Birch bark letters: letters of the Middle Ages. Novgorod birch bark letters

True, it should be noted that he collected the first collection of birch bark letters back in late XIX century Novgorod collector Vasiliy Stepanovich Peredolsky(1833-1907). It was he who, having carried out independent excavations, found out that in Novgorod there is a perfectly preserved cultural layer. Peredolsky exhibited the birch-bark letters found or bought from the peasants in the first private museum in the city, built with his own money. According to him, the birch-bark letters were "the letters of our ancestors." However, it was impossible to make out anything on the old pieces of birch bark, so historians spoke of a hoax or considered the "ancestral letters" to be scribbles of illiterate peasants. In a word, the search for the "Russian Schliemann" was classified as eccentricity.
In the 1920s, the Peredolsky Museum was nationalized and then closed. Director of the State Novgorod Museum Nicholas Grigorievich Porfiridov issued a conclusion that "most of the things did not represent a special museum value." As a result, the first collection of birch bark letters was irretrievably lost. Purely Russian history.

The sensation came half a century late. As they say, there was no happiness, but misfortune helped... During the restoration of the city in the 1950s, large-scale archaeological excavations were carried out, which revealed medieval streets and squares, towers of the nobility and houses of ordinary citizens in the thickness of the multi-meter cultural layer. The first birch bark document (end of the 14th century) in Novgorod was discovered on July 26, 1951 at the Nerevsky excavation site: it contained a list of feudal duties in favor of a certain Thomas.

Academician Valentin Yanin in the book "Birch bark mail of centuries" described the circumstances of the find as follows: "It happened on July 26, 1951, when a young worker Nina Fedorovna Akulova found during excavations on the ancient Kholopya street of Novgorod, right on the flooring of its pavement of the XIV century, a dense and dirty scroll of birch bark, on the surface of which clear letters shone through the mud. If not for these letters, one would think that a fragment of another fishing float was discovered, of which there were already several dozen in the Novgorod collection by that time. Akulova handed over her find to the head of the excavation Gaide Andreevna Avdusina and she called out Artemia Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky, which had the main dramatic effect. The call found him standing on the ancient pavement being cleared, which led from the pavement of Kholopya Street to the courtyard of the estate. And standing on this pavement, as if on a pedestal, with his finger raised, for a minute in full view of the entire excavation he could not, gasping for breath, utter a single word, uttering only inarticulate sounds, then shouted out in a voice hoarse with excitement: “I was waiting for this find twenty years!"
In honor of this find, on July 26, an annual holiday is celebrated in Novgorod - “Birchbark Letter Day”.

The same archaeological season brought 9 more documents on birch bark. And today there are already more than 1000 of them. The oldest birch bark writing dates back to the 10th century (Trinity excavation), the “youngest” - to the middle of the 15th.

The wax was leveled with a spatula and letters were written on it. The oldest Russian book, the 11th-century Psalter (c. 1010, more than half a century older than the Ostromir Gospel), found in July 2000, was just such. A book of three tablets 20x16 cm, covered with wax, carried the texts of the three Psalms of David.

Birch bark letters are unique in that, unlike chronicles and official documents, they gave us the opportunity to “hear” the voices of ordinary Novgorodians. The bulk of the letters are business correspondence. But among the letters there are also love letters, and a threat to summon to God's judgment - a test of water ...

The study notes and drawings of the seven-year-old boy Onfim, discovered in 1956, gained wide popularity. Having scratched the letters of the alphabet, he finally depicted himself in the form of an armed warrior riding a horse crushing enemies. Since then, the dreams of the boys have not changed much.

The birch-bark charter No. 9 became a real sensation. This is the first female letter in Russia: “What my father gave me and my relatives gave me in addition, then after him (meaning - for ex-husband). And now, marrying a new wife, he does not give me anything. Striking my hands as a sign of a new engagement, he drove me away, and took the other as his wife. Indeed, a Russian share, a female share ...

And here love letter written at the beginning of the 12th century. (No. 752): “I sent to you three times. What kind of evil do you have against me that you did not come to me this week? And I treated you like a brother! Have I offended you by what I sent to you? And I see you don't like it. If you liked it, then you would have escaped from under people's eyes and rushed ... do you want me to leave you? Even if I offended you by my own ignorance, if you start mocking me, then let God and I judge you.”
It is interesting that this letter was cut with a knife, the fragments were tied into a knot and thrown into a heap of manure. The addressee, apparently, has already got another sweetheart ...

There is also among the birch bark letters the first marriage proposal in Russia (end of the 13th century): “From Mikita to Anna. Follow me. I want you, and you want me. No. 377).

Another surprise came in 2005, when several messages of the 12th-13th centuries with obscene language were found - e... (No. 35, XII century), b... (No. 531, beginning of the 13th century), p. ..(No. 955, XII century), etc.. Thus, the well-established myth that we supposedly owe the Mongol-Tatars the originality of our "Russian oral" was finally buried.

Birch-bark letters revealed to us a striking fact about the almost universal literacy of the urban population of ancient Russia. Moreover, Russian people in those days wrote almost without errors - according to Zaliznyak, 90% of letters were written correctly (sorry for the tautology).

From personal experience: when my wife and I worked as students for the 1986 season at the Troitsky excavation site, a letter was found that began with a tattered "... Yanin". There was a lot of laughter at this message to an academician in a millennium.

Wandering around the Novgorod Museum, I came across a letter that can serve as a good alternative to the title of Yanin's famous book "I sent you a birch bark". "I sent you a bucket of sturgeon", by God, it's better))...

According to archaeologists, the Novgorod land still keeps at least 20-30 thousand birch bark letters. But since they are discovered on average 18 per year, it will take about one and a half thousand years to extract this priceless library into the light of day.

A complete set of birch bark letters was posted in 2006 on the site "Old Russian birch bark letters" http://gramoty.ru/index.php?id=about_site

On July 26, 1951, at the Nerevsky excavation site in Veliky Novgorod, a unique birch bark was discovered. It was a welcome find! The head of the expedition Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky dreamed about it for almost 20 years (excavations have been carried out since 1932). Messages on birch bark have not yet been met, but they knew for sure that in Russia they wrote on birch bark.

In particular, the church leader Joseph Volotsky wrote about Sergius of Radonezh: "In the monastery of blessed Sergius, even the books themselves are not written on charters, but on birch bark."

On July 26, during excavations at a depth of 2.4 meters, a member of the expedition, Nina Akulova, drew attention to a piece of birch bark measuring 13 by 38 centimeters. Observation helped the girl find a needle in a haystack - she took a closer look and made out the scratched letters on the scroll!

Expedition leader A.V. Artsikhovsky: "During excavations, several hundred empty birch bark scrolls accounted for one inscribed one. Empty scrolls did not differ in appearance from letters in any or almost nothing, apparently served as floats or were simply thrown away when finishing logs."

The scroll was carefully washed in hot water with soda, straightened and squeezed between the panes. Subsequently, historians began to decipher the text. The entry consisted of 13 lines. Scientists analyzed every word and fragment of a phrase and found out that the speech in the manuscript (it is assumed that the XIV century) was about feudal duties - issues of land and gift (income and dues).

From birch bark No. 1, found by Artsikhovsky's expedition: "20 Bel gift (y) came from Shadrin (a) village", "20 Bel gift (y) went from Mokhova village."

The very next day, archaeologists will be lucky to find two more letters - about the fur trade and the preparation of beer. In total, during the expeditionary season of 1951, scientists discovered nine letters. In addition, they also found a tool for writing - a curved and pointed bone rod.

It is the scratched letters that have an outstanding historical value. Expedition leader A.V. Artsikhovsky: “Before these excavations, only Russian birch bark manuscripts of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were known. But during this period, birch bark was written with ink. Meanwhile, birch bark ... is preserved in the ground in two cases: if it is very dry and if it is very damp. , and the ink should be poorly preserved there. That is why, by the way, discoveries are unlikely during the excavation of parchment letters, also common in ancient Russia. Although parchment (ed. note: author's spelling) is well preserved in the ground, it was written only with ink" .

Artsikhovsky's expedition opened a new page in the study national history. According to experts, the Novgorod cultural layers still store about 20 thousand ancient Russian birch bark letters.

Birchbark letters- letters, notes, documents of the 11th-15th centuries, written in inside separated layer of birch bark (bark).

The possibility of using birch bark as a material for writing was known to many nations. Ancient historians Cassius Dio and Herodian mentioned notebooks made of birch bark. The American Indians of the Connecticut River Valley, who prepared birch bark for their letters, called the trees that grew in their land "paper birches." Latin name This type of birch - Betula papyrifera - includes a distorted Latin lexeme "paper" (papyr). In the famous Song of Hiawatha G. W. Longfellow (1807–1882), translated by I. A. Bunin, also provides data on the use of birch bark for writing by North American Indians:

He took paints out of the bag,
He took out paints of all colors
And on a smooth birch bark
Made a lot of secret signs
Marvelous and figures and signs…

Based on the folklore of the tribes he describes, the American writer James Oliver Carwood spoke about the birch bark letters of the Indians of Canada (his novel Wolf hunters published in Russian in 1926).

The first mention of writing on birch bark in Ancient Russia belongs to the 15th century. Messages Joseph of Volotsky says that the founder of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, Sergius of Radonezh, wrote on it because of poverty: parchment was saved for chronicles. On Estonian soil in the 14th century. there were birch bark letters (and one of them in 1570 with a German text was discovered in a museum depository before the Second World War). About birch bark letters in Sweden in the 15th century. wrote an author who lived in the 17th century; it is also known that they were later used by the Swedes in the 17th and 18th centuries. Siberia in the 18th century birch bark "books" were used to record yasak (state tax). Old Believers and in the 19th century. kept birch bark liturgical books of the "Donikon era" (that is, until church reform Patriarch Nikon in the middle of the 17th century), they are written in ink.

However, until the early 1950s, Russian archaeologists failed to find ancient Russian birch bark writings in the early cultural layers of the 10th–15th centuries they excavated. The first accidental find was a 14th-century Golden Horde birch bark, discovered while digging a silo pit near Saratov in 1930. After that, archaeologists tried to find birch bark letters exactly where there was no moisture access to birch bark, as was the case in the Volga region. However, this path turned out to be a dead end: in most cases, the birch bark turned into dust, and it was not possible to detect traces of letters. Only the deep conviction of the Soviet archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky that birch bark writing should be sought in the north-west of Russia made it necessary to organize special excavations in the center of Novgorod. The soils there, in contrast to the Volga region, are very wet, but there is no air access to the deep layers, and therefore it is wood objects that are well preserved in them. Artsikhovsky based his hypotheses both on ancient Russian references in literary texts and on the message of the Arab writer Ibn al-Nedim, who quoted the words of “one Caucasian prince” in 987: “I was told by one, on the veracity of which I rely, that one of the kings of Mount Kabk sent him to the tsar of the Russians; he claimed that they had writing carved into wood. He showed me a piece white wood on which there were images ... "This" piece of white wood "- birch bark, plus information about the prevalence of letters on birch bark among the natives of the New World and forced him to look for birch bark letters in northwestern Russia.

Artsikhovsky's prediction about the inevitability of finds of birch bark letters in the Russian land, first expressed by him in the early 1930s, came true on June 26, 1951. The first Novgorod birch bark document was discovered at the Nerevsky excavation site of Veliky Novgorod by a handyman N. F. Akulova. Since then, the number of birch bark letters found has already exceeded a thousand, of which over 950 were found just in the Novgorod land. In addition to Novgorod, over 50 years of excavations, about 100 birch bark letters were found (one and a half dozen in Pskov, several letters each in Smolensk, Tver, Vitebsk, the only one, folded and laid in a closed vessel, was found in 1994 in Moscow). In total, about 10 cities of Russia are known where birch bark letters were found. Most of them are supposed to be found in Pskov, where soils are similar to those of Novgorod, but the cultural layer in it is located in the built-up city center, where excavations are practically impossible.

Birch bark scrolls were a common household item. Once used, they were not stored; that is why most of them were found on both sides of wooden pavements, in layers saturated ground water. Some texts, probably, accidentally fell out of the Novgorod patrimonial archives.

The chronology of letters on birch bark is established different ways: stratigraphic (according to the tiers of the excavations), paleographic (according to the lettering), linguistic, historical (according to the known historical facts, persons, dates indicated in the text). The oldest of the birch bark writings dates back to the first half of the 11th century, the latest to the second half of the 15th century.

Historians suggest that poorly trained townspeople and children wrote mainly on waxed tablets; and those who mastered the graphics and filled their hands were able to squeeze out letters on birch bark with a sharp bone or metal stick (“writing”). Similar sticks in tiny leather cases were found by archaeologists before, but they could not determine their purpose, calling either “pins” or “fragments of jewelry”. Letters on birch bark were usually squeezed out on the inner, softer side, on the exfoliated part, specially soaked, evaporated, unfolded and thus prepared for writing. Letters written in ink or other colors, apparently, cannot be found: the ink has faded and washed out over the centuries. Letters sent to the addressee on birch bark were folded into a tube. When letters are found and deciphered, they are again soaked, unfolded, the upper dark layer is cleaned with a coarse brush, dried under pressure between two glasses. Subsequent photography and drawing (for many years M.N. Kislov was the head of these works, and after his death - V.I. Povetkin) is a special stage of reading, preparation for the hermeneutics (interpretation, interpretation) of the text. A certain percentage of letters remain traced, but not deciphered.

The language of most birch bark letters differs from the literary language of that time, it is rather colloquial, everyday, contains normative vocabulary (which indicates that there was no ban on its use). About a dozen letters were written in Church Slavonic ( literary language), several in Latin. According to the most conservative estimates, in the Novgorod land you can still find at least 20,000 "birch barks" (the Novgorod name for such letters)

The content is dominated by private letters of a domestic or economic nature. They are classified according to the preserved information: about land and landowners, about tribute and feudal rent; about craft, trade and merchants; about military events, etc., private correspondence (including alphabets, copybooks, drawings), literary and folklore texts in excerpts, voting lots, calendars, etc.

As a historical source of the period of early writing, birch bark documents are unique in terms of the information they contain about Russia in the 10th–15th centuries. The data available in them make it possible to judge the size of duties, the relationship of peasants with the patrimonial administration, the “refusals” of peasants from their owner, the life of “owners” (owners of land cultivated by the family and occasionally hiring someone to help). There you can also find information about the sale of peasants with land, their protests (collective petitions), which cannot be found in other sources of such an early time, since the annals preferred to remain silent about this. Diplomas characterize the technique of buying and selling land plots and buildings, land use, collection of tribute to the city treasury.

Valuable information about the legal practice of that time, the activities of the judiciary - the princely and "street" (street) court, about the procedure for legal proceedings (dispute resolution on the "field" - a fist fight). Some of the letters themselves are court documents containing a statement of real incidents in matters of inheritance, guardianship, and credit. The significance of the discovery of birch bark letters lies in the ability to trace the personification historical process, implementation of legal and legislative norms Russian Pravda and others normative documents criminal and civil law. The oldest ancient Russian marriage contract - 13th century. - also birch bark: “Come for me. I want you, and you want me. And for that, the rumor (witness) Ignat Moiseev.

Several charters contain new data on political events in the city, the attitude of the townspeople towards them.

The most striking evidence of the everyday life of the townspeople, preserved by birch bark letters, is the everyday correspondence of husbands, wives, children, other relatives, customers of goods and manufacturers, owners of workshops and artisans dependent on them. In them one can find records of jokes (“Ignorant wrote, unthinking [one] showed, and who read it ...” - the record is cut off), insults using abusive vocabulary (the latest finds of 2005). There is also the text of an ancient love note: “I sent to you three times this week. Why didn't you ever respond? I feel like you don't like it. If you were pleasing, you, having escaped from human eyes, would have run headlong to me. But if you [now] laugh at me, then God and my thinness (weakness) of a woman will be your judge.

Of exceptional importance are the evidence of confessional practices, including pre-Christian ones, found in letters. Some of them are associated with the “cattle god Veles” (pagan patron god of cattle breeding), others with the conspiracies of “sorcerers”, others are apocryphal (non-canonical) prayers to the Mother of God. “The sea was indignant, and seven simple-haired wives came out of it, cursed by their appearance ...”, says one of the letters with the text of the conspiracy from these “seven wives - seven fevers” and an appeal to the demon-fighters and “angels flying from heaven” to save from "shake".

In terms of significance, the discovery of birch bark letters is comparable to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the discovery of Troy described by Homer, and the discovery of the mysterious culture of the ancient Maya. The reading of birch-bark letters refuted the existing opinion that in Ancient Russia only noble people and the clergy were literate. Among the authors and addressees of letters there are many representatives of the lower strata of the population, in the texts found there is evidence of the practice of teaching writing - the alphabet (including with the owner's designations, one of them, 13th century, belongs to the boy Onfim), copybooks, numerical tables, "probes of the pen ". A small number of letters with fragments of literary texts is explained by the fact that parchment was used for literary monuments, and from the 14th century. (occasionally) - paper.

Annual excavations in Novgorod after the death of the archaeologist Artsikhovsky are conducted under the guidance of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences V.L. Yanin. He continued the academic publication of drawings of birch bark letters (the last of the volumes included letters found in 1995–2000). To facilitate the use of texts of diplomas by Internet users, since 2005, re-shooting of diplomas in digital format has been carried out.

Natalya Pushkareva

It is customary to call birch bark texts inscribed (scratched) with a pointed bone rod on birch bark - birch bark.

Birch bark as a writing material is found among many peoples of Eurasia and North America. Some Russian Old Believer books are written on specially processed birch bark. However, all the texts on birch bark known until recently were written in ink (sometimes with charcoal) and do not differ in anything except writing material from manuscripts written in ink on parchment or paper. And all of them are of relatively late origin (not older than the 15th century).

The discovery of Novgorod birch bark letters introduced academia with an unexpected and surprising phenomenon ancient Russian culture. Although the traditions of birch bark writing in Ancient Russia (before the 14th-15th centuries) were known for a long time, the first ancient Russian birch bark writing was found only on July 26, 1951 during excavations in Novgorod led by a prominent Soviet archaeologist A. V. Artsikhovsky. It is no coincidence that birch bark letters were discovered in Novgorod, one of the most important cultural centers of our Middle Ages: the composition of the local soil favors the long-term preservation of wood materials in it.

With the expansion of archaeological excavations, systematic finds of letters on birch bark followed: in the early 80s. their number exceeded 600. Birch bark letters were also found in Smolensk (10 letters), in Staraya Russa near Novgorod (13 letters), Pskov (3 letters), and in Vitebsk (one well-preserved letter). It is easy to see that all the sites of finds are geographically close to Novgorod and had, if not identical, then similar conditions for the preservation of these monuments of ancient writing. Their preservation, of course, was also facilitated by the fact that they were scratched, and not written with ink, which should have dissolved over hundreds of years of being in the damp earth.

Novgorod birch bark documents have been presented since the 11th century. The vast majority of them are texts of one-time use: these are private letters sent with an opportunity to close people - family members, friends, neighbors or business partners (for example, with a request to send something as soon as possible, come or somehow help in business ); there are drafts of business papers (which then, apparently, were rewritten on paper or parchment), memorable notes “for oneself” (about debts, about the need to do something); texts are known that belong to students and represent something like rough exercises in writing. For example, a whole series of exercises in the alphabet and drawings of the boy Onfim and his friend, who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century, were found. Naturally, after some time, such records or read letters were thrown out.

Most of the birch-bark letters have been damaged by time, so that often only fragments of the ancient text are read, but there are also those where the text has been preserved in full. These letters are the most valuable material for historians: they characterize the private, economic and cultural life of ancient Novgorod as if from the inside, greatly enriching our information about ancient Novgorod.

Their historical and cultural significance is also very great: birch-bark letters confirm the long-standing assumption about the wide spread of literacy in Russia, especially in medieval Novgorod, where the ability to read and write was the property of the most diverse segments of the urban population (including women who are the authors or addressees of some birch bark letters), and not only the clergy and professional scribes. Medieval Western Europe did not know such a wide spread of literacy.

For linguists, as well as for historians, birch bark letters are a fundamentally new source. Created by people who were not involved in the correspondence of ancient books or the preparation of official documents, they only partly reflect the norms of church-book spelling and are more closely related to the peculiarities of local pronunciation. At first, however, it seemed that the birch-bark letters could only confirm the correctness of the previous assumptions about the features of the Old Novgorod dialect, made on the basis of the analysis of “slips” in books and official documents, and would not provide fundamentally new information that would be unexpected for historians of the Russian language. . So, for example, birch bark letters widely reflect such a striking feature of the ancient Novgorod dialect as “clatter” - the presence in the speech of Novgorodians of only one affricate ts (which in other ancient Russian dialects corresponded to two affricates - ts and h) (see. clatter): wheat, martens and hotsu, tselobitye, Gorislavitsa (genus), etc. But this feature of the ancient Novgorod dialect is also reflected in previously known books written in Novgorod (for example, in the Menaia of the 11th century, in the Novgorod Chronicle of the end of the 13th-14th century, etc.), although, of course, not as consistently as in birch bark letters. This is understandable: they learned to read and write from church books, memorizing prayers and psalms in which the letters ts and ch were used “correctly”, so the ancient scribes, regardless of the peculiarities of their native dialect, tried to write ts and ch “according to the rules”. And among the birch bark letters there are those where the rules for the use of these letters are not violated (the same boy Onfim in his exercises writes letters and syllables with these letters in the order in which they are arranged in the Slavic alphabet: ts-ch, tsa - cha, tse - Che). But the majority of birch bark authors, making notes “for themselves” or hurrying to send a note close person, unwittingly violated these rules, using only the letter q or mixing q and h. This confirms the assumption that there are no two affricates in the local dialect (which also corresponds to its modern state).

With further, deeper study of the language of birch bark letters, it began to be discovered that oi reflect such features of ancient Novgorod speech that disappeared over time and are not reflected in traditional sources or are represented in them by involuntary scribes of scribes that did not allow drawing more or less definite conclusions.

An example is the spelling representing the fate of the consonants k, g, x, which in Slavic (including Old Russian) languages ​​were not possible at that time before the vowels and and e (ђ). They spoke and wrote help (and not help), according to bђltsђ (and not according to bђlkђ), sins (and not sins).

In Novgorod texts, rare examples with spellings that contradict traditional ones have long been known. So, a Novgorodian, who in 1096 rewrote the text of the service Menaion, wrote in the margins his local (non-Christian, absent in church books) name Domka in a form that does not correspond to what is known from other texts of the 11th-12th centuries: Lord, help the slave to his D'makb, while according to the laws of the then pronunciation (as historians of the language always imagined it) and according to the rules of spelling, it would follow: Domtsђ. Single spelling Дъмъкђ on the background general rule was interpreted as a special case of an earlier generalization of the basis (under the influence of Dom'k-a, Dom'k-u, etc.).

However, a careful study of the oldest birch bark letters (before the 14th century) revealed that in them such a transfer of purely local words (personal names, names of settlements, terms) not found in church books is common: type of tax), by whites (local unit of calculation), etc.

Such spellings mean that the ancient Novgorod dialect did not know the change to, r, x into the usual Slavic languages ​​c, z, s (it would be expected Kulotshch, in Pudoz, etc.). This is also reflected in other positions, including the beginning of the roots, which is found only in birch bark letters: kђli (= tsђly, i.e. whole) xro (= sђro, i.e. gray), as well as vђho, vђkhomu (= all, everything). All these cases show that the combinations kђ, xђ and others in the speech of Novgorodians did not change combinations with the consonants c, s. It turns out, therefore, that the usual in parchment and in later Novgorod texts are whole, gray, all - in everything, etc. - this is the result of the loss of the original Novgorod dialect features and the assimilation of general Russian pronunciation norms in the process of forming a single language of the Old Russian people.

By themselves, such facts suggest that further study of birch bark letters, the collection of which continues to grow, promises historians of the Russian language many new interesting discoveries.

At the same time, birch-bark letters contained materials that made it possible to judge by what texts and how the ancient Novgorodians were taught to read and write (see the drawings of the boy Onfim, who did his “homework” on birch bark).

The first birch bark found in Novgorod in 1951 by archaeologist Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky became a sensation. But over the years, it has already been forgotten what controversy this discovery caused in the scientific world, how our understanding of the past has changed due to it, and what versions have been rejected over time.

A short review of achievements on this topic was made by Acad. A.A. Zaliznyak, who has been studying and systematizing the language of birch bark letters since 1982 and summarized his observations in the book "Old Novgorod Dialect". Below is the text of A.A. Zaliznyak's speech, made within the framework of the Bilingua project.

___________________________________

As far as I understand, I will in general terms tell you what kind of occupation we have - excavation of birch bark letters and what we extract from them. This is not such an unknown topic now, there is enough written about it both in scientific journals and in popular ones, so that I will not portray it as something sensational new. The sensation was 50 years ago, when the first letter written many centuries ago and preserved on a piece of birch bark, birch bark.

The first discovery was almost accidental, because no one really expected that it would ever be found. Although deaf rumors that in ancient times they wrote on birch bark slipped in some places in old documents, no one believed that they would ever be able to see and read it, because, of course, they believed that it was written, like everything else, in ink . Well, if a document written in ink falls into the ground, lies there for several hundred years, then there is no doubt that all the ink will dissolve and nothing will remain. The surprise was that the first letter was not written in ink, it was scratched with a sharp object. And thus, if the birch bark itself is preserved, then the text on it is just as well preserved - such a wonderful feature of the inscribed, and not written in ink.

Then archaeologists found a lot of tools with which these letters were applied. This is what in the ancient tradition was called “stylus” and what in Ancient Russia, as we now know, was called “wrote”. This is such a stick, usually metal or bone, with one sharp end and a spatula at the other end. The form is absolutely classical, coming from Greece and Rome, where it was invented in order to write on wax: write with a sharp end, and wipe the wax with a spatula on the opposite end when everything has already been read and you can write something next. On birch bark, of course, it is impossible to overwrite anything, but, nevertheless, this particular form was kept traditional.

By the way, these items were found much earlier than birch bark letters, but no one knew what it was. Some archaeologists identified them as nails, others as very large hairpins, others as simply unknown objects - they could be found in museums under such names. Now we know perfectly well that these are tools for writing - she wrote. More than a hundred of them have now been found in different places. Sometimes they were even found not separately in the ground, but in a leather case that was attached to the belt. So one can imagine the image of such an ancient Novgorodian, who, on the one hand, had a knife on his belt (which he always had), and on the other, he wrote, two sides of his normal daily activities.

The Novgorod expedition is such a rare archaeological expedition, which is permanent. It was established not for 2-3 years, but in the plan - forever. In fact, it all began in the 30s, now many decades have passed, and every year the Novgorod expedition, minus the war years, excavates, and every year a new number of birch bark letters is revealed, which is completely different in different years. Here archaeologists are in the position of people of fortune, adventurers. There are rare years when, alas, not a single letter is found, and once, not so long ago, in 1998, the expedition found 92 (!) Letters in one year (this was the absolute limit for all time), and on average for many years, a figure of about 18 letters per year is obtained with the current volume of work. Of course, this depends on the most everyday circumstances: how much money can be obtained for these classes, how many workers can be obtained from among students or schoolchildren, and so on.

In general, Novgorod land is full of these documents. According to some estimates, very tentatively, there are 20-30 thousand of these documents. Another thing is that at the rate at which we are now finding them, it is easy to calculate that it will take about 2 thousand years to find them all. Anyway, the last number that was found this year is #959. Novgorod archaeologists dream of reaching 1000, but whether it will take one year, or ten years, we do not know in advance. One way or another, this process has been going on for half a century and replenishes our fund with documents that no one has seen or known before. More precisely, of course, they came across, just no one suspected that these were not just pieces of birch bark, which, of course, no one needed, but ancient letters. Since then, as we know that this happens, they began to be found. Moreover, now gradually they began to be found in other places.

On the territory of Russia now there are already 11 cities in which there are birch bark letters. The scale, of course, is not at all the same as in Novgorod. In Novgorod - 959, and in other cities - a completely different order. Following Novgorod is Staraya Rusa, a town that belonged to the Novgorod state, 90 km from Novgorod, there are now 40 letters. One letter was found even in Moscow, and not just anywhere, but on Red Square. But, however, no excavations have ever taken place on Red Square, they were repair work when they provided the opportunity for tanks to pass. There, fortunately, archaeologists were given the opportunity to observe, and one letter was extracted from there, which shows that this writing was widespread throughout Russia.

Now there are examples of this writing in Novgorod and Pskov, from the small towns of the Novgorod old land - in Staraya Rusa and Torzhok, in addition, in Smolensk, Tver and several other cities. So it is quite clear that this ancient writing system was very common. It was a letter of a domestic nature, not official documents that were written on parchment, but notes of a domestic nature, drafts of what was then copied onto parchment and became more official.

Such a paradox of history. Some luxurious books, which were written with exceptional diligence, precious ink, etc., were, of course, calculated to last forever. There is very little left of them. If now there is one per mille of these ancient Russian books left, then this is a lot. All the rest died in fires, during predatory attacks, in various kinds of catastrophes, and nothing remained of them. And the tiny notes that were written, for example, from husband to wife: “They sent a shirt, I forgot the shirt” - or something like that, and which, of course, had exactly the meaning that you read now, and you don’t need it anymore - they are now kept in museums, we diligently study them. They have existed for their 800-1000 years and, I hope, will continue to exist. AT this case such a paradox of history comes through clearly.

What does this thousand documents give us now? Of course, in terms of volume, this is not very much. A separate letter is, as a rule, several lines, only rare letters contain 10 lines, this is already considered a very large text. Most often 2-3-4 lines. Plus, not all letters reach us in their entirety, the way they were written. About a quarter reaches us in its entirety, 3/4 is only the pieces that we get. In some exceptionally successful cases, then some pieces converge with each other, and it turns out that these are parts of one document - but this is a special happiness, it happens very rarely. Although we have one case when pieces found with a difference of seven years converged, and once pieces found with a difference of 19 years converged, so this happens. For this reason alone, there is no such tiny piece of letters that should not be completely carefully stored. First, because someday, maybe, it will be combined with something else. Secondly, because even fragments sometimes carry very interesting information.

At first it was not even very clear why so many documents come in the form of pieces - 3/4, and not just whole texts. In some cases, this is understandable, for example, when half of the letter burned down, half remained, the letter lay so well that part of it was in the fire zone, and part was already in the ground - there are such cases. The last letter, No. 959, was preserved in this way. There are still some cases when, obviously for a mechanical reason, part of the letter disappeared, was torn off, crushed by a horse's hoof, or something else like that.

But gradually we realized that the main reason why fragments, and not whole letters, reach us is completely different and humanly understandable to the highest degree. The addressee, having received a letter, just like you and me, in most cases did not want it, lying on the ground, to fall into the hands of a neighbor or anyone else who would read everything you receive. Therefore, the vast majority of received birch bark letters, as we now understand, the man immediately destroyed. If he was near the hearth, he threw it into the fire, and everything was in order. If not, then most often he cut or tore, if there was a knife nearby, then he took a knife and cut it, some were cut with scissors. By the way, the old scissors work very well, they have been repeatedly found by archaeologists. The joke is to cut the end of the beard of some incredulous visitor with these scissors.

If there were no cutting objects, then the person tore with his hands, and then we already get such a piece. This is the main reason, it is eminently understandable, why now most we have fragments, not whole documents. But, I repeat, sometimes a fragment is no less interesting both in content and in language than the whole document. For example, one of the most valuable and great letters, number 247, is a fragment torn off from the beginning and from the end, which, however, made a whole revolution in the history of the Russian language. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I can show you approximate size. This is one of the good letters in true size. I won’t let it through the rows, but you can roughly see the size. Color achieved by current technical means, but roughly similar. Most letters look like this. There are less, there are more. Approximately modern postcard.

The texts, as I said, are very short. Moreover, at first it was not even very clear why it was so short, sometimes with brevity, completely in Spartan, in ancient Greek. Were simple hypotheses that writing in writing, scratching on birch bark is a difficult task, so a person didn’t scratch anything extra. But these are, of course, naive explanations. Our craftsmen very quickly got the hang of making such “fake” documents with these ancient writings, and those who have the skill already wrote easily. Of course, this was not a matter of physical effort, but of tradition. A special, very stable tradition of writing in a specific, unusually concise style without a single extra word. A big problem for us to read them, because in a number of cases a lot of things were obvious to those who wrote a thousand years ago, and we have to unravel it, build hypotheses about this, and work a lot. I will read some texts to you later, so that you get an idea of ​​what might be written there.

The event, the surprise, and the innovation that came out of these finds are of two sorts.

One side is innovations in the history of Russian society.

The other is in the history of the Russian language.

I myself am a linguist, a specialist in language, so my side concerns the language, but I will tell you something about the first side as well, since it is about general introduction. It is just more difficult to talk about the language, you need to state much more specific things, so in a short introduction I am unlikely to say much about the language.

As I said, these texts are short, 3-4 lines each. In fact, there are far from a thousand of them - if you do not count the small pieces, then these are several hundred texts. This is a total of about two printed sheets in the current edition. This is an absolutely insignificant fraction of the totality of ancient texts, which is stored in Russian repositories and libraries, where hundreds of thousands of ancient books and other documents have now been accumulated. Of course, from different centuries a different amount. Ancient centuries - XI-XII centuries. - not too many, just a few dozen documents. But then it grows rapidly, in the 17th century. already hundreds of thousands. So the sum of what the history of the Russian language, the history of Russian culture has preserved, is huge, on the same scale as, for example, the history of French, German or English, is one of the largest collections available.