Legendary Stone Tomb. Ten minutes from Melitopol. A fantastic jumble of huge boulders. Looks much cooler than statues from Easter Island and even the famous Inca city of Machu Picchu. Not a single scientist in the world has given even the slightest acceptable version: where did this come from in the steppes of Ukraine?
Scientists have expressed several versions regarding the origin of the Stone Tomb. According to one of the most common, the stone hill is the result of the violent activity of a long-asleep volcano.
According to another version, this is a gift from a meteorite, which crumbled to stones covered with unknown inscriptions from contact with the solidity of the planet. The adherents of the third believe that the sanctuary was created by the waters of the Molochnaya River, which was made by the ancient glaciers melting in Europe into a fast and full-flowing stream. They allegedly brought with them a huge monolith, which cracked over time. Pieces of various sizes broke off and slid to the ground. Many thousands of years ago, the stone mound took the form that we can see today.
They say the hill looks a lot like a giant turtle. Those who wish have the opportunity to check this by taking a bus to Melitopol and in a few hours having traveled so deep into the millennia that even the muse of history has forgotten those times …
The legendary grave of Bogur
A person who lived on this earth could not but be interested in the miraculous stone complex towering in the steppe. The legends about him were also attempts to explain his origin.
We find the first legends about the Stone Tomb among the Nogai steppe tribe, the descendants of the army of Khan Batu: “Once Allah called a hero named Bogur to him and ordered him to carry stones from the nearest mountain range. Allah demanded that a hill be made of stones so that from its top one could observe the endless surrounding steppes. The Chosen One of Allah got down to business, but soon realized that there was no end to work here and, in order to speed up the process of erecting a "viewing platform" for God, he resorted to tricks - he began to loose stones. Things went faster. But one day, carrying another stone block to the top, Bogur stumbled and fell into the gap between the stones.
The hero was stuck and could no longer free himself from the stone captivity - and so he died without food and water, punished for having planned to outwit the Almighty. So the pile of stones acquired the name Bogur-Dag (Tomb of Bogur).
Promotional video:
Some scientists, studying the images on the slabs of the Melitopol phenomenon and the legends associated with it, note that the legend of Bogur is only one of the echoes of the earlier legend that has come down to us about the “steppe Prometheus” who gave people fire and found here, on the Tomb, his last shelter.
Chronicle of research.
The first researcher of modern times to become interested in the riddles of the Tomb was the Russian academician P. I. Köppen. In 1837 he made a note: “In one place between the rocks overgrown with moss there is a gap like a street 2 or 3 arshins wide, and there once was an entrance to a cave, in which one of my guides, who was a shepherd in childhood, I saw inscriptions on the walls … The entrance to this cave was covered with sand around 1822”.
It is known that in 1788, the famous commander A. V. Suvorov set up a post station, guarded by a Cossack outfit.
On the map of the Tauride province in 1793, the mysterious stone hill is designated as Yuyun-Tash, which in translation from the Turkic means "assembled stone". There is a version that the hill served as a gathering place for Tatar hordes before raids on the Slavic lands.
Then, many years later, at the end of the 19th century, a shepherd from the village of Mirnoye found five silver coins at the Tomb. Rumors immediately spread throughout the area that untold treasures were hidden under the sandstone slabs. Lovers of easy money rushed to the hill from all over. The sacred stones began to smash some with a shovel and a pickaxe, and some with the help of gunpowder. Perhaps the treasure hunters would not have left anything to the descendants if a local peasant almost died during one of the explosions. The gold rush subsided, but rumors of the Stone Tomb reached scientists.
In 1890, the famous archaeologist Professor N. I. Veselovsky. He was interested in the Tomb as a possible tomb of the Scythian kings. But soon the professor became convinced that there were no burials among the slabs. However, in the same place, in the steppe Zaporozhye, not far from the village of Bolshaya Znamenka, the professor dug up an 18-meter mound of Solokha and showed the world Scythian gold, in particular the world-famous golden comb.
The systematic study of the Stone Tomb by modern historians began in 1932, when the expedition of the Melitopol Museum of Local Lore began to work. Already in the first years of research, it became clear that man began to develop the territories adjacent to the Tomb, approximately in the 8th millennium BC, that is, a hundred centuries ago! This fact is confirmed by finds of flint tools of the Neolithic era and ancient settlements. The first was discovered back in 1933, and then it turned out that the entire Stone Tomb is surrounded by ancient settlements. But there is one curious detail: on the stone hill itself, people have never settled and buried the dead there. The pile of stones among the sea of steppe herbs had a different purpose - to serve as a sanctuary, temple, temple. There, prehistoric people prayed to their gods.
Secret signs.
The inner planes of sandstone slabs, the ceilings of halls and caves are dotted with thousands of ancient drawings, one might even say, plots. The most "fresh" belong to the XI-XII centuries of our era, the most ancient ones appeared 8 thousand years ago, and maybe even more. Some works of art of antiquity cause violent scientific controversy. For example, in the grotto preserved at the very top of the grave, an image of a mysterious animal was found. Its silhouette is not outlined by contours, but is a kind of depression in the stone. Two long, slightly curved lines extend from the head of the animal. What is it? If there are horns, then we have a bull, and if there are tusks, a mammoth. It is generally accepted that mammoths became extinct about 10 thousand years ago, and if we prove that the creature drawn by an ancient artist is a mammoth, then this means that we have before us the most ancient drawing on earth.
The theme of the drawings of the Stone Tomb is very diverse. There is a plot of a group of bulls who took up a perimeter defense, possibly from wolves or other unknown predators. There is an image of cows marching one after another. Two bulls are pulling a cart, and nearby an ancient master drew a snake. What did he want to say, emphasize, express by this?
In the Stone Tomb, they also found imprints of human feet that haunted scientists, and either only the right, or only the left - there are no paired! Many images are combinations of vertical and horizontal lines, circles, rhombuses, squares, crosses. In the so-called Koldun's grotto, there are reminiscent of fishing nets and labyrinthine drawings. Numerous images of cart, chariot, wheel make an amazing impression. This confirms the once very bold guess that the idea of a wheel - a cart - a cart - a chariot dawned on a person in the steppe …
The grave could have died.
In the early 50s, the research of the Stone Tomb was carried out especially intensively. In connection with the planned construction of the Melitopol hydroelectric power station, a hydroelectric dam was to pass through the sanctuary. Scientists were in a hurry, since there was very little time left. A few years before that, the Zaporozhye Stonehenge had perished ingloriously, the ancient settlement Kurzemal, the mysterious country of Gilea described by Herodotus, thousands of historical monuments shedding light on the ancient history of all mankind were hidden by the waters of the Kakhovsky reservoir. Fortunately, the builders' plans changed, the dam was erected elsewhere, and the research continued. And during the intensive work, archaeologists managed to discover twelve new grottoes and caves in the sanctuary.
The Sumerians weren't the first?
According to modern historical doctrine, the very first written people of the Earth are considered to be the Sumerians, who lived about 6 thousand years ago in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Sumerians were the first builders of cities, the first creators of statehood. World literature begins with the poetic word of the Sumerians. Several centuries later, spiritually impregnated by Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon arise …
However, in 1961 in Romania, or, more precisely, in Transylvania, during excavations in a layer of seven thousand years ago, three clay tablets with inscriptions similar to Sumerian ones were found. They are called "tablets from Terteria". Just think, proto-Sumerian inscriptions, which are a thousand years older than Sumer himself!
The tablets from the Danube basin did not fit so much into the generally accepted ideas about the steps of civilization that the discoverer of Terteria's letters, Romanian scientist N. Vlassa, was accused of deliberately mixing archaeological layers and was stripped of his academic title. The timid statements of the Moscow Sumerologist Anatoly Kifishin that the tablets from Terteria and the Sumerian writing originate from the same ancient, but not yet open writing, were not accepted by the scientific community. However, later in the Danube basin - in Romania and Hungary - many more similar inscriptions were found. The study of the mysterious tablets led scientists to the study of the Melitopol Stone Tomb.
Archaeologist Yuri Shilov, who devoted many years to the study of the Melitopol phenomenon, has good reason to assert that about 8,200 years ago, as a result of natural disasters, the Black Sea-Azov waters flooded the world's first civilization of arat-ploughmen, the creators of the world writing system. The main temple, cultural and spiritual center of this civilization, its sanctuary was the Stone Tomb over the Molochnaya River. In his bold conclusions and statements, Shilov relies on the sensational studies of the Sumerologist Kifishin. In 2001, after a quarter of a century of silence, this scientist published the monograph “The Ancient Sanctuary of the Stone Tomb. An experience of deciphering the proto-Sumerian archive of the XII-III millennia BC”, which immediately became a bibliographic rarity.
The oldest book depository in the world.
Back in the 19th century, local peasants said that they saw inscriptions in the grottoes of the Stone Tomb. Scientists of the time who examined these notches decided that the illiterate villagers mistook intersecting curved and straight lines for inscriptions. Researchers were interested in specific images: mammoths, bulls, horses, sailboats, horsemen … However, the illiterate peasants were right!
For several years, starting in 1994, Anatoly Kifishin deciphered more than a hundred texts, the lion's share of which is "The Canon of Nine Inscriptions" - the basis of Sumerian myths about the deeds of the gods and the creation of the world.
We used to think that cuneiform is icons that look like bird tracks. But in reality, the "classical" cuneiform was formed only by the XXII-XVIII centuries BC. It was she who inherited the Babylonians, Assyrians and many other peoples. And before that, the Sumerian letters were drawings in which you can guess the meaning of the word. It was these letters that Anatoly Kifishin deciphered in the Stone Tomb.
Currently, there are 130 panel inscriptions inscribed on the ceilings and cornices of grottoes and caves, and 160 stone tablets with inscriptions kept in four caches of the Stone Tomb.
Quite curious are the references to the previous in time and, apparently, more authoritative documents, for example: "… according to the tablet about the wanderings of the Six-Headed Capricorn." Exactly the same form of exile was adopted by the Sumerians of the classical Mesopotamia in the IV-III millennium BC. But what is especially interesting: the tablets with the primary sources of the texts referred to by the ancient authors were found right there, in the caches of the grottoes of the Stone Tomb.
Proto-Sumerian and Sumerian texts are very difficult to understand. Try to figure out, for example, the expression: "A seed tied in a dead person." But together with the phrase “The tied man will live”, the logical conclusion follows from the inscription that the person continues in his descendants. And how do you like this: "The deed of the god Enlil by the knowledge of the wandering of fate because of the tied seed may be punished" (for seducing the virgin he was sentenced to exile, "to knowing the fate of a wanderer"). Or "Suhur - alal" - "carp that sets the seed" - an epithet of the god Enlil, the one who seduced the maiden. In the concepts of the ancient inhabitants of our land, carp is the king of fish, like a lion is the king of animals, an eagle is the king of birds. The fish, which fed the coastal inhabitants, fully deserved the royal title.
In the texts of the Stone Tomb, there are endless judgments: gods and goddesses are judged, gods and goddesses are judged. They are judged by "the court of water" - to drown, "by the court of a tree" - to hang, "by the court of a goat" - to slaughter like a goat. If not for the Old Testament analogies, it would be very difficult for us to understand the proto-Sumerian mythological delights. Remember the biblical "scapegoat?" And what about the fact that the patriarch Abraham hails from Ur of the Chaldees, and Ur was one of the Sumerian capitals.
Anatoly Kifishin in his monograph "The Ancient Sanctuary of the Stone Tomb" states: "While there are no other sources, the Stone Tomb can be considered the oldest archive of the oldest writing in the world."
Main question
The findings of the Stone Tomb are amazing and excite the imagination. But the main question remains, to which there is still no intelligible answer: how did the creators of the proto-Sumerian script and native speakers from the Stone Tomb end up in Sumer? Yuri Shilov believes that at a time when water flooded the ancestral home of the ancient arats-plowmen, the priests were hastily looking for a replacement for the fertile homeland. Modern black earth Ukraine was for them the far cold north. Then, more than eight thousand years ago, the arats found fertile lands in the lower Mesopotamia and brought there the legend of the Flood. The resettlement took many years, but for a very long time the spiritual center of the mysterious people remained in their old homeland, in the steppe above the Molochnaya River. This is why written monuments such as the Terteria tablets are found in the middle of the long road to Sumer. Moreover, Yu. Shilov claimsthat after millennia the descendants of the Black Sea plowmen returned to the homeland of their ancestors and became the creators of the famous Tri-Polish culture, or, as it is called in Romania, Cucuteni.
Epilogue
Of course, it's too early to put an end to this story. The Stone Tomb keeps so many secrets that it will be enough to puzzle grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Scientists, instead of starting full-scale research, prefer to abstract from this topic. But there are too many coincidences for this information to be easily ignored under the pretext of unscientificness. The geographical names of rivers and cities are the same between the Sumerians and the unknown people who left inscriptions on the stone tablets of the Tomb. The peoples, separated by thousands of kilometers, have similar names of gods and goddesses, requests, prayers, elements of everyday life.
To avoid accusations of knowingly incorrect deciphering, A. Kifishin invited other Sumerologists known to the scientific community to collaborate. Their texts are given in his monograph. Differences in translations are very minor. But scientists are still silent …
When the skull of the ancestor of modern man was found in France, on the Cro-Magnon River, it became a world sensation. When a clay statuette of an ancient woman was dug up in a run-down German village of Willendorf, she was immediately nicknamed the Venus of Willendorf and is still admired, making a lot of money to show the figurine to tourists. When Heinrich Schliemann dug up the legendary Troy, the most inveterate skeptics admitted defeat.
And the Stone Tomb has been waiting for a very long time, when we will finally wake up and become worthy of the great secrets hidden in its ancient and mysterious stone womb.