From the history of Orenburg region

Андрей Тихомиров, Марина Попова

From the history of Orenburg region

The country of the cities of the Southern Urals

For a very long time, such a linguistic community of ancient people has been formed on the territory of the Southern Urals, as they later became known as the Indo-Europeans. This is about the 8th-5th millennium BC, in the 4th-3rd millennium BC this community began to disintegrate, later they were divided into the Eastern language group (Iranians, Armenians, Tajiks, Indians, etc.), Western European (Greeks, Germans, Romance peoples, etc.), Slavs (Russians, Bulgarians, Poles, etc.), Balts (Prussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, etc.). For many millennia, peoples disappeared, appeared, and assimilated with other ethnic groups, in particular, with the Finns and Turks.

Traces of the former community are visible everywhere. For example, in the Slavic and Iranian languages there are many common words and concepts – god, hero, wealth, hut, boyar, lord, axe, dog, etc. They all came to us from the ancient Indo-Europeans. This commonality is also visible in applied art. In embroidery patterns, in decorations on clay vessels, a combination of diamonds and dots was used everywhere. In the areas of settlement of Indo-Europeans, the domestic cult of moose and deer has been preserved for centuries, although these animals are not found in Iran, India and Greece. The same applies to some national holidays – for example, to bear holidays, held by many peoples during the spring days of the bear's awakening from hibernation. All these are traces of the northern ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, in the area of the modern Arctic Ocean, whose climate was warmer thousands of years ago.

These peoples have a lot in common in religious cults. Thus, the Slavic pagan god Perun the thunderer is akin to the Latvian-Lithuanian Perkunis, the Indian Parjanya, the Celtic Perkunia. And he himself is very reminiscent of the main Greek god Zeus. The Slavic pagan goddess Lada, the patroness of marriage and family, is comparable to the Greek goddess Lata.

The concept of "civilization" has many meanings, but the main thing is the emergence of something new and progressive that helps to move development forward.

And now the traces of the most ancient civilization are gradually being found by scientists within the greater Urals. The most ancient idol known today is the "Shigir idol". The museum exhibit "The Great Shigir Idol" is considered to be the oldest wooden sculpture on the planet, which, according to scientists, is 10,000 years old. The value of the Shigir idol in monetary terms is not even imaginable. There is no doubt that today it is the most significant relic not only in the Sverdlovsk region and Russia, but also on the whole planet.

The megaliths of Vera Island are a complex of archaeological monuments (megaliths – chamber tombs, dolmens and menhirs) on the island of Lake Turgoyak (near Miass) in the Chelyabinsk region. The oldest megaliths on Earth were presumably built about 6 thousand years ago, in the IV thousand BC, that is, before the famous Stonehenge in England (5 thousand years ago, III thousand BC).

The country of cities is the oldest settlements, prototypes of cities that have been found by archaeologists in the Southern Urals: in Bashkortostan, Orenburg and Chelyabinsk regions of the Russian Federation, as well as on the territory of northern Kazakhstan. The cities are located on an area with a diameter of 350 km.

All found cities are united by a similar type of structure, organization of urban infrastructure, building materials, time of existence, as well as the same topographic logic. The settlements are clearly visible in aerial photographs. And it is these pictures that make a great impression. After 4,000 years, the skeletons of cities stand out clearly against the background of the natural landscape, plowed fields. The mastery of the ancient engineers who designed and created such city systems is coming to an awareness. The cities themselves were very livable. First, they provided protection from external enemies. Secondly, in the cities, rooms were made for the life and work of various artisans (saddlers, potters, metallurgists, blacksmiths, etc.). Inside each of the cities there is a storm sewer that takes water outside the city. Burial grounds were organized near the cities, animal pens were built. Uniqueness: the age of the monuments, the youngest of them is 3,700 years old, which is comparable to the ancient Egyptian pyramids; the type of settlement is a city.

Basically, other traces of human activity are found, mounds, burials; cities did not arise spontaneously, having evolved from villages, but were built immediately as cities; other ancient settlements (and not only ancient ones) with a similar urban structure and architecture have not yet been discovered on the planet; also: unlike other cultural strata of the steppes of Eurasia; the most ancient from the found chariots (dated 2026 BC); products of metallurgy developed for that time; sufficiently advanced ancient hydraulic structures (dam, dam, drainage channels (Sintashta); ancient storm sewer (Arkaim).

Comparative linguistics and the construction of a linguistic genealogical classification are very important for understanding the issues of ethnogenesis (the origin of peoples). In addition to anthropologists, ethnographers and linguists, scientists of many other specialties participate in the development of these problems, including historians studying written monuments, geographers and archaeologists, whose subject of research is the remnants of the economic and cultural activities of ancient peoples.

"During the Late or Upper Paleolithic (ancient Stone Age), which lasted several tens of thousands of years and ended about 16-15 millennia ago, modern humans have already firmly mastered a significant part of Asia (with the exception of the far north and high-altitude areas), all of Africa and almost all of Europe, except for the northern areas, still covered then glaciers. In the same era, Australia was settled from Indonesia, as well as America, where the first people penetrated from Northeast Asia through the Bering Strait, previously there was an isthmus in its place, there is also evidence that South America was inhabited from Antarctica, previously there could also be islands or narrow island isthmuses. According to the hypothesis of "primitive linguistic continuity" proposed by the Soviet ethnographer S. P. According to Tolstoy, mankind spoke at the dawn of its history in numerous languages, apparently gradually passing into one another in adjacent territories and forming as a whole a single continuous network ("linguistic continuity")" (Tikhomirov A.E., Collection of articles 2015, "PoLyART", Orenburg, 2016, pp. 18-19).

An indirect confirmation of S. P. Tolstov's hypothesis is that traces of ancient linguistic fragmentation in some countries persisted until recently. In Australia, for example, there were several hundred languages between which it was not easy to draw clear boundaries. N. N. Miklukho-Maklay noted that among the Papuans of New Guinea, almost every village had its own special language. The differences between the languages of the neighboring Papuan groups were very small. However, the languages of more distant groups have already become significantly different from each other. Tolstov believes that language families could have formed in the process of gradual concentration of individual languages of small collectives, their consolidation into larger groups that inhabited significant areas of the globe. Other Soviet and foreign linguists suggest that language families usually arose in the process of independent separation of one basic language during the settlement of its speakers or in the process of assimilation during its interaction with other languages, which led to the formation of local dialects within the basic language, which could later become independent languages.

The question of the time of formation of language families is very important for the problems of ethnogenesis. Some Soviet researchers – archaeologists and ethnographers – admit that the formation of these families could have begun already at the end of the Late Paleolithic or in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), 13-7 thousand years before our days. In this era, in the process of human settlement, groups of related languages, and perhaps the languages of some of the largest ethnic communities, could spread over very vast territories.

The Danish linguist X. Pedersen once hypothesized the genetic connection of the languages of several major families, which were considered unrelated. He called these languages "nostratic" (from Latin. noster is ours). The research of the Soviet linguist V. M. Illich-Svitych has shown the scientific validity of combining Indo-European, Semitic-Hamitic, Uralic, Altaic and some languages into a large nostratic macrofamily of languages. This macrofamily was formed in the Upper Paleolithic in the territory of South-West Asia and adjacent regions. During the retreat of the last Wurm glaciation and climatic warming in the Mesolithic, Nostratic tribes settled over a vast territory of Asia and Europe; they pushed back, and partially assimilated the tribes that lived there earlier. In this historical process, nostratic tribes formed a number of isolated areas, where the formation of special language families began. The largest of them, the Indo–European linguistic community, began to form on the territory of the Southern Urals, and then in the "Big Steppe" – from Altai to the Black Sea region.

As archaeological cultures that could be correlated with the area of the pan-Indo-European cultural complex, scientists name the Khalaf, Ubeid, Chatal-Huyuk cultures in Southwestern Asia and the Kuro-Araksin culture in Transcaucasia. According to these scientists, the secondary intermediate ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans was the Northern Black Sea region, where their settlement dates back to the III millennium BC. To the south of the area of the Indo-European family, the core of the Semitic-Hamitic (Afrasian) language family may have formed. To the north of the Indo—Europeans lived the speakers of the Kartvelian proto-language, to the east – the Dravidian proto-language. The ancestral home of the Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoyed) Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic-Manchu languages was located on the northeastern periphery of modern Russia. This nostratic macrofamily of languages includes the Indo-European, Semitic-Hamitic, or Afrasian, Kartvelian, Uralic, Dravidian, Turkic, Mongolian, Tunguso-Manchurian, Chukchi-Kamchatka and, possibly, the Eskimo-Aleut language families. The languages of this huge macro-family are now spoken by over 2/3 of the world's population.

The spread of Nostratic languages was probably both through the settlement of ancient people of the modern type, and through contacts between their various tribal groups. There is reason to assume that in southeast Asia, at about the same time, another ancient linguistic macrofamily (or trunk) was formed – the Pacific Ocean, the differentiation of which led to the development of Sino—Tibetan, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages. Other scientists (including many Soviet linguists) believed that the most likely time for the formation of language families were the later periods of history corresponding to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and the Bronze Age of archaeological periodization (8-2 thousand BC). The formation of the oldest language families at this time was associated with the allocation of mobile, mainly pastoral tribes and their intensive migrations, which intensified the processes of linguistic differentiation and assimilation. It should be noted, however, that the real differences between both points of view are not so great, since the formation of different language families did not occur at the same time and was a very long process.

Earlier than others, there were probably ethnic communities speaking languages that are currently preserved among small peoples living on the periphery of the primitive ecumene – the land area inhabited by people (Greek. "eikeo" – to inhabit). These languages are distinguished by a wide variety of phonetic composition and grammar, often forming imperceptible transitions between themselves, perhaps dating back to the era of primitive linguistic continuity. Such languages, which are very difficult to classify geneologically, include the languages of American Indians, "Paleoasiates of Siberia", Australians, Papuans of New Guinea, Bushmen and Hottentots, and some peoples of West Africa.

Primitive humanity, settling from the west (Africa) to the east (the Arabian Peninsula) and developing new lands in the depths of Asia, split into two groups of populations in the Ancient Stone Age: black and white. This was due to a decrease in the amount of melanin, brown and black pigments. For groups of hunters and gatherers who constantly change their habitats in search of food, primitive forms of buildings in the form of wind barriers, tree dwellings or temporary huts made of branches, bark and leaves are still typical, which strongly reminds of Russian folklore, where Baba Yaga lives in a hut on "chicken legs" (fumigated with smoke so as not to rot) and "flies" on a broomstick. Yaga, like a lamb, is a victim in Sanskrit, and in ancient Russian (chaga) is a prisoner. Yaga – in German and Swedish – "to hunt, drive, hunt game." The male version of "huntsman" (from German – hunter). All these words have the same origin – from the Indo-European base. There is a version of the origin of the name Yaga from the ancient Slavic beregini (originally pre-Christian good spirits –patrons of the Slavs) – Yasha (Yagi), its name means that it comes from a Lizard, that is, the ancestor – the most ancient ancestor in the family, Yaga guarded the Fiery River, that is, the sacred border separating the earthly and otherworldly worlds. The guardian of this border should be harsh, therefore, negative traits were attributed to Yaga, after the adoption of Christianity, the image of the good Yaga became insidious and evil, she became an ugly witch who controls forest lands and feeds on human flesh.

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