The Scythians worshiped their idols, stone women, as they considered them to be deities connecting the underworld with the heavenly. The female deity in Scythian culture is the Great Mother Goddess, who is reborn from the earth, like the Greek Persephone, and gives birth to new life. Take a closer look at the stone Scythian woman, she carefully keeps the secret of eternal life, folding her hands on her stomach, holding the container of the fruit.
Common images in the ancient temple of Gebekli Tepe in Southeastern Anatolia on the Armenian Highlands, near the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
The Scythian burial mound is a complex burial structure, which embodied the ideas of the Scythians about the structure of the world, consisting of the underworld, the earthly and heavenly worlds.
The underground, or other world, is the grave itself, a tomb arranged in an underground stone house, filled with many gold jewelry, ritual gifts, utensils, amphorae with wine and food, sacrificial animals, servants sent to the other world together with the deceased king.
The high mound mound represents the Earthly world, a memorial meal was arranged on the mound, and its remains were buried here.
The stone woman installed on the top of the Scythian mound is a deity of the heavenly world, a symbol of the eternity of life and the great mystery of birth.
In the Black Sea steppes, you can still find many mounds and stone idols guarding the peace of the Scythian mounds and guarding the gold of the Scythians.
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Monuments of the Kemi-Obinsk and Yamnaya archaeological culture of the Copper-Bronze Age were found by archaeologists in the Crimea and the northern Black Sea region (carriers of Haplogroup R1a are a genetic marker of the Russian people). Namely, the earliest stone Idols are found here. Along with the migration of tribes from the Black Sea region, the culture of establishing and worshiping stone Idols also spread - their path is depicted on the map "The Stelae People". The path of distribution of stone idols lay along the shores of the Black Sea, and went to the territory of Thrace, then to Venice (the language of Venedo), Liguria, Etruria, Corsica, and on the island of Sardinia, stone idols appeared in the pre-Roman era.
The father of "History" Herodotus in Book IV, Melpomene (IV, 59.) writes that the supreme deity of the Scythians "is called Papai" - a formidable idol crowning the rod of the Scythian kings. The name Papay comes from the name of his progenitor, the goddess of earth and fertility - Api - the Scythian Mother goddess who keeps the great secret of procreation.
Many gold jewelry of the Scythian-Siberian world, found in the mounds, often depicted formidable griffins attacking people and tearing horses apart. Fantastic creatures winged griffins, with the body and claws of a lion, the wings and beak of an eagle, personify the power of royal power and the divine protection of eternal life.
Burial of GRAIN in a miniature sarcophagus. Ancient Egypt.
Where is the secret of eternal life?
If you cut a grain of wheat and examine it under a microscope, you can see eight thin layers, shells, covering the embryo of the grain, from which in the spring a green sprout will break through to life. A green young sprout is born from a grain embryo in the spring, turning into an ear, into a LIFE, into a new Life. Precisely, there, in a grain wrapped in eight covers, as in the womb of the Mother, LIFE is kept!
The burial ritual of the Egyptian pharaoh embodied this mystery of the continuation and rebirth of life from the germ of the grain.
We find confirmation that the initial idea of a person's rebirth after death to a new life was, namely, the grain of wheat, rye or barley, in the ceremonial burial of grain in a miniature sarcophagus found in Egypt.
The mummified body of the Egyptian pharaoh, like an embryo of grain, was covered with seven sarcophagi, the eighth cover was the pyramid itself, like an egg shell, protecting the embryo of new life. The body of the Egyptian pharaoh was left in the afterlife under the cover of the pyramid until the time of his mysterious rebirth to a new life, to a new birth.
The children of the "original" ancient Greek gods of the titans Uranus and Gaia were the god Cronus (ancient Greek Κρόνος), who reigned in the Cosmos, and the Great Mother of the gods Rhea (Greek α, ΄Ρεία, Κυβέλη - Cybele) - the goddess of Earth and fertility. In the Cretan-Mycenaean texts, there is an inscription: te-i-ja ma-te-re (“te-i-e ma-te-re” - “that is, the Mother of the gods”)
The etymology of the name Kronos comes from * Kranao - "cut off, reap", hence the word kranos (grano) - grain, that is, Kronos - god "sower and gatherer of the harvest."
Nevertheless, not scientific, but folk etymology brought the god Crohn closer to Chronos (ancient Greek Χρόνος, from χρόνος - time) - the god of Time, the gatherer of the harvest of the time of human life. The Etruscan god Harun is close to the image of Chronos (Etruscan Harun; later Harun; lat. Charun - Charun, Karun), whose attribute was a two-sided ritual ax - labrys. Chronos measured the time of human life, and cut the thread of life with a sickle, like the Etruscan Harun - with a labrys.
The attribute of the god Cronus was a sickle, since by nature the god Cronus, like the Etruscan god Satre - the "sower", the "savior", are the "reapers" of human souls, the harvesters who sum up the life path of each person. The Romans borrowed the god Satra from the Etruscans, calling him Saturn.
According to legend, the seed of the god Cronus was hidden, like in a casket, in a silver egg in the cache of Time, from his seed came the Earth and the generation of the first gods living on Olympus. Perhaps the keeper of the divine seed was a stone egg - Omphal (ancient Greek ὀμφαλός - navel), kept in the archaeological museum in Delphi.
"Golden Woman" Hyperboreans
In the "History" of Herodotus, you can read that behind the distant Ripean (Ural) mountains, there is "the damned part of the world where it constantly snows", there are nerves that can turn into wolves, warlike Amazons, "one-eyed men - Arimasps" (Greek. Αριμασποι), possessing innumerable treasures and "vultures guarding gold, and even higher behind them, by the very sea - Hyperboreans", who do not know death.
Arkaim's finds.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus learned about the Arimasp tribe from the Scythian Aristeus. (IV, 27), who composed "his epic poem, which is now called by the Hellenes" The Epic of the Arimasps. "(Herodotus IV 13, 14, 27;)
Repeating after the Scythians, Herodotus says that the one-eyed "Arimasps" living in the north, where "there is an unbearable cold for eight months," and nothing is visible because of the "feathers flying from the sky", of course, it is heavy snow, because, "K to the north of the Scythian land there are constant snowfalls”.
Perhaps the Arimasps, about whom Herodotus spoke two and a half thousand years ago, were the keepers of the Golden Woman. In Scythian, the word “arimasp” is translated as: “arima” is a unit, and “spu” is an eye. It can be assumed that the ancient Greeks called this tribe the Arimasps (one-eyed) because the Arimasps "slept with their eyes open," that is, they were always on the alert, guarding their golden treasures.
For a thousand years, there have been legends about the untold treasures of Hyperborea, about the inaccessible Ripean mountains, where a colossal statue of the Golden Woman is hidden in the snowy northern abyss - an idol made of pure gold, and the Arimasps guarding it, living next to the Hyperboreans.
Golden woman near Lukomorye.
For the first time, the Golden Woman is directly mentioned in the Russian chronicle of 1398.
In 1549, the Austrian diplomat Baron Sigismund Herberstein wrote a detailed essay about Muscovy "Notes on Muscovite affairs", where he says that "Zlata Baba is an idol located at the mouth of the Ob in the Obdore region on a farther bank …"
For a long time, there were legends among the people that in the forests beyond Vyatka and Perm, in the upper reaches of the Kama River, the Golden Woman, revered by local tribes, was really kept. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, the land beyond Vyatka and Perm, in the upper reaches of the Kama River, was called Viarmia, possibly the land of the Aryans.
A hundred years ago, our ethnographers began a systematic study of the territories of the Urals and Trans-Urals. Talking with old-timers, they found in human memory the traces of the Golden Woman, which is called Mu-Kylchin here. (apparently, the sound "mu" reproduces her howl, scream, "kylchin", similar to the word "shouts")
Old-timers said that no one saw the Golden Woman because it was impossible to approach her, she made a terrible groaning howl, a continuous sound, like a trumpet sound, perhaps the wind was howling in her. Hearing this howl, the traveler falls, he cannot go further, with trembling hands he leaves his gifts on the ground and leaves. These donations will then be taken away by the hereditary guardians of the shrine, gloomy, like dumb monks in strange red robes. This tradition has remained in Buddhism.
The local miracle, the keepers of the shrine, is guarding the Golden Woman. (Chud and Kudesnik, miracles and kudesa are the same root words).
The first Golden Baba of the Arimaspians might not have been big at all. Accumulating gold, the Arimasps, like the Scythians, could turn the entire gold reserve into sacred, cult objects, for example, into royal jewelry (pectorals), into statues of gods and goddesses.
When the gold reserve increased, the Arimasps could make a shell from the new metal for the old statuette of their golden deity, thus increasing its size. Gold was alloyed with gold, like combined with like and kept inside a small semblance of a large idol. That's when the first matryoshka appeared!
Many ancient peoples had legends that small children are hidden in the body of every woman, and even smaller children are hidden in girls who have not yet been born themselves, and so on endlessly.
Such a hypothesis in science is called "preformism" (from Lat. Praeformo - pre-form, pre-form), this is the doctrine of the presence in the germ cells of organisms of material structures that predetermine the development of the embryo and the signs of a newborn organism formed from it.
This secret of birth gave rise to the legends that a son is kept inside the Golden Woman, a grandson is inside a son, a great-grandson is inside a grandson, and so on. The golden woman personified the greatest secret of nature - the secret of procreation.
This is the oldest genius prototype of our Russian matryoshka!
Loparev Khrisanf Methodievich, ethnographer, Byzantine scholar and researcher of Old Russian literature, wrote that the Guardians carried the Golden Woman beyond the Urals, hiding her in a cave near the Denezhkin Mountain at the source of the Sosva River, then through the swamps of the Kontsy and Yukonda River, she was transferred to the Ob, where the Golden Woman stood by White mountains, where the Ob merges with the Irtysh.
Another ethnographer, traveler, explorer of the north, Konstantin Dmitrievich Nosilov (1858-1923), questioned the decrepit old Mansi in the upper reaches of the Konda about the secrets of the Golden Woman; the old Mansi was the Keeper of a small silver casting from her.
Perhaps it was the oldest, the first interior of a composite statue. The old Mansi said that once a young Mansi named Senka stole a silver casting from him, sold it to his ass and the old Mansi collected ten of the best sables to buy it back. Since then, the old Mansi does not show her to anyone and where she is now unknown!
Egg - the source of life, the winged griffin keeps in a casket (Lari). Sumerians and Mayans.
The idea of Eternal Life, hidden and preserved in the EGG, existed long before the appearance of Christianity in Russia - this idea is a thousand years old! In ancient Russian folk tales before Christian Russia, we find evidence of an egg hidden under the SEVEN covers, which contains the Life of Koshchei the Immortal.
The researcher of the ancient Russian epic Alexander Nikolaevich Afanasyev wrote: “… Koshchei's death is hidden far away: on the sea on the ocean, on the island on Buyan there is a green oak, under that oak there is an iron chest, in that chest there is a hare, a duck in a hare, an egg in a duck; one has only to crush an egg - and Koschey instantly dies."
Phoenician egg with winged griffins - 625-600 BC from an Etruscan tomb.
Since ancient times, detachable wooden products have been very popular in Russian folk crafts; the well-known wooden detachable gifts for Easter are Easter eggs. Probably, the master who carved the first matryoshka remembered and knew Russian folk tales well - in Russia, fairy images were often projected onto real life.
In the ancient Russian culture, the tradition of making, namely, seven nesting dolls, hidden in one, has been preserved.
The great secret of nature - the secret of procreation, is personified by the Russian matryoshka. In Russia, the matryoshka was a good symbol of fertility, alternation of generations, wealth and good luck, and the smallest matryoshka was the very symbol of the "embryo of living grain."
Where did the idea of creating a TOY matryoshka come from?
The Russian matryoshka toy appeared around 1899; it was made, manufactured by the turner V. P. Zvezdochkin in Mamontov's Children's Education workshop, and painted by the artist S. V. Malyutin. At the World Exhibition in Paris in April 1900, the Russian nesting doll received a bronze medal.
It is believed that the prototype of the Russian nesting doll was the figurine of the god of learning and wisdom Fukuruma, inside which four more Japanese deities were kept, and not seven, as in Matryoshka.
It is believed that the Japanese wooden doll was borrowed from the ancient Indian epic about the sage Daruma (Skt. Bodhidharma) in the 5th century, who moved to China and Japan. The one-eyed cave recluse Daruma called for the comprehension of the truth through silent contemplation, his legs were taken away from immobility and he turned into a tumbler doll.