"Listen, good people,
Shall I tell you the old story?
(from a folk song)
The well-known translator of the hymns of the Rig Veda, the oldest part of the Veda (rig - spoken, veda - knowledge), into Russian T. Ya. Elizarenkova writes: “In the deepest conviction of the translator, when translating from Vedic into other languages, the Russian language has a number of undoubted advantages over Western European languages These advantages are determined by both the greater 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 has preserved its Indo-European tree naming system better than all other Indo-European languages, from which he concludes that the ancestors of the Slavs during the common Slavic period lived in a natural and climatic zone that corresponds to the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans , and "after the Slavic period, speakers of various Slavic dialects continued to live in a similar area to a significant extent." It must be said that the outstanding linguist of the first third of the twentieth century, A. Meillet, was convinced that the Old Slavic language is one of the most ancient in the pan-Indo-European family and continues “without any interruption the development of the pan-Indo-European language: one cannot notice in it those sudden changes that give such a characteristic appearance of the languages of Greek, Italian (especially Latin), Celtic, and Germanic. The Slavic language is an Indo-European language that has generally retained its archaic type.”
Soviet linguist B.V. Gornung believed that the ancestors of the Aryans (Indo-Iranians) at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e. inhabited the northeast of Europe and were located somewhere near the Middle Volga, and another outstanding 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 20s of our century, Academician A.I. Sobolevsky said that in the vast expanses of European Russia, right up to the northern regions, names based on some ancient European language dominate. 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 - S.Zh.) are related to each other and belong to the same language of the Indo-European family "
And it is not surprising that Academician N.Ya. Marr believed that the ancient basis of the Slavs existed 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 Eastern European north, preceding Slavicization and Finnishization, N.Ya. Marr sometimes called them “northern Sarmatians” or, what is even more interesting, “Russians”.
In the second millennium BC. Tribes of cattle breeders and farmers who call themselves “Aryans,” which means “noble,” come to Northwestern India from their Eastern European ancestral home. Some of the Aryans, and not a small one, left their ancestral home in search of a better life, but, as Indologist N.R. writes. Gusev, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which the entire population of a significant part of Eastern Europe would leave it. Most likely, such a situation is simply impossible, because “no historical reasons have been identified that could cause their obligatory general departure from their ancestral home.”
Probably, part of the Aryan tribes remained at home, in the vastness of Eastern Europe, to become the ancestors of the future peoples of this land. The Aryan tribes left this native land (for reasons unknown to us) thousands of years ago to find a new homeland in Iran (that's right - 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 preserved the memory of their past, their ancestral homeland. Preserve your and our memories!
A low bow to you, distant brothers and sisters, for the fact that through thousands of years you have carried our common shrine, our common past, our common memory! For preserving the golden keys from bygone times, and today we are opening with them the treasury of the past of our people. Do we need this? This question was answered back in 1911 by the outstanding researcher of the Russian North A. Zhuravsky: “In the “childhood” of humanity is the basis for the knowledge and direction of the future paths of humanity. In the eras of the “childhood of Russia” - the paths to the knowledge of Russia, to the control knowledge of those historical phenomena of our modernity, which seem to us fatally complex and not
subordinate to the ruling will of the people. But the roots of which are simple and elementary, like the initial cell of the most complex organism." The germs of social "evils" are in the personal of each and everyone. And we are obliged to take full advantage of experience
hoary past, and the closer we get to the germs of this past, the more consciously, faithfully and confidently we will move “forward”...
It is the history of the “childhood of humanity”, it is ethnography that will help us learn the logical laws of natural progress and consciously, and not blindly, go “forward” ourselves and move our people “forward”, for ethnography and history are the paths to knowledge of that “past”, without which cannot be applied to the knowledge of the future by the knowledge of the present. “Humanity” consists of “nations” and, first of all, it is logically necessary that a nation represents a definite mutual whole, so that it appears to us not in the third person plural - “they” - but in the first person - “we”. Russia, less than any other nation, can know itself without the help of knowledge of the roots of its past; and without knowing yourself, it is impossible to know others and take into account your positions among others, just as without correcting yourself, it is impossible to correct others... The germs of many beliefs and ideals have perished - let us look for their imprints on objects before they too perish for centuries. This is by no means only “interesting” or “curious,” but also vitally important, necessary.” No, we do not have a thousand-year history, as is customary now to write and speak, but a multi-thousand-year history. We can only talk about one thousand years in relation to the adoption of Christianity After all, until this year, our ancestors did not live in caves and did not dress in skins. It was not suddenly that the word Gardarika ("Country of Cities") came into use in the European world as the name of Rus'. These cities were on our lands, and not in one day. were born, and took shape and developed over many centuries. Prince Oleg of Novgorod, having seized power in Kiev in 885 and united Rus' around this center, went to war against Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, and brought this empire to its knees at the beginning of the 10th. century, Prince Igor, the son of Rurik, sent 500 ships with 100 people on board to the Khazars, who were trying to suppress Rus'. And they fought to the south of the Caspian Sea. Other peoples were afraid of this Rus', they paid tribute to it. Such strength and unity took shape long before Christianity, and, therefore, our history is incalculably ancient. Goods produced by village residents flocked to the cities of Rus' - 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 for the production of many goods and especially luxury goods for the growing stratum of the nobility.
Judging by the data obtained from numerous excavations and carefully processed by archaeologists, from ancient times the Slavs conducted barter trade with other countries, and this required an increase in the qualifications of people employed in any branch of production. The fortified settlements and the embryos of the cities of the ancient Slavs were also known in the eastern countries: the fact that they had long been known to the Arabs and Persians is mentioned in the works of Abu Reyhan Birun (10th century) and Ibn Fadlan (9th - 10th century). The latter describes the arrival of Russian traders on Itil (on the Volga) and talks about their ships, weapons, chains and jewelry made of precious metals, pearl and beaded necklaces, as well as large wooden houses, which upon arrival they immediately build on the shore and live in there are 10 - 20 of them with wives and slaves; he also writes that the Russians knew money and at that time were already selling, and not just exchanging their goods; He describes their idols and the ritual of burning the dead, in which the wife is killed (or she kills herself) and burned along with the body of her husband (let us note here that a similar ritual is described in ancient Indian literature, which in India survived until the 19th-20th centuries ); it is said that “Russian kings usually keep with them in their castle or town 400 of the bravest warriors (squad) ... These 400 sit below on a large Royal sofa, decorated with precious stones ... he (the King or Prince) has a viceroy, who leads the army..."
All this data is presented by N.M. Karamzin in the book “History of the Russian State,” vol. 1 (Moscow, 1989, pp. 316-319). So what kind of beginning of statehood, and indeed our history in general, can be dated back to just one millennium? There were cities, there was class stratification, there were historical traditions, and all this took shape from ancient eras. So, in these cities of the Rus with large wooden houses, we repeat, artistic crafts developed, their origins going back to time immemorial. Gradually, over the centuries, technology changed and improved, but the themes of images, drawings and signs applied to craft items 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 crops. 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
would be the simple fact that they have survived in folk art to this day.
The plot language, the language of symbols, in this art aroused increased interest, but the main attention in the works of scientists is on identifying and explaining the images of female and male deities, found even in late Russian embroidery - this is a clear relic of paganism. It is interesting that such a female deity (and perhaps it is a praying woman) is almost exactly repeated in Russian embroideries and on Indian fabrics and ritual objects, which is not a mere coincidence (N.R. Guseva. Deep Roots. Collection of "Roads" millennia" M. 1991). Since ancient times, in Russian and other Slavic embroideries there have been many geometric motifs, which, along with other themes, also take us back to ancient times, which means that some lines of history can be traced through them.
Russian folk embroidery has attracted the attention of researchers for more than 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.
Many interesting works have appeared devoted to the analysis of the plot-symbolic language, technical features and religious differences in Russian folk embroidery. However, the main attention in most of these works is paid to anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images, archaic tripartite compositions, including, as already mentioned, a stylized and transformed image of a person - a female (more often) or male (less often) pre-Christian deity.
The geometric motifs of North Russian embroidery stand somewhat apart, accompanying, as a rule, the main detailed plot compositions, although very often in the design of towels, belts, hems, sleeves and shoulders of shirts, it is the 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 lace also deserves great attention from this point of view. Academician B.A. has repeatedly written about archaic geometricism in Russian ornamental creativity and the need for its careful study. Rybakov. Both in his works of the 60s and 70s, and in his profound work on the paganism of the ancient Slavs, published in 1961, a red thread runs through the idea of the unchanging depths of folk memory, preserving in itself and carrying through the centuries in the images of embroidery, carving woodworking, toys, etc. the most ancient ideological schemes, rooted in unknown distant millennia.
Very valuable in this regard are the collections of the Museum of the Russian North, i.e. those places where one can say eternal remoteness from government 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 over an immeasurable number of centuries of the most ancient forms of life and economy, careful attitude to the faith of fathers and grandfathers, and, as a direct consequence of this, the preservation of the most ancient symbolism encoded in embroidery patterns, in patterns of fabrics and lace.
Of particular interest are the embroideries that “survived” until the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, which originated from the north-eastern regions of the Vologda and neighboring areas of the Arkhangelsk regions. Many scientists wrote that these were the lands of Finno-Ugric tribes, but toponymy data indicate something completely different - the overwhelming majority of toponyms here are Slavic, and many of them are very archaic. Thus, in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region, out of 137 settlements, both large and small, only six have different names. It is in these areas that the traditions of ornamental designs of ancient origin, as we will trace below, are best preserved.
The ornamental compositions that will be discussed and which were reproduced in Vologda embroidery until the 30s, decorated only sacredly marked things. B. A. Rybakov speaks very precisely about this process: “the deposition in embroidery of very early layers of human religious thinking ... 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 the wedding cart and much more. A specially ritual item, long ago separated from its everyday counterpart, was a towel with rich and complex embroidery, bread and salt were served on the towel, the towels served as the reins of the wedding train, the coffin with the deceased was carried on the towels and they were lowered into the grave. corner, the “devotees” placed icons on the towel.” (Paganism of the ancient Slavs, p. 471, M., 1981)
It is precisely these sacred ornaments that are presented in the Vologda Museum of Local Lore, and they will subsequently be the main comparative material in our attempt to identify ornamental parallels between the oldest patterns of North Russian embroidery and the ornaments created by those peoples who lived later in various historical eras on 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 tribes united by it, included in science under the general name of the Aryans).
So, one of the oldest motifs of geometric ornaments among the peoples of Eurasia was a rhombus or a rhombic meander (many explained the meander as a conventional image of the top of a wave turning at right angles). The meander is even found on things dating back to the Paleolithic, for example, on various bone objects 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 dentin 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. This could also have a magical spell meaning aimed at the success of the hunt, and at the same time reflect people’s idea of prosperity.
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 Aryan movements to the southeast. As a symbol of good luck and a kind of amulet against misfortune, we find it on cult objects and ceramics (i.e., on repositories of drink and food that are very important for people’s lives) and in later cultures.
It should be pointed out that already on the bone artifacts of the mentioned Merzin site one can trace how the outlines of a swastika grow from a stripe of a double meander, depicted in a movement from right to left, - another ornament that is most characteristic of all Indo-Europeans. This element is depicted in its basic form - in the form of a chair with ends bent at right angles, and being complicated by new elements in the form of additional processes.
The swastika occupied 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, “u” before the vowel “a” is replaced by “v” and the result is “svasti”, to which the suffix “k” and the ending “a” are added: swastika. This sign means “the bestower of all good things, the bringer of happiness.” If you place a dot in its four “divisions,” it will be a symbol of a sown field and at the same time a prayer for a good harvest. By the way, if two swastikas are superimposed on one another with the top one rotated 45 degrees, you will get the ancient Slavic sun sign “Kolovrat”, i.e. a rotating wheel (circle) with eight spokes with ends bent clockwise. Since ancient times, the swastika sign began to be used by the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans to designate light, the sun as the source of life and prosperity. This sign can be traced from Arkhangelsk to the lands of India, where it is visible everywhere - it is used to decorate temples, houses, clothes and, of course, many items related to weddings.
There are other elements of patterns that can be traced sequentially in time from the north of our country to the Black Sea, and then further, along the routes of Aryan migrations to new lands. And the fact that they were carefully preserved in folk art suggests that they were given great importance in the worldview of people, especially among the ancestors of the Aryans and Slavs.
A peculiar transformation of the meander motif appears to be a figurative ornament, characteristic of Trypillia ceramics, consisting of the so-called “jibs”.
In general, we can determine the range of basic ornamental motifs with which, focusing on Trypillia as a certain set of them, we will compare the materials of subsequent cultures. This is a meander and its varieties, a meandering spiral, a complexly drawn cross, a swastika, and “geese”.
In search of the closest analogies in time, we will naturally turn to the ceramic complexes of those cultures that existed at various time intervals in the territory of Eastern Europe and the Urals with the Ural lands. We find traditions of ceramic ornamentation, including an amazing variety of variants of meander and swastika motifs, among the closest neighbors of the “Srubniki” - the population of the Andronovo culture, created by the Indo-Iranians and genetically related to the Srubniki. These two cultures, synchronous in time, 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 patterns described here. As in all Andronovo ornaments, in North Russian folk embroidery and bran weaving, the composition is divided into three horizontal zones, with the upper and lower often duplicating one another, and the middle one bearing the most important patterns from their point of view. We do not know what forms of ornaments would have been on things made by people in the era of the ancient Indo-Iranian (pan-Aryan) unity, but we believe that the described elements of ornamental patterns were unlikely to have been born overnight in the minds of the same Andronovo people, but are rooted in a genetically related them the culture of their common ancestors.
The mentioned middle strip of the horizontal composition can bear the most diverse of the indicated ornamental elements, successive in time for different cultures, which are absolutely identical to the North Russian, Trypillian and much more eastern and southeastern cultures. Particularly interesting is the legitimacy of such analogies, which can be traced in archaeological East Slavic materials. For example, a buckle in the shape of complex crosses, found in Novgorod in the 60s, dating back to the mid-13th century, found a repetition of its pattern in embroidery recently made on a towel by a Vologda peasant woman. The discovery of a slate whorl whorl at a Slavic settlement near Ryazan, which dates back to the 11th-13th centuries, published by G. Polyakova, is interesting in that a design in the form of a six-pointed Orthodox cross surrounded by meandering spirals and swastika motifs is scratched on the whorl.
Similar examples could be continued. It remains for us to state the following: similar ornaments can arise without mutual connection among different peoples, but it is difficult to believe that among peoples separated by thousands of kilometers distances and millennia - unless these peoples are ethnogenetically related - such patterns can appear completely independently of each other. complex ornamental compositions, repeated even in the smallest details? and even performing the same functions: amulets and signs of belonging to a family or clan.
It is impossible to deny the inevitability of the emergence of ethnogenetic connections between the ancient ancestors of the Indo-Iranian tribes and the Indo-speaking and Iranian-speaking branches that emerged from their community, and, accordingly, those ethnic groups that developed in close proximity to them over thousands of years, right up to the formation of vast and similar in their culture log-houses and Andronovo communities.
During their formation, a process of their partial disintegration must also have occurred, expressed in the resettlement of individual tribes or even groups of them both to the west and to the east. The departure of the Aryans, for example, ended, as recognized by science, by the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. Geographically close to them for such a long time, the ancestors of the Slavs partially moved to the west, forming groups known as the Western Slavs, and the main massif, called the Eastern Slavs, settled in the lands of Eastern Europe.
Moving to the east and south, the Aryan tribes took with them traditional forms of culture - established production skills, types of ornaments (and understanding of the symbolism reflected in them), customs and beliefs. On their way to India and Iran, the Aryans came into contact with the peoples of the countries through which they passed, settling there for different periods of time and partially mixing with this population. Therefore, we are also interested in those pattern motifs that are close to the ancient Slavic ones, which are identified among peoples living, for example, in the Caucasus or Central Asia (although it should be remembered that beyond the Urals and before Afghanistan, part of the lands were part of the area of the Andronovo culture earlier) .
Unfortunately, scientists began to trace racial, linguistic, cultural and other Arya-Slavic parallels in their works only in the last 25-30 years, and research has significantly expanded the boundaries of our knowledge about our own past.
We here refrain from making far-reaching conclusions, and will only note in conclusion that the scope of this analysis is limited to the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. Undoubtedly, the involvement of Indian and Iranian materials would significantly expand this framework. In our deep conviction, we should not so persistently hush up the hypothesis of the Indian historian B. Tilak about the likelihood of the most ancient unification of the ancestors of the Aryans (back in that distant era of their common Indo-Iranian language, recognized as the original form of existence of their community) into tribal and tribal unions precisely in circumpolar regions. He convincingly proves not only the possibility, but the full probability of this fact, by numerous descriptions of Arctic nature preserved in the monuments of ancient Indian literature.
The most ancient ancestors of the Slavs, judging by the many similarities between various aspects of the origins of their culture with the ancient Aryans, and then with the culture of the peoples of the Eurasian steppes, speakers of Indo-European languages (such as the Andronovo people, who once separated from the Indo-Iranian community), were apparently so close The Aryans passed on to their descendants many common elements of language and common motifs of ornaments. Both language and ornaments were means of mutual communication and evidence of genetic proximity, and possibly signs of membership, inclusion in the same clans, in the same tribes.