Everyone has heard of the Polovtsian stone women and idols of Easter Island. Ingushetia has its own statues depicting men and women. But where is the portrait of a gorilla among them - remains a mystery.
In the Caucasus, there are many man-made stone structures, the purpose of which has not yet been precisely determined and causes controversy among scientists. It is enough to remember dolmens and cyclopean buildings. The anthropomorphic stone statues preserved in the mountainous Ingushetia are the same mystery. They have a tradition rooted in history, when people worshiped stone, considering it the most durable material on earth and endowing it with magical powers.
Stone faces of Ingushetia
These monuments are massive steles from 1 to 3 meters high with bas-relief images of human faces. Today they can be found in the area of medieval tower complexes Barakh, Myashkhi, Ankyt, Heirakh. Scientists attribute them to the late Middle Ages - to the XV-XVII centuries.
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By the way, in Ingushetia there are other monuments of architecture that depict human faces. For example, a residential tower with a man's physiognomy on the facade in the Pyaling tower complex in the Dzheyrakh region, or silings - pillar-like sanctuaries in the neighboring Niy tower complex, into which a bas-relief with a male face is mounted. They all have different features and expressions.
One of the anthropomorphic steles was recorded in the village of Furtoug in the Dzheyrakh region at the beginning of the 20th century. She was taken to the museum, after which she disappeared without a trace. Many of these monuments have remained completely out of sight of scientists who have studied architectural complexes for one simple reason: the stelae are usually located outside the village and from afar it is easy to confuse them with ordinary stone pillars, which are found in great abundance on the territory of mountainous Ingushetia.
And only a few years ago the staff of the E. I. In the course of field work, Krupnov discovered statues and steles that are very interesting from the point of view of science.
Strange couple
Perhaps, two of the strangest steles were found by archaeologists in the vicinity of the village of Myashkhi in the Dzheyrakh region. They are next to each other, and one of them clearly depicts a woman in a high cap. Perhaps the ancient sculptor depicted a medieval Ingush female headdress - kur-khas, which was mentioned in the 17th century by Russian ambassadors traveling to Georgia through the Ingush lands: “And women wear them on their heads … that their horns are half an arshin upward”.
The second stele is one of a kind. Perhaps she depicts the wife of a woman in kur-khas. The stone portrait reminds someone of a gorilla, someone of a bear, but this is not at all an oversight of the artist. The expressive features of the stone muzzle indicate that a talented master worked on the stele, although, perhaps, this is his only work in such an animalistic genre.
Whom did he portray? There is no information about the gorilla in Ingush folklore. But, perhaps, the stele is associated with a master for the manufacture of damask blades, who stamped them with the image of the so-called "howling" or "roaring" monkey. These blades were quite popular in the Caucasus until the beginning of the twentieth century, among the Ingush they are known under the name "Turs-meimal", which translates as "monkey damask blade" or "damask blade of a monkey".
An interesting legend has survived about the bear. Once a bear dragged a young girl out of the village and married her. They had a son - a human cub named Chaitong, which translates as "bear cub". After many adventures, Chaitong married a beautiful girl and began to live with her among the people. Maybe people erected these stone monuments in honor of this bear and his wife? Ingush archaeologists are at a loss to guess. According to them, this stele has no analogues either in Ingushetia or in the entire North Caucasus.
Search for destination
The purpose of these steles also remains a mystery. These were hardly objects of worship. All sacred temples, temples and meadows, where religious rites took place, are usually located on heights. But stone steles do not have such patterns in their arrangement: they were installed in different places - both on the hills and in the lowlands.
The paired statue, depicting a man and a woman, suggests gravestones. The fact is that in the 20th century, in Muslim Ingush cemeteries, almost two identical monuments (churts) were often erected for deceased spouses, on which female and male figures with a head (but without images of faces), garments and jewelry of a man and a woman were clearly drawn. This tradition tells us that the man and woman depicted on medieval stone steles are spouses. But there is one "but". In the late Middle Ages, no tombstones were erected, the dead were placed in crypts, each family had a family crypt.
Perhaps the stone menhirs are cenotaphs, symbolic graves of those who died in a foreign land and whose bodies could not be laid to rest in the family tomb.
Another version connects the Ingush steles with the so-called stone women, found throughout the territory where the Scythians once lived. Archaeologists suggest that they depicted deceased ancestors who were present in such a stone form at ritual feasts. But dating speaks against this version: Scythian idols appeared before our era, and Ingush steles - in the Middle Ages.
Whether they were mythical patrons or guardians of settlements, images of enemies or monuments to master gunsmiths - none of the proposed versions has been proven. This mystery, left to us by our ancestors, requires further study and analysis.
Author: Tanzila Dzaurova