It is drawn in the genre of a production novel, contains 260 characters and 60 inscriptions.
Comics are a story in pictures where the direct speech of the characters is transmitted in the form of a word bubble. People learned to draw a long time ago - the first pictures, 40 thousand years old, were found in the caves of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Local craftsmen have captured the imprint of their own palm for history by spraying paint around it through a straw. It took humanity about 38 thousand more years to combine pictures with signatures. This delay is partly due to quite objective circumstances - after all, before drawing comics, it was necessary to come up with writing.
It seems that this brilliant idea first came to minds of people who lived 2000 years ago in the territory of modern Jordan. Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient tomb located on the site of the city of the Capitol. It was founded at the end of the first century AD and was part of the Decapolis - the union of 10 Greek cities that were under the protectorate of the Roman Empire.
The walls of the burial chamber were decorated with frescoes depicting people, animals and gods. In total, "funny pictures" contain images of a total of 260 characters and 60 figure captions. Characteristically, the cosmopolitanism of the region, where Roman and Greek culture collided with the local mentality, was reflected in the verbal bubbles. The signatures are in Greek letters in Aramaic. In those days, it was the most common language in the Middle East, it was spoken by Jesus Christ and his apostles. By the way, the Gospel of Mark mentions the journey of Christ to the Decapolis, but the Capitol was not built at that time. Actually, most of the drawings are devoted to the construction of this city. We can say that we are dealing with a comic strip on a production theme.
“In the drawings, we see characters resembling architects or foremen, as well as workers who transport construction materials on the backs of camels or donkeys,” says archaeologist Julien Aliquot from the Laboratory for the Study of the History of the Ancient World (France). - The captions explain what these characters are doing. “I'm cutting stone,” says the stonecutter. “Alas for me. I died! - reads the signature to the figurine of a bricklayer who falls from the fortress wall (probably, the drawing describes an industrial accident - Ed). Not all captions for pictures have been deciphered yet, but it is clear that we are dealing with an extraordinary phenomenon. We have never encountered such a genre before.
Comics, of course, are not from the category of "laughing". However, it is worth making allowances for innovation. If you watch the first film of the Lumière brothers, The Arrival of the Train, you will hardly find anything mesmerizing about it. However, he made an indelible impression on his contemporaries.
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV
