One of the greatest historical and geographical mysteries of Siberia is that the right bank of the Ob is named Lukomorye on old maps created "before Yermak". This word is undoubtedly Russian and means a bend of the sea coast. Since the sea in these parts is not visible, the question arises how this name got to the West Siberian land. The answer, apparently, is that it was brought by Russian people who used to live on the seashore, and then for some reason moved to Siberia. Where did they come from?
Scientists were divided on this issue. TSU professor A. M. Maloletko, based on the works of prof. TSU G. I. Pelikh, claims that the Russians came to Siberia from the shores of the warm southern sea. They called themselves "Samaras" because they lived on the Samara River. Samara belonged to an ethnic community called "Pajo". The reason for the resettlement was the "terrible wars" that began in the old homeland 10 generations before Yermak. If we count 25 years for one generation, we are talking about the Batu invasion.
Lukomorye Samara was called the bend of the Irtysh in the estuary part, where they settled after resettlement.
Ethnographer G. I. Pelikh identified two layers of Russian old-timers in Siberia. One layer is those pioneers who came with Ermak and later. Another, more ancient layer, is the Russian people who lived in Siberia long before Yermak. The first were called "Kasak" by the Selkups and were disliked for their arrogance and oppression. The latter they called "pajo" and treated them with great respect, respecting them primarily for justice and equality in relationships.
Without disputing the opinion of Pelikh and Maloletko, your humble servant expressed the version that along with this migration from the west, there could have been an earlier resettlement of Russians to Western Siberia from the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Let's start with the fact that in the 9-10th centuries the third (according to the Arab account) Russia was known to the Arab scholars. They called it Artania, and the capital was called the city of Artu, or Arsu. Arta means "truth" in Iranian, from which it can be assumed that Artania was the legendary land of Truth, where truth was prayed to as a deity. So, on G. Sanson's map (1688), the city of Arsa is shown just south of the Golden Lake, from which the Ob River flows. Consequently, the Russian kingdom existed in Siberia at least half a millennium before the Samarans migrated to the Irtysh. Chinese authors, according to the Russian orientalist N. V. Kuhner, traditionally believe that the closest neighbors of China even before the birth of Christ were precisely the ancestors of the Russian people. The Chinese emphasized their typically Caucasian features and called them Usuns, Dinlins, Jurchens. Bichurin points outthat the latter were also called "nuichzhi" and the modern Yakuts call the Russians the same word "nuuchi".
Apparently, it was precisely this Siberian Rus that the famous 11th century cartographer al-Idrisi had in mind, describing it under the name “Rusia-Türk”. By the way, on old maps the territory near Lake Teletskoye is called Samaria. Should we be surprised that only Russian place names appear in the west of Altai?
The resettlement of our distant ancestors from the shores of the Arctic Ocean to South Siberia took place, apparently, with the division of the people. One part (those who are younger) embarked on a long and dangerous journey, the other part, represented by the elderly and old people, remained in place. Both those and others called their country Lukomorye. The Arctic Lukomorye, otherwise called Belovodye, is, in fact, a common ancestral home for the Eurasians, in which the then inhabitants lived according to Truth. Memories of the Golden Age in the Ancestral Homeland were preserved by the ancient Sumerians, ancient Greeks, Indo-Aryans, Iranians, Germans and Slavs.
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By the way, the Tomsk ethnographer Alexander Loktyushin, considered it possible to derive the word lukomorye from Sanskrit as “localization of the dead”, “land of ancestors”, “ancestral home”, finally. Hence, the Tomsk Lukomorye is a secondary ancestral home, where localization and accumulation of immigrants from the primary ancestral home took place before being thrown into the steppe.
The Russian people who remained in the arctic ancestral home repeatedly reminded of themselves. So, in 583, the Avar Khakan sent to the Russians for help in his war with Byzantium. The elders refused to help, citing their very distant residence. The refusal was brought to the Khakan by ambassadors - three young people. He, taking offense at the Rus, began to obstruct the ambassadors in returning to their homeland, and then they fled, but were captured by the Byzantine emperor. It was not difficult to capture them, since they walked unarmed, carrying only the gusli. When the emperor asked where they came from, the ambassadors replied that their people lived on the shores of the Western Ocean, and that they went to the theater of war for 15 months (Theophylact of Simmokata) or 18 months (Theophanes of Syria).
If we turn the months of travel into distance, we get about 7.5 thousand "along a curve", and in a straight line it will be five thousand kilometers. A circle with this radius will cross the ocean shores in the area of Cape Chelyuskin. Strange coincidence, but Arab geographers called the Kara Sea the Western Ocean or the Slavic Sea.
In 1043, warriors from the islands of the Arctic Ocean, undoubtedly the descendants of those Rus who refused to the Avar Khakan, took part in the campaign against Byzantium of the Novgorod prince Vladimir. Later, due to the Horde enslavement, the connection with the “island Rus” was lost, so that after four hundred years it could be restored again.
The written report to Pope Innocent 8 of the disgraced Philip Kallimach from Poland contained super sensational news: around 1492 the Russians discovered a large polar island inhabited by the Slavs. The island was larger than Crete and was named Phillopodia. N. Witsen and F. Stralenberg in their writings mentioned cases of Russian people coming to Novaya Mangazeya from some Arctic island located east of the mouth of the Yenisei.
Returning to the South Siberian Lukomorye, it is necessary to emphasize the abundance of Russian toponyms here: the river Kiya, the village of Chumai on it, p. Karacharovo, s. Zlatogorka, Boyary ridge in the Western Sayan, Shuiskaya land on the right bank of the Yenisei in the north of the Minusinsk depression, r. Poros near Tomsk. If the Poros River flowed not into the Tom, but into the Dnieper somewhere near Kiev, historians would unequivocally declare that the Russian land came from here. And we have not only that Poros almost flows into the Kia, practically on this river before the arrival of the Cossacks "Tatars and Russians lived together."
Archaeological evidence of the residence of the Russian people in the Tomsk Ob region "before Yermak" is also available. In 1999, the Tomsk archaeologist L. M. Pletnev, digging mounds on the river. Tugoyakovka, noted a striking feature. Actually, there were no burials in any of the opened mounds, all of them were cenotaphs. Under each mound there were areas burned with calcinations and treated with ocher, but there were no dead. But it is precisely such a burial ceremony among the Slavs that Arab authors of the eighth-tenth centuries described. The deceased was burned at the stake, ashes and ashes were collected in a jug and placed under a tree, the relatives of the deceased poured a mound and feasted on it, using 10-20 barrels of honey inside. The impression is that Lyudmila Mikhailovna in 1999 dug just such mounds.
In 1978, she also dug a Russian settlement near the Kolarovsky burial mound. Here, "stone masonry" and Russian pottery ceramics were discovered. “The remains of such structures have been recorded for 400-500 m in length and 300 m in width,” that is, it is a rather large object. “Residents of the village. This place is called Kolarovo Severe, but there is no information about the origin and history of this monument”. The lack of information about a large Russian village in the vicinity of Tomsk is very surprising, since the history of all the settlements in the Tomsk is restored to the "capture" and the name of its owner. It remains to think that Surovo was a Russian pre-Ermak settlement.
Now tell me, isn't the above material a highlight for the Tomsk anniversary? Tomsk returns to Russia its own Siberian history, convincingly showing that not only Russian power, but the very history of Russia is growing by Siberia.
Birsk urban civilization
What was Siberian Russia like? Was this state developed or backward, in huts made of twigs, or did Russian Siberians live in cities? What cities, you ask, are we talking about? They are mentioned in numerous Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Germanic, Byzantine and Russian sources. Descriptions of both flourishing and destroyed ancient Siberian cities "before Yermak" can be found in authors such as Takhir Marvazi, Salam at-Tarjuman, Ibn Khordadbeh, Tran Chun, Marco Polo, Rashid-ad-Din, Snorri Sturlusson, Abul-Gazi, Sigismund Herberstein, Milescu Spafari, Nikolai Witsen. An outstanding source in this regard is the medieval Western European atlases and maps depicting the territory of Siberia: Fra Mauro's map (1459), Abraham Ortelius's atlas (1570), Gerard Mercator's maps (1585, 1595), I. Gondius (1606), J. Cantelli (1683), G. Sanson (1688) and many other cartographers.
The following names of the disappeared Siberian cities have come down to us: Inanch (Inandzh), Kary-Sairam, Karakorum (Sarkuni), Alafkhin (Alakchin), Kemidzhket, Khakan Khirkhir, Darand Khirkhir, Nashran Khirkhir, Ordu-balyk, Kamkamchut, Apruchian, Chinhai,, Eli, Arsa, Sahadrug, Ika, Kikas, Kambalyk, Grustina, Serponov, Kossin, Terom. In fact, the sources speak of hundreds of cities, including those located on the Siberian coast of the Arctic Ocean. I could not make out the names of six cities on the right bank of the Ob River between the mouths of the Tym and Vakh on a fragment of the map by J. Cantelli.
The sizes of some cities and their age are amazing: from 5 to 30 km in diameter, from 22 to hundreds of kilometers around the perimeter, in the walls from 12 to 40 gates. Accordingly, the population of these cities was crowded. In Kambalyk, there were 25 thousand prostitutes alone. For comparison, in London with four million inhabitants, according to the 1878 census, 24 thousand representatives of the most ancient profession worked honestly. As for the age of Kambalyk, in 1300, sofa books were kept in it for five thousand years, therefore, in 3700 BC. this city was already so large that sofas existed in it - in modern terms - ministries.
The cities were connected by roads equipped with post stations. Trees were planted along the roads every two meters. Bridges were thrown across the rivers. The rivers were connected by navigable canals. The mouths of many tributaries were blocked by dams with the formation of large artificial water areas. These waters near Grustina and Kambalyk are perfectly visible on medieval maps. Vessels were thrown over dams using winch hoists.
The localization of most of the cities mentioned is very approximate and, therefore, controversial. However, the location of some is more accurate.