The slab was found in 2011 during the excavation of five mounds on the border of Dobropolsky and Konstantinovsky districts of Donetsk region.
The slab, which is at least three and a half thousand years old, is considered by scientists to be a unique find. Its dimensions are 1 meter by 70 centimeters, weight is 130 kilograms. On both sides there are images: embossed holes and dashes cut like furrows. Until now, it was believed that the most ancient sundial was an invention of Ancient Egypt and Babylon, and here something similar but more Perfect was found in a mound near Donetsk. At the same time, it can be argued that the found watches are much more perfect than the Egyptian and Babylonian ones, since they allow using not only the sun but also the moon to determine the time, plus it can be done much more accurately by moving the gnomons depending on the time of day and year, which allows further research is not easy as with the hour a and with the calendar (an astronomical instrument tuned to a given area).
The group of mounds was named Popov Yar-2, since a mound group with the same name was excavated nearby in the 80s. In our case, the first excavations were carried out near a huge ravine and the village of Popov Yar. In 2011, they dug closer to the village of Poltavka, but in general administratively, this is the territory of the village of Vladimirovka, Dobropolsky District. The slab was located in the highest burial mound, built in the Neolithic era, then it was repeatedly filled up. The slab itself covered a Late Bronze Age burial, that is, its age is at least 3500 years!
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The age was determined by the type of burial. This is the Srubna culture or the Late Bronze Age. Srubnaya cultural and historical community is a whole group of related cultures of the Bronze Age, which flourished 3800-3200 years ago on the territory of the East European Plain from the Dnieper to Western Siberia.
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A pot with a pictogram was also found in the burial, which is also typical for this culture. This is evidence that the boy was being prepared for the career of a priest. Usually, dead children were placed in the graves only with bones from the legs of a lamb or goat, called achiks (similarly they did in Egypt and America), which most likely served as toys. Children of the shepherds of Mongolia and Kazakhstan still play with such bones.
It can be assumed that the calendar placed on the grave was part of a funeral rite. Timber society, unlike many societies of antiquity, was socially more monolithic and the ideas of brotherhood, in relation to that time, were most clearly represented. It was a society where wars played no role. There are practically no weapons in the burials of that time. The settlements were never walled. They were peaceful laborers.
About a thousand burials of the era of the Srubna culture have been excavated, but only this one was covered with a slab with clear symbols, ” said Yuriy Polidovich, a leading researcher at the Monuments Protection Department of the Donetsk Regional Museum of Local Lore. - Usually burials of this era are covered with stones without any images. Burial chambers are a kind of home for the dead. This concept is reflected even in the modern Ukrainian language, where the coffin is called domina - from the word "house". The north of Donetsk region is the only place in Ukraine where gravestones with signs have been found.
Several years ago, seven kilometers from this mound, a burial was found covered with a similar slab with symbols engraved on it. True, they were not so bright. It was a stone box, and on one side slab there were carved lines, but without holes. Archaeologist Anatoly Usachuk is a traceologist (traceology is the doctrine of footprints), this slab was carefully studied with a magnifying glass for drawing images in the 90s. And the whole picture emerged as it happened. As much as it could be reconstructed then. The drawings were sketched, but the photographs could not be taken, because there was no modern technology, it was in the 90s. And that's all. There is a drawing, but, unfortunately, a complete study of the application of marks on that slab has not been done, and now, due to damage to the slab, this is no longer possible. The slab was placed in storage in front of the museum building in the city of Konstantinovka, and its visitors finally ruined it, making further study impossible.
Archaeologists, after consulting with astronomers, suggested that this is a calendar. The number of symbols coincided with the cycles of the sun and the moon, some astronomers who saw the photos and drawings believe that the holes in the circle of the plate are some kind of solar breakdown, and the dashes are associated with the lunar cycle. It was quite common among Indo-European peoples. In our time, the clock and the calendar are conjugate concepts, and in antiquity they were mainly separated, but further studies of the slab may refute these statements.
Why was this cyclicality so important? Because people were tied to agricultural work - be it farming or herding - the cycle of nature was equally important to nomads and sedentary tribes alike. It was necessary to understand in time when it was time to plant a particular crop or leave the pasture, because drought or rains were coming. Observing the cycles of nature was very important for survival, so calendars were paramount.
But back to the found plate. The image, holes and dashes are also on the other side, but they turned out to be compositionally dissimilar. The front side is more saturated, it was open for a longer time. Several cycles of image application can be traced - something was applied, then rubbed, several stages went through. On the reverse side, the drawing was most likely done in one act, for some event, perhaps a burial. Interestingly, the number of dashes and holes on both sides does not match.
The British newspaper The Daily Mail reports that the burial site was unearthed by Yuri Polidovich and his team of archaeologists, who sent photographs to Larisa Vodolazskaya from the Southern Federal University. Studying the location of the notches and their number, as well as the images on the stone, she came to the sensational conclusion that this is the oldest sundial in the history of mankind !!!
Previously, the oldest sundial was considered a clock found in Egypt - in the local Valley of the Kings. No more, no less.
If a pin is installed in the center of the hour stone, which the Greeks much later called the gnomon, then you get a real astronomical device that will show the current time with amazing accuracy. In this watch, the place of the pin is not constant, that is, it is not a simple sundial, but the so-called analemmatic one. Therefore, they are more accurate, because in this way one gnomon can be used in the morning hours, and the second - in the afternoon. By moving the gnomon, you can also adjust the accuracy of the clock depending on the time of the year, that is, when the Sun changes the angle at which it casts its rays on the mortal Earth.
Larisa Vodolazskaya used two gnomons, and the first showed the exact time between 7.30 am and 2.30 pm, while the second showed the time perfectly from 10.30 am to 4.30 pm.
On the reverse side is also painted something like the dial of a sundial, but Vodolazskaya is not sure about this drawing. Perhaps it was a pen test or a sketch through which the master taught a novice carver / shaman.
Knowing what to look for, Larisa Vodolazskaya discovered another similar slab in one of the museums of the Rostov region. There is a semblance of holes, but without dashes. Maybe they came across more, but, frankly, they might not have been paid attention to. It happens that you miss such a small detail, there is a scratch with a plow, there is something else.
The slab whose age is more than 3000 years from the Tavria-1 burial ground in the Neklinovsky district of the Rostov region also has holes arranged in the form of an ellipse. The slab was discovered in 1991 and is currently kept in the Tanais Archaeological Museum-Reserve in the Rostov Region. The slab is in the open air and is overgrown with lichen, so small details on its surface are poorly visible. According to Vodolazhskaya, her research has not been completed; in the future, a separate publication will be devoted to this subject.
For more information on the sundial study, see the PDF publication in Archaeoastronomy and Ancient Technologies.
In a publication devoted to the study of watches and appeared in the publication Archaeoastronomy and Ancient Technologies, the role of natural scientific methods in historical and archaeological research, as well as the emergence of new scientific directions such as archaeoastronomy and historical informatics, is emphasized. Sophisticated calculations and analysis of the location of the cup-shaped marks led the specialists to several interesting conclusions at once. Thus, two interconnected groups of holes were identified. The first was interpreted as an analemmatic sundial, which could work as a lunar clock on a full moon night. The second group of holes, most likely, are markers of significant astronomical directions, auxiliary for both solar and lunar hours.
The plate with holes from Tavria-1 made it possible to track the movement of the Moon and the Sun, determine the moment of the solstice and equinox, measure time during the day with an analemmatic sundial and at full moon nights with the lunar clock. It turns out that a cracked piece of sandstone with cupped marks thrown in the open air is an ancient and complex astronomical instrument.
It is noteworthy that the slab from the Tavria-1 burial mound dates back to the 12th century BC. e. Science knows images of a sundial (about 1300 BC) from the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in Egypt, and in the Valley of the Kings in 2013, a vertical sundial was discovered with a division of the day into 24 hours of equal duration, dating back to the 13th century BC. e. All this suggests that in the indicated era there could have been a kind of migration of the technology of marking sundials among the peoples inhabiting the coast of the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
I would also like to remind you that the famous Phaistos disc about which I wrote in my notes earlier - the Phaistos disc is decrypted by this time approximately dated. Slavic writing 3700 years ago. Slavic writing 3700 years ago. One of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century, which is hushed up.
This could finish the article, but then I remembered where I saw something similar related to the calendar, but in my article about America - Cocaine mummies - America was discovered long before Columbus by the Egyptians! Found writing, and artifacts that united the "old and new world" 3600 years ago.
The Davenport calendar stele was recovered from a burial mound in 1877 in Iowa !!!
In the center of the stele is a scene surrounded by inscriptions in three languages - Egyptian, Ibero-Punic and Libyan. The Iberian and Libyan texts state that the inscription keeps the secrets of the calendar. The inscription ends with an Egyptian hieratic script. Its decoding is given next to the interpretation of the Celtic-Libyan inscriptions. The Egyptian text reads: “A mirror is attached to the pillar so that when the sun rises on New Year’s day, it would throw rays on the stone, whose name is the Observer. New Year is when the sun meets the zodiacal constellation Aries, when the day is growing and the night is decreasing. At this time, they celebrate the New Year and make sacrifices."
The tablet depicts the celebration of the New Year according to Egyptian customs on the morning of the vernal equinox (correlated with the modern date of March 21; in antiquity - later). This celebration consisted of the erection of a ceremonial New Year's pillar, made up of bundles of reeds, which they called "Jed".
This ceremony, in its meaning, was the erection of the spine of the god Osiris. On the left you can see a mirror in a carved frame, and on it hieroglyphs, read as "mirror of the Egyptians." On the mirror is an inscription that reads: "Reflective metal." On the right is the rising sun, with the hieroglyph "Ra" (Sun God, or the Sun). There are stars above the image of the morning sky. As the illustrations show, the Iowa stele confirms what we know from the graves at Thebes about the Jedi Column ceremony on New Year's. The Egyptian chronicles mention this ceremony, which took place in the month of Kagakh, corresponding to our March. This is also confirmed by the Iowa stele. The Egyptian text of the Davenport stele states that it is the work of Wntu (Astrologer), a priest of Osiris from Libya.
The meanings of the texts in the Libyan and Iberian languages coincide with the hieroglyphic text. This is suggestive. This stele is definitely of American origin. It may have been created by a Libyan or Iberian astronomer who copied a similar but older stele from Egypt or, more likely, from Libya, aboard the ship. The priest of Osiris could consider the stele as a calendar in distant lands. The date of her birth is no later than the 8th century. BC e., since we do not know the Libyan and Iberian inscriptions earlier than this date. The Egyptian text could only be a copy. Judging by its stylistic features, this text could have been attributed no earlier than the 16th century. BC.
I can't say anything more about her yet, there is very little information so I will be grateful for any additional information.
Thousands of kilometers and hundreds of years have passed, and in different parts of the world the technologies of calendars, burials and the principles of writing coincide. So there is a time to throw stones, and there is a time to collect and study them.
For those who have not yet believed, I can recommend another article on this topic: White gods in America thousands of years ago, and Columbus's discovery that he was not the first !!! All the indigenous peoples of America are from SIBERIA !!!