In one of the versions of the "Tsar's Titular" of the 17th century … an elephant was depicted on the coat of arms of the Perm land. How did this large animal that lived in southern countries get into the mythology of the northern peoples, and then into heraldry?
The victory of Christianity over the world of paganism
In 1672, the famous manuscript "Book, and in it a collection, from where the root of the great sovereigns, tsars and grand dukes of Russia comes from …", better known today as "The Tsar's Titular", was published. Its creators were the best masters of the Armory Chamber and the Ambassadorial Prikaz, from the archive of which the materials included in the book were drawn. A significant part of the illustrations used in the "Titular" are images of the coats of arms of the Russian lands and subordinate territories, the names of which were included in the title of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, who also had the title "Perm".
The royal heraldists chose the image of a polar bear with the Gospel and a cross placed on its back as the symbol of the Perm land. Thus, both the general idea of the victory of Christianity over the world of paganism and the specific flavor of purely local life, inextricably linked with the legends of the northern peoples about the sacred power of the bear, a descendant of the supreme deity En, were visibly embodied.
There was another version of the royal "coat of arms"
But information about the existence of another version of the tsarist "coat of arms" has reached our time. It has not survived in any form, but the images borrowed from it were used in 1691 when decorating the banners of one of the Moscow rifle regiments. By the will of fate, these banners became a trophy of the Swedish army during the Great Northern War (1700-1725) and are now kept in the storerooms of the Stockholm Army Museum.
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On the banner of the Strelets regiment - a mammoth
Among the territorial coats of arms presented on the banners, special attention is drawn to the image, above which the title "Great Permian" is placed. We are presented with a peculiar, but very realistic image of an elephant. A cross rises above the head of the "beast". Obviously, the creator of the image strove to convey the same conceptual idea that formed the basis of the Perm coat of arms from the "Tsar's titular", but he chose a completely different zoomorphic symbol as the personification of the pagan world, in which the "mammoth" that played in the mythology of the northern peoples is guessed only by intuition. as prominent a role as the bear.
"Mammoth bone", or rather, fossil tusks, have been known in Russia since ancient times. However, we can only speculate about what initial data allowed the Moscow artist of the 17th century to directly associate the appearance of an animal that did not exist in reality with the image of an exotic, but nevertheless known in Muscovy, large mammal that lived in southern countries. The artist, apparently, deliberately did not indicate either a tail or tusks in his drawing, but at the same time endowed his "elephant" with an underlined malicious look. This revealed a certain individual creative intention, possibly due to the desire to give the created image a less natural look, different from the elephant's.
We find an indirect hint in the search for an answer to the questions posed in the message of Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo, who was in Moscow in 1656 and witnessed the conversation between Patriarch Nikon and representatives of the northern tribes subject to the Russian Tsar. Answering the questions of the patriarch, the "dog-heads", as the Greeks called them, told in detail about their way of life and about their traditions of "worshiping". Unfortunately, most of the details of this conversation are unknown, but it can be assumed that during it some ritual objects were demonstrated that contained images of sacred animals.
In 1897, the famous ethnographer V. G. Bogoraz, who found near one of the remote settlements, in a long-abandoned barn, a Yukagir shaman tablet of a rectangular shape with images of various animals. It was divided into two halves, painted in different colors - black and red. In the dark part of the tablet, apparently personifying the otherworldly underworld, an image of a large four-legged creature was placed, from the head of which zigzag branches extended, more reminiscent of a trunk, although the aborigines, whom the scientist turned to, claimed that these were horns, meaning tusks-fangs protruding out of the mouth. Bogoraz himself was sure that the image conveyed the appearance of a mammoth.
The Ambassadorial Prikaz chose a traditional image
It is well known that the primitivist features of the traditional art of the peoples of the North have their roots in ancient times, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the 17th century such images were transmitted by similar artistic techniques. In the Moscow state, the Ambassadorial Order was usually in charge of organizing meetings of the highest persons with ambassadors of foreign states, as well as delegations from various foreign tribes. Therefore, in his archive, sketches of images presented to Patriarch Nikon could have been deposited, which, as we believe, were in demand when developing one of the versions of the Perm coat of arms for the Tsar's Titular. However, in the final choice of the image, it was decided to use the image of a bear, which is more understandable in its semantics, which has also been preserved in modern territorial heraldry.
The reasons for the selection of images from the unapproved version of the "coat of arms" for the decoration of the streltsy banners are not completely clear. It is possible that, contrary to the existing practice, the master-painter who executed the order was not given detailed instructions that concretize the content of the developed composition, and he, at his discretion, used the working sketches that were stored in the archive of the Posolsky Prikaz. But no matter how the matter is in reality, only due to a number of accidental circumstances one of the few unique evidences of the intellectual quests of the "Muscovites" who made one of the first attempts known in modern history to artistically embody the appearance of a prehistoric animal has come down to us.
Thus, more than half a century before the publication in Sweden in the 1720s of articles by the founder of Russian paleontology V. N. Tatishchev, who took upon himself the task of "satisfying the interest of Swedish scientists in the mammoth", among educated Russian people there was already an opinion that "this beast … is greatness from a great elephant."
