Ancient geography was completely different from modern geography, which is familiar to us in that it certainly included, in addition to real toponymy, speculative, that is, imaginary landmarks. Often, real geography and cartography obeyed these imaginary landmarks, first of all - the mystical "Center of the World" (Mount Meru, the country of Agartha, Shambhala, which was located either to the North or to the East, depending on the political situation). Nevertheless, a modern researcher, relying on the achievements of predecessors, can try to separate the real geographical representations of ancient peoples from the fantastic.
The depth of the people's memory is amazing. Deciphering the meaning of the images of Old Russian folklore takes the researcher into the depths of millennia, in the Neolithic period. In any case, Academician B. A. Rybakov interpreted the fairy tale plot of the mortal battle between the hero and the monster on the "Kalinovy bridge" as an echo of our ancestors' hunting for the mammoth. But folklore recorded not only chronological, but also geographical memory of historical events. Old Russian folklore is characterized by a wide historical outlook. Russian epics recorded the acquaintance of medieval Russians not only with their neighbors - the Horde, Lithuania, Turkey, but also with the Caspian ("Khvalynskoe Sea and the Falcon-ship"), Jerusalem ("Holy Land"), Italy ("Talyan Land"), the Arab East ("Saracen land"). The older the epic plot,the more distant layer of historical geography, he opens. For example, the cycle about Ilya Muromets tells about the struggle of Russia with the Pechenegs and Polovtsians, the story about the brash hero is interpreted as a memory of the collision with the Khazar Kaganate ("The Land of the Zhidov and the hero Zhidovin"), and the tale of the Tsar Maiden is interpreted as a story about the struggle with the Sarmatians ("Maiden Kingdom, Sunflower Kingdom"). And these are just three strata belonging to one geographic region of the Black Sea steppes.belonging to the same geographical region of the Black Sea steppes.belonging to the same geographical region of the Black Sea steppes.
The question arises: how deeply the geographical memory of the ancient Russian folklore tradition extends, and how accurately we can determine the historical and geographical realities from the poetic descriptions that have come down to us. Indeed, very often an ancient poetic plot was included in a new tradition and superimposed on new chronological and geographical realities. So, the old Cossack Ilya Muromets fights with the Polovtsy, then with the Golden Horde, then with Lithuania, or even goes to destroy the rotten Idol in Constantinople. Undoubtedly, the most ancient plots should be recorded in the epics about the "old" heroes: Volkh (Volkhva) Vseslavich, Svyatogora and Mikhailo Potok, who made up the trinity of the heroes of the "pre-Kiev" epic cycle. Later they were replaced by Alyosha Popovich, Ilya Muromets and Dobrynya Nikitich.
The epic about Volkh Vseslavich tells about the conquest of the Indian kingdom. The protagonist, born of witchcraft ("sorcery") and having the gift of werewolves, gathers a squad and goes on a campaign against the Indian kingdom that threatened Russia ("with all the squad bravely went to the glorious Indian kingdom immediately with them on the campaign").
It is immediately evident that neither the Horde nor Lithuania, but distant India is named the enemy of Russia. This may indicate that this story has come down to us in the least distorted form, and describes the resettlement of the Aryan tribes to Aryavata in 1800-1500. BC. This is supported by the too firm geographic reference of the final destination of the campaign, and the fact that Volkh Vseslavich and his retinue settle in the Indian kingdom after the extermination of the local population. However, it should be noted that the second version of the same epic plot is recorded, in which the main character is called not Volkh, but Volga, and the Indian kingdom is replaced by the Turkish land. But this is an example of how an ancient plot is tied to a new enemy and to new historical realities. In the text of the epic about Volga and the "king of Turets-santal" there is an anachronism:the main character, together with the Turkish king, is opposed by Queen Pantalovna, and this name is associated not with Turkey, but with the Pandava dynasty in India.
In the campaign Volkh (Volga) Vseslavich, using his werewolf abilities, puts on shoes, dresses, feeds the squad, conducts reconnaissance against the Indian kingdom and defeats the Indian king. In this case, he resembles another ancient hero - the Greek god Dionysus. Dionysus, according to legend, also made a campaign in India with an army of bacchantes, and miraculously fed his army on the way. However, it should be noted that the image of Volkh is much more archaic than the image of Dionysus. The latter can be considered the ancient "cultural hero" of the primitive farmers, who became the deity of the harvest. Volkh Vseslavich is the image of the god of hunting and fishing. He not only turns into a beast and a bird, but also beats the animals to feed the squad, so that "there is no descent for the wolf and the bear." This observation proves that the plot in question, firstly, is very ancient, and, secondly,has not undergone major alterations. In order to take the Indian kingdom by surprise, the werewolf prince turns his squad into ants. This image also lends itself to interpretation: the troops of the Aryans who invaded India were as innumerable as ants. Having overcome the inaccessible stone wall, which can be interpreted as the image of the Himalayan ridge, ants again turn into people. The army of Volkh Vseslavich exterminates the entire population of the country, leaving only seven thousand red maidens for themselves. But the Aryan settlers behaved in the same way in historical reality, partially exterminating, partially assimilating the local Dravidian population of Northern Hindustan.like ants. Having overcome the inaccessible stone wall, which can be interpreted as the image of the Himalayan ridge, ants again turn into people. The army of Volkh Vseslavich exterminates the entire population of the country, leaving only seven thousand red maidens for themselves. But the Aryan settlers behaved in the same way in historical reality, partially exterminating, partially assimilating the local Dravidian population of Northern Hindustan.like ants. Having overcome the inaccessible stone wall, which can be interpreted as the image of the Himalayan ridge, ants again turn into people. The army of Volkh Vseslavich exterminates the entire population of the country, leaving only seven thousand red maidens for themselves. But the Aryan settlers behaved in the same way in historical reality, partially exterminating, partially assimilating the local Dravidian population of Northern Hindustan.
The question arises, where did Volkh Vseslavich begin his campaign. According to the epic storyline, the werewolf prince begins his campaign from Kiev. This could be explained by the fact that the epic plot was rather artificially tied by the storytellers to the Kiev epic cycle, if not for one "but". After O. Schrader put forward a hypothesis about the origin of Indo-Europeans from the Northern Black Sea region, this idea became quite popular among scientists. A number of domestic archaeologists, for example Yu. A. Shilov and L. S. Klein, argue that the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans should be considered the tribes of the catacomb archaeological culture that lived in the Dnieper region and the Northern Black Sea region. So Volkh Vseslavovich could have been born on the Dnieper, but not during the time of the great Kiev princes, but two and a half - three thousand years earlier. (See Map 1. Scheme of a possible migration route for the Aryans to India.)
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One can make another assumption about the true birthplace of Volkh Vseslavich, associated with the archaic character of this image of a werewolf-hunter. But we will consider it below, in the conclusions of this article.
The epic story about Mikhail Potok (a variant of the nickname Potyk) lacks an exact geographic reference. The country of Tsar Vakhramey Vakhrameich, where the hero Mikhail goes on a diplomatic mission, is at the "dark cortex, black mud." Korba is a hollow overgrown with dense forest, and mud is a swamp; so the kingdom of Wahrameya lies somewhere between rugged woodland and a vast swamp.
True, there is one more indication that allows you to link the plot in question to a real story. These are the motives of snake fighting: Mikhailo Potok follows his deceased wife Marya the White Swan into the underworld, fights there with an underground snake and resurrects Marya. "In gratitude" Marya tries to harass her husband. This allowed the researcher D. M. Balashov to attribute the roots of this plot to the times of the struggle of the Proto-Slavs with the Scythians and Sarmatians, "where the marriage union of the Slavs with the steppe is fraught with the danger of death - absorption of the main character." The Sauromats-Sarmatians originally lived in the Volga region and the southern Urals, but then moved to the steppes of the Black Sea region, displacing their kindred Scythians.
The Sarmatians created a fundamentally new heavily armed cavalry, to which the light Scythian cavalry was forced to yield. This allowed them not only to subjugate the surrounding cattle-breeding tribes, but also the rich Bosporus kingdom, founded by Greek colonists in 480 BC. on the shores of the Kerch Strait (Cimmerian Bosporus). After the arrival of the Sarmatians, the Bosporus kingdom turns into a Greco-Sarmatian state. The sarmatization of the Cimmerian Bosphorus was expressed in the spread of elements of the Sarmatian culture: gray-clay polished ceramics, mirrors of the Sarmatian model, burials according to the Sarmatian rite, with crossed legs. In such a case, it should be assumed that the fairy-tale plot about the Maiden kingdom considered by B. A. Rybakov refers to the Bosporus kingdom of the Sarmatian times. Then Mikhail Potok goes to play "gold tavlei" to the king Vahramey exactly there, in the Bosporan Panticapaeum or in Tanais, where at that time (III century AD) the Sarmatian nobility lived.
Then "black mud" and "dark cortex" get their interpretation. The Bosporan Kingdom occupied the territory of the Kerch Peninsula, the Taman Peninsula, the lower reaches of the Kuban River, the eastern Azov region and the mouth of the Don River. But in ancient times, on the site of the modern Sea of Azov, there was a giant swamp, called the Meotid swamps by the Greeks. At present, Sivash, the Rotten Sea, is left of this swamp. At the time of the Bosporus kingdom, areas of open water pierced by the flow of the Kuban and Don alternated with swamps overgrown with reeds. This is the "black mud", and under the "dark boxes" were called the wooded hollows of the Kerch Peninsula. Mikhaila's future wife, Marya Lebed Belaya, has the gift of shapeshifting, and, turning into a bird, flies "through quiet backwaters, and over the dark green ones along the eaves."This corresponds to the description in the ancient Greek "periplas" - sailing directions - of the western end of the Taman Peninsula. Then in its place there were separate islands - Cimmeria, Phanagoria, Sindica. They were separated from the mainland by the Gipanis delta - the modern Kuban - which in ancient times flowed not only into the Azov Sea, but also into the Black Sea. There were many reed islands and estuaries in the delta. (See Map 2. Northern Black Sea Region during the Bosporus Kingdom.)Northern Black Sea region during the Bosporus kingdom.)Northern Black Sea region during the Bosporus kingdom.)
But the most interesting observations on the historical geography of the Old Russian epic can be made on the example of stories about Svyatogor, the central figure of the ancient epic heroic trinity. It is not for nothing that Svyatogor the hero is the direct predecessor of Ilya Muromets and transfers to him a part of his immense power.
First of all, as is clear from the texts of the epics, Svyatogor was associated with the Caucasus, or, more precisely, with the territory of ancient Armenia and Urartu:
“Here Svyatogor sat on a good horse
And drove across a clear field
He is to those mountains of Ararat …
And he rode along the Holy Mountains, Along the Holy Mountains and Ararat”.
At the same time, Svyatogor is by no means a Russian hero, and in his speech the Holy Mountains are opposed to Holy Russia:
“It is not my duty here to go to Holy Russia
I'm allowed to ride here
Over the mountains and high
Yes, along the thick ones."
The scene of the meeting of two heroes is noteworthy. Having met Ilya of Muromets, Svyatogor finds out: “You are of no land, but you are of a horde,” and learning that Ilya, the “Svyatorus bogatyr,” challenges him to a duel. However, this is not evidence of hostility. Rather, Svyatogor considers only Russian heroes equal to himself. Having listened to the courteous and respectful speech of Ilya Muromets, Svyatogor refuses the duel and suggests: "We will travel with me to the Holy Mountains."
Further, the action of the epic about Svyatogor and Ilya Muromets is transferred from Mount Ararat, that is, from the holy mountains, to Jerusalem, to the holy land:
“And let's go, but not in a clear field
And we drove along the Holy Mountains
Through the holy mountains and Ararat, They rode up to the Mount of Olives."
The Mount of Olives, or the Mount of Olives, the Olive, is located east of Jerusalem, and is separated from the city by the Kidron Valley. She played an important role in the sacred history described in the Bible. It is first mentioned in the story of the flight of King David during the uprising of his son Absalom. Here Jesus Christ prayed for a cup in the Garden of Gethsene. For us, it is important that in the minds of epic storytellers, two places in the biblical history - Ararat and the Mount of Olives - merge into one. It will be shown below that this is not accidental.
It is on the Mount of Olives that Svyatogor lies in wait for his fate:
To the mountains on the Mount of Olives
How is the mulberry oak coffin;
Like heroes from horses spustilisi
They bent to this grave."
Continuation is well known and does not need a detailed retelling … So who is Svyatogor? What ancient people, what state does it represent? We can assume, firstly, that this people is much older than the Slavs, since Ilya Muromets at Svyatogor is in the position of a younger brother; secondly, that we are still talking about the relatives of the Slavs, Indo-Europeans. And the geographical reference to the holy Ararat mountains suggests that Svyatogor may be Van (Kingdom of Van, Viatna is the self-name of Urartu) or Nesit (self-name of the Hittites, after the name of their first capital), since the Hittite state was located next to Ararat, on the Anatolian highlands of Malaya Asia. Both of these states existed in the geographical area described in the epic,had the strength to fight the most powerful powers of their time - Assyria and Egypt and ceased to exist due to the aggression of the wilder nomadic peoples. This is combined with the image of Svyatogor - a useless force trapped in the mountains and killed completely in vain:
He buried Svyatogor and the hero
On that mountain on the Olives.
Yes, here Svyatogora and they sing glory, And give praise to Ilya Muromets."
The following observation of the text of the epic is interesting: the path of Svyatogor and Ilya Muromets from Ararat to the Mount of Olives lies exactly to the south. But it was here, in the region of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, that the Hittites made their campaigns during the era of the New Hittite kingdom (1450-1200 BC). It was here that the battle of Kadesh took place between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1284 BC. And finally, after the collapse of the Hittite state, some groups of the Hittites went south, to the territory of modern Syria, and formed new city-states there, for example, Karchemish. That is why archaeologists of the 19th century for a long time could not find the center of the Hittite civilization: following the instructions of the Bible, they stubbornly searched for it in Northern Syria. So it is not for nothing that the epic Svyatogor finds his death in the Holy Land, near Jerusalem. (See Map 3. Areas of settlement of the Hittites.)
Even the fact that the city of Jerusalem is not mentioned in the epic near Mount Elion is historically justified. At the time of the Hittites and Ramses II, such a city did not yet exist. On Mount Zion stood the fortress of Jebus of the Canaanite Jebusite tribe. This tribe was conquered only by King David, after which he laid Jerusalem.
The epics brought to us another interesting episode about the adventures of Svyatogor, namely, the story of his marriage. The plot begins with the fact that Svyatogor goes to the "Sivernye", that is, the Northern Mountains, where the forge of a wonderful blacksmith forging human destiny stands. It can be assumed that this is an image of the Caucasian ridge, which in relation to Armenia and Anatolia is indeed located in the north. In the historical era under consideration, the Caucasus was the most important center of the metallurgical industry, and the fate of many countries and peoples depended on trade relations with it. The miraculous blacksmith announces to Svyatogor:
“And your bride is in the Pomeranian kingdom, In the throne city
Thirty years lies in the pestilence."
To avoid an unfortunate fate, Svyatogor decides to kill the bride and goes by land to the kingdom of Pomerania, to the throne city. Finding the girl lying in the pus, he stabs her in the chest and pays off the murder, leaving five hundred rubles on the table.
But the girl does not die from a knife blow. On the contrary, after Svyatogor leaves, a miraculous healing occurs to her: the scab falls off the skin. And with the money left by the hero, she begins a large sea trade, quickly becomes rich, builds a fleet, and travels along the Blue Sea to trade in the "great city on the Holy Mountains", where she reunites with her fiancé, Svyatogor.
In this plot, first of all, the parallels with the previously considered plot of the meeting of Svyatogor with Ilya Muromets are striking. Ilya Muromets "sat in sydney" for thirty-three years, the bride of Svyatogor lay "in pus" for thirty years. Both receive miraculous healing. Having met Ilya, Svyatogor first calls him to a duel, and then calls him his younger brother. In the second plot, Svyatogor first decides to stab his betrothed, but then marries her. In both cases, we are dealing with a differently reworked ancient poetic plot, allegorically telling about the conclusion of an alliance between two ancient peoples or states. At the same time, one of them, according to the epic - the younger, is in a deplorable state, and needs military (sword) and economic (money) assistance.
Where is the Pomeranian kingdom located? Svyatogor goes to this place by land from the Northern (Caucasian) mountains. The rich bride, in turn, equips the fleet for the trip to the city of Svyatogor. This gives us reason to assume that both cities are on the same peninsula, with one on the coast and the other close to the coast. It remains to recall which city on the coast of Asia Minor was the center of transit sea trade, suffered from military raids and needed the help of a strong neighbor. So, it should be considered the throne city of the Pomeranian kingdom of Troy-Illion. In the epic, he appears as a rich bride, a mighty groom. In such a fabulous form, information about the conclusion of an alliance treaty between Illion and Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite state, reached us. Isn't the mention of the bride's thirty-year illness an allegory about the long-term siege of Troy?
So, the above is a working hypothesis on the problem of decoding the realities of the historical geography of the Old Russian epic. The presentation is interrupted at the question posed in order to show that it is impossible in a short article to solve all the questions that stand in the way of scientific research. After all, after a resolved issue, a dozen new ones arise. At the same time, you need to think about the conclusions.
Folk epic - epics, legends, legends, fairy tales - contains encrypted information about the events of the distant past. It is only necessary to correctly decipher the poetic images of legends, to understand their meaning and significance. Using the instructions of B. A. Rybakov and D. M. Balashov, the author interpreted the epic story about Mikhail Potok as an exposition of the history of the struggle of the Proto-Slavs with the Bosporus kingdom (the Greco-Sarmatian state), and cited arguments that seemed convincing to him in favor of this point of view. However, the interpretation of the other two plots, the juxtaposition of their main characters with the Aryans, as well as with the Hittites or the Vani, can cause harsh criticism. After all, these are ancient peoples mentioned in the Bible. The question arises - isn't it too bold to find echoes of proto-Indian and Hittite myths in the ancient Russian epic? Is there a manipulation of historical facts?
Any scientific hypothesis put forward needs testing and criticism. The first step in such testing is to try to fit the hypothesis into the context of other scientific research. And here it should be remembered that the famous Russian philologist and linguist R. O. Yakobson came to the conclusion that the poetic rhythms of certain genres of Slavic folklore poetry (epics and laments) are comparable to the common European meters restored when comparing the most archaic forms of Greek verse from which Greek hexameter, with meters of the most ancient hymns of the Rig Veda. And the Czech scholar Berdzhich the Terrible, who deciphered the Hittite (non-Sessian) language, precisely determined the place of the Hittites among other peoples. The Hittite language occupies an intermediate position between the linguistic groups "centum" and "satem" of the Indo-European family,and is related to Latin on the one hand and Slavic on the other. The great scientist even joked about this: "It turns out that the ancient Hittites were our uncles!"
As for the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, scientists have been arguing about this for more than a dozen years. Some believed that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans was India, others found it in Mesopotamia, others in Asia Minor; the fourth inclined to the conclusion that the Balkans are the ancestral home of all Indo-European peoples. Above, we have also considered the hypothesis of the exodus of the Aryans from the Northern Black Sea region.
More than 20 years ago, the Soviet archaeologist G. N. Matyushkin put forward his own assumption that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans may be the territory of the South Caspian Sea and the Zagros ridge. In this case, the scientist relied on the data of a comparative analysis of the distribution of microliths and agriculture in the Neolithic period. (See Map 4. Diagram of the distribution of agriculture and microlithic crops.)
In 1984, a book by linguists T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov was published, claiming that the Indo-European language could have developed in the geographical area around the lakes Van and Urmia. It is west of the Zagros Ridge. For the first time this idea was expressed by TV Gamkrelidze and VV Ivanov in February 1979 in the report “The Ancient East and the Migration of Indo-Europeans” at a conference in memory of Academician VV Struve. If we accept their version, it becomes clear why in the Old Russian epics, the Arians, that is, the Pahari (compare the Old Russian "oratai") move to India under the leadership of a werewolf hunter, and Russian heroes wander through the mountains of Ararat and the Middle East together with the Hittites, who them "dear uncles".
The facts presented in the article show that the ancient Slavic epos contains the memory not only of episodes of the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, but also fragments of memories related to the era of the collapse of the Indo-European community.
A. B. GULARYAN. Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of History of the Oryol Agrarian University