Slavic patterns in Egypt

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

What is special about Egyptian embroidery from the Museum of Oriental Art, University of Oxford? In Egyptian exhibits, both the structure of the composition, and the pattern-forming signs and images are strikingly similar to the patterned patterns of the Russian North, where they usually adorn festive ritual towels, wedding dressings on the bed, patterned belts, hem and shoulder shirts.

Patterned heritage of great-grandmothers

Many townspeople believe that the inhabitants of small villages are deprived of cultural life and live on the sidelines of civilization. But since we moved from the city to the village of my great-grandfathers on the banks of the Northern Dvina, all the most interesting things in my life have just begun. I got a "time machine" - an old weaving mill and I began to master weaving. And in order to weave, I examined old samples and photographed the preserved heritage of our distant great-grandmothers who lived in the century before last. What patterns did great-grandmothers convey to us, from what depth of centuries did these signs, what thought were put into them? For a long time I was looking for answers to these difficult questions.

Patterned things in the Russian North are carefully kept in cherished chests and passed from mother to daughter from hand to hand as jewelry. Senior mentors strictly monitored the preservation from time immemorial, so that no mistake or arbitrary distortion crept into the work of young needlewomen. When creating a new one, the pattern is taken from old objects, thanks to which it is transmitted unchanged for centuries.

Scientists know that the earliest finds of objects with geometric ornaments date back to many thousands of years BC.

And somehow in the news feed there were pictures of ancient half-rotted fabrics with very familiar geometric patterns, but not ours - from Egypt. The entire collection of antique embroidery was published on the website of the Museum of Oriental Art at Oxford University. At the beginning of the 20th century, the English Egyptologist Percy Newberry collected more than 1000 fragments of ancient embroidery in Cairo and donated his collection to the Ashmolian Museum (Museum of Oriental Art). The collection represents pieces of clothing and patterned fabrics for different purposes and different degrees of preservation. In 1984, the Museum opened this collection of embroideries for the first time for study. As a result of the study carried out by the radiocarbon method, it was found that the time of origin of tissues covers the period from 400 - 1500 years of our era.

We decided to find out for ourselves the historical place of our ancestral village in the context of world culture and conducted an initial research by comparing the pictures.

In the Egyptian exhibits, much seemed very familiar: the structure of the composition, and pattern-forming signs, and images, and even the upper edges of the presets. All this ornamental pattern is widely known in our Russian North and usually decorates festive ritual towels, wedding dressings on the bed, patterned belts, hem and shoulder shirts.

The following should be said about the differences: our patterns are made with red threads using the technique of weaving on a home weaving mill. Egyptian patterns are embroidered with silk thread in blue, green, brown, rarely red. But in both cases, a linen fabric of a plain weave was used.

Anyone who, by the nature of their work or personal interest, explores our Russian and Egyptian history, traditional folk culture, fabrics, sign systems of information transmission, I propose to get acquainted with the patterned heritage of the Northern Great Russians and the Egyptian patterned collection of Percy Newberry from the Ashmolian Museum.

With interest and gratitude, I will take note of your opinions, hypotheses, and counter research on this topic.

What conclusions can be drawn from this? For an answer, we turned to the head of the ONIR of the Smolny Institute of the Russian Academy of Education, a candidate of cultural studies, a full member of the Petrovsk Academy of Science and Arts, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, a respected researcher of Russian folk culture Pavel Ivanovich Kutenkov: northern Great Russian fabrics identified in the course of primary research? Our position here is as follows. We recognize the emergence of any identical single signs in each culture, each nation - independently. These are obvious phenomena. At the same time, the identified identities and similarities are so accurate in detail and so multiple in the number of phenomena discovered that, together with the methods of obtaining patterns, the colors of the patterns, the fabric of the bearer of the patterns, all together indicate their emergence from a single source. According to our data, they may be the most ancient Slavic-Aryan cultural roots. Moreover, the greatest antiquity of ornamentation is preserved in the fabrics of the Russian North."

conclusions

Primary studies have revealed a previously unknown relationship between the patterns of the Eastern Slavs, in particular the Northern Great Russians, and ancient and medieval Egypt, which serves as a direct indication of the ancient origins of both cultures.

Further research is needed on the patterned Egyptian fabrics and fabrics of the folk culture of the Eastern Slavs. It is advisable to conduct research using collections of fabrics from state museums in Russia, Egypt, Syria, Iran and other countries where objects of research may be located.