Secrets of the ancient Aries. Digest of articles. S. V. Zharnikova

us: they were found in Russia on objects of art from the Mezin Paleolithic site, the time of which, as geologists believe, is many tens of millennia from us. And in what amazingly developed form they are there! And what is most surprising of all is the fact that even there they were associated with figurines of birds, undoubtedly having the same cult religious meaning as they have in our time, i.e. the meaning of the symbol of the spring sun and related ideas of happiness, well-being and joy. Thus, in the charming complex of swastika signs, in the patterns of the northern Russian skilled craftswomen, there is reminiscence (living memory) of the most ancient common human religious symbols. And what a fresh, what a solid memory!»

      What was the initial model for the most complex rhombo-meander and swastika ornament of Mezin is still a mystery.

      Paleontologist V. I. Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, broken meander stripes and rhombuses on objects from Mezin arose as a repetition of the natural dentin pattern of mammoth tusks.

      From this, she concluded that such an ornament for the people of the Upper Paleolithic was a kind of magical symbol of the mammoth, which embodied (as the main object of hunting) their ideas of wealth, power and abundance.

      I. G. Shovkoplyas, who published the materials of the Mezinskaya site, notes that the meander patterns characteristic of the monuments of this Upper Paleolithic culture have no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe and can be put «on a par with the perfect geometric ornament of later historical eras, for example, the Neolithic and copper-bronze». In the division of V. A. Gorodtsov of European Upper Paleolithic cultures of the 25—20 millennium BC into three separate regions – Western European, Central European and Eastern European in terms of the nature of art monuments, the unique ornament of Mezin served as the basis for distinguishing the Eastern European region.

      Thus, Mezin in the Chernihiv region is famous for its geometric meander ornament on the bone. In the rest of the Old World, the meander appears only in the Bronze Age. True, in connection with the origins of this ornamental motif, various researchers have developed very different points of view.

      V. I. Bibikova considers it possible to deduce the Mezinian meander and the swastika from the repetition of the natural pattern of the dentin of mammoth tusks.

      A. A. Formozov comes to the conclusion that: «the meander, characteristic of the antique vase painting, was adopted by the ancient Greek potters from the weavers, and they only copied the pattern from threads that they got involuntarily in the manufacture of clothes.

      For the Paleolithic hunters of Eastern Europe, who were not familiar with weaving, the meander appeared, most likely, as a result of the complication of the zigzags, often engraved on their bone products.»

      It seems that both the first and the second assumptions of A.A. Formozov it is difficult to agree. Ancient Greek potters could also adopt a different pattern of weaving of threads, as long as their weavers were so virtuoso that they received meander patterns in the structure of the fabric. After all, it is impossible to obtain a meander by «involuntary» interweaving of threads, this requires mastering the most complex multi-thread weaving technique, so, probably, both antique weavers and potters sought to decorate their products with a meander pattern not accidentally, but quite deliberately, linking it with a certain complex of ancient ideas… As for the Paleolithic hunters, they hunted mammoths not only in Eastern, but also in Western Europe, however, there the «complication of zigzags», also engraved on bone products, did not occur.

      Probably, nevertheless, B. A. Frolov is closer to the truth, who, deciphering the ornament of the Mezin bracelet, came to the conclusion that this reflects a complex of the most complex ideas of Paleolithic man about the movement of time, about the change of seasons of the year, about the lunar calendar, i.e. we are not dealing with a simple imitation of a natural pattern and not with the «complication of zigzags», but with the complication of thinking, with a complex worldview system. He writes: «Analysis of the Paleolithic graphics of Eurasia now indisputably testifies: certain patterns, a kind of algorithms for constructing the first ornaments really existed.

      The number of elements in the groups of the ornament, the intervals between homogeneous groups repeats the cycles of the most frequent and visible for the inhabitants of the Earth cosmic phenomena associated, first of all, with the movement of the Sun and the Moon».

      It should be noted that A. A. Formozov believes that it was «with the development of the thinking of our ancestors, who managed to move from a concrete-figurative perception of life to complex abstractions, that the change in the appearance of art in the Neolithic and Bronze was connected, when the ornament experienced a true heyday».

      The fact that the world of Paleolithic man was much more complex and spiritually richer than we imagined before is evidenced by the extremely developed and specialized industry of stone, and the complex structures of bone-sod houses, and thousands of drilled polished beads, spears and bracelets from mammoth tusks in the burials of Sungir, musical instruments and statuettes of Mezin and much more.

      As noted earlier, already in the Upper Paleolithic we meet with a peculiar contrast between red and white: the whiteness of the bone was contrasted with the rich color of the engraved ornaments worn with red ocher. In the Sungir graves, the bottom was covered with white matter (chalk or lime) and «already over the white layer of the grave, they were thickly covered with bright red ocher».

      The researchers noted that it was the red color that played a huge role in the cult rites and aesthetics of this period. Red dyes were used even in the Mousterian (even before 50 millennium BC), and for a very long time there was a belief that ancient people used only natural dyes. As a result of the research, it was found that by firing ferruginous nodules in different modes in the Upper Paleolithic, red dyes of various shades were obtained. N. D. Praslov notes that «in general, it can be stated that more than 20 thousand years ago primitive people used a wide range of dyes, at least four primary colors: white, ocher, red and black. Red paint is presented in a particularly rich range.» It should be noted that in the textile decor of many peoples of Eurasia, such a traditional combination of red and white survived until the beginning of the 20th century. And this is especially typical for East Slavic ornamentation in general and North Russian, in particular. It is in such a strict and ancient red-and-white color scheme that the ornaments of the «lovely complex of swastika signs in the patterns of the North Russian skilled craftswomen» are made, in which, according to V. A. Gorodtsov, «there is a vivid memory of the most ancient universal (or rather, common Indo-European) symbols. And what a fresh, what a solid memory!» – exclaims the researcher.

      This is not surprising. I. G. Shovkoplyas, who studied the Mezin Upper Paleolithic site, believed that the common ornamental assemblages indicate the kinship of the groups using these assemblages. He believed that the population of Kostenki II on the Don, the Mezinskaya site in the Dnieper region, and the East Siberian sites of Malta and Buret were closely related. He notes that: «the very distant migration of individual groups of the East European Late Paleolithic population, possibly also originating from the Middle Dnieper basin (the Middle Dnieper ethnocultural region), probably should also explain the presence of the sites Malta and Buret in Eastern Siberia, which are extremely close and even identical in many manifestations material and spiritual culture (flint tools, bone products, the nature of dwellings, etc.) with the sites of the Middle Dnieper basin, primarily with the same Mezinskaya. It is not excluded that the inhabitants of the sites of the Mezin culture in the Middle Dnieper basin, on the one hand, and the named Siberian sites, on the other, had a common origin and even constituted for some time one group of the population at an early stage of their history.»

      It should be added that the inventory of the Upper Paleolithic Byzovaya site, located 175 km from the Arctic Circle, 25—29 thousand years away from us, has much in common with the complex of the lower layer Kostenki I, 12 on the Don and belongs to the same time as, according to the conclusions of I. G. Shovkoplyas, it testifies to the genetic relationship of the human collectives