INSTRUCTIONS AND PROPHECIES OF THE Blessed MOTHER ALIPIA GOLOSEEVSKY, Kyiv...
I do not hesitate to assert that among the northern neighbors of the Scythians mentioned by Herodotus, not only the Neuri in Volhynia and Kiev region ... but also the Scythians, called plowmen and farmers and placed by Herodotus ... between the upper Bug and the middle Dnieper, were undoubtedly Slavs who were influenced by the Greeks. Scythian culture.
Lubor Niederle.
An analysis of the ethno-geographical records of Herodotus led us to an important, but almost boundless set of questions related to the origin of the Slavs, to the area of their settlement in different historical epochs, and to their historical destinies. This complex can be considered here only concisely, without a fully developed argumentation.
The search for the ancestors of the Slavs among the peoples described by Herodotus was conducted a very long time ago, starting from the 17th century, when it was customary to identify the Scythians with the Slavs. Identification in the XIX century. belonging of the Scythians to the Iranian language family(V.F. Miller) eliminated such straightforward identifications, but the latest research by V.I. Abaeva and V. Georgieva showed the existence of a kind of Scythian period in the history of the Proto-Slavic language, expressed in a large number of Iranianisms included in the Slavic languages; of these, the word “God” should be put in the first place, replacing the Indo-European “Deivas”.
It seems to me that the observation of B.V. Gornunga: “It can be concluded that the Scythian plowmen (Slavs?) and some other tribes of the forest-steppe were temporarily superficially “Scythianized” .
A private question: where were the Proto-Slavs located in the era of Herodotus? - is a section of the big problem about the location of the Proto-Slavs in general and must be solved within the framework of the entire Slavic world, which has not been studied evenly enough.
While we have in our hands only a thin guiding thread leading to determining the place of a part of the Proto-Slavs in the Scythian time, this is the comparison of O.N. Trubachev with the archaeological area of the Chernoles culture and some cultures of the Scythian time. For the region of the Middle Dnieper region studied by the linguist, an exact dating is established: a peculiar configuration of the Chernoles culture (which was retained in the Scythian tradition until the 4th century BC) took shape in the 8th century. BC, when the right-bank Chernoles tribes colonized the left bank of the Borisfen and settled Vorskla-Pantikapa. Situation VIII - IV centuries. BC. and reflected the archaic Slavic hydronymy, defined by O.N. Trubachev. Never - neither before nor later did the everyday features of the Middle Dnieper tribes, revealed by archaeologists, coincide with such completeness with the data of archaic Slavic hydronymy. No matter how interesting this example, the degree of its evidence is reduced to a certain extent by its singularity. To conduct a search for the location of the Proto-Slavs in the Scythian time, I consider it necessary to use a retrospective method. Let's take the following chronological slices:
1. Medieval Slavs in Europe, X - XI centuries. AD
2. Slavs on the eve of the great settlement, VI - VII centuries. AD
3. The Slavic world of the times of the first mentions of the Wends, the turn of AD.
4. Slavs in the era of Herodotus.
5. Slavdom in the period of primary sprout from other Indo-European tribes.
The first section is well supplied with all kinds of sources (written evidence, archeology, anthropology, linguistics) and is the clearest. The second chronological cut is provided by accurate information from written sources about the campaigns of the Sclavins and Antes on Byzantine possessions and very vague information about both the original place of residence of both, and the location of the Wends, their common ancestors. The one-sidedness of written sources is compensated by archaeological data: at present, the culture of the “Prague type” (or “Korchak type”) of the 6th-7th centuries has been very carefully studied. AD recognized as Slavic. The combination of two maps (Slavs in the 10th - 11th centuries and the culture of the Prague type of the 6th - 7th centuries) gives the following: the zone of Slavic ceramics of the 6th century. occupies a middle position, stretching in a wide strip from the Oder to the Middle Dnieper. The southern border is the Central European mountains (the Sudetes, the Carpathians), the northern one is from the bend of the Vistula in the Ployka region further along the Pripyat. Such is the situation on the eve of the great settlement of the Slavs.
For three - four centuries, the Slavs advanced in the west to the Elbe and Fulda, in the south, crossing the Danube, they passed almost the entire Balkan Peninsula to the Peloponnese. The colonization movement was especially widespread in the north eastbound, where the Slavs settled in a relatively rare Baltic and Finno-Ugric environment. Here the Slavs reached Lake Peipsi, Lake Ladoga, the Upper Trans-Volga region; the southeastern border ran from the middle Oka to Voronezh and Vorskla. The steppes, as always, were occupied by nomads.
At the stage of the VII century. one can still trace the expansion of the archaeological area (Rusanova, map 75), but in the future the role of archaeological data sharply decreases. To catch the contours of the entire Slavic world of the 10th century using archaeological materials. much more difficult than for the VI century.
The third chronological section is scheduled for the turn of our era (± 2nd century). It would be highly desirable to consider that bright time in the history of the Slavs, which the author of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" called the "Trojan Ages" - II - IV centuries. AD, when the Slavs prospered in the interval between the Sarmatian raids and the invasion of the Huns, when the conquest of Dacia by Trajan made the Slavs immediate neighbors of Rome, due to which the old trade in bread was widely resumed. But this interesting era is complicated, firstly, by the great migration of peoples, the advancement of the Goths and other Germanic tribes, and secondly, by the strong leveling influence of Roman culture, Roman imports, which makes it difficult to recognize ethnic signs. Therefore, in search of the Slavic “ancestral homeland”, it would be more correct to skip the era of the Chernyakhov and late Przeworsk cultures.
Our third section captures the time of the Przeworsk and Zarubinets cultures (2nd century BC - 2nd century AD), which in their totality very accurately correspond to the main array of Slavic culture of the later second section of the 6th century. AD In the same way, the Przeworsk-Zarubynets massif extends from the Oder to the Middle Dnieper (covering both banks here); the northern border goes from the break of the Vistula along the Pripyat, and the southern one also rests on the mountain ranges and goes from the Carpathians to Tyasmin. Geographical coincidence is almost complete. But is this enough to recognize the Przeworsk-Zarubynets massif as Slavic?
The Polish Slavist T. Ler-Splavinsky, according to archaic Slavic hydronymy, approximately in the 1st - 2nd centuries. AD, i.e. precisely at the time of the existence of the Przeworsk-Zarubinets archaeological culture, outlines two contiguous geographical areas, which coincide with the above mentioned archaeological cultures of the same time. Even the border between the two zones of hydronymics runs exactly where the boundary of the Zarubintsy and Przeworsk cultures lies. The only difference is that the area of archaic Slavic hydronymy in the western half is somewhat wider than the Przeworsk culture and covers the upper reaches of the Elbe and Pomorye. In the eastern, Zarubintsy, half, the coincidence of linguistic data with archaeological data is complete. According to linguistic data, F.P. Owl.
Archaeological materials give us not only statics (area), but also dynamics. The main features of temporary changes are as follows: from the west, Germanic elements penetrate into the area of Przeworsk culture; the Przeworsk elements partially wedged (along the southern edge) into the Zarubintsy culture, and the Zarubinets Slavic tribes began an active colonization process in the northeast, beyond the Dnieper, wedged into the environment of the Baltic tribes of the Desene region. For our purposes, it is important that not only linguistic Slavic materials (dated approximately), but also the first written evidence of the Venedian Slavs belong to the same Przeworsk-Zarubynets time. Historians of the 6th century AD wrote that the common ancestor of the "Sklavins" and "Antes", who attacked Byzantium from the northwest and northeast, was the people of the Venets. Geographers I - II centuries. AD they knew the Venets themselves as a people inhabiting the vast "Sarmatia".
In order to correctly assess the degree of usefulness for our purpose of written sources, contemporary to the Przeworsk-Zarubinets culture, we are completely lacking in individual textbook excerpts that speak of the Veneti near the Vistula or the similarity of the Veneti with the Sarmatians or Germans. It is necessary to consider the geographical concept of the ancient authors and the change in this concept under the influence of that practical acquaintance with the peoples of Europe, which occurred as a result of the advance of the Romans to the north. Much has been done in this direction by L. Niederle and in our time by G. Lovmyansky.
Herodotus' idea of Scythia, based on accurate measurements and detailed cross-questions, determined the views of Greek geographers on these lands for several hundred years. But Herodotus paid great attention to the East, to those regions from where, in his opinion, the Scythians once came; for this purpose, he attracted Aristaeus of Prokopnes with his information about the Urals. In the north, Herodotus found out the origins of Borisfen, the land of the distant "Androphages", and established a clear fundamental place in geographical references behind this river. But the western and northwestern directions away from its Scythian square were of little interest to the historian, and for a long time the sources of Tira and the land beyond the neurons became an area of the unknown for geographers.
The advance of Greek colonization to the west, to the shores of Sicily and Gaul, gave geographers new points of view on Europe and the place of Scythia in it. Efor, historian of the 4th century. BC. (405-330), gives an interesting distribution of the peoples of the Old World:
“The area facing Apeliot and close to the sunrise is inhabited by the Indus; the Ethiopians own the note and noon; the region on the side of Zephyr and the sunset is occupied by the Celts, and the area facing Borea and the north is inhabited by the Scythians.
These parts are unequal: the region of the Scythians and Ethiopians is larger, and the region of the Indus and Celts is smaller. "The area inhabited by the Scythians occupies the intermediate part of the solar circle: it lies opposite the people of the Ethiopians, which, apparently, stretches from winter sunrise to the shortest sunset."
"Scythians" or those peoples who were hiding under this generalized name, Efor allotted a huge space, covering the ecumene from the north and from the northeast and reaching in the northwest to the small land of the Celts.
For the era of Ephora, the archaeological boundary of the Celtic culture reached the Oder. Consequently, the “Scythians” of his time should include the monuments located east of the Oder along the Vistula of the so-called culture of underklesh burials.
The definition of Scythia as a neighbor of Celtica may seem to be simply the result of the geographical ignorance of Ephor, a native of Asia Minor. But at the same time, around the middle of the 4th century, the placement of Scythia on the coast Baltic Sea becomes a new geographical concept. Its author is, apparently, Piteus, whose initial point of view was shifted far to the west from Greece: he came from the farthest western Greek colony in Celtica - from Massilia (modern Marseille). Pitaeus traveled the North Sea, knew Britain and Ireland, and may have sailed as far as Jutland.
“Against Scythia, which lies above Galatia, there is an island in the Ocean called Basilia. Upon this island, the waves throw forth in abundance a substance called electricity, found nowhere else in the universe ...
Electrum is collected on the aforementioned island and brought by the natives to the opposite mainland (i.e. to Scythia. - B.R.), along which it is transported to our countries ”(Diodor Siculus).
The concept of Baltic Scythia, or more precisely "Scythia to the Baltic Sea", became especially strong after the advance of the Romans to the shores of the Rhine and the North Sea, i.e. in the era of the highest prosperity of the Przeworsk-Zarubinets tribes.
After the campaigns of the Romans on the Rhine and Elbe and after they created an uninterrupted defensive line from the sea to the Danube, their geographical ideas about Europe became more holistic: the old knowledge of the southern regions was connected with newly acquired information about the North Sea and the Baltic. In this regard, the testimony of two contemporaries who wrote in the middle of the 1st century BC is very important. AD: a native of Spain Pomponius Mela and a participant in the northern campaigns of Pliny the Elder.
Mentioning the Rhine, the Elbe and Jutland surrounded by islands, Pomponius Mela defines the eastern limit of the Germanic tribes at the westernmost edge of the Baltic and proceeds to describe "Sarmatia":
“The inner part of Sarmatia is wider than its coastal part. From the lands lying to the east, Sarmatia is separated by the Vistula River. The southern border of Sarmatia is the Istra River.
Here, Sarmatia means located south of the Baltic Sea and west of the Vistula (obviously, its lower reaches) the areas of distribution of the tribes of the Przeworsk and Oksyvska (coastal) cultures of the first centuries AD. e. In a further presentation, Mela speaks of the Black Sea Sarmatians. The geographer's desire to link together the peoples of the Black Sea region with the peoples of the Baltic Pomerania is noteworthy. At first glance, it seems that Mela made a mistake by mistaking the Vistula for the eastern border of Sarmatia: after all, the real Sarmatians and their immediate neighbors were not to the west, but to the southeast of the Vistula. But this contradiction is resolved important note geography: internal, southern part wider than the coast. Obviously, by the mouth of the Vistula, he determined a clearer coastal line for him.
Pliny, obviously relying on information about the voyage of the Roman squadron in AD 5, describes the Baltic Sea, mentioning Scandinavia and Scythia as the southern amber coast of the sea. G. Lovmyansky very wittily suggested that the squadron, whose information was used by Pliny, made a circular detour of the sea, to the mouth of the Vistula, and the Romans called the southern coast either the “Scythian region”, or the “island” of Eningia, where “the Sarmatians, Wends lived up to the Vistula , skirres and girrs ”(Pliny book IV, § 97).
Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD also considers "European Sarmatia" in a very wide geographical framework from Tanais to the Vistula and from the Venedian Gulf of the Baltic Sea ("Sarmatian Ocean") to the Black Sea coast.
Ptolemy gives the exact coordinates of the "Venedi Mountains" (47°30′ east longitude 55° north latitude). This corresponds in latitude to the Budin and Alan mountains, i.e., according to our account, approximately the 50th parallel. In the meridional direction, these mountains are located to the north of the Danube Gate and the Carpathians. These coordinates (of course, approximate) correspond to the Małopolska Upland in the upper reaches of the Vistula, the Warta and the tributaries of the Oder, part of which is the Swietokrzyzskie Mountains.
Ptolemy names the Wends living “across the entire Venedsky Gulf” in the first place among the tribes of Sarmatia, and from the Wends, as a guide, he counts (not very clearly, though) the position of other tribes: the Gitons (below the Wends, near the Vistula), the Avarins near the origins of the Vistula. Below the Wends live in the eastern direction Galinds, Sudins, Stavans. “Lower” in this case means “closer to the sea”, “downstream” of the Vistula.
Ptolemy ends the Scythian-Baltic concept, born as a desire to combine knowledge received from different parts of the Old World - from the Black Sea and from Marseilles and Celtica. This concept was reinforced by the presence of Slavic (Venedian) tribes both in Scythia (in a broad geographical sense) and near the Baltic Sea beyond the Vistula.
The eastern border of the Germanic tribes at the turn of our era passed along the Elbe basin, but over the next two centuries, two heterogeneous, but partly related processes took place: firstly, Roman geographers expanded their understanding of the tribes beyond Albis (east of the Elbe) ; some of them turned out to be Germans (Semnons, Burgundians), while others were simply ranked as Germans, and in geographical writings a new artificial region appeared instead of "Scythia" or "Sarmatia" - "Germany", which extended to the Vistula. Secondly, there was a real process of some infiltration of Germanic elements in the eastern and southern directions, a process reflected in the archaeological cultures of the Elbe-Vislen interfluve. It should be said that the results of this process were far from being as significant as it might seem from the geographical surveys of that time. The areas east of the Oder continued to be Przeworsk in their archaeological appearance.
Summing up our third chronological cut, it should be said that written sources, in full agreement with archaeological ones, define in Europe a vast Baltic-Pontic region inhabited by "Scythians", "Sarmatians", Wends. Archaeological unity for the era of Mela and Pliny, allowing to transfer the Eastern European terminology (Scythians, Sarmatians) to the Baltic, is only one - Przeworsk-Zarubinet.
In our gradual retrospective movement, we will skip the fourth chronological cut (Scythian time) as the desired one and first get acquainted with the very primary area of \u200b\u200bsettlement of the Slavs, which we took for the fifth chronological cut.
Linguists determine the time of the offshoot of the Proto-Slavs from the mass of Indo-European tribes by about the 2nd millennium BC. e. V. Georgiev speaks about the beginning of the II millennium, and B.V. Gornung is more specific about the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. and connects with the Trzynec archaeological culture of the 15th - 12th centuries. BC. The Trzynec culture of the Middle Bronze Age is currently well studied. The area of \u200b\u200bits distribution is outlined by S. S. Berezanskaya as follows: from the Oder to the Middle Dnieper, a wide strip between the Pripyat and the upper reaches of the Vistula, Dniester and Bug. Within this framework, the Trzynec culture coincides so completely with the common area of the Przeworsk and Zarubinets cultures that for its exact geographical definition it is quite possible to use a map of these two cultures, although there are about nine centuries between the Trzynec culture and the Zarubinets-Przeworsk complex.
A number of researchers (A. Gardavsky, B.V. Gornung, V. Genzel, P.N. Tretyakov, A.I. Terenozhkin, S.S. Berezanskaya) consider it possible to build the ancestral home of the Slavs or the primary placement of the Proto-Slavs to Tshinetskaya (or to Tshinetsko-Komarovskaya) culture between the Oder and the Left Bank of the Dnieper.
The neighbors of the primary Proto-Slavs were tribes with other centers of gravity, from which the following groups formed in the same centuries (and in the south, perhaps even earlier): Germans and Celts - in the west; Illyrians, Thracians and, possibly, Iranian-speaking pre-Scythian tribes - in the south; the Balts - in a wide, but deserted northern space. The least definite was the northeastern outskirts of the land of the Proto-Slavic tribes, where there could be Indo-European tribes that are unclear to us, who did not create a strong, tangible unity for us, but turned out to be a substratum for those colonists who slowly settled from the Dnieper for a millennium.
The notion of the Tshinec-Komarov culture as Proto-Slavic is very successful, in my opinion, reconciles two competing hypotheses of the “ancestral homeland”: the Vistula-Oder and the Bug-Dnieper, because. and the Trzynetsk and later Zarubinets-Przeworsk cultures cover both the Vistula-Oder region and the adjacent Bugodneprovsk region.
The elongation of the Proto-Slavic region in the latitudinal direction for 1300 km (with a meridional width of 300-400 km) facilitated contact with different groups of neighboring tribes. The western half of the Proto-Slavic world was drawn into some historical ties, the eastern half into others. This was especially true at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, when the western Proto-Slavs were drawn into the orbit of the Lusatian culture, and the eastern, after some time, into the orbit of the Scythian. This did not yet create separate Western and Eastern Proto-Slavs, but, as it were, predicted and determined the future division of the Slavs in the 1st millennium AD. on the western and eastern.
The Proto-Slavic world was like an ellipse, which has a common perimeter, but within which the researcher can find two independent focuses. As soon as external ties were weakened, the unity of the Proto-Slavic world was clearly and tangibly revealed. From the above brief overview of the area of settlement of the Slavs in different eras, it can be seen that three times over two millennia this unity manifested itself in the homogeneity of archaeological material in the same territory:
1. After the turbulent era of movements of Indo-European pastoralists (at the turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC), approximately in the 15th century. BC. the unity of Trzynec culture is established. This is our fifth, deepest chronological slice.
2. After the high rise experienced by the Proto-Slavs together with the tribes of the Lusatian culture and the Scythians, and after the fall of the Scythian state, the unity of the Zarubinets-Pshevorsk culture is again manifested within the same geographical boundaries, supported by archaic Slavic hydronymy and the evidence of ancient geographers who stretched "Scythia" or " Sarmatia" to the southern coast of the Baltic Sea inclusive. The date of this unity is the 2nd century. BC. - II century. AD
3. After three centuries of the most lively economic ties with the Roman Empire (II - IV centuries AD) and after the fall of Rome, Slavic unity is once again indicated. This is a culture of the Prague-Korchak type of the 6th-7th centuries. The great resettlement of the Slavs in the VI - VIII centuries. destroyed the boundaries of ancient unity and those common language processes that were experienced by all the Proto-Slavs together.
The two-thousand-year stability of the main area of settlement of the Proto-Slavs (of course, not absolute) allows us to look at the Scythian world of Herodotus from the standpoint of a Slavist: those areas of his "Scythia" that fall within the area of the previous Tshinets culture and at the same time the area of the subsequent Zarubintsy culture should be considered as Proto-Slavic and subject them to analysis from this side.
We have already seen a brilliant confirmation of what has been said in the complete coincidence of the range of archaic Proto-Slavic hydronymy, identified by O.N. Trubachev, with the areas of the Chernolesskaya culture of the pre-Scythian time, firstly, and the Scythian agricultural culture of the Borisfenites, secondly.
Scythian genealogical legends, recorded by Herodotus, are devoted to a huge literature. Recently, two books have been published summarizing the historiography of the issue over the past decades; these are the books of A.M. Khazanov and D.S. Raevsky. Their historiographical chapters save me from analyzing contradictory opinions (A. Christensen, J. Dumézil, E. Benveniste, B.N. Grakov and E.A. Grantovsky), which, in my opinion, contain four erroneous constructions:
1. The two legends told by Herodotus (one in §§ 5-7, and the other in §§ 8-10) are considered as “two versions”, “two variants” of one common Scythian legend, although they are fundamentally different.
2. Both "versions" are dated either to the whole of Scythia as a whole, or specifically to the "alien nomadic environment", although the ritual worship of the plow and yoke speaks against the nomadic, non-plowing Scythians.
3. The gifts of heaven, listed in one of the legends, are considered as a reflection of the "class-caste structure of the Scythian society":
Ax - kings and aristocracy
Chalice - class of priests
Plow and yoke - pastoralists (?)
It is more natural to consider the sacred golden gifts as the embodiment of elementary magical symbolism: a plow with a yoke - a plentiful harvest, a supply of bread, a bowl - a supply of drink (maybe ritual), an ax - a symbol of protection, security.
4. I consider the fourth mistake to be the long-standing desire to distribute the four “kinds” coming from the ancestor kings according to the indicated “estate-caste” scheme:
Such schemes are objectionable. Firstly, the existence of a class-caste structure among the nomadic or agricultural Scythians has not been proven in any way, and secondly, it is very strange to trace the origin of simple shepherds to the king or the son of the king.
The third and most serious objection is that Pliny mentions the Avkhetians not as a social stratum (warriors - according to Dumezil, priests - according to Grantovsky), but as a tribe that has a certain geographical area on Gipanis.
A. M. Khazanov is inclined to admit that the legend shows a desire to “substantiate the divine establishment of social relations inherent in Scythia”, but does not completely break with the ethnic interpretation of the “kinds” of Lipoksai and his brothers.
D.S. Raevsky seeks to reconcile the class-caste hypothesis with the ethnic one, putting forward a new religious and mythological interpretation, which, in his opinion, should complement and explain all perplexities.
Before entering into the consideration of the socio-cosmogonic hypothesis (without denying interesting and fruitful individual provisions), we will try to apply the simplest geographical method, which is fundamentally denied by our authors: Herodotus's geographical "Scythian square" of 4000 x 4000 stages is considered as "a reflection of ideas about the organized universe"; geographical and economic differences are not taken into account, the ethnic side of the legends is ignored.
It seems to me that the analysis of the mythological essence of legends should be preceded by the definition of their tribal affiliation. It seems to me very dangerous to attribute the cult of arable tools to nomadic pastoralists, about whom Herodotus insistently said that "the Scythians are not tillers, but nomads" (§ 2).
Considering the legends, I would like to start not in the order in which I placed them in my book Herodotus. Let's start with the legend about Agathyrs, Gelon and Scythus, told to the historian by the local Greeks (the so-called Hellenic version). Its essence is as follows: the half-snake-half-maiden, the ruler of the lands, who was in Gilea (obviously, the Dnieper), gave birth to three sons from Hercules: Agathirs, Gelon and Scythus. Hercules, leaving the half-snake, bequeathed to her his bow and belt so that she would give her kingdom to one of her sons who could pull the bow and gird herself correctly. Only the youngest son, Skif, was able to fulfill his father's covenant. "Two sons - Agathirs and Gelon - could not cope with the task, and their mother expelled them from the country" (§ 10). Scythian, the son of Hercules, became the ancestor of all Scythian kings.
The legendary events are obviously dated for the “Primordial Scythia”, which stretched from the Danube to Karkinitida. Somewhere in the middle of this strip near the Dniester, the Cimmerian kings died. It is possible that the legend reflects the primary settlement of the Scythian and related tribes in the 7th century. BC. after the extermination of the Cimmerians. Some tribes moved further west to the Carpathians, where they subjugated the pampered Thracians and adopted much of their culture (the Agafir union), others (the Gelonian union of tribes) moved north, to the Dnieper Left Bank, subjugating themselves as the native population of the proto-Baltic (?) appearance, the Boudins , and recently moved here from the right bank of the Borysfenites along the Vorskla-Pantikape. The Scythians proper remained in the Black Sea and Azov regions. At some time (VI - V centuries BC), part of the Scythians separated from the royal ones and migrated to the Don.
The genealogical legend reflects the likely settlement of the Scythian tribes along Eastern Europe, considering the southern Black Sea steppes as the starting area, from where the nomadic newcomers fanned out: to the Carpathian pastures, to the steppe and forest-steppe Left Bank of the Dnieper and to the distant lands of the Middle Don. In the areas of settlement of the Agathirs and Gelons, where there were not only steppes, but also forest-steppe, there was a settled native population, which became the substrate of new ethnic formations, which separated them from the steppe Scythians.
D.S. Raevsky owns a very interesting interpretation of the plots of the images on the Scythian royal vessels: in a number of images, he rightly sees illustrations for the genealogical legend mentioned above. Such vessels come from Gerros (Gaymanova Mogila), from the region of the “separated Scythians” (Voronezh Chastye mounds) and from the Cimmerian Bosporus (Kul-Oba), as if outlining the extreme points of the royal Scythians.
The totality of all the numerous plots of Scythian art testifies against the thesis of Khazanov - Raevsky about the general Scythian symbolic meaning of the plow and the team of oxen - neither the Scythians nor their neighbors have this plot at all. Unraveled by D.S. Raevsky illustrations to the legend of the Scythian, the son of Hercules, are not found anywhere except in the area of the royal Scythian nomads. Neither the Gelons, nor the Agathyrsians, nor the Borysthenites have them.
Let us put on the map the lands of the Agathyrsians, Gelons and all the nomadic Scythians, including the Alazons, in whose land King Ariant set up his famous memorial vessel. As a result, we will get an almost complete picture of the distribution of Scythian antiquities, a specific Scythian culture of the 6th - 4th centuries. with one extremely important exception: on the map illustrating the resettlement of the mythical sons of Hercules, the land of the Scythians-Borysphenites in the Middle Dnieper, the main center of farmers, exporters of bread to the emporium of the Borysphenites, to Olbia, remained unfilled.
In the legend about the sons of Hercules, the hero's bow, the main weapon of equestrian archers, nomadic Scythians, appears as the main sacred object. The important role of archery among the Scythians is confirmed not only by many Greek testimonies about the Scythians as excellent horsemen, but also by the legend of Ariantes: he determined the number of Scythians by the number of arrowheads. It is most natural (as a number of researchers did) to connect the legend of the test with a bow with the Scythians proper, with nomadic archer warriors. It is also natural to associate the legend of the sacred plow not with all the Scythians in general, but only with those who were famous for their agriculture. As long as the "Scythian farmers" (Georgoi) were wrongfully associated with the mouth of the Dnieper and they appeared before the researchers in some kind of geographical confusion, in a patchwork with Callipids and Royal Scythians, until then it was still possible to combine two legends into one and spread an artificial construction obtained by such contamination on all areas of Scythian culture, on all Scythians. Now, when the geographical analysis of sources, in full agreement with archeology, has led to a clear demarcation of nomads and farmers, such an association (of course, in case of agreement with the results of the analysis) appears in an extremely unfavorable light. We will proceed from the fact that the legend of the bow of Hercules is associated with nomadic archers, and the legend of arable tools that fell from the sky is associated with plowmen.
The historical information contained in the legend of the three brothers, the sons of Hercules, is relatively simple: the three peoples, occupying the space from the Carpathians to the Seversky Donets, come from one common root and are related to the Scythians. There is no reason to doubt the reliability of these data, because throughout this space dominate common features Scythian culture. The Gelons speak Scythian, but nothing is said about the Agathyrsians about the difference between their language and the Scythian.
The historical information of the legend about the heavenly plow is much more interesting and requires special analysis.
“According to the stories of the Scythians, their people are the youngest of all. And it happened in this way. The first inhabitant of this still uninhabited country was a man named Targitai. The parents of this Targitai, as the Scythians say, were Zeus and the daughter of the Borisfen river. I don't believe this, of course, despite their claims. Targitai was of this kind, and he had three sons: Lipoksai, Arpoksai, and the youngest, Kolaksai.
During their reign, golden objects fell from the sky to the Scythian land: a plow with a yoke, an ax and a bowl.
The elder brother saw these things first; no sooner had he come to pick them up than the gold blazed. Then he retreated, and the second brother approached, and again the gold was engulfed in flames.
So the heat of the flaming gold drove away both brothers, but when the third, younger brother approached, the flame went out, and he took the gold to his house.
Therefore, the older brothers agreed to cede the whole kingdom to the younger one ”(§ 5).
A plow with a yoke is placed in the first place among the sacred gifts of heaven, which makes it necessary to connect this legend primarily with the agricultural forest-steppe zone of Scythia.
The next paragraph of Herodotus' History is of exceptional historical interest and was subjected to numerous comments in its first part, but unfortunately, its second part (about chippings) was often silent on commentators. It is noteworthy that in the books of A.M. Khazanov and D.S. Raevsky not only does not give one or another interpretation of the term "chipped", but even this name itself is never mentioned in both books. Meanwhile, the importance of the theme of "chipped" is beyond doubt:
“So, from Lipoksai, as they say, there was a Scythian tribe called Avkhats. From the middle Arpoksai - catiars with traspians, and from the youngest king - called paralats. All of them together have a name - chipped by the name of their king. Hellenes called them Scythians" (§ b).
Sacred gold is guarded by the kings and honored with annual plentiful sacrifices in the open air (§ 7). Once again, we can make sure that Herodotus clearly distinguished between the Scythians proper and the skolot farmers - he described their festivities and sacrifices separately, and where the deities of the nomadic Scythians are described, sacrificing in the treeless steppe, there is no mention of the veneration of the golden plow and yoke, but it speaks of the worship of the sword and the slaughter of captives (§ 62).
An expert on the Scythian language V.I. Abaev writes about agricultural tools: “Terms such as the names of the yoke and some of its parts, harrows, wheels, sickle, oats, crops, mortars undoubtedly lead to European languages and are alien to the rest of the Iranian world.”
The further fate of the country of admirers of the plow and the yoke is as follows:
“Because the country was vast, then Kolaksay divided it for his sons into three kingdoms, and in one of them, the most extensive, gold is preserved ”(§ 7).
The country of admirers of the arable team of the Skolt farmers is not located in the southern steppe, to the north of which the plowmen live. It is located at the northern limit of reach, at the turn of the snow-covered spaces.
“It is also said that in the countries lying above, to the north of the upper inhabitants of this country, one cannot look into the distance, nor pass because of the flying feathers.” (§ 7).
The only region in Eastern Europe within the Scythian square that can be identified with the country of plow worshipers, a country ruled by the descendants of Targitai and Kolaksai, is the region of the agricultural Scythian tribes of the Middle Dnieper. Following the Hellenic tradition of calling the inhabitants of this country Scythians (which, obviously, was reinforced by its entry into the Scythian federation), Herodotus writes about them as Scythians, but always adds an explanatory epithet: “Scythians-plowmen” (i.e., “fake Scythians” , living a non-nomadic way of life), "Scythian farmers".
In a number of cases, Herodotus replaces an ethnic or economic artificial name with a geographical one: "Borisfenites" - "Dnepryans".
Fortunately, he nevertheless found it necessary to give a final explanation, listing the lands of the descendants of Targitai and saying that all of them in the aggregate were chipped off, and the Greek colonists called them Scythians (obviously, by analogy with the actual Scythians surrounding the Greeks).
So, we got the right to call the Dnieper-Dniester array of agricultural cultures of the Scythian time and the Scythian appearance by its self-name - chipped. The southern border of the Skolots is the steppe with its own Scythian nomadic population; the eastern neighbors are the Gelons, who probably included the Skolot settlers on Vorskla in their union. The northern and western boundaries of the distribution of the collective name “Skoloty” remain unclear to us. It is most likely that the unification of three or four tribes under a common name, which took place several centuries before the campaign of Darius, corresponds to the unity of the Chernoles culture of the 10th-8th centuries. BC, in which four local groups can be seen: Tyasma (with the largest number of fortresses), Kyiv, Podolsk and Vorsklin (the latest).
Unfortunately, we do not have data for the exact geographical distribution of all the Skolot tribes. Only the Avhats are mentioned by Pliny:
“Inside the mainland live the Avkhetians, in whose possessions Gipanis originates, the neurons, from which Boristhenes flows.”
Proceeding from this, with the Avkhats, we must compare for the Cimmerian time the Podolsk group of Chernoles sites, and for the Scythian - the East Podolsk group of monuments of the Scythian culture, which really comes into contact with the southwestern edge of the land of the Nevri. Hypanis in its new sense really originates in these places visited by Herodotus.
Iranians translate the word "paralat" as "pre-established" ("paradata"), "originally appointed". Therefore, the richest and most fortified region of both the Chernoles and Scythian cultures, the region south of Ros along Tyasmin, with a large number of archaeological sites of both eras, should be considered the area of \u200b\u200b"originally assigned" paralats.
It is difficult to say whether the sacred gold of the skolots was kept in this fortified, but also the closest region to the steppe riders. It is possible that a more northern, safer, remote from raids area beyond Ros, along the mountainous bank of the Dnieper, was chosen to store common tribal relics. There are Chernolesk monuments here near Kyiv, in Podgortsy, near Kanev and in other places. In later times, the settlement at the mouth of the Ros near the Great Scythian settlement was the center of the cult of the god of fertility - Rod.
For the Scythian time, such huge settlements as Trakhtemirovskoye in the Dnieper bend or the Great Scythian settlement near Kanev could be a suitable place for sheltering relics in the same places. However, all this is so conjectural that it does not deserve discussion; I just wanted to show that in the northern, Kyiv part of the Chernoless-Scythian monuments of the 10th - 4th centuries. BC. there could be many points suitable for hiding ritual gold.
The attitude of the Skolots to the Proto-Slavs is as follows: the Skolots-farmers of the Middle Dnieper region occupied the eastern tip of the vast Proto-Slavic world, in contact here with the steppe-Cimmerians, and later with the steppe-Scythians. The presence of the most archaic Slavic hydronymy, revealed, as has been repeatedly said, by O.N. Trubachev specifically for this territory, confirms the Proto-Slavic character of the population of the country of plow admirers - chipped.
In connection with the definition of the place that the Proto-Slavs occupied in Herodotus' Scythia, we should make a comparison, which, at first glance, may seem far from scientific rigor.
Turning to Herodotus after a whole series of works on the historical geography of the Eastern Slavs of the 9th - 12th centuries. AD, I could not help but notice that a certain geographical similarity was found between a certain part of the ancient Russian tribes and the agricultural tribes of Scythia. Let's try to superimpose the map of the Skolot agricultural tribes of Herodotus' time, developed above, on the general map of the Slavic tribes listed by the chronicler Nestor, the author of the 12th century. The chronological range between the two historians is more than one and a half thousand years, and nevertheless, a certain coincidence stands out quite clearly: where in the Herodotian time the chipped farmers were located, in the Nestorian time there are tribes (more precisely, unions of tribes), whose names end in "- ane", "-yane"; all the rest of the space occupied by the Slavs in later times (starting from the first centuries A.D.) contains tribes with names in “-ichi”, “-itsi”. There are four exceptions to this system that require special consideration.
Before delving into the analysis of exceptions, let's consider the issue more broadly, within the framework of the entire Proto-Slavic world. As a basis, let us take all that stable territory, which already three times, on three chronological sections, revealed the sameness of its basic outlines, that which, with a certain right, we have repeatedly called the ancestral home of the Proto-Slavic tribes.
We have just examined the eastern half of it. In the western half, exactly the same division is observed according to the principle “-ane”, “-yane” (“Stodorians”, “Luzhichans”, “Ukrane”, “Milchanes”, etc.) and “-ichi”, “ -itsi" ("encourage", "shkudich", etc.); the second group includes other formations such as "varna", "ploni", etc.
Throughout the territory of the ancestral homeland, only the names of the first, archaic group existed. The area of their distribution is even somewhat wider than the Trzynetsk and Przeworsk areas: in the west, a continuous zone of tribes of the Stodoryan type reaches in places almost to the Elbe, and in the south it descends along the river. Morave almost to the Danube. In this form, the closed compact area of archaic tribal names comes closest to the area of Prague ceramics of the 6th century BC. AD The vast tribal union of the Moravans was the southernmost outcropping of archaic terminology beyond the boundaries of the ancient ancestral home. It was in this region that the advance to the south was facilitated by the mountain pass between the Sudetes and the Carpathians (“Moravska Brama”), where the upper reaches of the Oder approached the upper reaches of the tributaries of the Morava. Obviously, this circumstance facilitated the movement of the Proto-Slavs to the south, and the first settlers from the land of the Wends appeared here. Perhaps this explains the mysterious phrase of the chronicler Nestor: “... the Apostle Paul came to Moravia and teaches that one. Tu bo is Ilirik, the apostle Paul reached him: tu bo besha Slovene the first ... "
Usually this phrase is understood as an indication of the ancestral home of the Slavs in Illyria or Pannonia, but archeology and observations on the types of tribal names allow us to understand it as evidence of the primary movement of the Slavs (Slovenes) from the common ancestral home outward. Ceramics of the Prague type of the 6th century. seeps in a narrow stream precisely from Morava to Illyricum, to the Adriatic Sea. “Tu bo besha Slovene first” I would translate as follows: “Here, in Illyricum, the first settlers from the land of the Wends appeared.”
Outside this range, on the left bank of the Elbe and in Mecklenburg, there are both names of the old type (for example, "clay"), and neoplasms of the "non-flying" type are also interspersed with them.
The process of settlement of the South Slavic tribes is reflected in the sources with large gaps: the entire vast area to the north from the Danube to the Carpathians, inclusive, is not covered by sources, and the placement of Slavic tribes there in the 6th - 9th centuries. we know only from unnamed archaeological evidence. To the south of the Danube, on the Balkan Peninsula, exactly the same picture is observed as in the west: both “strumyanes” and “dragoviti”, “bright”, “encouraging”, etc. are found in stripes.
The correlation between the archaeological ancestral home and the stable tradition of naming unions of tribes with names in “-an” or “-yan” is complete. Judging by the fact that the zone of continuous designation such as "stodorians" extends beyond the Oder and the upper reaches of the Elbe ("zlichane"), it can be most fully compared with our second chronological cut in the 6th century BC. AD, when the area of ceramics of the Prague type, having covered the entire territory of the "ancestral home" in the third and fifth sections, somewhat expanded in comparison with the "ancestral home", as if foreshadowing the beginning of the great settlement of the Slavs. Linguists believe that common processes in the Slavic languages took place until the 6th century. AD, before the beginning of the great settlement. The unity of the method of forming the names of tribal organisms (unions of tribes and individual small tribes) was preserved throughout the territory of the ancestral home until the 6th century. n. e. After that, the settlers from the ancient ancestral land of the Venedi-Veneti began to use three different forms of tribal names: some formed the name of their tribal union with the suffix “-ichi” (“Radimichi”, “Krivichi”, “Glomachi”), others, on the border with foreign-speaking peoples, on the edge of the settlement area, indicated their connection with the original land of the Venets, taking the name “Slovene” in its various variants (“Slovene” on Ilmen, “Slovenians” near the Baltic Sea west of the Vistula, “Slovenians” on the Middle Danube, “Slovenes” in the Adriatic, "Slovaks", etc.).
The third form of naming small tribes in new places is the traditional one (in "-an", "-yan"), sometimes formed from local substrate elements. So, for example, the Adriatic "Konavlyane" came from the Latin designation "canale"; and "duklyane" from the Latin local name "dioclitia".
Large tribal unions in new places were already named after new system: "lutichi", "cheerful".
So, it can be considered established that up to a certain point, before the start of the great settlement of the Slavs in the VI century. n. e., throughout the old Proto-Slavic land there was a single law for the formation of names of tribal unions according to the type "glade", "Mazovshane". In the process of stratification, a completely new, patronymic form of the “Krivichi” type appeared, which is found in all newly colonized areas: on the Elbe, and in the Balkans, and in Central Russia; the old form is found in new lands, but the new one never occurs in old ones.
Judging by the correspondence of the area of Proto-Slavic tribal names to the area of Prague ceramics of the 6th century BC. in. e., we can assume that traditional way the formation of these names lived to the very last chronological limit of the all-Slavic unity. But when was he born? When did more or less strong territorial unions of tribes begin to take shape?
Let's return to our fourth (Scythian) chronological section. In the eastern half, already well known to us from Herodotus, local groups of the Scythian archaeological culture are found, which can be considered individually as a cultural unity of stable tribal unions. We will find exactly the same local archaeological groups of the Lusatian culture for this time in the western half of the Proto-Slavic world.
Nestor begins the history of the Slavs with the placement of the Slavs in Europe long before the great settlement, because. on the movement of the Slavs in the VI - VII centuries. AD on the Danube and the Balkans, he writes: “... for many times, the essence of Slovenes sat down along the Dunaev ...” Nestor feels the connection of times, and in general he calls the southern steppes Scythia, the region of the Tivertsy (Tirites?) and streets (Alizons?) between the Danube and the Dnieper " ol to the sea "he correctly, according to Herodotus, calls the Great Scythia ("Yes, I call from the Greek" Great Scythia "").
Of the ancient tribal unions, separated from the great settlement for "many times", Nestor names the Pomeranians, Mazovshans, Polyans (glades), Kyiv glades, Drevlyans, Buzhans, Volhynians. Each of these tribal names corresponds to a certain archaeological group both in the Scythian half and in the Lusatian half. In the west, there are more archaeological cultural groups than were included in the Nestorian list of tribes. Therefore, we can use other, more detailed medieval lists of tribes, the location of which is quite well known. We will get the following correspondences (from west to east) with the cultures of the 5th - 4th centuries. BC. :
Large and stable unions of Slavic tribes, vestigial signs of which are felt in medieval archaeological materials, were conceived by Nestor as the most ancient political form of Slavic life in the distant times of the primary settlement of the Slavs in Europe. Of course, we cannot fully rely on the chronological calculations and assumptions of the medieval historian, but we must take into account the fact that these tribal unions were placed by Nestor as the first foundation stones of common Slavic history long before the start of the great settlement in the 6th century. AD
The geography of the archaeological cultures of the Scythian-Lusatian era, the time of the flourishing of the Proto-Slavic life and the time of defensive actions against the Celts in the west and the Scythians in the east, gives us very convincing contours of large and powerful tribal unions precisely in those very places where the annalistic meadows, Mazovshans, then lived. Drevlyans. Should this be considered a coincidence?
So far, we have followed a retrospective path, delving from the known to the unknown. In a consistent development, we will get the following picture of the historical fate of the Slavs.
1. In the middle of the II millennium BC, in the heyday of the Bronze Age, when the widespread settlement of Indo-European shepherds of pastoralists subsided, north of the European mountain barrier was designated large group pastoral and agricultural tribes, which revealed significant unity (or similarity) in the space from the Oder to the Dnieper and even further to the northeast (Tshinetsko-Komarovskaya culture).
The length of the land of the Proto-Slavs from west to east is about 1300 km, and from north to south - 300-400 km.
It is to this time that linguists attribute the isolation, isolation of the Proto-Slavs.
2. By the end of the Bronze Age, by the IX - VIII centuries. BC, the western half of the vast Proto-Slavic world was drawn into the sphere of the Lusatian (Celtic?) culture, and the eastern half came into contact with the Cimmerians (Iranians?), opposing them, but perceiving some elements of their culture.
An amazing coincidence of the configuration of two areas dates back to this time: firstly, the Chernoles culture of the 10th - 8th centuries. BC e., and secondly, the most archaic hydronymy, which leaves no doubt about the Proto-Slavic nature of the Chernoles culture of the Middle Dnieper.
Most likely, the Proto-Slavs of the Chernoles time, forced to repel the raids of the nomadic Cimmerians, not only learned to forge iron weapon and build mighty fortresses on the southern border, but also created an alliance of several tribes between the Dnieper and the Bug, which was called "Skoltov". This name survived until the middle of the 5th century, when Herodotus recorded it as the self-name of a number of agricultural tribes of the forest-steppe Dnieper region. The union of the Skolots could not cover all the Proto-Slavic tribes of the eastern half of the Slavs.
3. Change of the Cimmerians by the Scythians in the 7th century. BC. obviously led to the fact that the Skolot tribal union entered a vast federation, conventionally called Scythia. However, the Proto-Slavs-Skolos, presumably, retained a certain autonomy: the southern system of fortresses that protected against nomads was renovated, and new fortresses were erected. The Proto-Slavs-Dnepryans (Borisphenites) had their own special seaport, which bore their name (Miletian Olbia), the path to which lay away from the land of the royal Scythians. And at the same time, there is no doubt about the strong merging of the Proto-Slavic culture with the Scythian, the perception by the Slavic nobility of all the basic elements of the Scythian equestrian culture (weapons, harness, animal style) and, to some extent, perhaps even the language. IN AND. Abaev noted a number of Scythian elements in Slavic, V. Georgiev, making a periodization according to the form of the name of the supreme deity (“Daivas - Deus” - “God” - “Lord”), establishes that it was during the Scythian time that a significant Iranianization of the Proto-Slavic language took place and instead Indo-European Daiwas (Div) the Iranian designation God, Boh, was established among the Slavs.
Herodotus does not speak about the difference between the Skolot language and the Scythian language, but warns against confusion, noting that the Greeks called them Scythians, Skolots. This could be the result of the quite natural similarity of clothing and weapons in those conditions, as well as the bilingualism of the Borisfenite merchants and the nobility, who constantly communicated with the Scythians. The sharp separation by Herodotus of the Scythians proper (who do not know arable land, do not sow bread, owning only herds in the treeless steppe, roaming in wagons) from those tribes for whom the main sacred object was a golden plow that fell from the sky (chips, erroneously called Scythians), did not gives us the right to distribute data about non-Scythian farmers to Scythian nomadic tribes even if the names of agricultural kings have an Iranian appearance.
The western half of the Proto-Slavic world at that time was still part of the vast Lusatian community, which led to a difference in the archaeological appearance of the eastern and western halves, but does not in the least contradict the existence of ethnic unity and the sameness of linguistic processes, which linguists insist on. Until now, the words of Lubor Niederle, which he said after he outlined the common ancestral home, remain in force (although often forgotten): Eastern Slavs".
Despite the external differences between the Lusatian and Scythian halves of the Slavs, the commonality historical process is clearly felt in the fact that in this era of rise, vast territorial unions of tribes were formed, which, judging by archaeological data, were located exactly in the very places where they are indicated (sometimes retrospectively, like Nestor, for example) by later written sources. The form of the formation of the names of these unions (“Polyane”, “Mazovshan”) outlines a single vast area that completely covers both the Lusatian and Scythian halves of the Proto-Slavic world of the 6th - 5th centuries. BC.
4. The disappearance of the Lusatian culture and the fall of Scythia as a great federal power led to the elimination of those two external forces who made differences in different halves of the Proto-Slavic world. The overall level has gone down. For several centuries, a certain unity of the two archaeological cultures (Zarubintsy and Przeworsk) is established, although external ties reappear: in the west, the influence of Germanic tribes is growing, and in the east - Sarmatian.
5. A new rise and significant changes in culture occur in the II - IV centuries. AD, when the Roman Empire, as a result of Trajan's conquests in Dacia and the Black Sea region, became almost a direct neighbor of the Slavs and, with its insatiable import of bread, had a beneficial effect on the forest-steppe part of the Slavic tribes (Chernyakhov culture). The appearance of the eastern and western halves of the Slavs began to differ again, but, in addition, the Roman export of various products greatly leveled the culture of the Slavic and Germanic (Goths) tribes, which often confuses researchers.
6. The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. AD, the cessation of the favorable "Trojan Ages", the replacement of Iranian nomads in the steppes by the Turks - all this led to a new decline in culture and to a new (this time the last) resurrection of the all-Slavic unity, expressed in wide distribution in the old Tshinetsk-Pshevor-Zarubynets within the framework of the last pan-Slavic culture of the Prague type. This was followed by the great settlement of the Slavs, the collapse of the Slavic unity and the creation of large feudal states, which became new centers of attraction and consolidation.
Having considered all the arguments in favor of attributing the northwestern agricultural part of Scythia to the Proto-Slavs, let us turn to part of Herodotus' records about the local legends of the tribes, revering the plow with a yoke as a sacred gift from heaven and the main shrine of the whole people.
We can compare the records of Herodotus with some valuable passages of other authors (Alkman, Valery Flakk, Diodorus Siculus), which has already been done by researchers more than once, with the “archaeological history” of the Middle Dnieper region and with Ukrainian and Russian folklore, which gives interesting parallels to the testimonies of ancient authors.
The story of Herodotus about the origin of the four Skolot tribes is a record of the local Middle Dnieper epic legend with elements of the myth of the first man. The Middle Dnieper, Borisfenite origin of the legend is firmly determined by two signs: the veneration of agricultural tools and the origin of the first man from the daughter of the Dnieper; the combination of these features excludes the Scythian nomadic, arable environment and transfers the scene of the legend up the Dnieper, to the agricultural forest-steppe of the Middle Dnieper, so well known to us from the abundant archaeological materials of the 10th-4th centuries. BC.
The genealogical scheme of the Skolot tribes looks like this:
The chronology reported to Herodotus is epic: from the first king of Targitai to the campaign of Darius, no more than a thousand years passed in round numbers (§ 7). For us, this must mean several centuries. Alkman, poet of the 7th century. BC, already mentions the swift horse Kolaksai, which means that the name Kolaksai had already become epic by this time. The Roman poet, a contemporary of Pliny, Valerius Flaccus, speaking of the Argonauts, lists the leaders of countless tribes of Scythia (drawn by him extremely vaguely) and in second place in a long list of generals mentions Colax, the son of Jupiter and Ora, whose coat of arms was three lightning bolts. The phrase is somewhat mysterious: "Kolax gathered air dragons, the difference of mother Ora and opposing snakes on both sides approach with their tongues and inflict wounds on a chiseled stone." It is possible that we are talking about the image of the Dnieper snake-footed goddess on the banners (?). Following Kolax, the aged Avkh, the owner of the "Cimmerian riches", is mentioned. Avkhat warriors are famous for their ability to wield a lasso.
It is impossible to rely on Flakka's poem as a historical source, because the geography and chronology of numerous tribes are fantastically mixed up in it. One can only extract from it that fragments of the Scythian epic survived (perhaps only in writing) until Roman times, when the Scythian heroes were erected to the era of the Argonauts. It seems that Valery Flakk merged the details of the two genealogical legends of Herodotus, preserving and poetizing some interesting details: Abkh, a descendant of the eldest son, is represented here by an old man; The Avkhetians, who live along Gipanis, where, according to Herodotus, wild horses were found, are excellent at lassoing. All this Flaccus could draw from both Herodotus and numerous compilers.
The myth of the fall from the sky of agricultural tools, axes and bowls, we can in the most in general terms to date the time of the appearance in the Middle Dnieper, firstly, of arable farming, and secondly, the time of the allocation of squads armed with axes. The emergence of arable farming in the Middle Dnieper should be attributed, in all likelihood, to the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages - to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.
Mythological and epic concepts are created among all peoples at certain key moments in their history, when in real life either internal shifts occur (the birth of new economic forms, the emergence of a new social organization), or a sharp contact with the outside world (wars with neighbors, the invasion of enemies and etc.).
For the Proto-Slavs-Skolots, such a stormy era of internal and external innovations was the time of transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, the time of the Chernoles culture. The appearance of a new metal, iron, the deposits of which were abundant in the swamps and lakes of the Slavic region (bog ore), the increasing role of agriculture and the appearance of the ral occurred simultaneously with the raids of the southern Cimmerian nomads, against whom the Chernolesians built their first fortresses along the southern outskirts of their land . The Skolots defended their independence; new iron weapons and mighty fortresses one and a half kilometers across allowed them to resist the battle with the steppes attacking from the sea.
This whole complex of real events, which dramatically changed the former slow life of the Proto-Slavic tribes, was reflected in primitive mythological and epic tales, fragments of which survived until the 20th century. and were recorded by folklorists. Some of these ancient pre-Slavic ideas were reflected in fairy tales; the attention of researchers was drawn to them from time to time, while some of the fragments survived without a definite folklore form, only in the form of a retelling of ancient legends, and this half-forgotten part of ancient creativity remained essentially in the position of an ethnographic archive, despite two most interesting publications by V.V. Gippius and V.P. Petrova.
The hero of these legends is the magic blacksmith Kuzmodemyan (or two blacksmiths - Kuzma and Demyan). Sometimes he looks like the first person (“sh buv the first cholovsh with God, as if he were resurrecting”). In other materials, Kuzma and Demyan look like the first plowmen: “guessing that K. and D. buli plowman) adamovsyu”, “persh) on the ground buli orachi’1”, “they thought it was better” . Magic blacksmiths forged a plow for 40 years and this wonderful first plow weighed 300 pounds. The blacksmith-bogatyr acts at that epic time when the people suffered from a snake, which always flew in from the sea (i.e. from the south); sometimes the kite is even called "Black Sea". The blacksmiths build a strong smithy, which is not accessible to the snake, where the fugitives fleeing from the ferocious monster rush. Girls, the tsar's daughter and even a hero on horseback run to the forge. Sometimes this is the hero who has already fought with the snake somewhere in other expanses. The forge is always protected iron door. Enraged by the chase, the snake is always invited to lick a hole in the door and stick its tongue into the forge, which the snake always does, because. he is promised to put on the tongue of his victim. But here the most stable element of the legends appears: the magic blacksmith (or blacksmiths) grabs the snake by the tongue with red-hot tongs, harnesses the monster to a huge plow and plows furrows on it either to the Dnieper or to the sea itself. And here, near the Dnieper or on the seashore, the snake, having drunk half the sea, bursts and dies.
Sometimes a snake captured by blacksmith tongs is forced to plow the city: “Dem’yan, standing behind the plow, and Kuzma led by the tongue, yell at the snake, equip [plow] Kshv. I melted the greatness of the skibis turned - zavbshshki like a church. the trochs didn’t finish screaming, for the snake was tired. ”
The famous “serpent shafts” in Ukraine, dating back to Scythian times, are considered to be the trace of the victory over the serpent.
Of particular interest is the geography of records about Kuzma-Demyan: Kiev region, Poltava region, Cherkasy region, Priluki, Zolotonosha, Zvenigorod, Zlatopol, Belaya Tserkov. It is easy to see that the legends about Kuzma-Demyan (sometimes they are replaced by Boris and Gleb) geographically close in the ancient region of the Chernoles culture, in the area of archaic Slavic hydronymy, in the land of the Herodotian skolot farmers.
However, Herodotus did not know such legends. Stage by stage, the legends about magic blacksmiths, the creators of the first plow and the defenders of people from the Black Sea snake, date back to a time much more distant than the time of the historian's travels. Based on the appearance of the first iron forgings and the construction of the first powerful fortifications, the legends about blacksmiths dated in the Middle Ages to Kuzma and Demyan should be erected by the beginning of the 1st millennium BC.
What in folklore records goes back to the primitive heroic epic, the epic of struggle and victory, was told to Herodotus in the form of a more generalized genealogical legend, and the only point of contact - the appearance of the plow - is associated with magic farriers. However, the very appearance of the first plow in the Ukrainian legends about Kuzma and Demyan is not depicted at all, since their main task is to tell how blacksmiths protected people who were already plowing the land from an evil snake. The first plow is only a side feature in the characterization of the magical blacksmiths-winners, acting on earth, but also connected with the sky ("God's forged", saints). By the time of Herodotus, this, so to speak, prehistory of the first plow was already obscured by another plot that was closer to Herodotus' informants: the competition between the prince-brothers and the determination of the hegemonic tribe.
The names of mythical kings are interpreted from Iranian languages as follows:
Targitai - "Long-powered";
Lipoksay - "Mountain-King";
Arpoksay - "Lord of the Depths";
Kolaksay - "The Sun-King".
The youngest son of Targitai, the winner in the competition for the possession of golden national relics, the organizer of the kingdom of "paralats" (they think that "paradats" are more correct), i.e. “ruling”, and the main figure of the legend recorded by Herodotus turns out to be the Sun King. Here it is impossible not to recall the entry in the Russian chronicle of the 12th century. about the Sun King. The chronicler visited Ladoga in 1114, discovered ancient beads on the shore, collected a whole collection of them and listened to stories from the local population about wonderful clouds, from which not only beads fall, but also “veils” and “small deer”. On this occasion, the well-read chronicler cited an extract from the chronicle of John Malala about the fall of various objects from the sky, providing it with precious Russian folklore parallels.
Once in Egypt, King Feost (Hephaestus), called Svarog, reigned. “During the reign of his kingship, the klPshchP fell from heaven and began to forge weapons. Before that, I fought with clubs and stones.” Svarog-Hephaestus established firm monogamy, "for this reason, the god Svarog was nicknamed." After Svarog, his son reigned "by the name of the Sun, he is called Dazh-god."
"The sun is a psar, the son of Svarogov, if there is Dazhbog, if the husband is strong."
“From now on, the people have begun to pay tribute to the priests.”
Chronicle tradition gives us a two-stage relative periodization, correlated, to a certain extent, with the genealogy of the Skolot kings according to Herodotus:
Svarog (Hephaestus) - Targitai;
Sun-Dazhbog - Sun-Kolaksay.
All chips are named after the king of the Sun; Russian people of the XII century. considered themselves (or their princely family) the descendants of Dazhbog, the Sun Tsar (“dazhbozhi vnutsi” “The Tale of Igor's Campaign”).
The parallels cited so far are fragmentary and cannot yet be brought together into a coherent system. We get rich comparative material for Herodotus' story about three sons, about three kingdoms and about the youngest son - the winner in the competition with his older brothers. This time, it is not Ukrainian half-forgotten legends that help us out, but a powerful layer of the entire East Slavic fairy tale fund, widespread and well studied.
Determining the most favorite plots, out of several hundreds, researchers put the plot “the winner of the serpent” in the first place, and the “three kingdoms”, divided among the three brothers, in the third place. Three brothers have different names, but one of the most interesting and quite common is the name of Svetovik, Zorevik, Svetozar. He is the youngest son, like Kolaksay the Sun, but he is the strongest: the brothers have clubs of 160 and 200 pounds, and Svetovik has 300 pounds; the brothers are armed with sticks, and Svetovik is uprooting a tree with a root for a club. As in the Scythian legend, in the East Slavic tales, the competition of three brothers appears in various forms, always ending in the victory of the younger brother, like in Herodotus. The names of the brothers in the fairy tales change, but the fairy tales, where the youngest son is called the "Sunny" name, turn out, according to the observations of N.V. Novikov, the most archaic.
Competitions are different: who will throw a club higher, who will kill the "Black Sea reptile", who will move a huge stone, who will shoot farther, etc. The victory of the youngest son is stable, who, after the competition, becomes the leader, the leader of the heroes.
One of the feats of the heroic brothers is the victory over the vicious and gluttonous snake (usually from the sea side) that eats people. The motif of blacksmiths forging heroic weapons is almost obligatory. Three brothers, after defeating the serpent, take possession of three kingdoms: gold, silver and copper.
The golden kingdom always goes to the younger brother, the winner of the competition. Kolaksay-Sun owned, as we remember, one of the three kingdoms of the sons of Targitai and kept in it the sacred gold of the chipped.
Often the sea appears in fairy tales; from here a snake threatens the Russian people, devouring and leading away into full, bloody victories often end here; here the hero is looking for his captive mother.
Sometimes an island in the sea seven versts from the coast is mentioned. The whole fairy-tale setting is very reminiscent of long-term Slavic-nomadic relations: hordes of horse warriors rise from the sea, burn villages, demand tribute, and lead them away to full. And, obviously, a very long time ago, in distant semi-mythical times, the raids of the Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians were clothed in epic poetry in the image of a flying fiery serpent.
Turning to the treasury of Russian, Ukrainian and, to some extent, Belarusian fairy tales helps us more accurately correlate the archaic layer of the fairy tale fund with the legends about the king of the Sun - Kolaksai recorded by Herodotus. Alkman's poem allows us to define the era of Kolaksay even more ancient time - until the 7th century. BC, i.e., obviously, by the Cimmerian time itself, in which, as in focus, various manifestations of a new pore in the life of the Proto-Slavic-Skolots converged (blacksmiths, fortifications, the fight against the "Black Sea serpent", etc. ).
Proto-Slavic myths and epic tales contain common Indo-European motifs about three brothers, known to us both from Iranian versions (on which supporters of common Scythian mythology relied), and from others. Suffice it to recall the German legend cited by Tacitus about the first man named Mann (!) and his three sons - the founders of the three Germanic tribes.
Now, even after such an extremely brief digression into the field of archaic folklore, we can bring all our disparate data into a single system:
The records of Herodotus, made by him, in all likelihood, during his journey to the land of the Skolt farmers, are extremely precious to us, because they allow us to determine the great chronological depth of the whole layer of East Slavic fairy-tale folklore. A fairy tale, as you know, is often the latest transformation of a myth or ancient epic tales.
Folklore records of the 19th - 20th centuries. inevitably give us these rudiments of ancient narratives in a one-dimensional, flattened form, without chronological depth. Herodotus, who turned out to be the first folklorist of the agricultural tribes of the Middle Dnieper, gave them the missing depth, created a chronological stereoscopicity with a range of more than two and a half thousand years. Let us add to this that Herodotus recorded not contemporary or close in time legends (like legends about the abuse of Darius by the Scythians), but what was already considered a distant antiquity, almost a thousand years away.
The records of the echoes of the primitive epic and mythology, dating back to the Bronze Age and to the most important historical event - the discovery of iron, probably contain a considerable share of the common Indo-European heritage, such as the legends of the three brothers, but there are also local specifics. Apparently, the “golden kingdom” should be attributed to such local features.
Herodotus speaks of the most extensive kingdom, where the Sun King Kolaksay keeps sacred gold.
In Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian fairy tales, as we have seen, there is an extensive section of fairy tales about three kingdoms, and the youngest son (like Kolaksay) always becomes the owner of the golden kingdom; the motif of heavenly gifts has already faded away, only the name of the kingdom of gold remains.
No less interesting and original is the second tsar of the mythological genealogy - the Herodotus conqueror Kolaksay, corresponding to the ancient Russian Dazhbog tsar and hero (“The sun is Caesar. The husband is strong”), reflected in the fairy-tale fund under the significant name of the hero “Svetovik”. Is not the pagan Slavic Svyatovit, close to Dazhbog, hiding in this later fabulous name?
Due to the fact that researchers usually extend the Herodotus record of the ancestral kings to all the peoples called “Scythians” by the Greeks, including the nomadic Iranian Scythians (and often to them predominantly), attention should be paid to the Iranian form of royal names. The Iranian character of the second half of each name - "ksai" - is beyond doubt.
The first half of the names is etymologized from Iranian with great difficulty.
IN AND. Abaev even refused to explain the name of Lipoksay, and this was done later by Grantovsky.
Let us pay attention to the fact that in the pantheon of ancient Russian deities we will find both an archaic Indo-European layer (Rod, Svarog, Perun, Belee, etc.), and a layer very definitely associated with the Scythian era, which gave rise to partial (maybe temporary?) bilingualism Eastern Proto-Slavs: Dazh-god, Stri-god, where the second half of the name, certifying their divinity, is Iranian.
Exactly the same thing happened, obviously, with the names of the mythical sons of Targitai: in the Scythian era, their kingship was certified by the Iranian term "ksai", which, in all likelihood, was as widespread as the archaeological "Scythian triad". The tribes and peoples that were part of the political framework of Scythia, who firmly adopted the Scythian squad culture and called their gods by semi-Iranian names, could well designate the subject supreme power to perceive the Iranian, actually Scythian term "ksai".
The Iranian element in the names of the three brothers - Kolaksai, Lipoksai and Arpoksai - does not in the least prevent the attribution of the chipped farmers to the Proto-Slavs, just as it does not prevent the recognition of Stribog and Dazhbog as Slavic (Proto-Slavic in time of origin) deities.
176 Abaev V.I. Scythian language. - In the book: Ossetian language and folklore, vol. 1. M.-L., 1949, p. 151-190; Georgiev V. Trite phase on Slavic cat mitology. Sofia, 1970.
177 (Gornung B.V. Review of the book by F.P. Filin “Education of the language of the Eastern Slavs”. M.-L., 1962. - Questions of linguistics, 1963, No. 3, p. 135.
178 Rusanova I.P. Slavic antiquities of the 6th - 7th centuries. M., 1916, p. 74-76, maps.
179 Lehr-Splawinski T. O pochodzeniu i praojczyznie Slowian. Pozanan, 1946.
180 “The most plausible, from our point of view, is the hypothesis of the Middle Dnieper-Western Buzh ancestral home of the Slavs. Zarubinets culture, as we are told by linguistic data, should be considered Slavic” (Filin F.P. Origin of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. L., 1972, pp. 24, 26).
181 As you know, the name Veneti (Vendov, Vindov) for a long time denoted the Slavs or some part of the Slavic world. So, among the Germans, the ancient Slavic villages were called Wendendorf - “Venedian village”. Finns call Russians venaia, venat, Estonians - vene (see: Lowmionski H. Pocz^tki Polski, t. 1. Warszawa, 1964, p. 91). I think that the long dispute about the origin of the word "Slavs", "words stump" can be resolved with a strict attitude to the chronology and geography of this term: it appears no earlier than the 6th century. (i.e. not earlier than the great settlement of the Slavs) and is found only outside the ancestral home, i.e. outside the land of the ancestors of the Veneti, in areas colonized by people from the indigenous territory of the Veneti. These are: Slovaks, Slovenes, Slovenes, "Slovenes" of Novgorod and others. "Slovenes", in my opinion, are "slys", deportees from the land of "Vene" - Venets. The word "sl'", "s'ly" denoted ambassadors, people sent on a mission ("let them go" - see: Sreznevsky I.I. Materials for a dictionary of the Old Russian language. St. Petersburg, 1883, stb. 141).
182 See, for example: Mishulin A.V. Materials for the history of the ancient Slavs. - VDI, 1941, No. 1, p. 230-231. Tacitus' information here is greatly distorted.
183 Latyshev V.V. News of ancient writers about Scythia and the Caucasus. - VDI, 1947, No. 2, p. 320.
184 Kukharenko Yu.V. Archeology of Poland. M., 1969, p. 105, map.
185 Latyshev V.V. News. - VDI, 1947, No. 4, p. 258.
186 Pomponius Mela, vol. III, ch. IV.- In the book: Ancient geography. M., 1953, p. 225.
187 An interesting reconstruction of the map of Pomponius Mela was given by Fridtjof Nansen (Nansen F. Nebelheim, vol. 1,
p. 95).
188 Lowmionski H. Pocz^tki Polski, s. 156-159.
189 Latyshev V.V. News. - VDI, 1948, No. 2, p. 232-235 (459-462).
190 Georgiev V.I. Studies in Comparative Historical Linguistics. M., 1958, p. 224; Gornung B.V. From the prehistory of the formation of a common Slavic linguistic unity. M., 1963, p. 3, 4, 49, 107.
191 Berezanskaya S.S. The middle period of the Bronze Age in Northern Ukraine. Kyiv, 1972, fig. 45 and 50 (cards). It is possible that the northeastern part of the area outlined by the author is in closer relationship with the Sosnitsa culture, which goes north from the Desna and the Seim.
192 Some isolation of the Komarovo culture and its somewhat higher level is explained, as it seems to me, by the proximity to the Carpathian mountain passes, to those “gates” (“gates”) through which the tribes living north of the mountains communicated with the south. The presence of salt deposits in the area of the Komarovo culture (Galych, Kolomyia, Velichka) could attract Proto-Thracians here.
193 Khazanov A. M. social history Scythians. M., 1975; Raevsky D.S. Essays on the ideology of the Scythian-Sak tribes. M., 1977.
194 Khazanov A. M. Social history of the Scythians, p. 53 and others; Raevsky D.S. Essays. With. 29 and others.
195 Khazanov A. M. Social history of the Scythians, p. 53.
196 Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 28, 70-73. “The ethnological content of the P and VF versions of the Scythian legend (Shb horizon) is the substantiation of the three-member estate-caste structure of society, consisting of a military aristocracy, to which kings, priests and free community members - pastoralists and farmers belong. This structure models the structure of the universe as Scythian mythology thinks it” (ibid., p. 71).
197 Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 114, 84. The author wrongly applies the ancient idea of a square arable field, coming from the Eneolithic, to a purely geographical, real concept subject to measurement. The recognition of Exampai as the center of the “model of the organized world” is also unjustified - after all, the side of the Scythian square was equal to 20 days of travel, and there were only four days to Exampai (see ibid., p. 84).
198 The meeting place of Hercules with the half-snake was called Gilea, but we do not have complete certainty that this is the Lower Dnieper Oleshye: named Gilea. There, in a cave, he found a creature of mixed breed - a half-maiden, half-snake. (§ eight).
There are no caves in the lower reaches of the Dnieper. There are caves on the banks of the Dniester, where forest zone descends to the south closer to the sea. Perhaps, in this case, the Dniester forests are called hylaea? At the Dniester, a giant footprint of Hercules was shown in the rock (§ 82).
199 Vulpe Alexandra. Forschungen uber das 7 bis 5 Jh. v. u. Z., s. 12.
200 Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 30-39.
201 D.S. Raevsky cited a very interesting parallel from Celtic customary law: among the inhabitants of Wales, the youngest of the sons inherits a house with a manor, part of the land, a plowshare, an ax and a cauldron (Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 182) . The set of objects is indeed very close to the Herodotus record, but D.S. Raevsky did not pay attention to the fact that the Celtic law does not speak in favor of the theory of class-caste symbolism (an ax - aristocrats; a bowl - priesthood; a plow - ordinary people), but against her: after all, here we are not talking about the sum of various symbolic objects, but about a single complex of necessary things, without which the conduct of a peasant agricultural economy is unthinkable. Obviously, the golden heavenly gifts were a later transformation of the folk agricultural tradition of the Borisfenites.
202 See indexes in the book: Khazanov A. M. Social history of the Scythians, p. 331; Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 210. The word "chipped" is missing in both cases.
203 I give the last two phrases in the translation of A.Ch. Kozarzhevsky, to whom I express my gratitude for
help.
204 Abaev V.I. On some linguistic aspects of the Scythian-Sarmatian problem. - In the book: Problems of Scythian archeology. M., 1971, p. 13.
205 The border settlements of the Skolots on the Vorskla, perhaps, explain the name of this river: in the Russian chronicles the river is called Vorskol. The word "thief" meant a fence, a log fortification, a fence. "Vor-skol" could mean "border fortification of the chipped".
206 Pliny the Elder, book. IV, § 82. - VDI, 1949, No. 2, p. 282-283.
207 Abaev V.I. Scythian language, p. 175.
208 See: Rusanova I.P. Slavic antiquities of the 6th - 7th centuries, p. 75 (cards).
209 Niederle L. Slovanske Starozitnosti, d. II, sv. 2. Praha, 1902, s. 397.
210 Exceptions to this rule (“North”, “Croats”, “Dulebs”, and some others) are obviously explained by the presence of a non-Slavic substratum element that passed its name on to the Slavic assimilators.
211 Glades
212 Kostrzewski J., Chmielewski W., Jazdzewski K. Pradzieje Polski. Wroclaw - Warszawa - Krakow, 1965, s. 220, map. The map is repeated in a generalized form by Yu.V.Kukharenko in the book "Archaeology of Poland" (M., 1969, p. 96). Lusatian culture XII - IV centuries. BC. covered the entire western half of the Proto-Slavs (west of the Western Bug) and a number of surrounding tribes.
213 The tribes mentioned by Nestor are marked with an asterisk.
214 On the archaeological map of this era, only two very small groups remained nameless: one in the bend of the Vistula, where we do not know the tribes from written sources, and the other along the San (maybe Lendzyans?).
215 See: Archeology of Ukraine, vol. II, map 2.
216 From the nomenclature of Nestor it is difficult to associate any tribal name with the tribes of the Milograd culture. Most likely, the Radimichi (and Vyatichi?) later formed from the Milogradians who settled in the northeast direction, whom Nestor remembered that they came “from the Poles”.
217 Georgiev V. Trite at once., p. 472-473.
218 Niederle L. Slavic Antiquities, p. 33.
219 Latyshev V.V. News ... - VDI, 1947, No. 1, p. 297.
220 Latyshev V.V. News. - VDI, 1949, No. 2, p. 344-345, 348.
221 Gshshus Vasil. Koval Kuzma-Dem'yan (folklore) - Ethnographer) chny V) snik, vol. VIII. Kiv, 1929, p. 3-54; Petrov V) ctor. Kuzma-Demyan in Ukrainian folklore). - There, Prince. IX, 1930, p. 197-238.
222 Petrov V)ctor. Kuzma-Dem'yan., p. 231.
223 Ibid.
224 Petrov V)ctor. Kuzma-Dem'yan., p. 202.
225 Ibid., p. 203.
226 Abaev V.I. Scythian language, p. 243; Raevsky D.S. Essays., p. 62, 63.
227 The Tale of Bygone Years. Pg., 1916, p. 350.
228 Ibid., p. 351. The Sun King reigned for 20 and a half years.
229 Novikov N.V. Images of the East Slavic fairy tale. L., 1974, p. 23.
230 Ibid., p. 67
231 However, the Sarmatian time introduced a new fabulous image into the Slavic primitive epic poetry. Sarmatian female warriors left a trace in the form of a tsar-maiden, a girlish kingdom beyond the fiery sea, where “heroic heads on stamens”, like those of Herodotus Taurus.
232 Abaev V.I. Scythian language, p. 243.
233 Grantovsky E.A. Indo-Iranian castes and Scythians. - XXV Intern. congr. orientalists. Reports of the Soviet delegation. M., 1960, p. 5, 6.
Having traced the history of the myth of the divine blacksmith from the era of belief in Heavenly Svarog to Ukrainian legends about Kuzmodemyan, let's turn to the second plot, recorded not by ethnographers of the 19th-20th centuries, but by the "father of history" Herodotus in the 5th century. BC e., who visited the southern outskirts of Scythia. Doubting and checking, he nevertheless included in his notes a story about neurons-werewolves who once a year turn into wolves. This is obviously information about the annual "wolf holidays" at which the participants could. dress up in wolf skins. This is the oldest record of the Slavic "wolves" or ghouls, since the Herodotus neurons are, without a doubt, Slavs.
Of even greater interest are Herodotus' information about various "Scythian" genealogical legends, recorded by him both among the natives and among the Pontic Hellenes (Herodotus. History, IV-5-11).
Turning to these well-known legends, I must warn in advance that all my predecessors regarded them as Scythian, actually Scythian (nomadic), Iranian-Scythian. The thought of any relation to Slavic history and mythology, or simply of going beyond the limits of the narrow Scythian circle, never arose, and the appearance of such a thought was not expected. It was this circumstance that made me turn to a detailed and captious revision of many points of view on Herodotus, redefine the route of his journey, the geographical location of the tribes he describes, and express my attitude to the folklore records of the historian -. Recognition of all stories and legends about the origin of the Scythians only exclusively by Scythian nomads seems to me a priori and unproven. Strictly speaking, no evidence was given because this point of view was not controversial; it was presented as an axiom. The most dangerous thing seems to me to be the attitude to different legends as "variants" of a single legend about the origin of all the Scythians and their kings.
Before proceeding to the analysis, we first of all separate the legendary from the historical. Herodotus, reporting the existence of two different legends, was skeptical about them and wrote (Herodotus. History, IV - 11) that “there is also a third legend, I myself [Herodotus] trust him most of all. It read as follows: the nomadic tribes of the Scythians lived in Asia; when the Massagets ousted them from there by military force, the Scythians crossed the Arak and arrived in the Cimmerian land ... ".
With great detail, this legend is transmitted by the author of the 1st century. BC e. Diodorus Siculus, who, however, connected this story, in which there is nothing mythological, with one of the mythological legends.
“At first they [Scythians] lived in very small numbers near the Araks River [in this case, the Volga] and were despised for their dishonor. But even in ancient times, under the rule of one warlike and distinguished by strategic abilities of the king, they acquired a country in the mountains to the Caucasus, and in the lowlands along the coast of the Ocean and Meotian Lake - and other areas up to the Tanais River. The descendants of the Scythian kings "subjugated a vast country beyond the Tanais River to Thrace ... and extended their dominion to the Egyptian Nile River ..."
The stories of Herodotus and Diodorus complement each other and do not contradict one another: the Scythians originally lived somewhere beyond the Volga; from there they were pushed back by the Trans-Caspian Massagetae, they crossed the Volga and occupied the steppes of the North Caucasus up to the Sea of Azov and the coast of the Black Sea, which was considered (and rightly so) as a bay of the ocean. From here, from the Kuban, crossing the Don, the Scythians moved even further west, to the Black Sea steppes occupied by the Cimmerians.
Diodorus casually mentions the Asian campaigns to the Egyptian possessions.
In this scheme, everything is clear, simple and historical. The stay of the early Scythians in the North Caucasus is confirmed by archaeological materials from the Scythian burial mounds in the Kuban, and the displacement of the Cimmerians in the 7th century. BC e. documented by the change of cultures in the steppes. Scythian archaeologists now believe that the Scythians are really newcomers, and not an autochthonous people in the steppes.
There is nothing fantastic in these historical references, which Herodotus believed. Here we are talking about where the Scythians came from, and specifically the nomadic steppe Scythians in the Northern Black Sea region. Here the exact geography is given, the real-life tribes are named; It has nothing to do with mythology.
Two other legends are entirely mythological. Before presenting them and subjecting them to analysis, I once again remind you that Herodotus very persistently convinced his readers that the Scythians themselves are pastoralists, nomads living in wagons in the treeless steppe, without settled settlements, without arable land. It is especially emphasized that “they are not farmers, but nomads” (Herodotus. History, IV - 2).
Let's start our consideration of mythological legends with the one that refers specifically to these real nomadic Scythians, riders and archers. The legend does not concern either the movement of the Scythians from behind the Volga under the onslaught of the Massagetae, or the campaigns in Asia Minor. The legend begins with the fact that Hercules, in a cart drawn by horses, drove the bulls of Geryon and reached the land of the Scythians. Here his horses disappeared, and for a long time he could not find them, until, looking for them, he reached Giley (Oleshya at the mouth of the Dnieper). Here lived the owner of this land, a half-maiden half-snake, who, it turns out, stole the horses. She agreed to give them up on the condition that Hercules enter into cohabitation with her. When she had three sons, the snake maiden gave the horses to the hero and asked him what to do with her sons when they grow up. Hercules, leaving her, gave her his tight bow and belt with a cup attached to it. Whichever son can draw his father's bow must stay and inherit his mother's land; weak sons who failed to draw a bow should be sent to a foreign land. Hercules got the horses and departed. His sons were named Agathyrs, Gelon and Scythus.
When they matured, the mother offered them a test. The older brothers could not pull the bow, and only the younger brother, the Scythian, from whom “all the Scythian kings descended,” could do it. Agathyrs and Gelon were expelled from the mother earth (Herodotus. History, IV-8-10).
As you can see, this legend, told to Herodotus by the Greek colonists, does not at all concern the distant Asian past of the Scythians, but begins right from the moment when the Scythians ended up in the land of the Cimmerians. The Hellenic legend did not touch upon such an epic topic as the struggle of the Scythians with the Cimmerians, information about which (and with traces of epic tradition) Herodotus received from other informants.
Let us analyze the geography of the Hellenic legend. Gilea - the mouth of the Dnieper-Borisfen with wooded banks. Herodotus considered this point to be the median for coastal Scythia; she was ten days' journey from the Istra-Danube.
Herodotus defined “original Scythia” as the coast of the Black Sea from the Danube to the Karkinitsky Gulf; Gilea enters this space. It is not clear how far into the depths of the steppes the possessions of the snake-maiden, which passed to the Scythian, extended.
Agathyrs is the eponym of the Agathirs tribe, who lived in the southern Carpathians and beyond the mountains along the Muresh. Archaeologically, this is a Scythian-Thracian culture.
Gelon is the eponym of the Herodotus Gelons, who lived in the Left Bank of the Dnieper and spoke the Scythian language. On the Vorskla, among the Proto-Slavic population, they owned the city of Gelon (Belsk settlement), and their main places were on the Sula and the Seversky Donets.
Archaeologically, this is a culture of the Scythian appearance, but with a number of local features. Here, for example, as we have seen, the image of the “Scythian deer”, the traditional plot of Scythian art, which has become a symbol of the Scythian nomads, is unknown.
What was the meaning of this legend, which was silent about many of the most important episodes in the early history of the Scythians, full of heroic deeds?
It seems to me that the "Greeks living on Pontus" were not only the transmitters of the legend, but also its supplements, who placed their Hellenic hero Hercules as the founders of the Scythians. The basis of the legend of the three brothers undoubtedly arose among the royal Scythians, who lived in the lower reaches of the Borysthenes and owned both Hylaea and a significant part of the "Native Scythia". It was the royal Scythians who needed to show their kinship with other Scythian tribes and emphasize their superiority over both the Gelons and the “pampered Agathyrs”, who evaded an alliance with the Scythians against Darius in 512.
Diodorus Siculus supplemented his historical story about the advancement of the Scythians with a retelling of the Hellenic legend, but with changes and additions: the Scythian brothers are omitted, but two Scythian descendants are mentioned - the brothers Pal and Nap, who divided the kingdom; the peoples of the new kingdoms began to be called palas and nals.
The connection of the Hellenic legend with the royal Scythians is confirmed by images on a silver vessel from the Chasty kurgans near Voronezh.
D. S. Raevsky managed to wittily unravel the content of the engraved scenes as an image of the three sons of Hercules: Agathyrs and Gelon regret that they failed to master their father's heritage, and the youngest, Scyth, accepts the bow with a somewhat embarrassed look. I will add to this that the vessel was found, although in a remote area from the royal Scythians, but directly connected with them: “... other Scythians live in the direction to the east, who arrived in this area after separating from the royal Scythians” (Herodotus. History, IV-22 ).
The vessel with the image of three brothers certifies that its owner belongs to the dynasty that goes back to the ancestor Scythian. However, neither the Greek Hercules nor Echidna (the serpent maiden) is here; the artist was ordered only to show the three brothers and the triumph of the youngest. Everything here is within the Scythian nomadic world with its bows, whips, saadaks.
Let's move on to another legend, which Herodotus outlined before the Hellenic one; he heard it from the Scythians, in all likelihood, from those Borysfenite Scythians who lived in Olbia, the "Marketplace of Borisfenites."
Getting acquainted with this legend, we immediately find ourselves in a completely different world: a different geography, other characters, a complete absence of signs of a nomadic life, sacred relics in the form of agricultural arable tools, a thousand-year-old autochthonous inhabitants of the banks of Borisfen, a special self-name of these "Scythians", annual festivities in honor of heavenly plow ... The only similarity is the competition of three brothers, but the nature of the competition is completely different: some compete in mastering weapons, while others compete in mastering a plow and a yoke. The only reminder of the Scythians-Iranians are the names of the kings, interpreted from the Iranian languages. However, only the word “king” (“qais”), added to each name, turns out to be authentically Iranian. But in this case, the Russian fairy tale about Ivan Tsarevich should also be declared foreign, since the word "tsar" is Russified, but not Slavic.
In my book on Herodotus' Scythia, I gave a number of arguments in favor of the fact that in this legend about the admirers of the plow, we are not talking about Scythian nomads, but about the plowmen-proto-Slavs of the Dnieper Right Bank, who were part of the broad concept of Scythia, in the huge "Scythian tetragon" of Herodotus measuring 700 X 700 km, including over a dozen different peoples.
Let's get acquainted with the full text of Herodotus in view of the exceptional importance of the information he reports.
“According to the stories of the Scythians, their people are the youngest of all. And it happened in this way. The first inhabitant of this still uninhabited country was a man named Targitai. The parents of this Targitai, as the Scythians say, were Zeus and the daughter of the Borisfen river. I don't believe this, of course, despite their claims.
Targitai was of this kind, and he had three sons: Lipoksai, Arpoksai, and the youngest, Kolaksai.
During their reign, golden objects fell from the sky to the Scythian land: a plow with a yoke, an ax and a bowl.
The elder brother saw these things first; no sooner had he come to pick them up than the gold blazed. Then he retreated, and the second brother approached, and again the gold was engulfed in flames.
So the heat of the flaming gold drove away both brothers, but when the third, younger brother approached, the flame went out, and he took the gold to his house. Therefore, the older brothers agreed to cede the whole kingdom to the younger one.
(Herodotus. History, IV-5).
“So, from Dipoksai, as they say, there was a Scythian tribe called Avkhats. From the middle one, Arpoksai, there are catiars with traspies, and from the youngest king, they are called paralats. All of them in the aggregate have a name - chipped, after the name of their king. The Hellenes called them Scythians.
(Herodotus. History, IV - 6).
“So the Scythians tell about the origin of their people. They think, however, that no more than 1000 years have passed from the time of the first king Targitai to the invasion of their land by Darius. The Scythian kings carefully guarded the mentioned sacred golden objects and revered them with reverence, bringing rich sacrifices every year. If someone at the feast falls asleep in the open air with this sacred gold, then, according to the Scythians, he will not live even a year. Therefore, the Scythians give him as much land as he can go around on a horse in a day. Since he had a lot of land, Koloksay divided it, according to the stories of the Scythians, into three kingdoms between his three sons. He made the kingdom where the gold was stored the largest. In the region lying even further north of the land of the Scythians, as they say, nothing can be seen and it is impossible to penetrate because of flying feathers. Indeed, the earth and air there are full of feathers, and this interferes with vision. This is how the Scythians themselves talk about themselves and about their neighboring northern countries ... "
(Herodotus. History, IV - 7).
Before proceeding to the consideration of those plots that are associated with mythology, rituals and folklore motifs, one should justify one's right to use this part of the Herodotus text when describing Proto-Slavic paganism. This is all the more necessary because this legend in the scientific literature has firmly become one of the elements of the Scythian nomadic culture. The literature devoted to the genealogical legends of Herodotus is enormous. The presence of books by D. S. Raevsky and A. M. Khazanov, which have large historiographic and bibliographic sections, allows me not to delve into it and limit myself to polemics with the latest authors.
I will dwell on the book of D. S. Raevsky as a study devoted directly to the consideration of the Scythian ideology. The book contains a number of interesting conjectures and comparisons, but in its main idea it repeats much of what has already been established in modern Iranian studies as a class-caste interpretation of ancient genealogical traditions, complicated in some cases by ideas about three cosmic planes. Full confidence in these provisions without checking how they fit the Scythian (and non-Scythian) society, and without a strict selection of sources, often puts the author in a difficult position.
First of all, it is necessary to object to the merging of five different sources into one alleged mythological and sociological story, into a single legend with five "versions": here are two different legends recorded by Herodotus, and confused lines from the poem of Valerius Flaccus, and Diodorus' record, made for several centuries after Herodotus, and an insignificant epigraphic source.
The late author, Diodorus, on this basis, conjectured two descendants (not sons) of the legendary Scythian. This has nothing to do with the Herodotus basis and should not be included in the number of "versions" of the supposedly single legend.
Where Herodotus very definitely speaks of tribes, of peoples that even have a common name, D. S. Raevsky sees “deceptive evidence”.
Where Herodotus directly points to the complete relationship of the Scythians, Gelons and Agathyrs, our author stubbornly speaks of "three unrelated peoples".
The kinship, the presence of obvious Scythian features are well known to us both from archaeological materials and because the Gelons knew the Scythian language, and the names of the Agafir kings are similar to the Scythian ones (Herodotus, History, IV - 78, 108).
As a result, D. S. Raevsky comes to the following conclusions: “So, the ethnological content of the versions G - I [Herodotus, History, IV-5-7] and VF [Valery Flakk] of the Scythian legend (horizon III b) is the rationale for the three-membered estate the caste structure of society, consisting of a military aristocracy, to which belong kings, priests and free community members - pastoralists and farmers. This structure models the structure of the Universe, as Scythian mythology thinks it.
This is the result of the merger of the legend of the nomadic Scythians with the legend of the tillers, who are also erroneously called Scythians. For now, I will point out only two illogicalities: first, where there are nomads, there, according to Herodotus, there are no farmers. Secondly, each nation, according to Herodotus, had its own king; if peoples are equated with estates or castes, then warriors and kings (!) will have their own king, priests will have their own king, and plowmen and cattle breeders will have one more king.
“Each class-caste group,” D. S. Raevsky writes further, “and the zone of the universe associated with it corresponds to a certain attribute from among the sacred objects appearing in the legend.”
Here the author enters into a clear and unreasonable confrontation with Herodotus, since, following a number of researchers (A. Christensen, E. Benveniste, J. Dumezil), he determines for each of the sons of Targitai one object from the complex of golden things that fell from the sky: Kolaksayu , the king of warriors, - an ax, Lipoksai, the king of priests, - a bowl, and Arpoksai, the king of cattle breeders and plowmen, - equipment for a plow team. But after all, the culminating point of the entire Herodotus legend is the description of the rivalry of the brothers, as a result of which there was no peaceful distribution of heavenly gold at all, but one of the brothers (Kolaksay) received all the things, and then it was stored not in different kingdoms, but in one, “the most extensive” . And it should be said that there was enough sense in the unity of this golden celestial complex: a plow with a yoke (placed by Herodotus in the first place) symbolized the economic basis of the welfare of the kingdom, an ax - the military power of the kingdom, and a bowl could mean not so much libations to the gods (which were made from rhyton ), how much joy, joys of life. And this whole set of symbolic objects went, according to Herodotus, to one youngest son of Targitai, who became the king of the hegemonic tribe.
The distribution of gold according to estates or castes as their “guild coats of arms” is a clear delusion, fundamentally contradicting the sources.
The concept of D. S. Raevsky, including the cosmological aspect, appears before us in this form.
1. Lipoksai (Mountain-King) - a tribe of Avhats - priests - a bowl - earth.
2. Arpoksay (River-King) - catiars - farmers - plow - water; traspii - pastoralists - yoke - "lower world".
3. Kolaksay (Sun-King) - paralats - warriors and kings - ax - sky.
Without going into the essence and the complex system of substantiation of this table, I will note the doubts that arise when looking at it: why did the tribe of priests get the land? Why are pastoralists endowed with a yoke, which, according to D.S. Raevsky, is included in the same arable complex with a plow?
But most of all, the complete disappearance of geographical and ethnic signs is puzzling.
The fascination with the estate-caste hypothesis, complicated by correlation with the three zones of the universe, led D. S. Raevsky to deny Herodotus' geography in general. Referring to the text of "History", D. S. Raevsky often puts in quotation marks such words as "tribes", "ethnos", "ethnic". He writes: "... the six Scythian "tribes" listed by Herodotus are not only ethnic units, but also class-caste groups that form two triads." In connection with this view, "callipid priests", "alazon priests" arise.
“The transformation of six ‘ethnic groups’ into a three-member estate-caste structure had to take place in any case. It is possible that this is precisely why attempts to locate the six “tribes” named by Herodotus fail on the archaeological map.
It is impossible to agree with these provisions for two reasons: firstly, Herodotus mentioned not six, but ten peoples or tribes inside Greater Scythia - after all, Paralats, Avkhats, Katiars and Traspians were also named by him as the population of a part of Scythia, but only he did not indicate to what part of this country, nomadic or agricultural, do they belong to, relying on the attentiveness of the readers, who in the previous paragraph have already seen that we are talking about plow worshipers who lived on the Dnieper. Secondly, the lack of consensus among archaeologists on the placement of the Herodotus tribes on the map is a consequence of the fact that archaeologists, having received a sufficiently detailed map of archaeological cultures, did not turn to a new analysis of the Herodotus text, and not at all that this text does not contain sufficient data for an accurate localization of tribes and peoples (without quotes).
I could not object to D.S. Raevsky in my book, because by the time his work (in many respects interesting) was published, my book “Herodot’s Scythia” was already in the publishing house.
Herodotus, as everyone knows, indicates the rivers on which certain peoples live, determines the length of their lands, the distance to other peoples, mentions different landscape zones - in a word, he gives enough accurate and indirect indications so that the researcher can correlate these specific information with the specificity of archaeological cultures.
Since the estate-caste (and at the same time cosmological) hypothesis is based on the principle of denying ethnic groups and their geographical location, the study of the extremely important text of Herodotus will have to begin with an examination of the geographical side of his two genealogical legends.
Herodotus - a resident of ancient Greece, the "father of history." The Greek became the author of the first surviving treatise "History", in which he described in detail the customs of the peoples that existed in the fifth century BC, as well as the course of the Greco-Persian wars. The works of Herodotus played an important role in the development of ancient culture.
Two key sources of information about the life path of Herodotus have come down to us: the encyclopedia "Court", created in the second half of the tenth century in Byzantium, and the texts of the historian himself. Some of the information in these sources is contradictory.
Bust of Herodotus
The generally accepted version is that Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus in 484 BC. This ancient city was located on the territory of the historical region "Karia", on the Mediterranean coast in Asia Minor. The city of Halicarnassus was founded by the Dorians, and a settlement of the Carians was located nearby (both the Dorians and the Carians are representatives of the main ancient Greek tribes).
The future ancient Greek historian was born into an influential and wealthy Lix family. In his youth, Herodotus participated in the political life of the people. He joined the party, which aimed to overthrow the tyrannical ruler Ligdamid, was expelled, lived for some time on the island of Samos.
Then Herodotus went on long and numerous journeys. He traveled to Egypt, Babylon, Asia Minor, Assyria, the Northern Black Sea region, the Hellespont, and also traveled around the Balkan Peninsula from Macedonia to the Peloponnese. During his travels, the historian made sketches for his subsequent creation.
At the age of forty, Herodotus settled in Athens. At that time, he was already reading excerpts from his History to representatives of the upper strata of urban society, which gave the researchers the opportunity to conclude that the outlines were written while traveling. In Athens, the historian met and became close friends with the supporters of Pericles, the commander and orator, who is considered one of the founders of democracy in Athens. In 444 BC, when on the site of the destroyed city of Sybaris was founded Greek colony Furies, he took part in the restoration of the settlement from the ruins.
The science
Thanks to Herodotus, science was enriched by the fundamental work "History". This book cannot be named historical research. It is an interesting story of an inquisitive, sociable, gifted man who had traveled to many places and had extensive knowledge of his contemporaries. The "History" of Herodotus combines several components at once:
- ethnographic data. The historian has collected an impressive amount of information about the traditions, customs, features of life of various tribes and peoples.
- geographic information. Thanks to the "History" it became possible to restore the outlines of the ancient states as of the fifth century BC.
- Natural history materials. Herodotus included in the book data on historical events that he managed to witness.
- literary component. The author was a gifted writer who managed to create an interesting and captivating narrative.
Book "History" by Herodotus In total, the work of Herodotus includes nine books. The essay is divided into two parts:
- In the first part, the author tells about Scythia, Assyria, Libya, Egypt, Babylonia and a number of other states of that time, as well as about the rise of the Persian kingdom. Since in the second half of the work the author intended to tell a story about numerous Greco-Persian wars, in the first part he sought to trace the milestones of the historical struggle between the Hellenes and the barbarians. Due to the desire for such unity, the interconnectedness of the presentation, Herodotus did not include in the work all the materials that he remembered from his travels, but managed with a limited number of them. In his work, he often expresses a subjective point of view on certain historical realities.
- The second part of Herodotus' work is a chronological account of the military confrontation between the Persians and the Greeks. The story ends in 479 BC, when Athenian troops besieged and took the Persian city of Sesta.
When writing his book, Herodotus paid attention to the whims of fate and the envy of divine forces in relation to the happiness of people. The author believed that the gods constantly intervene in the natural course of historical events. He recognized the fact that the personal qualities of politicians are also the key to their success.
Herodotus condemned the rulers of Persia for their impudence, for their desire to violate the existing order of the world order, according to which the Persians should live in Asia, and the Hellenes in Europe. In 500 BC, the Ionian uprising took place, because of which Ancient Greece was involved in a bloody war. The author characterizes this event as a manifestation of pride and extreme indiscretion.
Structure of Herodotus' "History"
- The first book is Clio. It tells about the beginning of the strife between the barbarians and the Hellenes, provides the history of the ancient country of Lydia, the story of the Athenian politician and sage Solon, the tyrant Peisistratus, the history of Media and Sparta. In this book, Herodotus also mentions the Scythians in the context of the confrontation with the Cimmerians, and also talks about the war between the Massagetae and the Persians.
- The second book is "Euterpe". In this part of the work, the historian decided to tell about the history of Libya and Egypt, about the pygmies and the Nasamones, about the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Here Herodotus recounted the legend of how Psammetichus I determined that the Phrygians were the oldest people in the world.
- Book three - "Thalia". It provides information about Arabia and India, about the Greek tyrant Polycrates, and also tells about the conquest of Egypt by the Persian king Cambyses, about the revolt of the magicians, the conspiracy of the seven and the anti-Persian uprising that took place in Babylon.
Fragment of a page from the book "History" by Herodotus - The fourth book is Melpomene. Here the author described the peoples of Scythia, Thrace, Libya and Asia, and also presented the information known to him about the campaign of the Persian king Darius against the Scythians of the Black Sea region.
- The fifth book is Terpsichore. In this book, the emphasis is already on the events of the Greco-Persian wars. If in previous volumes the author devoted many pages to describing the ethnographic features of the peoples, then here he talks about the Persians in Macedonia, about the Ionian uprising, about the coming of the Persian governor Aristagoras to Athens and the Athenian wars.
- Book six - Erato. Key events from those described - naval battle"Battle of Lada", the capture of the Carian ancient Greek city of Miletus, the campaign of the Persian commander Mardonius, the campaign of the Persian commanders Artafren and Datis.
Herodotus. Bas-relief in the Louvre, Paris - The seventh book is "Polyhymnia". It deals with the death of Darius and the ascension of Xerxes (Darius and Xerxes were Persian kings), Xerxes' attempts to conquer Asia and Europe, as well as the iconic battle of the Persians and Greeks in the Thermopylae gorge.
- Book eight - "Urania". This material describes the naval battle of Artemisia, the naval battle of Salamis, the flight of Xerxes, and the arrival of Alexander in Athens.
- Book nine - "Calliope". In the final part of the monumental work, the author decided to talk about the preparation and course of the Battle of Plataea (one of biggest battles Greco-Persian wars, which took place on land), the battle of Merkala, as a result of which the Persian army was inflicted a crushing defeat, and the siege of Sest.
The “History” of this ancient Greek thinker is also called “The Muses”, since Alexandrian scientists decided to name each of its nine parts after one of the Muses.
Nine Muses named the volumes of Herodotus' History In the process of work, Herodotus used not only his own memories and his own attitude to events, but was also guided by the memories of eyewitnesses, records of oracles, and inscription materials. In order to reconstruct each battle as accurately as possible, he specially visited the battlefields. Being a supporter of Pericles, he often sings of the merits of his family.
Despite the belief in divine intervention, the subjective approach and the limited means for obtaining information in antiquity, the author did not reduce his entire work to glorifying the battle of the Greeks for their freedom. He also tried to determine the causes and consequences of their victories or defeats. "History" of Herodotus became an important milestone in the development of world historiography.
The success of the historian's work is due not only to the fact that in one work he collected many facts about the peoples and events of his time. He also demonstrated the high skill of the storyteller, bringing his "History" closer to the epic and making it an exciting reading for both contemporaries and people of the New Age. Most of the facts stated by him in the book were subsequently proven during archaeological excavations.
Personal life
The biography of Herodotus has survived to this day only in the form of fragmentary information, in which it is impossible to find data about the scientist’s own family, about whether he had a wife and children. It is only known that the historian was an inquisitive and sociable person, he easily got along with people and was able to show amazing perseverance in the search for historically reliable facts.
Death
Herodotus supposedly died in 425 BC. The place of his burial is unknown.
The works of Herodotus played an important role in the development of ancient culture. In them, Herodotus described in detail the customs of the peoples that existed in the 5th century BC, as well as the course of the Greco-Persian wars.
Herodotus, nicknamed the "father of history", is one of the first travel scientists. To write his famous "History" he traveled all the famous countries of his time: Greece, South Italy, Asia Minor, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, visited most of the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, visited the Black Sea, the Crimea (up to Chersonesos) and the country of the Scythians . He is the author of works devoted to the description of the Greco-Persian wars, outlining the history of the state of the Achaemenids, Egypt, etc., gave the first description of the life and way of life of the Scythians.
Herodotus is called the father of history. It would be no less fair to call him the father of geography. In the famous "History" he presented to his readers the entire Old World - known, unknown, and sometimes fictional - all three of the old countries of the world that he knew. He writes: "However, I do not understand why three different names are given to the single earth." The three names are Europe, Asia and Libya meaning Africa.
Traveling around the world, the scientist refuted the idea of the Greeks that the earth is disk-shaped, rises along the edges, and deepens towards the middle. Having read the works on geography and history written by the Greek Herodotus, one cannot overestimate his great contribution to science!
Herodotus - a scientist - a traveler is called one of the main pioneers of his time. He collected the available knowledge about the world in one work, presented his contemporaries and followers with descriptions of many tribes, their way of life, and customs.
From the biography of Herodotus:
Two key sources of information about the life path of Herodotus have come down to us: the encyclopedia "Court", created in the second half of the tenth century in Byzantium, and the texts of the historian himself. But some data in these sources are contradictory.
Herodotus was born around 484 BC in the Asia Minor city of Halicarnassus (however, this information is unverified, and the exact date no one knows his birth. It is only known for sure that he was born in the interval between the Persian wars. He came from a wealthy and noble family with extensive trading connections.
The future ancient Greek historian was born into an influential and wealthy Lix family. In his youth, Herodotus participated in the political life of the people. He joined the party, which aimed to overthrow the tyrannical ruler Ligdamid, was expelled, lived for some time on the island of Samos.
A boy born in Halicarnassus, from childhood, watched how ships from distant lands come and go to the port. Most likely, this gave rise to a passion for uncharted lands, travel and discovery in him.
In his younger years, he had to leave his small homeland because of the struggle against tyranny, which nevertheless was established here. After living a little in Samos, in 464 the traveler Herodotus sets off on his long journey, whose geographical discoveries will make a huge contribution to science.
In 464, he sets off on long and numerous journeys. Herodotus dreams of learning about other, much more powerful peoples, some of which had a civilization much older than the Greeks. He, in addition, is occupied by the diversity and outlandishness of the customs of a foreign world. It was this that prompted him to study the history of the Persian wars, to conduct an extensive study of all the peoples who attacked Greece, about which the Greeks at that time still knew little.
He traveled to Egypt, Babylon, Asia Minor, Assyria, the Northern Black Sea region, the Hellespont, and also traveled around the Balkan Peninsula from Macedonia to the Peloponnese. During his travels, the historian made sketches for his subsequent creation.
At the age of forty, Herodotus settled in Athens. At that time, he was already reading excerpts from his History to representatives of the upper strata of urban society, which gave the researchers the opportunity to conclude that the outlines were written while traveling. In Athens, the historian met and became close friends with the supporters of Pericles, the commander and orator, who is considered one of the founders of democracy in Athens. In 444 BC, when the Greek colony of Thurii was founded on the site of the destroyed city of Sybaris, he took part in the restoration of the settlement from the ruins.
Returning as a young man to his homeland, to Halicarnassus, the famous traveler took part in the popular movement against the tyrant Lygdamis and contributed to his overthrow. In 444 BC, Herodotus attended the Panathenaic festivals and read passages from the description of his travels there, causing general delight.
The biography of Herodotus has survived to this day only in the form of fragmentary information, in which it is impossible to find data about the scientist’s own family, about whether he had a wife and children. It is only known that the historian was an inquisitive and sociable person, he easily got along with people and was able to show amazing perseverance in the search for historically reliable facts.
At the end of his life, he retired to Italy, to Thurium, where he allegedly died in 425 BC, leaving glory in his own right. famous traveler and even more famous historian. Herodotus left a lot of information about the Egyptians, Phoenicians and other peoples. The place of his burial is unknown.
Herodotus' contribution to science:
Thanks to Herodotus, science was enriched by the fundamental work "History". This book cannot be called a historical study. It is an interesting story of an inquisitive, sociable, gifted man who had traveled to many places and had extensive knowledge of his contemporaries.
The "History" of Herodotus combines several components at once:
1) Ethnographic data:
The historian has collected an impressive amount of information about the traditions, customs, features of life of various tribes and peoples.
2) Geographic information:
Thanks to the "History" it became possible to restore the outlines of the ancient states as of the fifth century BC.
3) Natural history materials:
Herodotus included in the book data on historical events that he managed to witness.
Book "History" of Herodotus
In total, the work of Herodotus includes nine books.
The essay is divided into two parts:
1) In the first part, the author talks about Scythia, Assyria, Libya, Egypt, Babylonia and a number of other states of that time, as well as about the rise of the Persian kingdom. Since in the second half of the work the author intended to tell a story about numerous Greco-Persian wars, in the first part he sought to trace the milestones of the historical struggle between the Hellenes and the barbarians. Due to the desire for such unity, the interconnectedness of the presentation, Herodotus did not include in the work all the materials that he remembered from his travels, but managed with a limited number of them. In his work, he often expresses a subjective point of view on certain historical realities.
2) The second part of the work of Herodotus is a chronological story about the military confrontation between the Persians and the Greeks. The story ends in 479 BC, when Athenian troops besieged and took the Persian city of Sesta. + When writing his book, Herodotus paid attention to the whims of fate and the envy of divine forces in relation to the happiness of people. The author believed that the gods constantly intervene in the natural course of historical events. He recognized the fact that the personal qualities of politicians are also the key to their success.
Herodotus condemned the rulers of Persia for their impudence, for their desire to violate the existing order of the world order, according to which the Persians should live in Asia, and the Hellenes in Europe. In 500 BC, the Ionian uprising took place, because of which Ancient Greece was involved in a bloody war. The author characterizes this event as a manifestation of pride and extreme indiscretion.
The structure of the "History" of Herodotus:
Book One - Clio
It tells about the beginning of the strife between the barbarians and the Hellenes, provides the history of the ancient country of Lydia, the story of the Athenian politician and sage Solon, the tyrant Peisistratus, the history of Media and Sparta. In this book, Herodotus also mentions the Scythians in the context of the confrontation with the Cimmerians, and also talks about the war between the Massagetae and the Persians.
Book Two - "Euterpe"
In this part of the work, the historian decided to tell about the history of Libya and Egypt, about the pygmies and the Nasamones, about the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Here Herodotus recounted the legend of how Psammetichus I determined that the Phrygians were the oldest people in the world.
Book three - "Thalia"
It provides information about Arabia and India, about the Greek tyrant Polycrates, and also tells about the conquest of Egypt by the Persian king Cambyses, about the revolt of the magicians, the conspiracy of the seven and the anti-Persian uprising that took place in Babylon.
Book Four - "Melpomene"
Book Five - "Terpsichore"
In this book, the emphasis is already on the events of the Greco-Persian wars. If in previous volumes the author devoted many pages to describing the ethnographic features of the peoples, then here he talks about the Persians in Macedonia, about the Ionian uprising, about the coming of the Persian governor Aristagoras to Athens and the Athenian wars.
Book Six - "Erato"
The key events of those described are the naval battle “Battle of Lada”, the capture of the Carian ancient Greek city of Miletus, the campaign of the Persian commander Mardonius, the campaign of the Persian commanders Artafren and Datis.
The seventh book is "Polyhymnia".
It deals with the death of Darius and the ascension of Xerxes (Darius and Xerxes were Persian kings), Xerxes' attempts to conquer Asia and Europe, as well as the iconic battle of the Persians and Greeks in the Thermopylae gorge.
Book Eight - "Urania"
This material describes the naval battle of Artemisia, the naval battle of Salamis, the flight of Xerxes, and the arrival of Alexander in Athens.
Book Nine - "Calliope"
In the final part of the monumental work, the author decided to tell about the preparation and course of the battle of Plataea (one of the largest battles of the Greco-Persian wars, which took place on land), the battle of Mercal, as a result of which the Persian army was inflicted a crushing defeat, and about the siege of Sest.
The “History” of this ancient Greek thinker is also called “The Muses”, since Alexandrian scientists decided to name each of its nine parts after one of the Muses. Nine Muses named the volumes of Herodotus' History
In the process of work, Herodotus used not only his own memories and his own attitude to events, but was also guided by the memories of eyewitnesses, records of oracles, and inscription materials. In order to reconstruct each battle as accurately as possible, he specially visited the battlefields. Being a supporter of Pericles, he often sings of the merits of his family.
Despite the belief in divine intervention, the subjective approach and the limited means for obtaining information in antiquity, the author did not reduce his entire work to glorifying the battle of the Greeks for their freedom. He also tried to determine the causes and consequences of their victories or defeats. "History" of Herodotus became an important milestone in the development of world historiography. + The success of the historian's work is due not only to the fact that in one work he collected many facts about the peoples and events of his time. He also demonstrated the high skill of the storyteller, bringing his "History" closer to the epic and making it an exciting reading for both contemporaries and people of the New Age. Most of the facts stated by him in the book were subsequently proven during archaeological excavations.
Interesting facts from the life of Herodotus:
1. He is the first to discover the female mythical epic of the Amazons.
2. The historian explored (travelling) in detail many areas of Western Asia, Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean Sea, the island of Crete and the coast of Syria, Phenicia, Macedonia, Egypt, Thrace, most of Greece, South Italy, Peloponnese, Sicily, the Black Sea coast.
3. Great thinker and writer ancient rome Cicero once called Herodotus "the father of history". Since then it has been called that.
4. But it is worth noting that Herodotus can rightly be called the "father" of a whole list of other sciences. Among them - ethnography and geography especially, historical geography.
5. Herodotus took part in the founding of a pan-Greek colony in southern Italy - Furia.
6. He closely communicated with the sculptor Phidias, Pericles, the playwright Sophocles, the philosopher Anaxagoras.
7. In his youth he was expelled from the city where he lived.
8. The historian firmly believed in the existence of Rock and the gods.
9. He wrote his work "History" in the Ionian dialect. The main idea is the confrontation between ancient Greek democracy and Asian despotism.
10. Herodotus initiated travel.
11. He took part in the popular movement against the tyrant Lygdamis and was for his overthrow.
12. Herodotus identified 3 climatic zones: the northern (in Scythia), the second, located in the Mediterranean, and the third, part of North Africa and Arabia.
13. He is considered the first person to circumnavigate the entire Earth.
14. After Herodotus, the American Nellie Bye made an attempt to bypass the earth only in 1889. And she did it in 72 days.
15. A large number of facts from the "History" of Herodotus were confirmed during archaeological excavations.
Quotes, sayings, aphorisms of Herodotus:
* Since ancient times, people have wise and beautiful sayings; we should learn from them.
*If opposing opinions are not expressed, then there is nothing to choose the best from.
* In peacetime, sons bury their fathers, and in wartime, fathers bury their sons.
* If all people once brought all their sins and vices to the market, then everyone, having seen the vices of a neighbor, would gladly take their own home.
* People who decide to act usually have good luck on the contrary, they rarely work out for people who are only concerned with weighing and procrastinating.
* A truly courageous person must show timidity at the time when he decides on something, must weigh all the chances, but in execution it is necessary to be courageous.
* Do not correct trouble with trouble.
*No one can be so crazy as to want war instead of peace, because when there is peace, then children bury their fathers, and when there is war, then fathers bury their children.
*Slander is terrible because one is the victim of its injustice, and two are doing this injustice: the one who spreads slander and the one who believes it.
* Circumstances rule people, not people rule circumstances.
* If all peoples in the world were allowed to choose the best of all customs and mores, then each people, having carefully examined them, would choose their own.
* Women, along with clothes, take off shame from themselves.
*Death is a delightful hiding place for weary people.
*It is better to be an object of envy than compassion.
*Usually people dream about what they think about during the day. *People's ears are more incredulous than their eyes.
*I am obliged to convey everything that is told to me, but I am not obliged to believe everything.
*Call no one happy until he is dead.
The search for the ancestors of Russia leads us through archaeological cultures that succeeded each other to the distant Scythian era.
Archaeological cultures reflect periods of rise and decline associated with wars, invasions of the steppes, but the historical center of the ancestors of Russia remains the historical center of the Dnieper region, which runs along the Dnieper-Borisfen and became the core of Kievan Rus. The role of the Scythians in the history of the Slavs has long interested historians. Chronicler Nestor, mentioning the Slavic tribes between the Dnieper and the Danube, added that they lived on the land called Great Scythia.
Slavic historian, archaeologist, ethnographer and linguist, author of the 11-volume encyclopedia "Slavic Antiquities" Lubora Niederle argued that "... among the northern neighbors of the Scythians mentioned by Herodotus, not only the Neuros ... but also the Scythians called plowmen and farmers ... were undoubtedly Slavs who were influenced by the Greco-Scythian culture."
11. Proto-Slavic folklore in. The Proto-Slavs lived in the Middle Dnieper, both in pre-Scythian and Scythian times, which developed here Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian folklore, in which the main characters are Kola-ksai - and the fairy-tale hero prince Svetozar, Zorevik, Prince Red Sun- an epithet of the Kyiv prince, it is quite combined with the stories of Herodotus about the myths and legends of the Scythians. You can draw many mytho-epic parallels between the records of Herodotus and the Proto-Slavic tales of the three kingdoms, from which the solar hero receives. Herodotus retained the name of the mythical the ancestor of the Skolots - Tarkh Tarakhovich, legends about a magic plow, etc. The name of Tarkh-Tarkhovich, Bull-Bykovich remained in Slavic folklore.
Scythian royal pectoral from the mound Tolstaya Mogila (Ukraine). A stylized image of Serpentine Ramparts, protecting the peaceful life of the villagers from enemy attacks, in the form of wild animals.
12. Herodotus spoke about the gods of Scythia, religious rites, customs and traditions of the Scythians, noting that Scythian gods are much older than the Greek ones.
Ritual images of Scythian deities are symbolically displayed in ancient ones, and in the burial rites of the Slavs there are elements of ancient rites - a grave mound, a feast for the deceased, rites of 3, 9, and 40 days, etc. Folk Slavic rites of the annual agricultural holiday - forging a ritual plow, shiny, like gold, the feast of the first furrow, in times of disaster, a ritual furrow was plowed around the village, like a talisman, protecting the village from all troubles and other pagan customs of ancient Russia.
The custom of determining the correctness of those arguing with the help of red-hot iron, when the “golden” metal of the guilty was burned, and the right one could take it. In the Scythian legend about the three sons of King Targitai, the youngest, Koloksai, turned out to be “right”. In East Slavic folklore, a lot of fairy tales about three kingdoms - copper, silver and gold, led by three brothers. after all the fabulous adventures, it always goes to the younger brother.
In the ancient epic of the Middle Dnieper, there are many legends about mythical blacksmiths forging a huge forty-pound plow, the first on earth, with which you can plow deep furrows and Serpentine shafts, “forging like a church”.
In ancient Russian folklore, the blacksmith Nikita Kozhemyaka forged a plow of 300 pounds, harnessed the Gorynych snake into it and plowed a furrow from Kyiv to the Russian Sea, divided the sea, and drowned the snake in it. Since then, that furrow has been called the Serpentine Shafts, and the tract near Kyiv is still called Kozhemyaki.
Serpent ramparts or serpent ramparts have been preserved to this day in many regions of Ukraine as a monument of defensive structures protecting the city from steppe nomads. Who and when built a powerful earthen rampart facing the steppe, with a deep ditch at the foot, is unknown. Serpentine shafts were built by hand, the construction of one giant shaft could take from 20 to 30 years. In some places, the height of the Serpent Shaft equal to 12 meters has been preserved. In terms of the amount of work and effort expended on construction, the serpent ramparts can be compared with the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
Outside, from the south, the ramparts were surrounded by deep ditches filled with water. Guard villages were located along the inner side of the Serpentine Wall, in which warriors settled, carrying out security service in the state, guarding the southern borders of Russia. Armed wars could repel the first attacks of nomadic enemies, stop their predatory raid and warn the city of danger, enable the city military squad to assemble and march, prepare for battle.
The remains of the Serpent Shafts have survived to this day along the rivers Vit, Ros, Trubezh, r. Krasnaya, Stugna, Sula, etc.
Serpent Shafts- the popular name of the ancient (II century BC to VII century AD) defensive ramparts along the banks of the Dnieper tributaries south of Kyiv.
The Zmiev ramparts correspond in time to the Slavic archaeological cultures that existed here:
Zarubenets archaeological culture(III - II century BC - II century AD), discovered in the village of Zarubintsy, Monastyrishchenko district, Cherkasy region. The Zarubnitsa culture was spread in the Upper and Middle Dnieper region from the Berezina in the north to Tyasmin in the south, in the Middle Poseimye and Pripyat Polissya, in the territory of Western and Central Ukraine, in the south and east of the present Republic of Belarus, about to Vladimir.
Chernyakhovsk archaeological culture, II-IV centuries, which existed in the territories of Ukraine, in the Crimea, Moldova and Romania
Penkovskaya archaeological the early medieval culture of the Slavs of the 6th - early 8th centuries, distributed on the territory of Moldova and Ukraine from the Prut River basin to the Poltava region.
