dotted in some places. The most interesting thing is happening here: the expansion of humanity, the illumination of psychological archaism.
Who liked to compare psychoanalysis with archaeology Z.Freud found his own language on each layer of the "excavation". He considered the main achievement of the psychoanalyst's "translation activity" to be the discovery of the "language of desire", collected from dreams, slips of the tongue, descriptions, hallucinatory associations and other linguistic garbage. Here, at the limit of readability, the first mediation of a vague reality with a vague language takes place. The underlying connections of the psyche with the collective unconscious are included in the work of language on structuring the blurred zone between speech and speech, individual and collective, modern and mythical. The researcher's thought, starting from the plane of the readable into the sphere of the unlit, inevitably finds equivalents to its semi-formed states somewhere on the edge of history. The humanitarian manages to include layers of his barely probed subconscious in communication with prehistory. The emanation of the humanitarian mind into the underlying darkness has the character of a semantic humanization of physical and physiological facts supplied by natural science. The subtraction of "human, too human" in piles of material, seemingly devoid of a sign of animation, means the expansion of the human in man and the humanitarian in science.
