Светлана Жарникова – Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia (страница 3)

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.

At the same time, in the East Slavic tradition, many elements of the ancient swastika-meander and "single-file" ornament can be traced continuously practically from the Proto-Slavic Trinecko-Komarovo culture (mid-2nd millennium BC) until the end of the 19th century, from which one can conclude that the bearers of the ancient ornamental tradition were also those groups of the East Slavic (Krivichi) population, whose settlements and burial grounds dating back to the IV-VI centuries AD, discovered in 1984-1987 by archaeologist A. N. Bashenkin (Archaeological discoveries in 1984. M. 1986. p. 4; Hills and long mounds in the east in the Novgorod land. Abstracts of the conference "History and archeology of the Novgorod lands", Novgorod. 1987. p. 12-14) in the west of the Vologda region.

Thus, we can conclude that it was on the territory of Eastern Europe among closely related tribes that the most ancient ornamental complexes were formed that remained sacred symbols of Indo-Iranian peoples, on the one hand, and did not lose their sacred functions of amulets and signs of kinship among the East Slavic peoples, up to until the beginning of the 20th century, on the other. A comprehensive consideration of the development of ornaments common to the East Slavic (North Russian) and Indo-Iranian traditions from ancient times to the present day testifies to the single, deeply archaic origins of this tradition, about the long process of development and transformation of ancient archetypes, on the joint development of more diverse, new ornamental patterns over the millennia, about the obvious genetic relationship of these peoples, since similar ornament, of course, can occur among different peoples, but it's hard to believe that the peoples not ethno-genetically related and separated by thousand kilometers distances and millennia, such complex ornamental compositions can appear completely independently of each other, repetitive even in the smallest detail, moreover, performing the same sacred functions of amulets and signs of kinship.

The second chapter of the dissertation is devoted to the analysis of archaic plot compositions in the North Russian textile decor, which also developed in ancient times. A number of zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, ornithomorphic and phytomorphic images, which are the components of these archaic compositions, are quite reliably deciphered on the basis of Eastern Slavic folklore to mythology preserved until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries and on the basis of the hymns of the Rig Veda and Avesta, the poems of the Mahabharata, Beliefs of the inhabitants of mountainous Tajikistan and especially the Hindu Kush. And at the same time, some images of the Rig Veda, Avesta and Mahabharata can be deciphered with the help of Eastern European archaeological materials and archaic themes of embroidery, weaving and lace of the North Russian region.

Such is the circle of images associated with the image of a female character in North Russian embroidery, where the forthcoming (unlike the Western Asian circle of images) are not lions, bulls and goats, but moose - horses - geese - swans (or ducks).

Making the assumption that the assimilation of a horse to a bird - a duck, a goose or a swan, preserved in the Rig Veda, as well as the assimilation of a horse to a deer, can have its origins only in those territories where both deer and geese, ducks and swans had to play a huge role in the economic life of people, the author turns to the Neolithic petroglyphs of the White Sea and Onega Lake, where the leading characters are a man, a waterfowl (duck, goose, swan) and an elk. Since only in northern Europe geese, ducks and swans nested in huge numbers until the end of the 19th century, and it was here that these cautious birds, losing their plumage in the spring, became completely defenseless, they not only celebrated with their arrival and departure the arrival and departure of the warm season, but also gave people a large amount of meat food in the most difficult time of the year without food - in late winter - early spring. The sacralization of waterfowl, characteristic of the Proto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Scythian, Iranian, Indian and East Slavic (North Russian) traditions, probably has its origins in this ancient Neolithic northeastern European tradition. Judging by the archaeological materials of the Saka tombs of Pazyryk and the Katandkno burial mound, the origins of the contamination of the images of the horse and deer, so characteristic of the Indo-Iranian tradition and recorded in the hymn of the Rig Veda, are also associated with northern latitudes. This conclusion is made due to the fact that the images of the so-called. Horned horses in the Scythian and Saka traditions are in fact often, judging by the design of the muzzle and horns, images of elk. Referring to the idea of N. N. Marr that the first riding and draft animal was a deer, which was only much later replaced by a horse (Means of transportation, tools of self-defense and production in prehistory. L. 1926), we can conclude that this first riding of all representatives of the deer family, only an elk could be an animal in all respects. This conclusion is made in connection with the fact that, firstly, the general dimensions of all other representatives of the deer family do not give them the opportunity to be riding animals, and secondly, already on the Neolithic petroglyphs of the north of Eastern Europe there are images that can be interpreted as a moose team. In addition, modern researchers dealing with the problem of elk domestication state that in a harness and under the top, as well as in the process of domestication, an elk is preferable to a horse, because gets used to the team in 2 days and makes no attempts to hit or bite a person, and at the same time, not every horse can catch up with a running young elk. Only by the fact that the Elk preceded the Indo-Iranians as a riding animal, a horse, can one explain many of the old ways of describing the sacrificial horse in the Rig Veda, as a creature with a horned head and fallow deer hooves (RV, I, 163). In the North Russian tradition, the contamination of the images of the swan-goose and the elk-horse is constantly encountered, and these images, as in the Indo-Iranian mythological tradition, mark only the sphere of the sacred.