It turns out that the land of the Kama region contains a huge amount of gold and silver things that our ancestors used. This historical heritage belongs to us by right. Who benefits from not knowing anything about this? …
Gold and silver are always a special topic of conversation and rumor. Their attractive power does not lose its influence, after centuries and millennia. It seems that any archaeologist understands how much more valuable the materials collected during excavations are if there are gold and silver things among them, although they often hear from them that any shard is dearer to him than some golden earring. Say, a piece of clay carries invaluable information.
But we still understand that precious finds occupy a special position among the cultural heritage of mankind. Everyone has heard about the gold of the pharaohs, about the Greek and Scythian gold. And who has heard about large collections of magnificent jewelry made in the so-called “Perm animal style”? Why don't these antiquities evoke the same interest, and most importantly, pride in the past of their people?
Because most of the items presented are made of bronze, less often silver. So they lie to us that the Greeks and the Egyptians wore gold, the Scythians learned to hunt with gold, and our northeastern ancestors indulged in copper. But that's not the case at all!
I already wrote in the article "The Ancient Country of Cities in the Kama Region" about the numerous cities in which archaeologists periodically conduct excavations. The participation of the state in this matter is zero. So it was in the middle of the 19th century.
There is an archaeological diary of Alexander Efimovich Teploukhov, who was the chief manager of the Perm estate of the counts. He was not indifferent and tried to stop the plundering of the richest heritage of our region. So, Alexander Efimovich used his own funds to buy up everything found by the peasants in the ancient settlements.
This was a necessary measure, because by that time a business built on the purchase of ancient gold and silver finds from the population had long flourished. In June 1874, Teploukhov wrote in his diary that the merchant P. A. Stepanov from Ilyinsky specially travels to the village. Rozhdestvensk (located on the Obva River, a tributary of the Kama River, - author), in order to buy old things made of silver and gold (obviously, this is only one of many, - author).
He further reports: “The silver things found in the Perm province were brought to Vyatka (the present-day city of Kirov), where, as I. Krivoshchekov said, the Agafonov brothers in another year processed up to 30 pounds of silver and 20 pounds of gold into various images and other things. According to them, the silver things found in the ground, made of good silver, are better than ours, it melts better and turns black less on air. Therefore, the finders of silver items and second-hand dealers take him to Vyatka (RA IIMK, f.48, d.1-2, tetra. V, p. 194).
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320 kg of gold, and 480 kg of silver per year. At today's prices, this is about 300 million rubles in precious metals. And in terms of the historical value of the finds, the amount is generally off scale.
Just think - in the 19th century, within 1 year, only in the areas adjacent to Perm, peasants find and rent almost 1 ton of gold and silver Chud jewelry. I don't think they handed over everything they found. They kept something for themselves, hid something for a rainy day.
The population of the Perm province in the 19th century was about 1 million people. If we statistically distribute what was found by the number of inhabitants, it turns out that within a year everyone found an ancient gold or silver thing weighing about 1 gram. By weight, this is a small ring or earring. According to statistics, every inhabitant, every year.
Why don't we see these countless riches in the expositions of our local history museums? All that we see there is reconstruction of huts, scraps of rusty chains, bone, bronze and iron points and, of course, shards.
There is no gold there. And it shouldn't be! Who will carry the gold to the museum ?!
It is quite clear that you cannot find all the finds in a few years. They appear gradually. Somewhere the slope of the settlement was washed out, somewhere a plow turned a little thing out of the ground. It is clear that both in the 19th century and in our time, these finds happen. And I can understand a simple person who hid the found gold. He was deceived so many times by his native state that it is extremely naive to expect favors in the form of a reward.
Another thing is strange: when archaeologists purposefully dig a pagan burial ground, in which jewelry was necessarily put, and at the same time find several tens of thousands of bronze, iron, bone, clay artifacts, and of gold they describe only 3 (THREE) oh-oh-very small earrings, in the form of coarse bent and flattened wires.
Such a few carelessly crafted gold items, and this with the highest artistic level of bronze finds? Forgive me archaeologists, but this oddity requires an explanation. I personally assume that they, too, do not belong to "naive" people (of course, not all of them, someone described these 3 earrings and handed them over to the collection), because an archaeologist, according to the legislation of the Russian Federation, cannot count on a reward at all.
But it happened and people handed over valuable treasures in the "reliable" hands of the state. In 1851, not far from the village. Rozhdestvensk peasant Ippolit Uzhegov found a treasure of various silver items weighing 5.5 pounds (2.25 kg). Now it is referred to as the Christmas treasure - the Volga sanctuary. The materials of the treasure were received by the Lazarevsky Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow and in 1860 were published by the professor of Kazan University S. V. Eshevsky, but soon the materials of the treasure were stolen from the institute.
Well, how is it, they didn't save it! But among the things found was a silver bar with mysterious signs "similar to Chinese characters." That is why the treasure ended up in the Institute of Oriental Languages. Of course, the Orientalists couldn't read anything. Indeed, judging by the drawings made from the treasure, this is nothing more than a Russian runica, which V. A. Chudinov.
And there was also a "Chudskoy" silver icon! What kind of a miracle is this? It turns out that our pagan ancestors used silver images even earlier than the Greek religion bestowed upon us? Such sedition should not be shown to people! And if the ingot with the runica survived at least in the form of an image (disguised as a Chinese and survived), then I did not find the image of the image. But from this treasure every find was carefully sketched.
This is not an isolated incident. So, for example, in the 60s, right in the central part of the city of Izhevsk, excavations were carried out in which 211 burials were opened earlier in the 4th … 5th centuries. Of course, there can be no talk of any gold, but a copper coin was found. This is the tetrassarium of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Alexander Severus. According to archaeologists, this coin was an indisputable evidence of the developed trade relations of our ancestors already at that time.
It was stolen directly from the exhibition in 1963. Traces of her have not yet been found. We have no right even for such a "copper" heritage.
And something strange is going on right now. During the reconstruction of the Izhevsk embankment in 2008, at the suggestion of the President of Udmurtia A. A. Volkov, bulldozed the entire cultural layer of the historical part of the city. At the same time, the workers discovered a large treasure with silver coins.
The workers were not “naive” people either, and it took some time to find out about the find. But, the Chekists are not asleep. The intruders were declassified and the treasure was taken away. The local media once crowed about the find and fell silent forever. 2 years have passed since that time, but the expositions of our local history museum have not been replenished at all. The same bone picks and rusty iron fragments. Look for fistulas now for our Izhevsk silver.
The list of atrocities committed against the memory of our ancestors can be continued, however, and so it is clear that you and I are carefully "wiped off" from everything that is in the slightest degree valuable and significant.
But we'll find out soon enough. And although our gold-silver is, there is a lot of it, and it is very valuable, it is not the main heritage of our ancestors. The main thing that remains of them is that we are.
Let us be worthy of the ancient tillers who mastered these northern lands of risky farming thousands of years ago; skillful artisans, whose metallurgy and metalworking were very little different from today's level of development; honest merchants who deployed huge branched trade communications to the most remote corners of our region a thousand years ago; and many, many others.
Alexey Artemiev