Where birch bark letters were first discovered. Birch bark letters - an important historical document

It is customary to call birch bark letters the texts inscribed (scratched) with a pointed bone rod on birch bark - birch bark.

Birch bark as a writing material is found among many peoples of Eurasia and North America. Some Russian Old Believer books are written on specially processed birch bark. However, all the texts on birch bark known until recently were written with ink (sometimes with charcoal) and do not differ in anything other than writing material from manuscripts written in ink on parchment or paper. And they are all of a relatively late origin (no older than the 15th century).

The discovery of Novgorod birch bark letters introduced the scientific world to an unexpected and surprising phenomenon of ancient Russian culture. Although the traditions of birch bark writing in Ancient Russia (up to the XIV-XV centuries) were known for a long time, the first ancient Russian birch bark letter was found only on July 26, 1951 during excavations in Novgorod under the leadership of a prominent Soviet archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky. It is no coincidence that birch bark letters were discovered in Novgorod, one of the most important cultural centers of our Middle Ages: the composition of the local soil favors the long-term preservation of wood materials in it.

With the expansion of archaeological excavations, systematic finds of letters on birch bark followed: in the early 80s. their number exceeded 600. Birch bark letters were also found in Smolensk (10 letters), in Staraya Russa near Novgorod (13 letters), Pskov (3 letters), in Vitebsk (one well-preserved letter). It is easy to see that all the places of finds are geographically close to Novgorod and had, if not identical, then similar conditions for the preservation of these monuments of ancient writing. Their preservation, of course, was facilitated by the fact that they were scratched, and not written with ink, which, after hundreds of years in the damp earth, had to dissolve.

Novgorod birch bark letters were presented from the 11th century. For the most part, they are single-use texts: these are private letters sent with an opportunity to close people - family members, friends, neighbors or business partners (for example, with a request to send something as soon as possible, come or somehow help in business ); there are drafts of business papers (which were then, apparently, copied on paper or parchment), memorable notes “for oneself” (about debts, about the need to do something); there are texts that belong to students and represent a kind of rough writing exercises. Found, for example, a whole series of exercises in the alphabet and drawings of the boy Onfim and his comrade, who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century. Naturally, after some time, such notes or read letters were thrown away.

Most of the birch bark letters have been damaged by time, so only fragments of the ancient text are often read, but there are also those where the text has been completely preserved. These charters are the most valuable material for historians: they characterize the private, economic and cultural life of ancient Novgorod, as it were, from the inside, significantly enriching our information about ancient Novgorod.

Their historical and cultural significance is also very great: birch bark letters confirm the long-standing assumption about the widespread spread of literacy in Russia, especially in medieval Novgorod, where the ability to read and write was the property of various segments of the urban population (including women who were authors or addressees of some birch bark letters), and not only the clergy and professional scribes. Medieval Western Europe did not know such widespread literacy.

For linguists, as well as for historians, birch bark letters are a fundamentally new source. Created by people who were not engaged in the correspondence of ancient books or the preparation of official documents, they only partially reflect the norms of church-book spelling and are more closely related to the peculiarities of local pronunciation. At first, however, it seemed that the birch bark letters could only confirm the correctness of the previous assumptions about the features of the Old Novgorod dialect, made on the basis of the analysis of "opisies" in books and official documents, and would not provide fundamentally new information that would be unexpected for historians of the Russian language ... So, for example, birch bark letters broadly reflect such a striking feature of the ancient Novgorod dialect as "clinking" - the presence in the speech of Novgorodians of only one affricate c (which in other Old Russian dialects corresponded to two affricates - c and h) (see Clack): wheat, martens and hottsu, celibacy, Gorislavitsa (genus), etc. But this feature of the ancient Novgorod dialect is also reflected in previously known books written in Novgorod (for example, in the Menaia of the XI century, in the Novgorod chronicle of the late XIII-XIV and others), although, of course, not as consistently as in birch bark letters. This is understandable: they learned to read and write from church books, memorizing prayers and psalms, in which the letters t and h were used "correctly", so the ancient scribes, regardless of the peculiarities of their native dialect, tried to write ts and h "according to the rules." And among the birch bark letters there are those where the rules for the use of these letters are not violated (the same boy Onfim in his exercises writes letters and syllables with these letters in the sequence in which they are located in the Slavic alphabet: ts-ch, tsa - cha, tse - what). But most of the authors of birch bark letters, making notes "for themselves" or in a hurry to send a note to a loved one, involuntarily violated these rules, using only the letter c or mixing c and h. This confirms the assumption that there are no two affricates in the local dialect (which also corresponds to its modern condition).

With further, deeper study of the language of birch bark letters, it began to be discovered that they reflect such features of ancient Novgorod speech, which eventually disappeared and were not reflected in traditional sources or are represented in them by involuntary census of scribes, which did not allow making more or less definite conclusions.

An example is the spellings representing the fate of the consonants k, r, x, which in Slavic (including Old Russian) languages \u200b\u200bwere at that time impossible before the vowels and and e (ђ). They spoke and wrote with help (and not help), according to bђltsђ (and not according to bђlkђ), grђsi (and not grђhi).

In Novgorod texts, rare examples with spellings that contradict traditional ones have been known for a long time. Thus, a Novgorodian, who rewrote the text of the service Menaion in 1096, wrote in the margins his local (non-Christian, absent in church books) name Domka in a form that does not correspond to what is known from other texts of the 11th-12th centuries: Lord, help the slave his D'mkb, while according to the laws of the then pronunciation (as historians of the language always imagined it) and according to the rules of spelling it would follow: Dom'tsђ. The single spelling D'm'kђ against the background of the general rule was interpreted as a special case of early generalization of the basis (under the influence of Domk-a, Domk-u, etc.).

However, upon careful study of the oldest birch bark letters (up to the XIV century), it turned out that in them such a transfer of purely local words (personal names, names of settlements, terms) that are not found in church books is common: k Kulotk, in Mestiatka, on Tusk ( type of tax), by blki (local unit of calculation), etc.

Such spellings mean that the ancient Novgorod dialect did not know the changes k, r, x in the usual for Slavic languages \u200b\u200bc, s, s (Kulotshch, in Pudoz, etc. would be expected). This is reflected in other positions, including the beginning of the roots, which is found only in birch bark letters: kђli (\u003d tsђly, that is, whole) x (ro (\u003d s ,ro, that is, gray), as well as inђho, inђkomu (\u003d all, everything). All these cases show that combinations of kђ, xђ and others in the speech of Novgorodians did not change the combinations with consonants c, s. It turns out, therefore, that tsђlyi, sђryi, which are common in parchment and in later Novgorodian texts, all - in fact, etc. - are the result of the loss of the original Novgorod dialectal features and the assimilation of general Russian pronunciation norms in the process of forming a single language of the ancient Russian people.

By themselves, such facts suggest that further study of birch bark letters, the collection of which continues to grow, promises the historians of the Russian language many new interesting discoveries.

At the same time, the birch bark letters contained materials that made it possible to judge by what texts and how the ancient Novgorodians were taught to read and write (see the drawings of the boy Onfim, who was doing his homework on birch bark).

The archeology of the twentieth century led to the discovery of a unique historical source - birch bark letters.

True, it should be noted that the first collection of birch bark letters was collected at the end of the 19th century by a Novgorod collector Vasily Stepanovich Peredolsky (1833-1907). It was he who, after conducting independent excavations, found out that there is a perfectly preserved cultural layer in Novgorod.

Peredolsky exhibited birch bark letters found or purchased from peasants in the first private museum in the city, built with his own money. Novgorod birch bark letters, in his words, were "the letters of our ancestors." However, it was impossible to make out anything on the old scraps of birch bark, so historians talked about a hoax or considered the "ancestral letters" scribbles of illiterate peasants. In short, the search for "Russian Schliemann" was classified as eccentric.

In the 1920s, the Peredolsky Museum was nationalized and then closed. Director of the State Novgorod Museum Nikolay Grigorievich Porfiridov issued a conclusion that "most of the things were not of particular museum value." As a result, the first collection of birch bark letters was irretrievably lost. Purely Russian history.

Found again!

The sensation came with a half-century delay. As they say, there was no happiness, but misfortune helped ... During the restoration of the city in the 1950s, large-scale archaeological excavations were carried out, which revealed medieval streets and squares, a tower of the nobility and houses of ordinary citizens in the thickness of the multi-meter cultural layer. The first birch bark letter (end of the 14th century) in Novgorod was discovered on July 26, 1951 at the Nerevsky excavation site: it contained a list of feudal duties in favor of a certain Thomas.

Academician Valentin Yanin in the book "Birch bark post of centuries" described the circumstances of the find as follows: "It happened on July 26, 1951, when a young worker Nina Fedorovna Akulova found during excavations on the ancient Kholopia street of Novgorod, right on the flooring of its pavement of the XIV century, a dense and dirty scroll of birch bark, on the surface of which clear letters shone through the dirt. If it were not for these letters, one would think that a fragment of another fishing float was discovered, of which there were already several dozen in the Novgorod collection by that time.

Akulova handed over her find to the head of the excavation Gaide Andreevna Avdusina, and she called out Artemy Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky, which got the main dramatic effect. Hail found him standing on an ancient pavement being cleared, which led from the pavement of Kholopya Street to the courtyard of the estate. And standing on this pavement, as on a pedestal, with a raised finger, for a minute, in full view of the entire excavation, he could not, gasping for breath, utter a single word, uttering only inarticulate sounds, then in a hoarse voice with excitement shouted: “I was waiting for this find twenty years! "
In honor of this find, on July 26, Novgorod celebrates an annual holiday - "Day of the birch bark letter".

The same archaeological season brought 9 more documents on birch bark. And today there are already more than 1000 of them. The oldest birch bark letter belongs to the 10th century (Troitsky excavation site), the “youngest” - to the middle of the 15th.

As they wrote on birch bark

The letters on the letters were scratched out with a sharpened writing.

The writing was found in archaeological excavations on a regular basis, but it was not clear why their reverse side was made in the form of a spatula. The answer was soon found: archaeologists began to find in the excavations well-preserved boards with a depression filled with wax - tsera, which were also used for teaching literacy.

The wax was leveled with a spatula and letters were written on it. The oldest Russian book - the Psalter of the XI century (c. 1010, more than half a century older than the Ostromir Gospel), found in July 2000, was just that. The book of three tablets 20x16 cm, filled with wax, bore the texts of three Psalms of David.

Birch bark letters are unique in that, unlike chronicles and official documents, they gave us the opportunity to “hear” the voices of ordinary Novgorodians. The bulk of the letters is business correspondence. But among the letters there are also love letters, and the threat to bring to God's judgment - a test by water ...

Examples of Novgorod birch bark letters

The educational notes and drawings of the seven-year-old boy Onfim, discovered in 1956, are widely known. Having scratched the letters of the alphabet, he finally depicted himself as an armed warrior, riding a horse, crushing enemies. Since then, the boys' dreams have not changed much.

The birch bark letter №9 became a real sensation. This is the first female letter in Russia: “What my father and relatives gave me in addition, then for him (meaning - for my ex-husband). And now, by marrying a new wife, he gives me nothing. Shaking my hands as a sign of a new engagement, he chased me away, and took the other as his wife. " That's really, really, a Russian share, a woman's share ...

And here is a love letter written at the beginning of the XII century. (No. 752): “I have sent to you three times. What evil do you have against me that you did not come to me this week? And I treated you like a brother! Did I hurt you with what I sent to you? And you, I see, do not like it. If you were in love, you would have escaped from under human eyes and rushed ... do you want me to leave you? Even if I hurt you out of my own ignorance, if you start to mock me, then let God and I judge you. "
It is interesting that this letter was cut with a knife, the scraps were tied in a knot and thrown into a heap of manure. Apparently, the addressee has gotten another sweetheart ...

Among the birch bark letters there is also the first marriage proposal in Russia (end of the 13th century): “From Mikita to Anna. Follow me. I want you, and you want me. And for that the rumor (witness) Ignat ... ”(№377). This is so casual, but straightforward.

Another surprise was presented in 2005, when several messages of the XII-XIII centuries with obscene language were found - e ... (No. 35, XII century)., B ... (No. 531, early XIII century), n ... (No. 955, XII century), etc. This is how the well-established myth was finally buried that we owe the originality of our "Russian oral" to the Mongol-Tatars.

Birch bark letters revealed to us the amazing fact of the almost universal literacy of the urban population of ancient Russia. Moreover, the Russian people in those days wrote practically without errors - according to Zaliznyak's estimates, 90% of the letters were written correctly (sorry for the tautology).

From personal experience: when my wife and I were students working in the 1986 season at the Troitsky excavation site, a letter was found that began with a broken "... Yaninu". There was a lot of laughter over this message to the academician through the millennium.

Wandering around the Novgorod Museum, I came across a letter that can serve as a good alternative to the title of Yanin's famous book “I sent you birch bark” - “I sent you a bucket of sturgeon”, by God, it sounds better, more tempting)) ...

Here is such an illiterate Russia! There was writing, and Russia was illiterate -

True, it should be noted that the first collection of birch bark letters was collected at the end of the 19th century by a Novgorod collector Vasiliy Stepanovich Peredolsky (1833-1907). It was he who, after conducting independent excavations, found out that there is a perfectly preserved cultural layer in Novgorod. Peredolsky exhibited birch bark letters found or bought out from peasants in the first private museum in the city, built with his own money. Birch bark letters, in his words, were "the letters of our ancestors." However, it was impossible to make out anything on the old scraps of birch bark, so historians talked about a hoax or considered the "ancestral letters" scribbles of illiterate peasants. In short, the search for the "Russian Schliemann" was classified as eccentric.
In the 1920s, the Peredolsky Museum was nationalized and then closed. Director of the State Novgorod Museum Nikolay Grigorievich Porfiridov issued a conclusion that "most of the things were not of particular museum value." As a result, the first collection of birch bark letters was irretrievably lost. Purely Russian history.

The sensation came with a half-century delay. As they say, there was no happiness, but misfortune helped ... During the restoration of the city in the 1950s, large-scale archaeological excavations were carried out, which discovered medieval streets and squares, a tower of the nobility and houses of ordinary townspeople in the thickness of the multi-meter cultural layer. The first birch bark letter (end of the 14th century) in Novgorod was discovered on July 26, 1951 at the Nerevsky excavation site: it contained a list of feudal duties in favor of a certain Thomas.

Academician Valentin Yanin in his book "Birch bark post of centuries" described the circumstances of the find as follows: "It happened on July 26, 1951, when a young worker Nina Fedorovna Akulova found during excavations on the ancient Kholopia street of Novgorod, right on the flooring of its pavement of the XIV century, a dense and dirty scroll of birch bark, on the surface of which clear letters shone through the dirt. If it were not for these letters, one would think that a fragment of another fishing float was discovered, of which there were already several dozen in the Novgorod collection by that time. Akulova handed over her find to the head of the excavation Gaide Andreevna Avdusina, and she called out Artemia Vladimirovich Artsikhovsky, which got the main dramatic effect. Hail found him standing on an ancient pavement being cleared, which led from the pavement of Kholopya Street to the courtyard of the estate. And standing on this pavement, as on a pedestal, with a raised finger, for a minute, in full view of the entire excavation, he could not, gasping for breath, utter a single word, uttering only inarticulate sounds, then in a hoarse voice with excitement shouted: “I was waiting for this find twenty years! "
In honor of this find, on July 26, Novgorod celebrates an annual holiday - "Day of the birch bark letter".

The wax was leveled with a spatula and letters were written on it. The oldest Russian book, the Psalter of the XI century (c. 1010, more than half a century older than the Ostromir Gospel), found in July 2000, was just that. The book of three tablets 20x16 cm, filled with wax, bore the texts of three Psalms of David.

And here is a love letter written at the beginning of the XII century. (No. 752): “I have sent to you three times. What evil do you have against me that you did not come to me this week? And I treated you like a brother! Did I hurt you with what I sent to you? And you, I see, do not like it. If you were in love, you would have escaped from under human eyes and rushed ... do you want me to leave you? Even if I hurt you out of my own ignorance, if you start to mock me, then let God and I judge you. "
It is interesting that this letter was cut with a knife, the scraps were tied in a knot and thrown into a heap of manure. The addressee, apparently, has already started up another sweetheart ...

Among the birch bark letters, there is also the first marriage proposal in Russia (end of the 13th century): "From Mikita to Anna. Go for me. I want you, and you want me. And then Ignat (witness) hearsay ..." ( No. 377).

Another surprise was presented in 2005, when several messages of the XII-XIII centuries with obscene language were found - e ... (No. 35, XII century)., B ... (No. 531, early XIII century), p. .. (No. 955, XII century), etc. This is how the long-standing myth was finally buried that we owe the originality of our "Russian oral" to the Mongol-Tatars.

Birch bark letters revealed to us an amazing fact about the almost universal literacy of the urban population of ancient Russia. Moreover, the Russian people in those days wrote practically without errors - according to Zaliznyak's estimates, 90% of the letters were written correctly (sorry for the tautology).

From personal experience: when my wife and I were students working for the 1986 season at the Troitsky excavation site, a letter was found that began with a broken "... Yaninu". There was a lot of laughter over this message to the academician through the millennium.

While wandering around the Novgorod Museum, I came across a letter that can serve as a good alternative to the title of Yanin's famous book "I Sent You Birch Bark". "I sent you a bucket of sturgeon", by God, it's better)) ...

According to archaeologists, the Novgorod land keeps at least 20-30 thousand birch bark letters. But since they are discovered on average 18 per year, it will take about one and a half thousand years to bring this entire priceless library into the world.

The complete set of birch bark letters was posted in 2006 on the site "Old Russian birch bark letters" http://gramoty.ru/index.php?id\u003dabout_site

Birch bark- letters, notes, documents of the 11th – 15th centuries, written on the inner side of the separated layer of birch bark (birch bark).

The possibility of using birch bark as a material for writing was known to many peoples. Ancient historians Cassius Dion and Herodian mentioned notebooks made of birch bark. The American Indians of the Connecticut River Valley, who procured birch bark for their letters, called the trees growing in their land "paper birches." The Latin name of this birch species - Betula papyrifera - includes a distorted Latin lexeme “paper” (papyr). In the famous Song of Hiawatha G.U. Longfellow (1807-1882) in the translation of I.A. Bunin also provides data on the use of birch bark for writing by the North American Indians:

From the sack he took out paints,
He took out paints of all colors
And on smooth birch bark
Made many secret signs
Wondrous and figures and signs…

Based on the folklore of the tribes described by him, the American writer James Oliver Carwood (his novel Wolf hunters published in Russian in 1926).

The first mention of writing on birch bark in Ancient Rus dates back to the 15th century: in Messages Joseph Volotsky says that the founder of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, Sergius of Radonezh, wrote on it because of poverty: the parchment was kept for chronicles. On Estonian soil in the 14th century. there were birch bark letters (and one of them in 1570 with a German text was discovered in a museum storehouse before the Second World War). About birch bark letters in Sweden 15th century. wrote by an author who lived in the 17th century; it is also known about their late use by the Swedes in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Siberia, 18th century. birch bark "books" were used to record yasak (state tax). Old Believers and in the 19th century. kept birch bark liturgical books of the "pre-Nikon period" (that is, before the church reform of Patriarch Nikon of the mid-17th century), they were written in ink.

However, up to the early 1950s, Russian archaeologists could not find ancient Russian birch bark letters in the early cultural layers of the 10th – 15th centuries they were excavating. The first accidental find was a 14th-century Golden Horde birch bark letter, discovered while digging a silo pit near Saratov in 1930. After that, archaeologists tried to find birch bark letters exactly where there was no moisture to the birch bark, as was the case in the Volga region. However, this path turned out to be a dead end: in most cases, the birch bark turned into dust, and it was not possible to find traces of letters. Only the deep conviction of the Soviet archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky that birch bark letters should be sought in the north-west of Russia forced to organize special excavations in the center of Novgorod. The soils there, in contrast to the Volga region, are very moist, but there is no air access to the deep layers, and therefore wood objects are well preserved in them. Artsikhovsky based his hypotheses both on ancient Russian references in literary texts and on the message of the Arab writer Ibn an-Nedim, who quoted the words of “one Caucasian prince” in 987: “I was told by one, on whose truthfulness I rely that one of the kings of Mount Kabk sent him to the Tsar of the Russians; he claimed that they have letters carved into wood. He showed me a piece of white wood, on which there were images ... "This" piece of white wood "- birch bark, plus information about the prevalence of letters on birch bark among the natives of the New World and made him look for birch bark letters in northwestern Russia.

Artsikhovsky's prediction about the inevitability of finding birch bark letters in the Russian land, first expressed by him in the early 1930s, came true on June 26, 1951. The first Novgorod birch bark letter was discovered at the Nerevsky excavation site in Veliky Novgorod by handyman NF Akulova. Since then, the number of birch bark letters found has already exceeded a thousand, of which over 950 were found just in the Novgorod land. In addition to Novgorod, over 50 years of excavations, about 100 birch bark letters were found (a dozen and a half in Pskov, several letters each in Smolensk, Tver, Vitebsk, the only one rolled up and laid in a closed vessel, found in 1994 in Moscow). In total, about 10 cities in Russia are known where birch bark letters were found. Most of them, it is assumed, can be found in Pskov, where the soils are similar to those of Novgorod, but the cultural layer in it is located in the built-up center of the city, where excavations are practically impossible.

Birch bark scrolls were a common household item. Having used them once, they were not stored; that is why most of them were found on both sides of wooden pavements, in layers saturated with groundwater. Some texts, probably, accidentally dropped out of the Novgorod patrimonial archives.

The chronology of letters on birch bark is established in various ways: stratigraphic (according to the stages of excavations), paleographic (according to the outline of the letters), linguistic, historical (according to known historical facts, personalities, dates indicated in the text). The oldest of the birch bark letters belongs to the first half of the 11th century, the latest - to the second half of the 15th century.

Historians suggest that poorly educated townspeople and children wrote mainly on wax tablets; and those who mastered graphics and got their hands full were able to squeeze out the actual letters on the birch bark with a sharp bone or metal stick ("writing"). Archaeologists had found similar sticks in tiny leather cases earlier, but could not determine their purpose, calling them either “pins” or “fragments of jewelry”. The letters on birch bark were usually squeezed out on the inner, softer side, on the peeled part, specially soaked, evaporated, unfolded and thus prepared for writing. The letters written in ink or other paints, apparently, cannot be found: the ink has faded and washed out over the centuries. The letters on birch bark sent to the addressee were rolled into a tube. When the letters are found and deciphered, they are again soaked, unfold, the upper dark layer is cleaned with a coarse brush, and dried under a press between two glasses. Subsequent photography and sketching (the head of these works for many years was M.N. Kislov, and after his death - V.I.Povetkin) - a special stage of reading, preparation for hermeneutics (interpretation, interpretation) of the text. A certain percentage of the letters remains traced, but not deciphered.

The language of most birch bark letters differs from the literary language of that time, it is rather colloquial, everyday, contains normative vocabulary (which suggests that there was no ban on its use). About a dozen letters are written in Church Slavonic (literary language), several in Latin. According to the most conservative estimates, at least 20,000 "birch" (the Novgorod name for such letters) can still be found in Novgorod land

In terms of content, private letters of a household or business nature prevail. They are classified according to the information that is preserved: about land and land owners, about tributes and feudal rent; about craft, trade and merchants; about military events, etc., private correspondence (including alphabets, recipes, drawings), literary and folklore texts in excerpts, electoral draws, calendars, etc.

As a historical source of the early writing period, birch bark letters are unique in the information they contain about Russia in the 10-15th centuries. The data available in them make it possible to judge the size of the duties, the relationship of the peasants with the patrimonial administration, the “refusals” of the peasants from their owner, the life of the “own land” (owners of land cultivated by the family and occasionally hiring someone to help). There you can also find information about the sale of peasants with land, their protests (collective petitions), which cannot be found in other sources of such an early time, since they preferred to keep silent about this. The diplomas characterize the technique of buying and selling land and buildings, land use, collecting tribute to the city treasury.

Information about the legal practice of that time, the activities of the judiciary - the princely and "street" (street) courts, about the procedure for legal proceedings (resolving disputes on the "field" - a fist judicial duel) are valuable. Some of the letters themselves are judicial documents containing a statement of real incidents in matters of inheritance, guardianship, credit. The significance of the discovery of birch bark letters lies in the ability to trace the personification of the historical process, the implementation of the legal and legislative norms of Russian Pravda and other regulatory documents of criminal and civil law. The oldest old Russian marriage contract - 13th century. - also birch bark: “Go for me. I want you, and you want me. And for that the herald (witness) Ignat Moiseev. "

Several letters contain new information about political events in the city, the attitude of the townspeople towards them.

The most striking evidence of the everyday life of the townspeople, preserved by birch bark letters, is the everyday correspondence of husbands, wives, children, other relatives, customers of goods and manufacturers, workshop owners and artisans dependent on them. In them you can find recordings of jokes (“An ignoramus wrote, a nonsense [a] showed it, and who read it ...” - the record is cut off), insults with the use of abusive vocabulary (latest findings 2005). There is also the text of the oldest love note: “I sent you three times this week. Why hasn't he responded once? I feel that you are not pleased. If you were pleasing, you, having escaped from the eyes of people, would have come running to me headlong. But if you [now] laugh at me, then God and my feminine weakness (weakness) will be your judge ”).

The evidence of confessional practices, including pre-Christian ones, found in the charters is of exceptional importance. Some of them are associated with the "cattle god Veles" (the pagan patron god of cattle breeding), others with the conspiracies of the "wizards", and still others are apocryphal (non-canonical) prayers to the Mother of God. "The sea was outraged, and seven simple-haired wives came out of it, cursed by their appearance ...", - says one of the letters with the text of the conspiracy from these "seven wives - seven fevers" and a call to demon-fighters and "angels flying from heaven" to save from the "shake".

In terms of significance, the discovery of birch bark letters is comparable to the decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the find described by Homer of Troy, the discovery of the mysterious culture of the ancient Maya. Reading the birch bark letters refuted the existing opinion that in Ancient Russia only noble people and clergy were literate. Among the authors and addressees of letters there are many representatives of the lower strata of the population, in the texts found there is evidence of the practice of teaching writing - the alphabet (including the designations of the owner, one of them, 13th century, belongs to the boy Onfim), formulas, numerical tables, “pen samples ". The small number of letters with fragments of literary texts is explained by the fact that parchment was used for monuments of a literary nature, and from the 14th century. (occasionally) - paper.

The annual excavations in Novgorod after the death of the archaeologist Artsikhovsky are conducted under the leadership of Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences V.L. Yanin. He continued the academic publication of the birch bark charts (the last of the volumes included charters found in 1995–2000). To facilitate the use of the texts of letters by Internet users, since 2005, a re-shooting of letters in digital format has been conducted.

Natalia Pushkareva

Literacy

Thus, a literate Russian person of the XI century. knew a lot of what the writing and book culture of Eastern Europe and Byzantium had. The cadres of the first Russian literati, scribes, and translators were formed in schools that were opened at churches since the time of Vladimir I and Yaroslav the Wise, and later at monasteries. There is a lot of evidence of the broad development of literacy in Russia in the 11th-12th centuries. However, it was mainly distributed only in the urban environment, especially among the rich townspeople, the princely-boyar elite, merchants, wealthy artisans. In rural areas, in remote, remote places, the population was almost entirely illiterate.

Since the XI century. rich families began to teach not only boys but also girls to read and write. Vladimir Monomakh's sister Yanka, the founder of a convent in Kiev, established a school there for teaching girls.

Thanks to the alphabet, the literacy level in Ancient Rus XI-XII centuries. was very high. And not only among the upper strata of society, but also among ordinary citizens. This is evidenced, for example, by numerous birch bark letters found by archaeologists in Novgorod. These are personal letters and business records: IOUs, contracts, orders of the master to his servants (which means that the servants knew how to read!) And, finally, student exercises in writing.

There is also one more curious evidence of the development of literacy in Russia, the so-called graffiti inscriptions. They were carved on the walls of churches by lovers to pour out their souls. Among these inscriptions are thoughts about life, complaints, prayers. The famous Vladimir Monomakh, while still a young man, during a church service, lost in a crowd of similar young princes, scrawled on the wall of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev "Oh, it's hard for me" and signed his Christian name "Vasily".

Birch bark letters

The discovery in 1951 by Professor A.V. Artsikhovsky in Novgorod birch bark letters of the XI-XV centuries. A whole new world has opened up to researchers while studying these letters. Trade deals, private letters, hasty notes sent by courier, reports on the performance of chores, reports of the campaign, invitations to commemoration, riddles, poems and much, much more are revealed to us by these wonderful documents, once again confirming the wide development of literacy among Russian citizens.

The so-called birch bark letters are striking evidence of the widespread spread of literacy in cities and suburbs. In 1951, during archaeological excavations in Novgorod, an employee of the expedition, Nina Akulova, removed a birch bark from the ground with well-preserved letters on it. "I've been waiting for this find for twenty years!" - exclaimed the head of the expedition, Professor A.V. Artsikhovsky, who had long assumed that the level of literacy in Russia at that time should have been reflected in mass writing, which could be in the absence of paper writing in Russia either on wooden plates, as indicated by foreign evidence, or on birch bark. Since then, hundreds of birch bark letters have been introduced into scientific circulation, saying that in Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk and other cities of Russia people loved and knew how to write to each other. Among the letters are business documents, information exchange, invitations to visit and even love correspondence. Someone Mikita wrote to his beloved Ulyana on birch bark “From Mikita to Ulianitsi. Come for me ... ".

Birch bark is a very convenient material for writing, although it required some preparation. Birch bark was boiled in water to make the bark more elastic, then its coarse layers were removed. The birch bark leaf was cut from all sides, giving it a rectangular shape. They wrote on the inner side of the bark, squeezing out the letters with a special stick - "writing" - made of bone, metal or wood. One end of the writing was sharpened, and the other was made in the form of a spatula with a hole and hung from a belt. The technique of writing on birch bark allowed the texts to survive in the earth for centuries.

The manufacture of ancient handwritten books was expensive and laborious. The material for them was parchment - special leather. The best parchment was obtained from the soft, thin skins of lambs and calves. She was cleaned of wool and washed thoroughly. Then they were pulled on drums, sprinkled with chalk and cleaned with pumice. After air drying, irregularities were cut from the skin and re-sanded with a pumice stone. The finished leather was cut into rectangular pieces and sewn together in a notebook of eight sheets. It is noteworthy that this ancient order of stitching has survived to this day.

The stitched notebooks were collected into a book. Depending on the format and the number of sheets, one book required from 10 to 30 animal skins - a whole herd! Books were usually written with a quill pen and ink. The tsar had the privilege of writing with a swan and even a peacock feather. Making writing instruments required a certain skill. The feather was certainly removed from the left wing of the bird, so that the bend was convenient for the right, writing hand. The pen was degreased by sticking it into hot sand, then the tip. cut obliquely, split and sharpened with a special, penknife. They also scraped out errors in the text.

The ink, in contrast to the usual blue and black for us, was brown in color, since it was made on the basis of iron compounds, or, more simply, rust. Pieces of old iron were dipped into the water, which, rusting, painted it brown. The ancient recipes for making ink have been preserved. As components, in addition to iron, oak or alder bark, cherry glue, kvass, honey and many other substances were used that gave the ink the necessary viscosity, color, stability. Centuries later, this ink retains the brightness and strength of the color. The scribe blotted the ink with finely ground sand, sprinkling it on a sheet of parchment from a sandbox - a vessel similar to a modern pepper shaker.

Unfortunately, very few of the oldest books have survived. In total, there are about 130 copies of invaluable testimonies of the 11-12 centuries. came down to us. There were few of them in those days.