A Medieval Repoussage Item from Pankrushikhinskiy District (Altai Krai)

Abstract

The paper describes a bronze plaque, made in Perm animal style by method of one-side casting. It depicts a rampant winged bear with its paws on the shoulders of a standing man. Being an accidental finding, the plaque comes from the northern regions of the Altai Territory (the village of Vysokaya Griva, Pankrushikhinskiy District). The paper features its composition and plot, which has a complex semantic content. Following other researchers, the authors consider such products a metal reflection of the three-part world structure, characteristic for the peoples at a certain level of social development, and a myth about the origin of the people. A comparative analysis with both neighboring and quite remote areas made it possible to assume that there were different totem animals, ancestors of the major ethnic groups of different Finno-Ugrian peoples. Thus, a bird of prey was the most typical totem animal for the western territories representing a Finnish-speaking population that lived in the European part of Russia. The bird was both the ancestor and the guardian spirit of the ethnic group. A bear was the totem for the eastern territories of the Finno-Ugrian peoples living in Siberia, in the Asian Russia, that represented the Ugrian-Samoyedic population. It is evidenced by the absence of bears on the plaques with encoded myths about the origin of the kindred in Western European regions, and on the contrary, a practically complete absence of birds on similar plaques in the Asian regions. The finding is published for the first time.

Keywords

• repoussage
• finno-ugrians
• semantics
• totem
• bear, bird
• human being