07.08.2023

Valentin Yanin - I sent you a birch bark. “I sent you a birch bark” () - download a book for free without registration I sent you a birch bark yanin summary

July 26, 2001 marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first Novgorod birch bark. From that day on, a new era began in the study of the history of the Russian language. In honor of this remarkable event, we decided to publish excerpts from the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark..." (M.: Languages of Russian culture, 1998). Half a century ago, Valentin Lavrentievich, then a very young scientist, witnessed an amazing find. Now he, an academician, head of the Department of Archeology of Moscow State University, continues excavations in Novgorod...

"I SENT YOU BIRCH BEREST..."

V.L.YANIN

1. From the preface to the book

The first ten letters on birch bark were discovered by the expedition of Professor Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky in the summer of 1951. Since then, forty-five years have passed, filled with active and exciting searches for new letters, and almost every year has been accompanied by unchanging success. In other years, archaeologists brought from Novgorod in their expedition luggage up to sixty or seventy birch bark texts. Now, at the end of the 1996 field season, when these lines are being written, the collection of Novgorod letters on birch bark includes 775 documents.<...>
This discovery had every reason to become a sensation. It opened up almost limitless possibilities for cognizing the past in those departments of historical science where the search for new types of written sources was recognized as hopeless.<...>

2. From the chapter "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations ..."

The ancient plan of Novgorod, depicted on the Znamenskaya icon of the late 17th century

For twelve years, the postal address of the Novgorod expedition of the Academy of Sciences and Moscow University was: "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, archaeological excavations ...".
Now this place is easy to find. The quarter, bounded by the streets of Velikaya (Dmitrievskaya), Rozvazha, Tikhvinskaya and Decembrists, is built up with multi-storey buildings. From afar, you can see the building of a department store standing on the corner of Rozvazhi and Velyka. Starting almost from the very site of the excavations, a powerful steel bridge hung over the Volkhov.
And in 1951, when we marked out the grid of the future excavation, there was a wasteland overgrown with elderberry and burdock. Rusty fragments of twisted rebar protruded from the weeds, grass in some places made its way through the solid heaps of brick rubble that covered the wasteland left by the Nazi torchlighters on the site of a flourishing city. It was the seventh post-war year. Novgorod with difficulty rose from the ruins, leveling and building up the conflagrations. But the contours of the future city were already visible. Not only new buildings grew, but also the pace of new construction. The archaeologists also had to hurry in order to take everything from the ancient city that could destroy modern Novgorod before the builders arrived.
And so it happened: the expedition broke up new excavations, and houses were already rising on the old, completely exhausted ones.
Of course, when we hammered in the first pegs, marking the excavation, none of us thought that twelve years of life and work would be associated with this excavation, that the small area that it was decided to excavate here would expand its limits to the entire area of the block. True, each of us was sure that great discoveries await us right here, in this wasteland. Without such confidence, one should not start an expedition, because only enthusiasm gives birth to success.

3. From the chapter "I sent you a birch bark, writing ..."

Then, on Wednesday, July 12, in the quarter on Dmitrievskaya Street, the opening of a relatively small area of 324 square meters was started.<...>
One by one, street decks were cleared, plans were drawn for the first log cabins that were discovered in the excavation. Student interns learned how to keep records in field diaries and how to pack finds. There were few finds, and very few interesting ones. Once only two lead seals of the 15th century were found in a row - one from the posadnik and the archbishop's. Chiefs of two
The sections into which the excavation was divided were arguing without much enthusiasm over which of them should tear off the earthen ridge that delimits their possessions and hinders the transporters from maneuvering. Shooting a brow on a hot day is not the most exciting thing to do: dust flies all over the excavation, and for some reason there are never decent finds in these brows.
And it must happen that the first letter on birch bark was discovered just under the ill-fated brow! Found it exactly two weeks after the start of the excavations - July 26, 1951 - a young worker Nina Fedorovna Akulova. Remember this name. It has entered the history of science forever. The letter was found right on the pavement of the end of the XIV century, in the gap between two planks of flooring. First seen by archaeologists, it turned out to be a dense and dirty birch bark scroll, on the surface of which clear letters appeared through the dirt. If it were not for these letters, the birch bark scroll would have been dubbed without hesitation in the field records as a fishing float. There were already several dozens of such floats in the Novgorod collection.
Akulova handed over the find to Gaida Andreevna Avdusina, the head of her section, and she called out to Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky. Gaida did not make any coherent speeches, being occupied only with thoughts about the fragility of the scroll. She showed the letter from her own hands to the leader of the expedition - no matter how it was broken!
Artemy Vladimirovich had the main dramatic effect. The call found him standing on the ancient pavement being cleared, which led from the pavement of Kholopya Street to the courtyard of the estate. And, standing on this pavement, as if on a pedestal, with his finger raised, for a whole minute, in full view of the entire excavation, he could not, gasping for breath, utter a single word, uttering only inarticulate sounds, then shouted out in a voice that was not his own: “The premium is one hundred rubles.” (at that time it was a very significant amount) and then: “I have been waiting for this discovery for twenty years!”.

And then, as N.F. Akulova many years later from the cinema screen, "here it began, as if a person was born."
Probably, then, on July 26, A.V. Artsikhovsky was the only one who to some extent foresaw future finds. It is now, when many hundreds of letters have been extracted from the earth, that we are well aware of the greatness of the day when the first birch bark scroll was found. And then the discovery of the first charter impressed the others precisely by its uniqueness, by the fact that the charter was simply the only one.
However, she was the only one left for only one day. On July 27 they found the second letter, on the 28th - the third, and the next week - three more. In total, by the end of the field season in 1951, ten birch bark letters were found. They lay at different depths, some - in the layers of the XIV century, others - in the layers of the XII century. Most of them have been preserved in fragments. Thus, already in 1951, one of the main qualities of the new find became clear. The discovery of birch bark letters was not connected with the discovery of any archive. No, they were found in the layer, similar to such mass finds familiar to an archaeologist as, for example, iron knives or glass beads. Birch bark letters were a familiar element of medieval Novgorod life. Novgorodians constantly read and wrote letters, tore them up and threw them away, just as we now tear and throw away unnecessary or used papers. This means that in the future it is necessary to look for new birch bark letters.
Look for the future! But after all, the expedition worked in Novgorod for more than a year. Before the war, the excavations, which began in 1932, continued intermittently for six seasons, and after the war, large-scale excavations were carried out for two years in 1947 and 1948 at a site adjacent to the ancient veche square, until in 1951 they were transferred to the Nerevsky end . Why didn't they find letters until July 26, 1951? Maybe they weren't looking for them? Maybe they were thrown away without noticing the letters on them? Indeed, in the Nerevsky end, one scribbled scroll falls on several hundred empty pieces of birch bark.
This question should be clearly divided into two. First: did they look for birch bark letters before? Second: could they have been missed in previous excavations? I will try to answer both questions.
In order to purposefully search for something, it is necessary to be firmly convinced that the subject of the search really exists. Was it known before 1951 that in Ancient Rus' they wrote on birch bark? Yes, there are such reports. Here is the most important of them.
An outstanding writer and publicist of the late XV - early XVI century, Joseph Volotsky, talking about the modesty of the monastic life of the founder of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, Sergius of Radonezh, who lived in the second half of the XIV century, wrote: books are not written on charters, but on birch bark. The monastery under Sergius, according to Joseph Volotsky, did not seek to accumulate wealth so much and was so poor that even the books in it were written not on parchment, but on birch bark. By the way, in one of the oldest Russian library catalogs - in the description of the books of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, compiled in the 17th century, “convolutions on the tree of the miracle worker Sergius” are mentioned.
In some legal acts of the 15th century, there is an expression "... and they wrote it out on the bast and put it before the Lord, and they were led along the bast." Of course, bast is not birch bark. But this message is important because it once again speaks of the use of various tree barks as writing material.
Quite a few documents written on birch bark have been preserved in museums and archives. These are the latest manuscripts of the 17th-19th centuries; including entire books. So, in 1715 in Siberia, a birch bark book that has survived to this day was recorded yasak, a tribute in favor of the Moscow Tsar. Ethnographer S.V. Maximov, who in the middle of the 19th century saw a birch bark book among the Old Believers on the Mezen, even admired this writing material, unusual for us. “Only one drawback,” he wrote, “the birch bark was torn, from the frequent use of Pomeranian readers in the callused hands, in those places where there were veins in the birch bark.”
Separate ancient writings on birch bark were also known. Before the war, a birch bark charter of 1570 with a German text was kept in Tallinn. Birch-bark letters in Sweden in the 15th century were reported by an author who lived in the 17th century; it is also known that they were later used by the Swedes in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1930, on the banks of the Volga near Saratov, peasants, digging a silo pit, found a birch bark Golden Horde charter of the XIV century.
And here is a curious passage that takes us to another hemisphere. “...At that moment, the birch bark suddenly unfolded to its full length, and on the table was the notorious key to the secret, in the form of some kind of drawing, at least in the eyes of our hunters.” This is an excerpt from the American writer James Oliver Carwood's adventure novel The Wolf Hunters, published in Russian translation in 1926. The action of the novel takes place in the vast expanses of the Great Canadian Plain.
However, the Russian reader was well aware of the American "scribbled birch bark" before. Let us recall Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" in the excellent translation by I.A. Bunin:

He took paints out of the bag,
He took out paints of all colors
And on a smooth birch bark
Made a lot of secret signs
Marvelous and figures and signs;
They all portrayed
Our thoughts, our speeches.

The chapter from which these verses are taken is called “The Letters.”
Finally, and in more distant times, the use of birch bark as a writing material was not rare. There is much evidence of the ancient Romans using the bark and bast of various trees for writing. In Latin, the concepts of "book" and "tree bast" are expressed in one word: liberal.
Prior to the discovery of Novgorod letters in 1951, scientists not only knew about the use of birch bark for writing, but even discussed the question of how birch bark was prepared for use. The researchers noted the softness, elasticity and resistance to destruction of birch bark, and the ethnographer A.A. Dunin-Gorkavich, who at the beginning of this century observed the preparation of birch bark among the Khanty, wrote that in order to turn it into writing material, birch bark is boiled in water.
So, the use of birch bark as a writing material in ancient times was well known to researchers - historians, ethnographers and archaeologists. Moreover, guesses about the widespread use of birch bark for writing were quite natural. Remember what Joseph Volotsky writes. He connects the use of birch bark with the poverty of the monastery. This means that birch bark was cheap compared to parchment. There is a lot of evidence that parchment was very expensive in ancient times. Let's get acquainted with one of them.
The scribe, who at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries rewrote the Gospel for the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, at the end of his work wrote down the cost of the material: "... before that, he gave the same three rubles for the skin ...". Three rubles at that time was a significant amount. As we later learned from birch bark documents, in the 14th century one ruble could buy a horse. No wonder unnecessary books written on parchment were not thrown away, but the text was carefully scraped off from them in order to use parchment again for writing.
If birch bark replaced parchment precisely because of its availability, ease of manufacture and cheapness, then birch bark in ancient times should have been used many times more than expensive parchment. And if so, then there should be a lot of chances of finding such birch bark during excavations. After all, they found not even during excavations, but when digging a silo pit, a Golden Horde birch bark charter!
And here the first “but” appears, which persistently pushed the researchers in their search to the wrong path. Without exception, all books and letters on birch bark, which science had before July 26, 1951, were written in ink. And this means that the chances of finding birch bark that retained its text were negligible.
The long stay of the birch bark covered with ink in the ground completely destroys its text. Birch bark is preserved in two cases - when there is no access to moisture, as was the case near Saratov, or when there is no access to air. In Novgorod and other Russian cities, in the cultural layer of which birch bark is well preserved, it is very damp. There, already at a depth of one and a half to two meters, the layer is saturated to the limit with groundwater, which isolates all underlying ancient objects from air access. And try putting an ink-covered sheet under the tap and see what happens.
Only once ancient ink texts were found in the cultural layer of a Russian city. In 1843, while digging cellars in the Moscow Kremlin, under the shovel of a digger, a copper vessel filled with water was found, in which eighteen parchment and two paper scrolls of the 14th century lay. And only on seven sheets, which fell into the very middle of a tight lump, the text was partially preserved. Yakov Ivanovich Berednikov, who published these documents the next year after they were discovered, wrote: “Being underground in a vessel filled with water, they were more or less damaged, so that some of the letters are not noticeable at all.”
By the way, there is an often repeated opinion that allegedly back in 1894, the famous Russian photographer E.F. Burinsky managed to read these extinct texts. However, a strange thing, none of the editions of ancient documents reflected the results of Burinsky's work at all. In reality, Burinsky's attempt was not crowned with success. Here is what Academician Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev, the organizer of the work on reading the letters, writes about this: “Photographer Burinsky, under my supervision, photographed one of the parchment sheets. The lines gradually came to light, but the content remained incomprehensible. When I suspected that Burinsky was painting on the negatives, I withdrew from the case, did not prevent Burinsky from printing a picture from a partially “restored” document by him, but became disappointed and did not apply for an extension of the stay of letters in St. Petersburg.
Of course, over time, the Kremlin letters will be read (most recently, in 1994, one of these documents, previously published with numerous cuts, was read in full using the latest methods). And this case is presented here only to show how difficult it is to read ink texts that have been in the ground. But the Kremlin letters were in a vessel and were practically not washed away by moving moisture. What can be seen on the scrolls, which, being directly in the ground, experienced for centuries the incessant effect of constantly flowing water!
I remember well how in 1947, when we first got to the Novgorod excavations, we - then students who switched to the second year - after the story of A.V. Artsikhovsky about the use of birch bark in ancient times for writing with hope and regret unfolded birch bark ribbons, of which there were many. And in each of them, it was assumed that the most important historical document was washed away by all the rains that had poured over Novgorod for five hundred years, spoiled to complete hopelessness in reading. But this hope was essentially a belief in a miracle. A possible find of birch bark texts was then presented differently.
It was thought then that it was possible to find inscribed birch bark that had retained its text only under the rarest conditions of its complete isolation from moisture. Isn't that how all the ancient ink texts were found - from Egyptian papyri preserved in tombs to Dead Sea manuscripts that had lain in caves for two millennia. This means that it is necessary to look for some incredible soil situations in the excavation itself, some natural or artificial “hiding places”, “pockets”, which miraculously turned out to be inaccessible to either moisture or air. Nothing like this was found in the Novgorod layer.
And when, on July 26, 1951, the first birch-bark letter was found in Novgorod, it turned out that not a drop of ink had been spent on writing it.
The letters of its text are scratched one after another, or rather, they are squeezed out on the surface of the birch bark with some kind of pointed tool. And 772 birch bark letters found later were also scratched, not written in ink. Only two letters were inked. One of them was found in 1952, and until now it shares the fate of the Kremlin letters, without succumbing to the efforts of forensic experts to read it. It is symbolic that this charter was found the thirteenth. Another ink letter #496 was discovered in 1972. She deserves a special story, and we will return to her later.
Later, a lot of tools for writing on birch bark were discovered - metal and bone rods with a point at one end and a spatula at the other. Sometimes such "wrote" - as they were called in Ancient Rus' - were found in preserved leather cases. It turned out, by the way, that archaeologists met with such rods often, for a long time and on the territory of the whole of Rus' - in Novgorod and Kiev, in Pskov and Chernigov, in Smolensk and Ryazan, in many smaller settlements. But as soon as they were not christened in publications and museum inventories - with “pins”, and “tools for working leather”, and “communion spoons”, and even “fragments of bracelets”. The assumption about the true purpose of these items simply did not occur to anyone.
In the same way, no one thought that a birch bark letter in the conditions of a wet cultural layer is an almost eternal document, that it is necessary to look for letters not in special soil conditions that are different from the usual soil conditions for Novgorod, but precisely among birch bark, found in hundreds of scraps found in moisture-saturated medieval Novgorod layers. Moreover, the sooner the birch bark document fell into the ground, the better its safety was ensured. Indeed, if birch bark is stored in the air for a long time, it warps, cracks and collapses. Once in moist soil fresh, it retains its elasticity without being subjected to further destruction. This circumstance turns out to be extremely important for the dating of birch bark letters found in the ground. Unlike durable, for example, metal objects that were in use for a long time and fell into the ground many years after they were made, birch bark letters practically have no difference between the time they were written and the time they hit the ground, or rather, this difference is minimal.
The first question posed above can be answered in the following way. Yes, they were looking for birch bark letters, but they did not expect massive finds characteristic of the cultural layer, but hoped for the discovery of the rarest, miraculously preserved documents.
It is only now that some not-so-clear reports from the sources are becoming clear. For example, this. The Arab writer Ibn al-Nedim preserved for later historians a testimony recorded by him from the words of the ambassador of a Caucasian prince in 987: “I was told by one, on the veracity of which I rely, that one of the kings of Mount Kabk sent him to the king of the Russ; he claimed that they had writing carved into wood. He also showed me a piece of white wood, on which there were images; I don't know if they were words or single letters. The “white tree”, on which the letters were carved, is most likely a letter scratched on a birch bark. But go and guess what it is, if you have no idea that birch bark letters were scratched.
Scratching turned out to be the most important property that forever protected the texts of letters from destruction. Letters and notes were no better treated in antiquity than they are now. They were torn and thrown to the ground. They were trampled into the dirt. After reading them, they melted the stoves. But after a very short period of time there will be no trace left of a modern paper letter thrown into the mud, and a scratched birch bark letter, once falling into the mud, will lie in complete safety for many centuries in favorable conditions.
Novgorodians in ancient times literally walked with their feet on letters thrown to the ground. We know this well, having discovered the letters themselves in the multitude. But this phenomenon attracted the attention of Novgorodians even in the 12th century. A curious record of a conversation between the Novgorod priest of the middle of the 12th century Kirik and Bishop Nifont has been preserved. Kirik asked Niphon many different questions that worried him in connection with liturgical practice. Among them was this one: “Is it not a sin to walk on letters with your feet, if someone, having cut them, throws them, and the letters are visible?” Here, of course, we cannot talk about expensive parchment, which was not thrown away, but scraped out and reused. This is about birch bark.
But if all this is true, if people literally walked with their feet according to the letters, then how much of the written birch bark was missed in the previous excavations? Before answering this question, it is necessary to pay attention to several important circumstances.

First of all, birch bark letters are in most cases not just pieces of birch bark on which inscriptions are scrawled. It has already been noted that birch bark was specially prepared for writing by stratifying, removing the coarsest layers. We now know that after writing the text on a birch bark sheet, the letter was usually cut off, removing empty margins, after which the sheet received neat right angles. Finally, the overwhelming majority of inscriptions were applied on the inside of the bark, that is, on that surface of the birch bark, which always turns out to be outside when the birch bark leaf is rolled up.
And this means that birch bark with its external technical features stands out from a pile of accidentally torn birch bark, shavings and blanks for bast baskets, boxes and tuesov. In all archaeological expeditions, there is an inviolable rule - to keep for careful viewing everything that has traces of processing by a human hand. This means that the probability of missing a well-pronounced birch bark letter is slightly higher than the probability of missing any other ancient object, for example, a float, with which the letter on birch bark looks so similar. However, among the dozens of floats until 1951, not a single written one was found. The situation is worse with fragments of birch bark letters, which are found much more than whole ones. Fragments, in their historical content sometimes not inferior to whole letters, are sometimes identified with great difficulty. A certain number of them, especially from among the smallest ones, could have been missed in previous excavations.
Here, perhaps, it is appropriate to talk about one interesting conversation. Shortly after the birch bark letters were discovered, one elderly man who was in Novgorod as a child - and this was at the beginning of this century - and who then visited the private museum of the Novgorod local historian and collector V.S. Peredolsky, said that he saw in this museum and letters on birch bark. Impressed by these unusual letters, my interlocutor recalls, he and other boys, his comrades, even started a game of birch bark mail. It is unlikely that this is a memory error. There is nothing unusual in the fact that birch-bark letters could be in the collection of a lover of Novgorod antiquities as early as the beginning of our century. Something else is more important. If these letters remained completely unknown to science, then most likely they were insignificant fragments on which it was not possible to read any coherent text.
Pay attention to one more important detail. Looking, for example, at the location plan of the letters found at the Nerevsky excavation site, it is easy to see that the saturation of the cultural layer with them is far from uniform. There are a lot of letters on some plots, especially on some estates inhabited in ancient times by the most active addressees. Other sites did little to please archaeologists.

<...>The second question posed above can therefore be answered in the following way. Yes, a certain number of birch bark letters in the old excavations could go unnoticed, but this number is negligible.

<...>One after another, day after day and year after year, from the depths of centuries, birch-bark letters went to the address of the expedition, pushing the limits of knowledge of the past. And since 1954, only the Nerevsky excavation has ceased to be a source of obtaining letters. More than a dozen letters came to science solely due to the activity of enthusiasts who carefully examined the dumps of construction pits in Novgorod.<...>

However, until 1962, the Nerevsky excavation site remained the main center for obtaining inscribed birch bark. What does finding a letter look like? First of all, it is a lot of joyful noise. The excavations are announced with a loud cry: “The letter has been found!”. Everyone strives to break through to it and see what is visible on it. Most often, curiosity is punished by disappointment, because you won’t see much on the surface of an unopened and unwashed letter, except that it really is a letter.
The place of the find is accurately marked on the plan, the depth of occurrence is carefully measured with the help of a level, and a detailed description of the circumstances of the find, its relationship with nearby log cabins, pavements and layers of the cultural layer appears in the field diary.
Meanwhile, the letter delivered to the field laboratory is lowered into hot water. The fact is that birch bark cannot be deployed immediately after the find - it can crack and die. It must be steamed in hot water and gently washed with a brush.
The washed letter is also carefully stratified. This is an extremely dangerous, although in most cases absolutely necessary action. When dried, different layers of birch bark behave differently. Some shrink more, others less. And if you leave the birch bark unstratified, it will warp when it dries out, and the text written on it will lose its distinctness, it will “lead”.
Following the delamination, the birch bark writing is dried with a rough towel and placed between the glasses, under which it is destined to dry, gradually taking the stable form of a flat sheet. However, before finally removing the letter under the press, one more, most exciting moment is to be experienced - the moment of the first reading of the letter. The process of reading letters defies a brief description - this whole book is devoted to it.
It is not only necessary to think that it is possible to read and especially understand a letter on the day when it is found. It will have to be picked up many times, checking doubts, returning to difficult or illegible places. And if at first it was read only by the members of the expedition, then after publication the circle of its readers expanded to include the most biased and exacting specialists, who offered their corrections and their sometimes unexpected interpretation of the text. This process engages more and more readers, giving rise to books and articles, generating controversy and defining deeper solutions. At first, the circle of such biased readers closed within the borders of our country, but now researchers from the United States of America, Poland, Italy, Holland, Sweden and other countries are also actively studying birch bark texts.
Let us return, however, to the field laboratory. There is another condition that must be met. Before the letter begins to dry, slowly and inevitably changing as it dries, it is photographed and carefully drawn, thus creating documents that can to some extent replace the original, frequent use of which is undesirable: these fragile birch bark sheets are too valuable. Many hundreds of drawings of letters were made by Mikhail Nikanorovich Kislov, after whose death he was replaced by Vladimir Ivanovich Povetkin, who created the subsequent hundreds of drawings and trained several artists who successfully cope with this meticulous work today.
The last question to be answered here is: where are the charters kept after they have been studied and issued? Birch bark letters, found in the 1950s, were transferred by the Novgorod expedition to the Department of Manuscripts of the State Historical Museum in Moscow. With the creation of a repository in Novgorod capable of ensuring the eternal preservation of birch bark documents, the Novgorod Historical and Art Museum-Reserve became their only recipient. Both museums widely use birch bark in their expositions.

4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist"
to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"

Let us now turn to the most interesting question for linguists: what new things can we learn from birch bark documents about the Old Russian language?
In ancient Rus', several different forms of Slavic speech were used in different areas of life. The language of church literature (which includes most of the ancient monuments that have come down to us) was Church Slavonic. Only business and legal documents were written in Old Russian proper, which was the living language of communication. The language of chronicles and fiction usually combined Church Slavonic and proper Russian elements; for different authors (and editors), the ratio of these two components could vary significantly.
The living language that sounded on the vast territory of the Old Russian state was not completely unified. Some elements of dialect differences have been known for a long time; for example, it was known that in the north from a very early time there was a clatter (mixing c And h), while in the south c And h consistently varied. It was assumed, however, that in the X-XI centuries. the number of such discrepancies was negligible. Almost all linguistic differences (both between languages and between dialects) now observed in the East Slavic territory were traditionally regarded as late, arising no earlier than the era of the collapse of Kievan Rus (and often much later). This point of view was greatly facilitated by the almost complete absence of texts of the 11th-12th centuries written in any local dialects. In particular, the ancient Novgorod dialect could be judged practically only on the basis of spellings that were erroneous from the point of view of ordinary norms, occasionally slipping in Novgorod book monuments of this era.
The discovery of birch bark letters created a completely new situation. It turned out that most of these documents were written directly in the local dialect. At the same time, in some of them, the writers still used, at least occasionally, “standard” (i.e., common for traditional monuments) Old Russian forms, while in others a completely pure dialect is presented (i.e., their authors did not add any amendments to his own living speech).
Unlike most other monuments of the ancient period, birch-bark letters were not written off from anything. Therefore, direct observations of their language are possible here, not complicated by assumptions about which of the observed features belong to the scribe and which are transferred from the original.
It is extremely important that more than 280 of the more than 800 known birch bark letters date back to the 11th-12th centuries. For comparison, we point out that before the discovery of birch bark letters from original documents of this period were known, except for a few very short inscriptions, only two documents written in Russian, and not in Church Slavonic: ., 156 words) and the Varlamov charter (1192–1210, 129 words).
Thus, the ancient Novgorod dialect of the early period (XI - early XIII centuries), reflected in birch bark letters, is better documented by the originals even than the ordinary Old Russian language, since almost all texts created in this language of the XI-XII centuries. came down to us only in later lists. Thus, the Old Novgorod dialect can be considered as the second form of Slavic speech recorded by a significant corpus of documents after the Old Slavonic language. If we take into account that the Old Slavonic language is represented by translated monuments of a church nature, while birch bark letters, on the contrary, reflect natural everyday speech, devoid of literary processing, then the Old Novgorod dialect appears as the oldest form of recorded live Slavic speech known to us.
What interesting things did linguists manage to learn about the Old Novgorod dialect after they began to receive documents written in it of an unprecedented type - birch bark letters one after another?
It must be admitted that the first reaction of historians of the Russian language was not what we would now like to imagine. There was no enthusiasm for new linguistic data. Russianists turned out to be unprepared for the idea that tiny little notes on birch bark could add anything important to the already existing slender building of the historical grammar of the Russian language, not to mention the blasphemous idea that they could shake something in this building. Here is an example of a statement typical of the 1950s and 1960s: “Despite the fact that the newly discovered birch bark documents do not allow us to revise the chronology of individual linguistic phenomena and only supplement and confirm the information we have, their significance for the history of the Russian language is undoubted” ( IN AND. Borkovsky. Linguistic data of Novgorod letters on birch bark // A.V. Artsikhovsky, V.I. Borkovsky. Novgorod letters on birch bark (from excavations in 1953–1954). M., 1958. S. 90). This shows that the question of the possibility of innovations more serious than the revision of the chronology of already known phenomena did not even arise.
Due to this position, those places in the birch-bark writings, where previously unknown features of the Old Novgorod dialect appeared, remained incomprehensible for a long time or were simply regarded as errors.
This position was revised only in the 1980s, due to the fact that the principles of everyday writing were revealed, and thus the fallacy of the thesis that birch bark documents were written by illiterate people was revealed.
Even now birch-bark letters have greatly expanded our knowledge of the language of Ancient Rus' and the history of the Russian language in general. But after all, in our hands is still only a small particle of what is hidden in the land of Novgorod and other ancient Russian cities. The excavations continue, and every year brings new letters, and with them new questions and new searches for answers, amendments to some of the previous decisions, confirmation or refutation of the hypotheses put forward earlier, grains of a more accurate knowledge of the language of our ancestors. This exciting work will last for a long time.

We decided not to give specific information about the Old Novgorod dialect in this publication: although they are of the greatest interest to a philologist, they are unlikely to be appreciated in a school audience. And yet, the passages published today must have caused some of the teachers to want to know the details. They can also be found - in a very concise form - in the partially cited above “Afterword by a linguist to the book by V.L. Yanin “I sent you a birch bark...” (M.: Languages of Russian culture, 1998), and - in all details - in the monograph by A.A. Zaliznyak "Old Novgorod dialect" (M.: Languages of Russian culture, 1995).
When this issue was being prepared, on June 26, 2001, excavations in Novgorod continued and will last until the end of August. So far, 1002 letters have been found (915 of them in Novgorod, 87 in other cities). But there's still a month until the anniversary! We wish the archaeologists success!

"I SENT YOU BIRCH BEREST..."

V.L.YANIN

1. From the preface to the book

2. From the chapter "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations ..."

The ancient plan of Novgorod, depicted on the Znamenskaya icon of the late 17th century

3. From the chapter "I sent you a birch bark, writing ..."

He took paints out of the bag,
He took out paints of all colors
And on a smooth birch bark
Made a lot of secret signs
Marvelous and figures and signs;
They all portrayed
Our thoughts, our speeches.

4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist"
to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"

Ninety years ago, the venerable historian of Russian culture, Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov, summing up the many years of disputes about the state of literacy in ancient Rus', declared his own position in these disputes. Some, he wrote, consider ancient Rus' almost completely illiterate, while others admit the possibility of recognizing the spread of literacy in it. “Sources give us too little information to be able to use them to prove the correctness of one or another view, but the whole context of the phenomena of Russian culture speaks more in favor of the first view than in favor of the latter.”

And here is the same idea expressed by another historian on the pages of a gymnasium textbook: “Then writing was limited to writing off someone else’s, since few schools ... served only to prepare priests.”

Since then, new research and new archaeological finds have gradually changed the "general context" that served as Miliukov's main argument, forming a new attitude to the old problem. The study of the highest achievements of ancient Rus' in the field of literature, architecture, painting, and applied art made the idea that the amazing flowers of ancient Russian culture bloomed on the basis of total illiteracy and ignorance more and more untenable. New conclusions about the high technical level of the ancient Russian craft, the study of the long-distance trade relations of ancient Rus' with the East and West made it possible to clearly see the figure of a competent artisan and a competent merchant. The researchers came to the recognition of a wider penetration of literacy and education among the Old Russian townspeople. However, even in the year of the discovery of birch bark letters, this recognition was accompanied by reservations that, nevertheless, literacy was mainly the privilege of princely boyar and especially church circles.

The fact is that the facts accumulated by science were few in number and provided the meager food for thought by researchers. Important theoretical constructions were fed mainly by speculative conclusions. The priests, by the very nature of their activities, cannot do without reading and writing, which means they were literate. Merchants, exchanging with the West and the East, cannot do without trade books - it means that they were literate. Craftsmen who improved their skills need to write down the technological recipe - which means they were literate.

True, they referred to household items found during excavations - mainly in Novgorod - with inscriptions by the craftsmen or owners who made them. But such inscriptions by 1951, even in Novgorod excavations, no more than a dozen were found. On the scales of debatable opinions, they could hardly outweigh the age-old skepticism of the advocates of the opinion about the universal illiteracy of Rus'.

And one more circumstance. Even agreeing that literacy in Rus' was the property of not only priests, historians of culture recognized only the 11th-12th centuries as a time favorable to enlightenment, and not the subsequent period, when, under the difficult conditions of the Mongol yoke, Rus' experienced a tragic decline in culture.

How the discovery of birch bark has changed all these ideas! And what an abundance of facts it brought!

The first significant result of the discovery of birch bark letters was the establishment of a phenomenon remarkable for the history of Russian culture: the written word in medieval Novgorod society was not at all a curiosity. It was a familiar means of communication between people, a common way to talk at a distance, a well-recognized opportunity to consolidate in records that which might not be remembered. Correspondence served Novgorodians, who were not employed in some narrow, specific sphere of human activity. She was not a professional sign. It has become a daily occurrence.

Of course, different families that inhabited the excavated section of Velikaya Street had different degrees of literacy. The illiterate lived next to the educated, and the uneducated lived next to the educated. It `s naturally. But what is more important for us is that many literate people and families lived next to illiterate people and families, for whom reading and writing became as natural a matter as eating, sleeping, and working. The sheer number of letters found is amazing and can forever cross out the myth of the exceptional rarity of literate people in ancient Rus'. However, the list of authors and addressees of birch bark letters is even more impressive. By whom and to whom were they written?

The landowners write to their managers, to the key-keepers. Keykeepers write to their masters. Peasants write to their lords, and lords to their peasants. Some boyars write to others. Moneylenders rewrite their debtors and calculate their debts. Artisans correspond with customers. Husbands address their wives, wives address their husbands. Parents write to their children, children to their parents.

Here is charter No. 377, written in the last third of the 13th century and found in 1960: “From Mikiti ka Ani. Follow me. I want you to be, and you me. And for that, Ignato Moisiev is weak-eared. And drive ... ". This is a fragment of the oldest marriage contract that has come down to us. Mikita asks Anna to marry him, naming Ignat Moiseevich here as a witness ("rumor") on the part of the groom.

It is curious that for the entire period of work at the Nerevsky excavation, only two or three liturgical texts were found - some half a percent of all birch bark read here. But such letters are common.

Letter No. 242, a document of the 15th century: “Colobite from Koshchei and from ladles. Who has a horse, and those are thinner. But (and) nyh do not. How, sir, do you favor the Christians? And rye, sir, do you order me to thresh? How would you point it out?" The authors of the letter are the key keeper and tenant peasants who cultivated the land of the master for half the harvest. They complain about poverty and lack of horses: "Those who have horses are bad, while others don't have them at all."

Or charter No. 288, written in the 14th century: “... khamou 3 cubits... spool of green shalkou, drogii of cerlen, third of green yellow. Golden white on squirrels. Soap on squirrels of Bourgalskog, and on another squirrel ... ". Although the letter has neither a beginning nor an end, it is safe to say that this is a record and calculation of the order of some embroiderer or embroiderer. The canvas (in old Russian “ham”) had to be bleached with “burgal” (?) soap and “whitewash” and embroidered with multi-colored silks - green, red and yellow-green.

In charter No. 21, written at the beginning of the 15th century, the customer refers to the craftswoman: “...woozzinc weaved. And you came to me. And if you don’t please send it with kym, and you’ll make yourself white.” The author of the letter received a notification that the canvases (“taskin”) were woven for him, and asks to send them to him. And if there is no one to send with, then let the weaver bleach these canvases herself and wait for further orders.

Letter No. 125, thrown into the ground at the end of the 14th century, does not indicate the occupation of the author of the letter and his addressee, but it seems that they are not rich people: “Bow from Marina to my son Grigory. Buy me a Zendyan good, and I gave the kun to Davyd Pribysha. And you, child, have wares with you, but bring semo. "Zendyantsey" was a cotton fabric of Bukhara origin, named after the area of Zendene, where it began to be made earlier than in other villages. "Kuny" is the old Russian name for money. If Gregory was a rich man, it is unlikely that his mother would have had to send money for the purchase with an opportunity. Gregory might not have any money, and his mother sends him the necessary amount from her savings.

Examples could be given endlessly. They brought and will bring every year of excavations. And here's something else great. It turned out that literacy in Novgorod invariably flourished not only in pre-Mongol times, but also in the era when Rus' was experiencing the severe consequences of the Mongol invasion.

Of the 394 letters found at the Nerevsky excavation under conditions that made it possible to accurately determine the time of their writing, 7 letters were found in the layers of the 11th century, 50 of them turned out to be in the layers of the 12th century, 99 letters were thrown into the ground in the 13th century, 164 in the 14th century, and in the 15th century - 74.

The sharp decrease in their number in the 15th century is explained not by some events that disrupted the cultural development of Novgorod, but by the fact that in the layers of the second half of the 15th century organic substances are almost not preserved. There is no birch bark there, and, consequently, 74 letters of the 15th century were found in layers only in the first half of this century. They fell into the ground for not a hundred, but only fifty years.

Such a steady cultural progress was, one must think, a feature of Novgorod. And the point is not only that the Mongol invasion stopped a hundred miles from its city gates. Although Novgorod did not experience the tragedy of military destruction and plunder of its dwellings and temples, it, like all of Rus', fell under the heavy yoke of the Golden Horde. The point here is that the heyday of the “great Russian republic of the Middle Ages” dates back to the end of the 13th - the first half of the 15th century. The veche system, which was used by the boyars as an instrument of their power over the rest of the population, nevertheless contributed more to the development of the activity of the masses in political and cultural life than princely autocracy in other medieval Russian centers. And it is no coincidence that the flourishing of culture in Novgorod coincides with the heyday of the republican system.

All this is so - the reader has the right to say - but how to prove that the birch bark letters, mined from the ground, were written by their authors themselves? And what were the recipients themselves reading? After all, it may well be that a few literate people, scribes, professionals, who earned a piece of bread with their literacy, read and wrote letters. Well, that's a very serious question. Let's try to answer it.

Of course, a certain number of letters come from illiterate people and are written at their request by literate people. These are some of the peasant letters. The master's thorn-makers are named as their authors, but the key-keepers write not from themselves, but from the inhabitants of this or that village, complaining to their master. A certain number of letters come from literate people, but were not written by them, but by another person. Such are the letters of some great landowners, coming from one person, but written in different handwriting. An important gentleman dictated his letter or instructed the keykeeper to write for him and on his behalf. In recent years, for example, during excavations at the Lyudin end, letters No. 644 and 710 were found, written in the same handwriting. Meanwhile, the author of charter No. 644 is Dobroshka, and the author of charter No. 710 is Semyun; Dobroshka is also mentioned in charter No. 710, but already as an addressee. Dobroshka was also the author of charter No. 665, but it was written in a different handwriting. The discovery of all three letters in one complex makes undoubted the identity of Dobroshka in all these documents of the second half of the 12th century and the participation of some other person in writing at least one of Dobroshka's letters.

However, as a rule, in letters coming from the same person, the handwriting is the same.

This observation, however, cannot be decisive. After all, most of the authors are known to us from single letters. And here you can no longer guess whether the author himself squeezed out letters on birch bark or sat next to the literate, marveling at the briskness of his "pen". Decisive evidence was given not by birch bark, but by finds closely related to it - iron, bronze, bone rods - wrote, with which all birch bark letters were written.

More than seventy of them were found at the Nerevsky excavation site (more than two hundred in total during the excavation). The distant ancestor of the modern fountain pen in medieval Novgorod was not a rare item, but the same household item as a comb or a knife. And it is naive to think that seventy writings were lost on Great Street by professional scribes who came to write or read a letter. They are lost by people who lived here and wrote their letters without outside help. And the variety of handwriting speaks for itself.

The figure of a Novgorodian, to whose belt an inseparable writing instrument on birch bark is hung from him, became known as a result of excavations, but historians have observed its vague reflection on the walls of Novgorod churches before, without distinguishing, however, an important detail for us.

The walls of many Novgorod medieval churches are covered with ancient scratched inscriptions. Such inscriptions - they are called "graffiti" - dotted the walls of St. Sophia Cathedral, the famous churches of the Savior-Nereditsa, Fyodor Stratilat, St. Nicholas on Lipna and many others in abundance. Some of these records are of an official nature. For example, in the church of St. Nicholas on Lipna, in the altar, where the clergy were placed during the service, the days of commemoration of various deceased Novgorodians are recorded on the walls. But most of the inscriptions are located where, during the service, not the clergy, but the worshipers were placed. Such graffiti owes its origin to the boredom of the church rite. Instead of praying, the parishioners took out their "feathers" from leather cases and scratched the walls. Sometimes the inscriptions seem pious: “Lord, help your servant,” but more often the thoughts of the owner of the “wrote” were far from piety. He left business records like records on birch bark. So, on one of the pillars of the Church of the Savior-Nereditsa, it is inscribed: “On Lukin’s day, the marshmallow took wheat”, “Lazor wrote a letter”. Or draw pictures. Or repeated the alphabet, especially if he was a few years old. And in all cases, the tool for writing on plaster was a rod, which was also used for writing on birch bark. It is quite understandable that before the discovery of birch bark letters, the abundance of inscriptions scratched on church walls seemed mysterious, and an awl or an ordinary nail was supposed to be used as a tool for writing on plaster.

Having discovered such a wide distribution of literacy in Novgorod, we cannot but be interested in how this literacy made its way, how literacy was taught. Some information could be gleaned from well-known and previously written sources. The chronicle under the year 1030 reports that Prince Yaroslav the Wise, having come to Novgorod, collected "from the elders and priestly children 300 teach books." In the lives of some Novgorod saints, written back in the Middle Ages, it is said that they studied at schools, and this is said to be a quite ordinary thing. Finally, at the famous Stoglavy Cathedral in 1551, it was directly stated: “before this school was in the Russian kingdom in Moscow and Veliky Novgorod and other cities.” The abundance of birch bark letters gave new life to these testimonies, showing that teaching to read and write was indeed a well-established business in Novgorod. It was necessary to look for traces of this training on the birch bark itself, especially since the graffiti of Novgorod churches reflected the exercises of little Novgorodians, who scratched the alphabet during a boring service.

The first such letter was found in 1952. This is a small piece, which received the number 74. On it, in an uncertain, unsteady handwriting, the beginning of the alphabet is scrawled: "ABVGDEZHZ ...". Then the writer got confused and instead of the letters he needed in order began to depict some of their similarities.

The new and most significant discovery of student exercises imprinted on birch bark was made in 1956 on July 13 and 14, memorable days for the entire expedition. During these two days, letters came from the excavation to the laboratory table in a continuous stream. Seventeen birch bark scrolls were steamed, washed and unrolled. And sixteen of them were found on some ten square meters. This bundle of birch bark sheets was thrown into the ground at the same time. They lay in one layer belonging to the fifteenth tier of the pavement of Velikaya Street, two meters from its flooring. Based on dendrochronology data, we can confidently say that a pile of birch bark letters found on July 13 and 14, 1956, fell into the ground between 1224 and 1238.

We will get acquainted with these letters in the order in which they appeared before the members of the expedition. Letter No. 199 was found first. It was not a sheet of birch bark specially prepared for writing. The long inscription of the letter was made on the oval bottom of the tues, a birch bark vessel, which, having served its time, was given to the boy and used by him as writing material. The oval bottom, which retained traces of stitching along the edges, was reinforced with crisscrossing wide strips of birch bark. These bands are filled with records.

On the front page, the entire alphabet is carefully written out from “a” to “z”, and then warehouses follow: “ba, va, ha, yes ...” and so on until “shcha”, then: “be, ve, ge, de ..." - to "shche". On the second page, the exercise is continued: “bi, vi, gi, di ...” and brought only to “si”. There just wasn't enough space. Otherwise, we would read both “bo, in, go, do ...”, and “boo, woo, gu, du ...”.

The method of learning to read and write in warehouses was well known from the evidence of the 16th-18th centuries; it existed with us in the 19th and even at the beginning of the 20th century. Writers often told about him, depicting the first steps in mastering the letter. Everyone knows that the letters in Rus' were called "a" - "az", "b" - "beeches", "c" - "lead", "g" - "verb" and so on. It was extremely difficult for the child to realize that "az" means the sound "a", "buki" - the sound "b". And only by memorizing syllabic combinations: "buki-az - ba, lead-az - va", the child came to the ability to read and understand what was written.

The boy who wrote down the alphabet and warehouses in charter No. 199 was just practicing, because he already knew how to read and write. We made sure of this by turning our birch bark bottom over. There, in a rectangular frame, it is written in familiar handwriting: “Bow from Onfim to Danila.”

Then the boy began to draw, as all the boys draw when they get bored with writing. He depicted a terrible beast with protruding ears, with a protruding tongue, similar to a spruce branch or the plumage of an arrow, with a tail twisted into a spiral. And so that the idea of our artist would not remain misunderstood by potential connoisseurs, the boy gave his drawing a name: “I am a beast” - “I am a beast”. Probably, adult artists sometimes have something of unsure boys. Otherwise, why would the excellent craftsmen, who carved magnificent matrices for the lead state seals of Novgorod in the 15th century, next to the image of the beast write “And this fierce beast”, and next to the image of the eagle - “Eagle”.

Having found the first letter, we could only guess that this boy was called Onfim, that, writing out the words of bow, imitating adults in this, he addressed his friend, probably sitting right next to him. After all, it could turn out that he simply copied the beginning of someone's letter that accidentally fell into his hands, or maybe that's how he was taught at school how to write letters. But the next discovery put everything in its place.

Diploma No. 200 is almost entirely filled with a drawing by a small artist already familiar to us with his “creative manner”. The little artist dreamed of valor and exploits. He depicted a kind of horse and a rider on it, who with a spear strikes an enemy thrown under the hooves of a horse. An explanatory inscription is placed near the figure of the rider: "Onfime". The boy Onfim painted his "heroized self-portrait". This is how he will be when he grows up - a courageous conqueror of the enemies of Novgorod, a brave horseman, who is the best at wielding a spear. Well, Onfim was born in the heroic age of Novgorod history, in the age of the Battle on the Ice and the Battle of Rakovor, in the era of the great victories of the Novgorodians. And his share probably more than got fights and exploits, the whistle of arrows and the sound of swords. But, having dreamed about the future, he remembered the present and wrote on a free piece of birch bark next to the “self-portrait”: “ABVGDEZHSZIIK”.

In charter No. 201, found on the same day, July 13, we also met Onfim's school neighbor. Here again the alphabet and syllables from "ba" to "shcha" were written out, but the handwriting was different, not Onfimov's. Maybe these are the exercises of Danila, to whom Onfim addressed with the words of greetings?

Diploma No. 202. It depicts two little men. Their raised hands resemble a rake. The number of fingers-teeth on them is from three to eight. Onfim still couldn't count. Nearby there is an inscription: “Take a dolozhzike on Domitra” - “Take debts on Dmitra”. Still unable to count, Onfim makes extracts from documents on debt collection. A business note, the most common type of birch bark writing in medieval Novgorod, served as copybooks for it. And at the same time, this letter clearly shows how Onfim got his hand in rewriting the alphabet. In the word "dolozhiki" he inserted an unnecessary letter "z", it turned out "dolozhzike". He was so accustomed to writing “z” after “g” in his alphabet that the hand itself made a memorized movement.

In charter No. 203 there is a complete phrase, well known from the inscriptions on the walls of Novgorod churches: "Lord, help your servant Onfim." This is probably one of the first phrases with which the mastery of writing began. Meeting it on the walls next to the scratched letters of the alphabet, we must each time assume not so much the piety of the writer - what kind of piety is there if he scratches the church wall during worship - but rather his tendency to constantly reproduce the knowledge learned in the first school exercises, inclination that arises before us from most of Onfim's letters, which he wrote not for a teacher, but for himself. Otherwise, he would hardly have begun to write and draw on one sheet of birch bark.

Next to the inscription of charter No. 203, two schematic human figures are again depicted. And again they have an unnatural number of fingers on their hands - three or four.

Diploma No. 204 is one of the exercises in a letter to warehouses. Writing out warehouses from “be” to “sche”, Onfim prefers to do his usual exercise. He failed at an attempt to write some kind of coherent text that begins with the words "Just like."

Diploma No. 205 - the full alphabet from "a" to "z". Here is the beginning of the name "Onfim" and the image of a boat - one of those that Onfim saw every day on the Volkhov.

Letter No. 206 - at first a meaningless set of letters, perhaps an attempt to depict the date, but an unsuccessful attempt, which can hardly be blamed on Onfim, who has not yet even learned to count the fingers on his hand. Then an exercise in writing in warehouses - from "ba" to "ra". And, finally, below - seven men holding hands "in the manner of Onfim" with a varied number of fingers on their hands.

Diploma No. 207 is one of the most interesting. Its text is written in Onfim's well-known handwriting: "As God is with us, hear before the envoy, but your prayers to your servant, God."

At first glance, there is only a meaningless set of words imitating church hymns. According to the first impression, Onfim memorized some prayers by ear, not understanding their content and the meaning of the words sounding in them. And he transferred this gibberish to birch bark. However, another interpretation of the illiterate inscription is also possible. It is known that in the old days education was mainly ecclesiastical in nature. Reading was taught from the Psalter and the Book of Hours. Perhaps, we have before us one of the dictations, one more step of Onfim in mastering reading and writing after the already mastered exercises in writing in warehouses. As established by N. A. Meshchersky, mutilated phrases from the followed Psalter, a book from which many generations of our ancestors learned to read and write, are recognized in literacy.

Letter No. 208 - a tiny piece of birch bark with a few letters. The handwriting betrays Onfim again.

In charter No. 210, also torn, people are depicted and near them the remains of inscriptions that defy interpretation. And, finally, five more birch-bark sheets cannot be counted as letters. They do not have a single letter, so they are not included in the general numbering of the inscribed birch bark. These are drawings by Onfim. On one is an incredibly long horse, two riders sit on it at once. Probably, the father more than once put Onfim on the back of his horse. Nearby, in the distance, another horseman, smaller. Another drawing is a battle scene. Three riders with quivers on their sides are galloping. Arrows fly. Under the hooves of horses lie defeated enemies. In the third picture, the rider is again. On the fourth - two people, one of them with a terrible mug, with bulging eyes, broad shoulders and tiny hands, like some kind of nightmare vision. In the fifth drawing, two warriors in helmets are depicted in full accordance with the archaeologically known helmets of the 13th century.

So, we met the boy Onfim. How old is he? It is impossible to establish this exactly, but probably about six or seven. He can't count yet, and he hasn't been taught numbers. The drawing itself, perhaps, indicates the same age. These observations are also confirmed by some written evidence preserved in previously known sources. In the lives of the saints, compiled in the Middle Ages, the story of learning to read and write “in the seventh year” even turned into a kind of template. The same age is also called stories about the time of training of Russian princes. Alexei Mikhailovich received an alphabet as a gift from his grandfather, Patriarch Filaret, when he was four years old. At the age of five, he was already briskly reading the Book of Hours. When Fyodor Alekseevich was six years old, his teacher received an award for success in teaching the prince, and Peter I read even at the age of four. This is information from the 17th century. From an earlier time, reliable evidence has been preserved of the teaching in Novgorod in 1341 of the Tver prince Mikhail Alexandrovich, who was then about eight years old, to read and write. Now we have even earlier evidence.

Findings of birch bark alphabets continued in the following years in other regions of Novgorod. A fragment of the alphabet of the end of the 13th century was discovered in 1967 in the Lubyanitsky excavation site on the Torgovaya side of Novgorod. In 1970, also on the Trading Side, a fragment of the alphabet of the first half of the 13th century was among the documents excavated on ancient Mikhailova Street. In 1969, when a new excavation was laid on the Sofia side, not far from Nerevsky, they managed to find a birch bark alphabet from the beginning of the 12th century. In 1979, in the Nutny excavation on the Trading Side, the alphabet of the first quarter of the 15th century was written on the page of a birch bark leaf folding in half, that is, like a small book. In 1984, at the Troitsky excavation, a letter No. 623 of the second half of the 14th century was discovered - exercises in syllabic writing.

However, the most significant find in this series was the letter No. 591 discovered at the same Nutny excavation site in 1981. It was found in strata of the 30s of the 11th century and today is the oldest birch bark document in the Novgorod collection. The circumstance that the most ancient birch-bark letter turned out to be an alphabet seems to be very symbolic. The one who wrote it, undoubtedly, made a mistake, having omitted three letters “i”, “i”, “k” after the letter “z” and swapped “l” and “m”. Apparently, the writer called the letters to himself and, having depicted "z", that is, "earth", mechanically wrote after it those consonants that followed the "z" in this word. Something similar can be observed in the characteristic mistake of a scribe who wrote down the alphabet in the margins of a liturgical book at the end of the 11th century. There, the letter "p" is translated as "by" - instead of the letter, the scribe began to write the word "peace" - the name of this letter.

Otherwise, the alphabet is distinguished by a regular sequence of characters, but it does not consist of 43 letters, but only of 32 (I take into account the accidentally omitted "i", "i", "k"). There are no letters "u", "s", "b", "u", iotated "a", "e", "i", "xi", "psi", "fita", "omega". Is the absence of these letters the result of insufficient knowledge of the writer of the alphabet in its final section? Or is it necessary to look for other reasons for its obvious incompleteness?

First of all, I note that the missing letters, without exception, all find acceptable replacements for themselves in those letters that are in charter No. 591. "Sch" can be conveyed by the combination "piece", from which it, in fact, arose; "s" - the connection "i" or "i"; “yu” finds a correspondence in “iotized yus big”, “iotized a” - in “yus small”, “xi” - in combination “ks”, “psi” - in combination “ps”, “fita” - in “f ”, “omega” to “o”. The absence of "b" in the alphabet is not fatal: the so-called one-er texts are well known in the early Slavic written monuments, where "b" performs both its role and the role of "b". Among them in the Novgorod finds are several letters of the 11th century and the turn of the 11th-12th centuries.

Among the Novgorod alphabets, charter No. 460, dating back to the 12th century, has a similar, albeit to a lesser extent, incompleteness. And the scratched Slavic alphabet of the 11th century found on the wall of the Kyiv St. Sophia Cathedral contains 27 letters arranged in strict accordance with the order of the signs of the Greek alphabet. It is somewhat different from the alphabet of our charter No. 591, but it also does not contain iotated letters, as well as "u", "s", "b", "yu".

Two important conclusions follow from these comparisons. Firstly, during the first centuries of the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in Rus', there were two stages of literacy education. The first was training in lightweight, everyday writing, reflected both by letter No. 591 and Kyiv graffiti. The second step required complete knowledge of the alphabet and was intended for professional book copyists. Secondly, - this is evidenced by the Kiev alphabet, - the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was only gradually replenished with specifically Slavic letters. At first, such letters as “b”, “g” were included in its composition, and only at some further stage “u”, “b”, “s”, “yus” and iotated. Therefore, there is no reason to attribute the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet to Saints Cyril and Methodius. Rather, they invented the Glagolitic alphabet, or the Greek alphabet was replenished with several of the most necessary Slavic letters.

However, let us return to the Nerevsky excavation site. The year after we met Onfim, in 1957, the first student exercises in digital writing were also found. I must say that the numbers in ancient Rus' did not differ from ordinary letters. The number 1 was represented by the letter "a", the number 2 - by the letter "c", 3 - by the letter "g" and so on. To distinguish numbers from letters, they were provided with special icons - “titles” - dashes above the main sign, but this was not always done. Some letters were not used as numbers, for example, "b", "g", "sh", "u", "b", "b". And the order of the numbers was somewhat different from the order of the letters in the alphabet. Therefore, when we see, for example, such an entry: “AVGDEZ”, we know that these are numbers, and not the beginning of the alphabet, due to the fact that the letters “b” and “g” are omitted. Exactly with such an entry the expedition met in charter No. 287, and in 1960 in charter No. 376, and in 1995 - in No. 759. By the way, both last entries were also made on the bottoms of birch bark tuesas that have served their time. Little Novgorodians were not particularly pampered; any birch bark was suitable for their school exercises. In these letters there were only a few numbers. And in charter No. 342, found in 1958 in the layers of the XIV century, the entire system of numbers that existed at that time was reproduced. Units come first, then tens, hundreds, thousands, and finally tens of thousands, up to the circled 'd'. This is how the number 40,000 was depicted. The end of the charter is cut off.

Over time, exercises of little schoolchildren in arithmetic will certainly be found. However, it is possible that one such exercise has already been found. In 1987, at the Troitsky excavation site in the layer of the second half of the 12th century, a letter No. 686 was discovered with the following text: “Without dovou thirty kostou in simple. And in the drougemo there are 100 without four. “Two to thirty” means 28. “28 to a hundred” - 128. “One hundred without four” - 96. It is possible to translate the entry and understand its meaning like this: “128 in a simple one, and in another 98”. The numbers indicated in the charter relate to one another as 4:3 (128:96). The document looks like an answer to some student problem in arithmetic, in which, for example, in a simple case (8 + 8) × 8 the result will be 128, and in another, more complex, (8 + 8/2) × 8, the result will be 96 Other option: 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 128; 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 96.

Be that as it may, already now, having made sure that the methods of teaching literacy in ancient Novgorod were generally the same as in the 16th-17th centuries, we have a much clearer idea of the way in which literacy in Novgorod made amazing progress in the era in which former researchers saw only savagery and ignorance.

Another birch-bark document is valuable because, resurrecting a tiny episode of the 14th century, it throws a bridge from the customs and jokes of the schoolchildren of Ivan Kalita's time to the customs and jokes of the schoolchildren of Gogol's and Pomyalovsky's contemporaries. In 1952, at the Nerevsky excavation, letter No. 46 was discovered, which at first baffled everyone. Two lines are scrawled in this charter, the right ends of which have not been preserved. The first line contains the following text: "Nvzhpsndmkzatsst ...". In the second, there is no less meaningful inscription: "eeyayaeuaaahoea ...".

What is this? Cipher? Or a meaningless set of letters? Neither one nor the other. Write these two lines one below the other, as they are written in the charter:

N V F P S N D M K Z A T S T...
E E I A E U A A A X O E I A...

And now read vertically, first the first letter of the first line, then the first letter of the second line, then the second letter of the first line and the second letter of the second line, and so on until the end. It will turn out to be a coherent, albeit broken, phrase: “Ignorant writing, thoughtless kaza, but who is this quote ...” - “The unknowing wrote, the unthinking showed, and who reads this ...”. Although there is no end, it is clear that "whoever reads this" has been severely reviled.

Isn't it reminiscent of a well-known schoolboy joke: "I don't know who wrote, but I, a fool, read"? Can you imagine this undergrowth who thought up how to play a tricky trick on a friend sitting next to him on the school bench?

By the way, the given method of encryption was fixed not only by this schoolboy joke. In the church of Simeon the God-Receiver of the Zverin Monastery in Novgorod, the phrase “Blessed is the husband” is written in the same way on the wall at the end of the 15th century:

b a e b y
l f n m f

To finish the story of how medieval Novgorodians learned to read and write, one more interesting question needs to be sorted out. Every person is well aware of how much paper literacy education requires, how much every schoolchild writes exercises, throws out spoiled sheets. Probably, in ancient times, in order to teach a baby to read and write, it was necessary to destroy a mass of writing material that there was no need to store. The letters of Onfim once again convinced us of this. They are written at the most in a few days. And there were a lot of such days, from which the years of school teaching were made up. Why are student exercises relatively rare among birch bark letters?

The answer to this question was obtained during excavations on Dmitrievskaya street. There, at different times and in different layers, the expedition found several planks, partly resembling the lid of a pencil case. One of the surfaces of such boards, as a rule, is decorated with carved ornaments, and the other is deepened and has a rim along the edges, and along the entire bottom of the notch formed in this way is a notch of dashed lines. Each board has three holes at the edges. The same paired plank corresponded to it, and with the help of holes they were connected to each other with ornamented surfaces outward. Sometimes the set consisted of more boards.

On one of the tablets, found in 1954 in a layer of the first half of the 14th century, instead of an ornament, the alphabet from “a” to “z” was carefully carved, and this find gave the necessary interpretation to the whole group of mysterious objects. They were used for literacy. The recess on them was filled with wax, and the little Novgorodians wrote their exercises not on birch bark, but on wax, just as a school board is now used in teaching.

The purpose of the spatula, almost obligatory at the end of numerous writings found during excavations, also became clear. This spatula smoothed out what was written on wax. Such a spatula is distantly related to a sponge, with which each of us erased what was written with chalk on the blackboard many times. The alphabet, placed on the surface of one of the boards, served as a manual. The student looked at her, writing off the letters. On one cer, found in recent years, the letters "b", "zh", "k", "p", "sh", "e", "yu" are carved on its face. This means that the set consisted of five boards:

a B C D E
f s h i
i k l m n
etc.

And again, an analogy with modern manuals - for example, with the multiplication table, which is printed on the covers of school notebooks.

Well, if, while learning to write, little Novgorodians resorted mainly to wax, then the rarity of school exercises on birch bark should not surprise us.

It also becomes clear why Onfim, already knowing how to write, again and again writes out the alphabet and warehouses on birch bark. Writing on birch bark was not the first, but the second stage of learning. The transition from wax to birch bark required a stronger pressure, a confident hand. And, having learned to print letters on soft wax, it was necessary to learn again the technique of writing on less pliable birch bark.

I would like to finish this chapter by mentioning the birch bark document No. 687 of the second half of the 14th century found in 1987 at the Troitsky excavation site. On a fragment of a letter that has lost both the first and last lines, it reads: And the horses..." The quoted text clearly shows that learning to read and write was a normal part of the upbringing of children, even in the families of ordinary citizens, among whom we must include the author of this letter, which reflected the mediocrity of his other household chores. Obviously, this is a letter to the wife of her husband, who is away somewhere. The order to send children to learn to read and write is placed as a completely ordinary matter on a par with concerns about buying oil (Volga), children's clothes, and some instructions regarding the maintenance of horses.

Current page: 1 (total book has 18 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 10 pages]

I sent you birch bark

Valentin Lavrentievich Yanin

Dedicated to blessed memory

Ivan Georgievich Petrovsky

to whose invariable attention the Novgorod expedition owes many successes

This book tells about one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of the 20th century - the discovery by Soviet archaeologists of Novgorod birch bark letters.

The first ten letters on birch bark were discovered by the expedition of Professor Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky in 1951. Twenty-four years have passed since then, and each of these years, filled with active and exciting searches for new charters, has been accompanied by continued success. In other years, archaeologists brought from Novgorod in their expedition luggage up to sixty or seventy new birch bark letters. Now, in January 1975, when these lines are being written, the collection of Novgorod letters on birch bark includes five hundred and twenty-one documents.

For twenty-four years, a whole library of books and articles devoted to birch bark has been formed. It is based on a detailed, multi-volume (six volumes have already been published) edition of charters, carried out by A. V. Artsikhovsky. The discovery of birch bark letters evoked a response from scientists of various specialties - historians and linguists, literary critics and economists, geographers and lawyers. And in the books and articles written by these scientists in dozens of languages, the discovery of birch bark letters is called sensational.

Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations...

I sent you a birch bark, writing

From the mouth of a baby

The Karelians were sent to the Kayano Sea ...

More Karelian letters

Two posadniks

In search of landlord's letters

The peasants strike their master with their foreheads...

Letters from Onciphorus

The recipient lives on the other side of the city

Two Maxims or one?

And you, Repekh, obey Domna!

A very short story about an unlucky kid

Endless variety of texts

The most ancient writings

Seven years later

Felix's manor

And a picture book

A little about trading

At the judge's estate

Birch bark can be found everywhere

Excavations continue

Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations...

For twelve years, the postal address of the Novgorod expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and Moscow University was: "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, archaeological excavations ...". Now this place is easy to find. A large quarter, bounded by Dmitrievskaya, Sadovaya, Tikhvinskaya (now Komarov Street) and Dekabristov streets, is built up with new high-rise buildings. From afar you can see the building of a department store standing on the corner of Sadovaya and Dmitrievskaya. Starting almost from the very site of the excavations, a powerful steel bridge hung over the Volkhov.

And in 1951, when archaeologists marked out the grid of the future excavation, there was a wasteland overgrown with elderberry and burdock. Rusty fragments of mangled rebar protruded from the weeds, grass in some places made its way through the continuous collapse of brick rubble that covered the wasteland left by fascist torchlighters on the site of a flourishing city. It was the seventh post-war year. Novgorod with difficulty rose from the ruins, leveling and building up the conflagrations. But the contours of the future city were already visible. Not only new buildings grew, but also the pace of new construction. Archaeologists also had to hurry in order to have time to take from the ancient city everything that could destroy modern Novgorod before the builders arrived. And so it happened: the expedition broke up new excavations, and houses were already rising on the old ones, completely exhausted by archaeologists.

Of course, when we hammered in the first pegs, marking out the excavation, none of us thought that twelve years of life and work would be associated with this excavation, that the small area that was decided to be excavated here would expand its walls to the entire area of the block. True, each of us was sure that great discoveries await us right here, in this wasteland. Without such confidence, it is not worth starting an expedition, because only enthusiasm gives rise to success.

How is an excavation site selected? Is it known in advance what will be found at the new location? Of course, no one can say before excavations what kind of masterpieces of art or unprecedented ancient objects will be discovered here. Archeology is always characterized by excitement. But it does not follow from this that archaeologists come to a new place blindfolded, testing only their luck. Each expedition has a scientific task, one of the most important conditions for the solution of which is the correct, comprehensively justified choice of the excavation site. The main task of the Novgorod expedition in 1951 was to study a residential area typical of medieval Novgorod. Archaeologists had to study the city estate, establish its layout, the purpose of various types of buildings, trace the history of the estate for as long as possible. In addition, it was necessary to collect a collection of ancient objects characteristic of the Novgorod layer and to establish, as far as possible, the exact dates of these typical objects in order to later date the layers in future excavations with their help.

Before the excavations, it was well known that the layout of medieval Novgorod differed significantly from the modern one. The current rectangular grid of streets was introduced only in the second half of the 18th century under Catherine II, when many Russian cities were redrawn in the St. Petersburg style. Our quarter and the streets that bound it, Dmitrievskaya, Sadovaya, Tikhvinskaya and Dekabristov, arose about two hundred years ago. A small number of plans for Novgorod in the middle of the 18th century, taken before the redevelopment, have been preserved. On them, old, no longer existing streets bore the same names that are constantly found in ancient chronicles when describing medieval events. The quarter, located at the corner of Sadovaya and Dmitrievskaya streets, on these plans was cut from north to south by one of the largest streets of ancient Novgorod - Velikaya, and from east to west within the same section Velikaya was crossed by two medieval streets - Kholopya and Kozmodemyanskaya.

The redevelopment of the city in the 18th century turned out to be a boon for modern archaeologists. Both now and in ancient times, residential buildings gravitate towards the red lines of the streets, and courtyards are located at some distance from the streets. Consequently, the closer to the street pavement, the more remains of houses and utensils that filled them in the ground. In ancient times, houses were most often wooden and their foundations did not differ in strength. Therefore, the construction of a new house almost did not affect the ancient remains lying below. When mass construction of urban brick houses began in the 18th-19th centuries, deep pits were dug for their capital foundations and cellars, sometimes destroying ancient layers to a considerable depth. New durable buildings, even if the remains of ancient buildings were preserved under them, made them inaccessible for study for a long time. But in the 18th century, new streets passed through other areas, they most often lay on the sites of ancient courtyards and wastelands, and accumulations of antiquities, the most interesting for archeology, turned out to be on the territory of new courtyards, where the threat of their destruction became minimal.

x / The excavation, broken in 1951, was called Nerevokim. With such a name, he acquired his fame. For a resident of modern Novgorod, the name "Nerevsky" will not say anything. But in the Middle Ages, it would have accurately marked the area where these archaeological works were started. Novgorod in the Middle Ages was divided into five ends - self-governing settlements, which in their totality formed a federation known throughout Europe under the name "Novgorod". Each of these villages was, as it were, a “state within a state”. Solving together the most important issues of state administration, the five Novgorod regions were constantly at enmity with each other, often opposing each other with weapons in their hands, concluding temporary political alliances, uniting and quarreling again. The ends were called Plotnitsky, Slavensky, Lyudin, Zagorodsky and Nerevsky. On the territory of the ancient Nerevsky end, Velikaya, Kholopya and Kozmodemyanskaya streets were once located.

The site chosen for excavations was located 250 meters from the Novgorod Kremlin. There were at least six ancient churches in close proximity to it. Now they are not, but they existed in the 18th century and are indicated on the plans of that time. Near one of these churches, according to the annalistic story, in ancient times the veche of the Nerevsky end gathered.

Thus, starting work on Dmitrievskaya Street, the expedition had an idea of what was here in the Middle Ages. We were also attracted by the thickness of the cultural layer, which reached a thickness of seven and a half meters at the corner of Dmitrievskaya and Sadovaya streets.

What is a cultural layer?

Imagine that you are standing on the edge of the gigantic Nerevsky excavation site, where work is being carried out at the level of the strata of the 11th century. True, it is necessary to make a reservation that none of the expedition members could ever see this excavation in full. The work was carried out alternately in separate sections for twelve years. But now, having completed them, we can mentally imagine the whole picture that has opened up.

The total area of the excavation reaches a hectare - ten thousand square meters. The excavation, having a complex shape, stretches from north to south for 150 meters, and from west to east for 150 meters. From north to south, forming a smooth bend, the excavation is crossed by powerful pavements of Velikaya Street. We can take a walk along it. If we move from south to north, then after thirty meters we will come to a crossroads with the same paved with pine blocks of Kozmodemyanskaya street, and after another forty meters Velikaya will be crossed by pavements of Kholopya street. Having decided to walk along all three streets opened in the excavation, by the time we return, we will have traveled half a kilometer, because the total length of the pavements dating back to the same time is 250 meters in the excavation. Traveling along the ancient streets, we saw on the sides the remains of wooden houses, preserved to the height of one or three crowns, manor palisades that survived in their lower part, the remains of gates leading to the courtyards of eight estates. Coming off the pavement, we put our feet on the layers of wood chips from the 11th century, and when we return from a walk, we can shake off the ashes of nine hundred years ago from our shoes. I did not note only one circumstance: in order to do this walk, we had to go down sixty-seven meters.

Standing on the edge of the excavation, we saw all these pavements and the remains of log cabins as if from a bird's eye view. And here is the time to answer the question that every archaeologist has been asked at least several hundred times during excavations: “But how did all this go underground?”

Yes, no way1 None of the logs we saw went underground. On the contrary, the earth grew over them. One of the properties of human activity important for archeology is the obligatory formation of a cultural layer wherever a person lives for a more or less long time.

A person comes to settle in a new place, where not a single foot has set foot before him. He builds a house by hewing logs and throwing chips on the ground. He heats the stove and, removing the ashes from it, throws it out next to the house. He eats meat and throws bones at his feet. He broke the pot and trampled the shards into the mud. He lost the coin. His boot was leaking, and a tattered sole flew over the threshold. Then his house burned down. The man leveled the conflagration, leaving the charred logs of the lower crowns in the ground, brought sand to sprinkle ashes and firebrands, and built a new house, again leaving a layer of fresh-smelling wood chips around it. In ancient times, manure was not taken to the fields, and it remained lying under the conflagrations of stables. Thus, from year to year, slowly but continuously, the formation of a cultural layer takes place in the places of human settlements. Archaeologists joke, saying that the more uncultured a person is, the thicker the cultural layer left by him.

However, in reality, the thickness of this layer depends on two circumstances - on the intensity of human activity and on the degree of preservation of organic matter in the soil. It is organic matter - wood, bone, skin, food remains, clothes - that make up the main part of the waste of human existence. Where they are not preserved, the cultural layer, as a rule, is thin, even if the settlement existed for a long time. At the Nerevsky end, this state of preservation is ideal. Logs of eight hundred years ago, extracted from the cultural layer, can now be used for temporary buildings, and a truck could freely pass along the ancient street decks without damaging them.

Without decay, the cultural layer at the Nerevsky end grew in the Middle Ages by one centimeter per year. For five hundred and fifty years, from the middle of the 10th century to the end of the 15th century, it grew here by five and a half meters, and over the next four hundred years by another two meters. The reason for the excellent preservation of "organics" is the increased humidity of the lower layers of the Novgorod soil. This humidity protects the organic matter that has fallen into the ground from air access. And without air, the processes of decay do not occur, since there are no conditions for the existence of microorganisms that cause the destruction of organic substances.

The attentive reader will no doubt ask why in later times the Novgorod cultural layer grew twice as slowly. In fact, the layers of the 16th-20th centuries in Novgorod are not particularly thick. In answering this question, two main reasons must be mentioned. Since the 16th century, the importance of Novgorod has fallen for a long time, its population has decreased, and the life of the townspeople has become less active. However, another circumstance is more important. Almost throughout its entire area, Novgorod is underlain by continental layers of dense waterproof clay. Therefore, the moisture of melted snow and rain saturated its soil to failure. Only in winter and hot summer it was dry. But in the 17th or 18th century the Novgorodians lost patience. They built an extensive system of wooden drainage systems - drainage, which in some areas still functions to this day. Drainages drained the upper layers, diverting water from them to the Volkhov. These layers opened access to air and with it to microorganisms. The upper layers continued to be deposited quite intensively, but all organic matter was destroyed in them just as intensively.

So, until the 17th century, it was very damp in Novgorod. Imagine how much "this feature caused trouble and expense to Novgorodians, who were forced, for example, to pave the streets too often. cleanliness. The pavement was laid in such a way that it somewhat towered over the adjacent areas. But twenty to twenty-five years passed, the cultural layer on the sides of the pavement grew by 20-25 centimeters, and mud began to creep onto the pavement in muddy conditions, flooding it. It was necessary to make a new flooring, although the old one could serve for more than a dozen years.The new pavement was laid directly on the old one.And so in the 550 years of the formation of the oldest cultural layer from the middle of the 10th century to the end of the 15th century, here, on Velikaya and neighboring streets, twenty eight tiers of pavements - a giant woodpile of perfectly preserved pine decks... And if you calculate, it turns out that in twelve years of excavations, it turns out that not 250 meters of street pavements were cleared, but 250 meters multiplied by 28. Seven kilometers of street decks of ancient Novgorod - this is the result of this multiplication!

Seven kilometers of street decks. Remains of 1100 wooden buildings. Seventy thousand cubic meters of the cultural layer accumulated over a thousand years. And all on one hectare of the ancient city.

And several tens of thousands of ancient things - wooden and iron, leather and bone, stone and glass, copper and lead ... Thus, there is a direct relationship between the thickness of the cultural layer and the number of finds.

Another important circumstance largely determined the choice of the site for excavations in 1951. A deep ditch was then dug along Dmitrievskaya Street for laying water pipes. This trench cut through the woodpile of the flooring of the ancient Kholopya Street, which in 1948 was also touched nearby by a small excavation of the Novgorod Museum. Therefore, even before the start of work, we had the opportunity to clarify the not very thorough plans of the 18th century and knew exactly on which sections of the underground pavements of this street lie. It was important to know this not only because the expedition from the very beginning got the basis to accurately orient itself in the plan of the ancient city, but also for another reason.

The expedition had to not only extract thousands of ancient objects from the earth, but also. understand their relationship. Clearing the remains of an ancient dwelling is only a small part of the job. It is still necessary to accurately determine the time of existence of this dwelling, to find out which of the ancient things found near it come from it, and which are not directly related to it, to establish which of the ancient buildings are simultaneous with our dwelling, which belong to an earlier time, and which built later. How is all this done? And what about street bridges?

So, the cultural layer grows gradually and consistently. First, if we talk about Novgorod, on the previously untrodden soil, which archaeologists call the mainland, layers of the tenth century lie down, then the eleventh, twelfth, and so on until the layers of today. This means that the very depth of an object that once fell into the ground can serve as an indicator of its relative antiquity. Things that fell into the ground a hundred years ago lie shallow, and those that were thrown five hundred years ago lie at great depths. Unless, of course, holes were dug in this place and the layer was not mixed up so that the ancient things were on top, and the new ones below them. However, Novgorodians did not like to dig holes because of the same soil moisture. There were no cellars there: they would be constantly flooded with water. Wells were hardly dug: they would be threatened by pollution from the waters washing the cultural layer. As a rule, they dug only the grooves of the palisades and the pits of the ropes - pillars that fasten the gates.

So what's easier? Knowing that the cultural layer grew by a centimeter per year, it is enough to measure the depth of each object and convert centimeters into years! No, if we think like this, we are wrong. Imagine that over the course of one century there were four fires in the excavated area, and none in the next century. This means that in the first hundred years, the owners of the estate brought building material four times, hewed logs, erected log cabins, leveled the conflagration four times, brought earth four times to cover the ashes and coals. And in the next century there was nothing like that. Due to four fires in the first hundred years, all one and a half meters of the cultural layer were deposited, and then only half a meter. On average, it turns out a centimeter per year, but this centimeter is conditional. How to be?

The very structure of the cultural layer comes to the rescue. The cultural layer is not at all homogeneous in its composition. When a house is being built, building chips fall on the ground in a thin layer. When the house burns down, the ash and coals of the leveled conflagration also cover the courtyard of the estate with a layer. When the conflagration is sprinkled with earth, this earth lies in a layer on top of the ashes. When a hole is dug here, the earth thrown out of the hole lies on top of the backfill of the conflagration. If you cut the cultural layer vertically, then the cut will look like a giant layer cake. Archaeologists constantly see and “read” this section on the four walls of the excavation. Hundreds of interlayers lying one on top of the other make it possible to divide the layer correctly into chronological levels.

It is quite clear that all objects and structures associated with the same layer belong to the same relatively short period of time. But how to determine this time?

Here, the eye basis has always been the things themselves (found in layers. Over time, the set of things surrounding a person changes. With the development of fashion, some types of jewelry disappear and others appear. With the development of technology, less perfect tools become obsolete and more perfect ones appear. With a change in trade connections, in place of some types of imported things, other types of them come.By studying ancient things, archaeologists have learned to date them.True, the accuracy of dating could not be very high, since any thing can sometimes be used for more than a dozen years.However, comparing the approximate dates of different objects, found in the same stratum, it was possible to date that stratum to within a hundred years.

Twenty-eight tiers of street decks lying one on top of the other form, as it were, the scale of a giant thermometer, to each division of which certain layers of the cultural layer are attached. Thanks to this, we get the opportunity to say that ancient things found in such and such a layer fell into the ground, for example, during the existence of the fifteenth tier of the pavement, that such and such a house was built simultaneously with the construction of the fourteenth tier of the pavement, and another house burned down in the period when Novgorodians traveled along the pavement, the thirteenth tier.

Based on the approximate dates of the interlayers and linking them with pavements, we will be able to assert that, for example, six tiers of pavements belong to the XIV century, and only five to the XIII century. This already contains a significant opportunity to clarify the chronology of our layers and things, dating them not by a whole century, but by the beginning, end or middle of a century.

These three circumstances - the historical characteristics of the place, the thickness of the cultural layer and the presence of street pavements - forced the expedition to stop in the area of Dmitrievskaya Street. All the discoveries were ahead, including the one that needs to be told here.

If a tree was cut down in 1975, and there are thirty growth rings on it, then its growth began in 1945. But not every person knows that by studying the growth rings of a tree cut down many years and even centuries ago, one can establish the year in which this tree was cut down.

It turns out that annual rings deposited on a tree in different years have different thicknesses. It depends on many reasons - whether the summer was wet or dry, hot or cold - and ultimately on the level of solar activity and atmospheric circulation, that is, conditions that operate in the same way over large expanses of the globe. The alternation of thin and thick rings creates unique combinations. If, for example, on a cut of a tree, a very thin annual ring is repeated after seven years, then after four years, after nine years and after twelve years, you can be sure that such an alternation will never be found on cuts of trees cut down in other centuries, but it will be repeated on sections of all trees growing simultaneously with ours in the same fairly large region of the globe.

The method of dendrochronology - the so-called method of determining dates from annual rings - was successfully applied in America. There, this was facilitated by the existence in the forests of certain species of exclusively perennial trees. Douglas fir and yellow pine grow for a thousand years, and the age of the giant California sequoia reaches 3250 years. From the cuts of these trees, the cycles of alternation from year to year of the climatic conditions of America for three thousand years up to the present day were calculated. After that, it was enough to compare the cut of any well-preserved log found during excavations with such a scale in order to establish its exact date.

There are no such durable trees in our forests, and the scale compiled on the basis of American material is not suitable for us - this is, after all, a completely different region of the globe. AND BOT In the Novgorod expedition, the idea arose to replace the missing sequoia with a woodpile of street pavements. In fact, pavements were laid every twenty to twenty-five years, and chopping blocks of hundred-year-old trees were used for them. This means that by comparing the annual rings of blocks of different times, one can gradually increase their readings and obtain a single scale for the alternation of climatic conditions for a long time, at least for a six-hundred-year period from the tenth to the fifteenth century, from which the tree in Novgorod is preserved quite well.

Archaeologist Boris Aleksandrovich Kolchin and botanist Viktor Evgrafozich Vikhrov undertook this laborious and painstaking work. They studied and compared thousands of excavated samples of ancient logs. To begin with, they managed to obtain a relative dendro-chronological scale.

Then we managed to get absolute dates. To do this, B. A. Kol-chin studied the logs that were once used in the foundations of some Novgorod churches, the time of construction of which was reliably known from the annals. This information, having taken its place on the general scale, gave dating to all, even the most distant parts of the scale from them. Already at this stage, the expedition gained confidence in the complete success of the reconstruction of the dendrochronological scale, since it was possible to check it with the help of the chronicle. Chronicle many times mentioned the big fires in the Nerevsky end, naming the years of these fires. But traces of fires were also preserved in the ground: some pavements turned out to be literally licked with flames and destroyed by fire so much that Novgorodians needed to immediately lay the streets again. When the dendrochronological dates of such new pavements were compared with the years of chronicle fires, the coincidence turned out to be amazing!

And then the work on compiling the dendrochronological scale entered the final stage. For many years, the search was carried out for logs of the 16th-18th centuries, which would allow bringing the scale to the present day and checking it again by counting from modern trees. The expedition was looking for new samples no longer in the ground, but in ancient buildings and in forests, gradually filling a four-century gap. The day when a single scale was created from all sites became the day of the triumph of the new dating method.

Thanks to this work, any well-preserved log found during excavations receives an absolute date. And this means that every blockhouse, every pavement now lies in the ground, as it were, with a label on which it is written: it was built from logs chopped in such and such a precisely designated year. This means that all layers associated with pavements and log cabins can now be dated with an accuracy unprecedented in archeology so far. This means, finally, that all things extracted from dated layers can accurately name their age, or rather, the time when they fell into the ground: after all, it is not new things that most often fall into the ground, but objects that have already served their time and thrown out for unnecessary.

In the story about the choice of the excavation site, about the cultural layer and about the dating of things, birch bark letters have never been mentioned so far. And this story has a lot to do with them. “Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations...” is not only the postal address to which the expedition members received letters from their relatives and friends. This is also the address where the expedition received the first birch bark letter from the depths of centuries, and after it four hundred more birch bark letters. 402 letters out of 521 were found in a rectangle bounded by Dmitrievskaya, Sadovaya, Tikhvinskaya and Dekabristov streets. And the story about the choice of the excavation site, about the cultural layer and the dating of ancient things is also a story about choosing a place where an outstanding discovery will be made, about the cultural layer in which birch bark documents lay for centuries, in order to later become the property of science, and about the dating of one from the categories of ancient things - birch bark letters.

PI a few more words about the excavations themselves. The Novgorod excavations are a large modern enterprise that deafens a person who has landed on them for the first time with the continuous noise of conveyors and the roar of winches. In the years when the work of the Novgorod expedition was at its greatest extent, up to three hundred diggers were engaged in excavations at the same time, and more than a hundred employees and students were monitoring the layer and finds. The Novgorod archaeological expedition, which first began its research as early as 1929 (first in the region, and since 1932 in the city itself), has long since become a major center of scientific work and student educational practice. It is also a large friendly team of people who love their job and know how to work well. And besides, this is one of the new centers of the cultural life of Novgorod, every Friday hospitably opening its doors to weekly reports for everyone who is interested in the past of Novgorod and progress in its study. And not just on Fridays. We feel interest in the work of the expedition every day. Probably, only rainy days pass without one or even several excursions visiting the excavations. Teachers and schoolchildren, students and tourists are our usual guests. The expedition also has permanent friends, mostly from Novgorod youth, who tell us about random finds of antiquities. And in the collection of birch bark letters, they have already found more than one letter.

I sent you a birch bark, writing...

Excavations with an area of one hectare! No one could even dream of such a scale of work in 1951. Then in! Wednesday, July 12, in the quarter on Dmitrievskaya Street, the opening of a relatively small section I of 324 square meters was started. A small excavation made it possible to accurately determine the direction of the ancient street and establish finally that "! This street was called Kholopya in the Middle Ages. "There were few finds, and there were very few interesting ones. Once, only two lead seals of the 15th century were found in a row - the posadnik and the archbishop's. The heads of the two sections into which the excavation was divided, without much enthusiasm, argued which of them should tear off the earthen brow that delimits them taking the lead on a hot day is not the most interesting thing to do: dust flies all over the excavation, and for some reason there are never decent finds in these brows.

And it must have happened that the first letter on birch bark was discovered just under the ill-fated brow! "I found it exactly two weeks after the excavations began - on July 26, 1951 - a young worker Nina Fedorovna Akulova. Remember this name. It is forever included in history of science.

The letter was found right on the pavement of the XIV century, in the gap between two planks of the flooring. First seen by archaeologists, it turned out to be a dense and dirty birch bark scroll, on the surface of which clear letters shone through the mud. If it were not for these letters, the birch bark scroll would have been dubbed without hesitation in the field records as a fishing float. There were already several dozens of such floats in the Novgorod collection.

The righteous
Born Sam
Detectives and Thrillers, Detective

What could be the connection between a New York pimp and an extremist fanatic from a remote corner of Montana?

A very unusual way of reprisal: before killing the victims, the killer injected them with a strong anesthetic. It seemed that the criminal, dooming the unfortunate to death, sought to save them from pain.

The young ambitious journalist Will Monroe is already looking forward to the glory that will fall upon him after publishing a series of articles about a mysterious maniac ... But the third murder, which completely coincides in handwriting with the previous ones, takes place on the other side of the world - in India.

Is it possible that these crimes were committed not by one person, but by an entire organization?!

But what are its members up to? Who are they? And on what basis are the victims chosen?

So who are the Jews? By what merits and by whom were they chosen? How did they manage to preserve and carry through the centuries that special Jewish character that makes them so similar (naturally, not outwardly) to each other, whether they are a native of Africa or Europe, Latin America or Australia. This is exactly what we have to figure out. The "Jewish question" is extremely confusing. The "chosen ones", like a protective shell, surrounded themselves with so many fictions and myths that it is rather difficult for the average person to understand where is the truth and where is the lie. Over the past century and a half, the Jews have been especially zealous and succeeded in this matter. Having gradually taken over everything that is commonly called the mass media today, the Jews managed to impose their view of themselves on the whole world. We stand with Herzl with both hands for the “final solution of the Jewish question”, only not from the positions of the Jews themselves, “The Jewish question is the most terrible, most difficult and most dangerous of all, which, like menacing ghosts, all at once appeared before us imperiously demanding his permission, ”said the Russian patriot I. A. Rodionov. As Konstantin Rodzaevsky wrote: "Knowledge of the Jewish question is the key to freedom." Let's try to "pick up" this "key" in order to open the doors on the path to freedom and at least one step closer to the Day of liberation from the power of the "chosen ones".
Edward Uspensky. The best fairy tales
Uspensky Eduard Nikolaevich
Prose, Contemporary fiction, Children's, Fairy tale, Children's adventure

The Retromonochrome series is fairy tales from our childhood, fairy tales from our favorite, mostly still Soviet publications, in our favorite black and white (not always) illustrations. In the compilations of the series, only the best domestic and foreign storytellers and the most successful stories written by them are printed to the reader.

The seventh issue presents the best fairy tales of Eduard Uspensky.

For preschool and primary school age.
Well-intentioned... and nothing personal
Kusachkin Yozh Gorynych
Fiction , Space fiction , Social-psychological fiction , Fantasy , Humor , Humorous poetry

This story is a warning, an attempt to show the sad, but, alas, quite probable outcome that Russia can come to in 20-30 years, if the socio-economic policy of the state does not change.

Unfortunately, the processes and mechanisms of weakening the country and turning it into a colony of Pindos are still operating in the country, launched by traitors - Western toadies labeled and drunkards: the collapse of industrial production, education, science and medicine; decrease in population (including 70+), growth of poverty, including working citizens. This is the data of Rosstat. Recently labeled and said - "reforms" continue.

Laws are multiplying that worsen the lives of ordinary people. A prime example is the Retirement Age Act, which gives men an average of 2.5 years of retirement life and increases youth unemployment. The budget gives trillions of rubles to close “businessmen” who have significantly reduced the capitalization of enterprises (Gazprom) and driven them into trillions of debts (Rosneft). The people are deprived of the right to fair elections.

Uncoordinated peaceful protests are declared illegal by the authorities, although the Law of the Russian Federation “On meetings, rallies, ...” provides for a notification, and not a permissive (except for border zones) nature of their holding. Protesters are declared on television, almost as foreign agents, intimidated with beatings, arrests, sentences and threats of deprivation of parental rights.

An analysis of the negative trends in the development of the country leads to a very depressing picture of the future, which in the story the reader will see through the eyes of an ordinary member of society. And you don't wish that kind of future on anyone.

I hope that there will be Patriotic Forces in the country that will break the negative in the development of the state without shocks and lead Great Russia along the path of prosperity. Well, the story will move into the genre of alternative history.
And the Curtain Comes Down (LP)
Pintoff Stephanie
Detectives and Thrillers, Detective

The careers of New York detective Simon Zeel and his former partner, Captain Declan Mulvaney, took completely different directions after the tragic death of Zeal's fiancée in the sinking of the steamer General Slocum in 1904.

Although both men had a great future ahead of them, Ziel moved to Dobson - a small town north of New York - to forget about the tragedy, and Mulvaney dug himself even deeper - he agreed to head the site in the most gangster area of \u200b\u200bthe city.

Mulvaney has many detectives and unlimited resources at his disposal, but when another crime occurs under mysterious circumstances, Declan begins to look for someone he can completely trust.

A chorus girl is found on the Broadway stage dressed as a leading prima. And no signs of violence. No cuts, no bruises, nothing at all.

Under pressure from above, the coroner would have been forced to declare the incident a suicide, if this was not the second such case in the past few weeks.

News of an alleged serial killer will be catastrophic for the burgeoning theater world. Not to mention ordinary New Yorkers.
Tell me about life in the desert...
Kekova Svetlana Vasilievna
Poetry, Dramaturgy , Poetry , Nonfiction , Journalism , Criticism

Svetlana Vasilievna Kekova was born in 1951 on Sakhalin in the family of a military man. In childhood and youth she lived in Tambov. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Saratov State University (1973). Published in samizdat magazines in Leningrad ("Clock", "Bypass Canal") and Saratov ("Counterpoint"). Author of more than ten books of poems and three literary books. She has been published a lot in Znamya: Short Letters (No. 4, 1997); "Lilies of Chalcedon" (No. 7, 1998); "Hoarfrost of Christmas", (№ 1, 2000); "Soldier Grass" (No. 8, 2000); "According to new drawings" (No. 11, 2001); "Color Triode" (No. 4, 2001); "The Restless Garden" (No. 5, 2002); "Constellation of Sleeping Children" (No. 7, 2003); "Shadows of Flying Birds" (No. 8, 2004); "Sick Gold" (No. 10, 2005); "Music of Christmas" (No. 4, 2015). Lives in Saratov.

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(Not) happiness for the dragon
Queen Alice
,

What were these three deities hoping for when they stole me from my crown? That I will be happy and run to save their world? Forget my fiancé and marry the first dragon I see? They didn't attack it! Am I a witch or not? They'll be sorry they didn't give me a choice!
I am not a witch!
Teresa tour
Fiction, Humorous fiction, Romance novels, Love-fiction novels

Something strange is going on in the city… Witches are losing control over their powers, people are suffering. And what to do with all this? I'm Agnes Presci, graduate psychologist. And I'll get a job at the Royal Adaptation Center and help the witches no matter what! And the fact that the arrogant lord does not like this and does not want to become my boss is his difficulties! I will prove to him and to everyone around me what I am capable of!

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"I SENT YOU BIRCH BEREST..."

V.L.YANIN

1. From the preface to the book

2. From the chapter "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations ..."

The ancient plan of Novgorod, depicted on the Znamenskaya icon of the late 17th century

3. From the chapter "I sent you a birch bark, writing ..."

4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist" to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"

"I SENT YOU BIRCH BEREST..."

V.L.YANIN

1. From the preface to the book

2. From the chapter "Novgorod, Dmitrievskaya street, excavations ..."

The ancient plan of Novgorod, depicted on the Znamenskaya icon of the late 17th century

3. From the chapter "I sent you a birch bark, writing ..."

4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist" to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"

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4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist"
to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"

4. A.A. Zaliznyak. From "Afterword by a Linguist"
to the book by V.L. Yanina "I sent you a birch bark"