I had serious misgivings about the Hitler-Halder regime becoming the new High Command ground forces, because I understood how they did not fit together. In our inner circle, the Führer often sharply ridiculed Halder's virtues and called him a "boy." Even if this unpleasant habit of choosing absent officers as the target of his ridicule was not the most terrible thing for a man like Hitler - since only a few people managed to escape his ridicule - it seemed to me very doubtful whether this couple could even be yoked to the same yoke. I myself suggested to Hitler that Jodl be appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Army, since he knew and respected him well; and in his place I advised to appoint General von Manstein as Chief of our Operational Staff - that is, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, with a new definition of his duties to me as Chief of the High Command. Surprisingly, Hitler did not dismiss my proposal, but said that he wanted to discuss it with Schmundt first and think it over. Soon Schmundt, without referring to any discussion between them, informed me that Hitler wanted to keep Jodl in the OKB and decided to work with Halder: most likely everything would be fine, since all he could say about Halder was that that he is honest, loyal, reliable and obedient.
Only one thing was clear to me (and Schmundt did nothing to belittle this opinion): that, despite Hitler's great respect for Manstein, he was largely afraid of him; he was afraid of his independent views and strength of personality. When I confidentially informed Jodl of my proposal, he shared my opinion: "He will never work with Manstein." When the decision had already been made, I did my best to support Halder's position with the Führer, helping him and giving instructions, suggesting Hitler's desires when I knew about them, and giving good advice. I did everything in my power to build a strong trust between them.
One way or another, but it was also in my own interests, since it was I who constantly had to experience and compensate for the consequences of each latent crisis of confidence. Gradually, I began to get tired of being the target of insults from everyone and everyone and to be guilty every time Hitler discovered that he no longer liked the face of this or that general.
In mid-December, after our return to Berlin from the meeting of the Reichstag on December 11, the weather changed radically in just a few days, after the mud and slush came diabolical cold with all the attendant and disastrous consequences for our troops, dressed only in a semblance of winter uniforms. But worst of all, however, was that in addition to vehicle breakdowns, the rail system was completely shut down: German locomotives and their water towers simply froze over.
In the face of this situation, Hitler's first order to Eastern Front was: "Stand still and not a step back!" The reason for this was that he correctly understood that the withdrawal of troops, even if only for a few miles, would be tantamount to writing off all our heavy weapons, and in this case, the troops themselves could be considered lost, since without heavy weapons they were absolutely defenseless , not to mention the fact that there was nothing to replace artillery, anti-tank guns and vehicles. In fact, there was no other solution than to stand still and fight, otherwise the army would have been forced to retreat without weapons and share the fate of Napoleon in 1812. Naturally, this did not prevent a well-prepared and limited withdrawal of troops to more equipped defensive positions, with provided that the redeployment remains under our firm control.
While these two huge armies simply froze on both sides of the front, west of Moscow and in the central sector of Army Group Center, local crises began to lead to clashes.
One evening in my presence, Field Marshal von Kluge called the Führer and bitterly complained about Colonel General Hoepner, who ordered his army to retreat some distance, contrary to the Führer's orders, as a result of which he seriously endangered the nearby northern flank of von Kluge's army. The Führer lost his temper and ordered Hoepner to be immediately removed from command of the army and dismissed from the armed forces for deliberate and deliberate defiance; Halder was at the headquarters of the War Office at the time, so he was not present. The Fuhrer raged all evening in our reading room, cursing his generals who did not want to obey. He must set an example for them - he must announce to everyone what he did to Gepner for not fulfilling his order of the day, in order to warn all those who dare, on a whim, to ignore his direct orders.
A similar incident happened to Guderian at Christmas and New Year. He commanded the 2nd Panzer Army, which advanced on Moscow from the south, through Tula, only to literally freeze into ice. Army Group [Center], with the permission of the Führer, planned to withdraw his army to the west to close the gap in the south of von Kluge's 4th Army. Guderian, however, developed his own program, which included a retreat south along his previous route of advance, stage by stage, after he had blown most their tanks, which are frozen solid in the mud. Field Marshal von Kluge tried in vain to influence Guderian, the latter refused to comply with the "impossible" retreat order given to him. Von Kluge demanded the dismissal of this general, which Hitler immediately did: Guderian was summoned to the Fuhrer's headquarters.
I was present at this meeting between Hitler and Guderian. He stubbornly held out in response to all the persuasions and exhortations of Hitler, answering that he did not consider this order of the army group necessary or justified, and also did not agree with the arguments of the Fuhrer; for him, as he explained, the welfare of his troops was most important, he tried to act in accordance with this and was firmly convinced even now that he had done the right thing. In the end, the Fuhrer gave in and, keeping absolute calm, let Guderian go, advising him to go somewhere for medical treatment after such a monstrous nervous load. After that, Guderian went on a long-term leave; he suffered terribly from enforced inactivity.
A third such incident occurred in January 1942 with Colonel General Strauss, commander of the 9th Army on the left flank of Army Group Center. This time it was the commander of the 6th Army Group, General Foerster, and one of his divisional commanders, who, in my opinion, completely lost their nerve, and they were sent back home. I would not like to go into the details of this heated defensive battle and the unfortunate circumstances that caused these resignations; it is quite obvious that there was an injustice as a result of erroneous reports by the Air Force.
However, it would not be entirely true if I did not state here clearly enough that we managed to avert disaster only thanks to Hitler's constantly demonstrated willpower, perseverance and merciless cruelty. If the biased and selfish plan to get out of the crisis, invented by the tired and apathetic front-line generals of Army Group Center, frightened by the terrible cold, had not been blocked by the ruthless and uncompromising resistance and iron will of the Fuhrer, the German army in 1941 would inevitably have suffered the fate [ French] in 1812.
On this point, I can speak quite definitely, since I myself witnessed those terrible weeks. All of our heavy guns, all of our tanks, all of our vehicles would be thrown onto the battlefield. The troops would have realized that they were virtually defenseless, and then they would have thrown their rifles and machine guns and fled from the merciless enemy advancing on their heels.
Under this burden, which is of great concern to all of us, we spent a bleak Christmas at the Führer's headquarters. I threw a short party in the big canteen of the security unit for non-commissioned officers and units attached to the Führer's headquarters, as well as for their officers, where I gave a speech about our struggle on the Eastern Front and our love for the fatherland. A dark shadow of anxiety lay on every face, reverently, but sadly, we began to sing "Holy Night, Silent Night."
In early January 1942, on the entire Eastern Front, it was possible to regroup from the offensive order, typical until early December, to a relatively well-ordered defensive front. But there was no question of any winter respite. The Russians were extremely active, and in several places along the front, especially where it was very much weakened by losses in men and equipment and was actually held only by a few outposts, they managed to go on the offensive. Now the enemy took the initiative; we were forced to return to defensive dispositions and pay for this by no means small losses.
In February, I had to resist the new program of Speer, the new Reich Minister for Armaments and Supplies (Dr. Todt died in a plane crash earlier this month at the Führer Headquarters airfield), this program prescribed the immediate withdrawal from the front of a quarter of a million soldiers of the ground forces, who should be made available for military production. This was the beginning of a struggle for human resources, a struggle that never ended. During the first winter months, the ground forces lost more than a hundred thousand people, and in December - January 1941-1942. - more than twice as much.
A reduction in the size of the divisions from nine to seven battalions was inevitable, although the main attacks were directed only at non-combatant supply troops, the "tail" of the army, which was radically reduced. This first offensive against me in February 1942 marked for me the beginning of an endless and painful struggle with the civilian authorities of the war economy for manpower in order to preserve personnel to ensure the combat effectiveness of the armed forces and, above all, the strength of the army itself.
Compared with the ground forces, the need for fresh manpower from the fleet and air force was minimal, while for the SS troops it soared sharply along the curve, it was an insatiable siphon that skimmed the cream of German youth. With the help of the Fuhrer, using open and secret, legal and illegal propaganda methods, as well as tactics of indirect pressure, the SS troops lured into their ranks the entire elite of German youth, this better half, from which wonderful commanders and officers for the army would come out.
All my protests to the Führer were useless; he refused to do anything in response to my arguments. Even the mention of this topic caused him outbursts of irritation: he knows about our dislike and antipathy for his SS troops, because they are an elite, he said, an elite that adheres to the same political views as himself, and his constant aspiration remains to send as many of the best young people from all over the country to the SS troops as there are volunteers for this - and there should be no restrictions on their number.
My objection that recruitment methods are quite often dubious and even illegal, such as bribery, did nothing but another uncontrolled explosion and the requirement to prove my claim - which I certainly could not provide in order to shield my informants, mostly fathers and teachers high school, from persecution by the state secret police.
And it is not surprising that the combat effectiveness of an army that had long since lost its brave young officers and commanders sank lower and lower every time its most valuable replacement was taken from it, if the gaps in its ranks had to be plugged mainly by an increasing number of former reserve workers with military factories, who felt that they had long since escaped the war and all its horrors, and who were now sent back to the front, no doubt with mixed feelings. On top of this, the army received the additional forces needed to replenish its ever-dwindling units through what was called "combing" in Germany itself and among the myriad formations and units of what was euphemistically called the "information zone", a concept that quite rightly had a dubious reputation. I'm not going to waste words here discussing the value of such additions; of course, some worthy fighters returned back to the front, especially from military hospitals in Germany, but most of them were not at all pleased with their situation. And there is nothing to be surprised that the morale of the troops and their readiness for self-sacrifice constantly fell.
As a front-line soldier in the First World War, the Führer no doubt stifled such thoughts in himself, but he always consoled himself with the belief that the enemy must be at least in the same predicament, if not worse, than we are.
Speer always knew how to ensure that the various entrepreneurs of the war economy, including the public sector - the state railways, the post office, etc. - had the right to release only those people whose merits were the least important, keeping the most valuable workers for themselves; in this way they could adhere to the amount - at least approximately - of the required quota. It is clear that the workers who were more easily freed were also not good soldiers, they certainly were no longer young and active people with military training.
At that time, Sauckel, Commissioner General for the use work force, had to look for replenishment for the gaps that arose in the war economy, for the most part unskilled workers from Germany and the occupied territories. And none other than Sauckel himself, not only shared my opinion on this problem, but also frankly informed me that in this "case" the armed forces were always deceived and that the military industry was not only dumping us worthless labor, but in fact in fact, she often hid highly skilled workers - guarding and protecting them from military conscription - all because of her undisguised selfishness, intending to use them somewhere else. Sauckel put the number of people who illegally evaded military service at least half a million, mostly those who could become excellent soldiers.
But what did these missing people mean for the Eastern Front? This is simple arithmetic: one hundred and fifty divisions of three thousand men each were supposed to increase the personnel of the army by fifty percent. Instead, its dwindling units were patched up by batmen, convoy officers, etc., while volunteers were recruited from Russian prisoners of war in the supply unit.
I have always been the first to understand that not only the preservation, but also the maximum possible increase in military production is a necessary condition for the conduct of war, since the replenishment of worn out and obsolete equipment is indispensable to maintain the combat effectiveness of troops; I was well aware that the longer this war dragged on, the more it began to resemble static fighting World War I, with its colossal spending on weapons and ammunition, the greater should be our spending on equipment and armaments. But, despite all this, I have always believed that, in the final analysis, the soldier who fights with these weapons is the main most important element in a combat-ready army and that its morale depends on him. Without it, even the possession of the best weapons and the most well-to-do army in the world will be little compensation.
It was characteristic of Hitler's modus operandi to achieve its maximum success by pitting the opposing sides against each other, in this case pitting the Minister of Supply on material matters with me, as Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, on manpower; he demanded from each of us what he himself knew was impossible, and then left us to fight over it. I needed soldiers, Speer needed military factory workers; I wanted to reinforce the ever-decreasing fighting capacity of the front, Speer wanted to avoid a decline in military production and, of course, to increase it in accordance with the orders given to him. Both of these tasks were mutually exclusive and impossible if the Commissioner General for the Use of Labor had not succeeded in obtaining workers. It is a small miracle that Speer and I were able to pin Sauckel against the wall, since I could not get soldiers until Speer had replacements for those workers who were called up for military service, since he could not release any of them until their replacement arrived .
When Speer blamed the armed forces to Hitler, arguing that too many people were in the "tail" of the army, in internal units, in the Air Force, being treated in hospitals, in recovery units, in information zones, etc., his protests were accepted; but when I stated that the war economy hoarded and concealed manpower in order to always be ready for all sorts of contingencies - extra shifts, overtime orders, etc. - I was showered with abuse because, as an amateur, I did not I understand industrial production; I was ordered to comb the "information zones" - hundreds of thousands of deviationists and parasites are hiding there. It was an endless tug-of-war, as the bow was drawn too far, although the rational use of military and industrial manpower had not yet reached its final limit. Human imperfection and selfishness of direct participants prevented this.
Black Summer 1942
I could write a whole book about this tragedy of the last three years of the war alone, without even exhausting the topic. The consequences of the shortage of manpower in the army are quite clearly revealed by the following statistics: the number of monthly losses of the army amounted to regular time- not counting major battles - an average of 150-160 thousand people, of which on average only 90-100 thousand people could be replaced. The number of recruits of one age group during the next few years was 550 thousand people; thus, since, by special order, the SS troops received in addition 90 thousand volunteers (but this number was never recruited), the air force - 30 thousand and the same number of the navy, this already amounted to almost one third of the same age group.
Only with the beginning of the spring thaw, sometime in April 1942, did the offensives carried out by the Russians along the entire line of the Eastern Front begin to weaken. It was quite obvious that their purpose was not to give us a real respite, creating moments of crisis, attacking us here and there, with no apparent strategic purpose. The only truly dangerous situations, from a tactical point of view, were the deep wedges south of Orel and the Demyansk cauldron. While the latter was finally surrendered, it became possible to start the encirclement in the south, east of Poltava, especially since the weather and soil conditions allowed us to start the operation about four weeks earlier than in the central and northern sectors of the front, moreover the Russians forced us by offering us a strategically significant target, concentrating their troops here and intensifying their attacks. Accordingly, Hitler decided to precede his personally planned summer operation with an independent offensive against the Russian wedge near Poltava.
It is quite obvious that the plan of operation developed by Hitler - and he was its sole creator - did not affect any further continuation of the general offensive along the entire Eastern Front, due to the acute shortage of manpower, and because of the need to provide defense in all other sectors; for this reason he chose to break through on the northern flank of Army Group South, command of which had been taken over by Field Marshal von Bock after Reichenau's death. After a tank breakthrough to Voronezh, this army group, constantly strengthening its northern flank, was to break through the Russian front along the Don and advance with this flank to Stalingrad, while its southern flank was to advance into the Caucasus, seize oil fields on its southern slopes and conquer the mountain passes.
While all the forces that could be withdrawn along the Eastern Front, especially the tank armies, had to be withdrawn for this operation, at the same time it was necessary to occupy the Crimea in order to cross from the Kerch Peninsula to the oil regions of the Caucasus; the War Department scheduled this operation for early March.
The most important thing in this operation for Hitler was to deceive the Russians about his real intentions by attacking Voronezh, approximately in the middle between Moscow and the Donets Basin, so that they would get the impression of a deliberate approach to the north, to Moscow, and by this deception to force them to concentrate their reserves there. He then planned to cut off the numerous north-south railroads connecting Moscow with the industrial and oil regions, and then suddenly turn south along the Don to seize the Donets Basin itself, take control of the Caucasian oil fields and block river transport links near Stalingrad. with internal Russia along the Volga; because hundreds of tankers delivered oil to Russia from Baku along this river. Our allied troops from Rumania, Hungary and Italy were to serve as a cover for the extended northern flank of our army, along the Don, which served as a natural obstacle, with a force of about thirty divisions, it was assumed that they would be protected from attack by this river.
Back in October, during my trip to Bucharest for the parade on the occasion of the capture of Odessa, I discussed in detail with Antonescu the military assistance of the Romanian armed forces for 1942. Intoxicated by my success in Bessarabia and the capture of Odessa - an old Romanian dream - Antonescu was not difficult this: again it was not without bidding, his troops were traded for our weapons and ammunition, but the Vienna decision still remained a sore point, forcing Romania to cede to Hungary, in fact, most of Transylvania.
Therefore, Antonescu demanded that Hungary provide an equivalent contingent of troops for 1942. If the latter did not make a noticeable contribution, then he saw this as a danger to Romania, since old scores would have to be settled with Hungary: the latter supported a large concentration of troops on the border with Romania , so Romania had to do the same on its border, which would greatly reduce its contribution to the war with Russia.
I objected that during the war with Soviet Union which would liberate both these countries from the great threat of Bolshevism, any talk of war between Romania and Hungary was sheer madness; but my statement had no effect on him, even though the terrible danger hanging over these two countries had been removed only a few weeks earlier. Or maybe it was actually because they were all so aggressive now?
In any case, Antonescu promised his continued participation in our war with Russia with a contingent of fifteen divisions, if we guarantee their modernization and full equipment, with which I naturally agreed, no matter how difficult it was for us. In fact, satiating the Romanian army proved to be much easier, since it was well equipped from the very beginning with standard French military production weapons, and besides, we satisfied their demands many times from the spoils of war we captured.
My trip to Bucharest took place because Hitler had declined their invitation, and Göring did not want to go, because he had angered Antonescu over the supply of oil from Romania; as a result, I had to go as a representative of the German armed forces at the victory parade. As a guest of the young king, I was placed in the royal palace, where, together with Antonescu, I was introduced to the king and the queen mother (the wife of the exiled king, who had long ago found her replacement in the person of his mistress, Madame Lupescu). The twenty-one-year-old king was a tall, slender, and handsome youth, still slightly awkward in his manner, but not obnoxious; the queen mother was still a rather attractive and wise woman. Antonescu put an end to our superficial conversation with them, noting that it was time for us to go to the parade and the awards ceremony that preceded it.
On several occasions, Antonescu asked me for my opinion on this parade, which by German standards was more than flawed. I hastily assured him that the big German parades held in peacetime were certainly not the standard, especially since these troops had just arrived straight from the front; I said that the whole point here is not in their drill, but in the expression on their faces with which they peer at their supreme leaders; So what it made a very favorable impression on me.
As a result of my negotiations in Budapest, Mussolini's vanity was hurt by the fact that not only Romania, but also Hungary would assist us in the Russian campaign of 1942: he could not allow such a shame for Italy. He therefore offered to lend us ten infantry divisions voluntarily; the Fuhrer could hardly refuse such an offer. According to our general in Rome, General von Rintelen, these should have been elite divisions, including four or six Alpine divisions, at least the best the Italians had. Problems with transportation prevented us from transferring them before the summer, since our railways were primarily supposed to ensure the concentration of German forces for the summer offensive.
The capabilities of the railway transport system never matched the needs of the armed forces and the war economy, despite the fact that the Reich Ministry of Railways spent a huge amount of materials on its reconstruction and sent the best engineers and directors to this. The work of the railways in the winter of 1941/42 could be called simply terrible; from December 1941 to March 1942 the situation became so critical that only the establishment of a special motor transport organization could prevent the complete collapse of the necessary supply system for our troops. On January 1, 1942, Minister Dorpmüller [Reich Minister of Transport] and his deputy Kleinmann spent the whole day from early morning until late evening at the Führer's headquarters. Hour after hour they conferred with me and the Führer, and then the head of the military transport, General Gercke, was also called. The situation required special measures to be taken, and especially to protect the locomotives and water pumps, which were completely unsuitable for sub-zero temperatures during this unusually cold period. On days like these, there were times when hundreds of locomotives broke down; German locomotives were completely unsuited for such a climate; we were forced to change all the railway lines to the standard German gauge, because we did not manage to capture almost no Russian rolling stock.
The head of the military transport complained bitterly - and rightly - to the Reich Ministry of Railways that it did not replace the failed locomotives, since their insufficient frost resistance was not his fault. In the evening, under the chairmanship of the Führer, only one possible decision was made: the Reich Ministry of Railways should take responsibility for the entire system of railways in the occupied territory of Russia, up to the final supply stations from which goods would be distributed to front warehouses; the head of military transport should no longer be responsible for this network.
At first glance, this was the only right decision, since otherwise the management of the entire transport system in the occupied territory would have been the responsibility of the head of military transport. But General Gercke was smart enough to agree to this Führer's proposal, since the Minister of Transport had completely different ways of eliminating delays and therefore he, Gercke, was no longer responsible for this. Instead, the minister was required to report personally to the Führer daily on how many loaded trains he handed over to the head of military transport at the terminal stations. The following data can give some idea of the scale of this problem: the need for the ground forces themselves (that is, without taking into account the Air Force) per day was 120 trains, this is if special operations were not carried out, when the need for supplies of ammunition and ambulances increased; but the capacity of the railroads, even with the greatest effort, could only end up with 100 trains a day, and only for a short period. In addition, there were strong fluctuations in the number of echelons due to the endless delays associated with the actions of the guerrillas; often over a hundred sections of railway tracks were blown up in one night.
The spring offensive in the Poltava region began at the very last moment before deep Russian wedges could break through our weak and very extended defenses. Field Marshal von Bock wanted to use the reinforcements provided to him for the counter-offensive - some of which were still being brought up - to protect the danger zone where a Russian breakthrough seemed most imminent; but the Fuhrer, as Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, insisted on launching a counter-offensive, in such a way as to strike at the very root of the enemy's wedge and break their "ligaments"; he wanted to cut out this abscess. Von Bock, on the other hand, feared that it was too late to make such an attempt.
Then Hitler intervened and simply ordered this operation to be carried out as he said. He was right, as a result, in just an hour of crisis, the battle led to the final defeat of the Russians, and we managed to capture an unexpectedly huge number of prisoners.
I do not have much time left, so I will not describe the development of Hitler's offensive operation, which stalled in the Caucasus and near Stalingrad - which was the beginning of a wave against us from the east. I would like to limit my story to only a few special episodes and my own impressions of this period.
The first, and completely inexplicable, episode was the publication in the newspapers of the Western powers of an exact copy of our plan of attack. At least one phrase of the Fuhrer from the "basic directive" was reproduced so accurately that there was absolutely no doubt that a betrayal had occurred somewhere in the chain. The Fuhrer's suspicion fell on the headquarters, and the preliminary investigation revealed new facts: he again began to blame the General Staff, which, as he said, could be the only source of this betrayal.
In fact, as it turned out the following winter, the perpetrator of the betrayal was an officer from the Air Force Operations Headquarters, who served in their intelligence department, who had established contact with the enemy's spy network. At a large trial in the Reichstribunal in December 1942, a number of sentences were passed, since it was possible to uncover a large organization of traitors and spies operating in Berlin. Although it involved mostly civilians, both men and women, the enemy's most important source of military intelligence was this Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Schulze-Boysen, and his wife. But before this was found out, Hitler continued to heap abuse on the completely innocent General Staff of the Ground Forces.
The second misfortune occurred when the plane of the division headquarters officer crashed in the neutral zone of the Eastern Front; he was carrying the Fuehrer's personal order to Army Corps General Stumme on his actions during the great offensive that was to begin in just a few days. The unfortunate officer lost his course and, along with the documents, fell into the hands of the Russians; he himself was killed on the spot. Hitler's resentment against those involved in this affair - the commanding general, the chief of staff and the division commander - eventually led to a military court before the military Reichstribunal, presided over by Göring. Thanks to him and my own participation, these accused officers were acquitted and returned to service in other positions. The worthy General Stumme was killed in action a few months later as Rommel's representative in North Africa.
After a three-day battle, we finally managed to break through to Voronezh, and now the battle began in the city itself for the crossing of the Don; it was then that the first fears began to arise about the correct leadership of von Bock's army group, since, in Hitler's opinion, he was too mired in battles, instead of turning south (not at all worried about the fate of Voronezh or about his flanks and rears) and conquer territory along the Don as quickly as possible.
In his quarrels with Halder, I again saw the growing crisis of leadership and advised the Fuhrer himself to fly to Field Marshal von Bock and personally discuss this with him. My offer was accepted. I accompanied the Führer on this flight, while Halder provided a staff officer from the Operations Department of the War Office. As usual, the Führer outlined to von Bock his basic strategy and discussed with him, quite amicably, how he would like to proceed with this operation.
All parties were very friendly, which, I must admit, disappointed me, since the Führer only touched lightly on the issue that primarily preoccupied him and which he had so confidently branded as a gross mistake earlier in the day. This made me very angry, and, quite unusually, my usual restraint abandoned me, and I told Bock directly what the Führer wanted, hoping that the latter would now also express his claims to him more clearly. But this moment passed unnoticed, as everyone began to rise for lunch. I still managed to find an opportunity to tell the Chief of Staff of the Army Group, General von Soderstein, quite openly why the Führer himself flew in person and what was on his mind.
After lunch, which took place in the same amiable atmosphere as the meeting, we flew back to the Führer's headquarters.
The result of all this was negative: the very next day, when Halder spoke at the meeting, Hitler again began to swear at the recalcitrant and incompetent leaders of the army group: but only the Fuhrer himself was to blame, I myself was an eyewitness of how he beat around the bush , instead of clearly expressing what he wants. So we - Halder, Jodl and I - once again had to put up with it.
I mentioned this episode only because I knew very well this weakness of Hitler in "negotiating" with distant but high-ranking generals. I got the impression that he was quite embarrassed and therefore forced to assume an attitude of modest reserve, which was not characteristic of him, as a result of which these generals, who quite rarely met with him, could not understand the full complexity of the situation at all. They could not even imagine that they were suspected of disobedience and disrespect for Hitler as the Fuhrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. In this respect - not to mention his innate suspicion - Hitler was quite sensitive and touchy. Thus, the prerequisites for the dismissal of von Bock began to emerge, and after a few weeks he was replaced by Field Marshal Baron von Weichs.
For the operation in the Caucasus, the newly formed Army Group "A" was intended, for which the operational headquarters had already been prepared. The question arose of a suitable commander-in-chief for this group; Halder and I - completely independently of each other - proposed the name of Field Marshal List. Hitler hesitated and could not make up his mind, at the same time without explaining what he had against him. Finally, when there was no time left to make a decision, Halder and I talked to Hitler about it, and after long hesitation he gave his consent. But at the very first operation carried out by this army group, when it advanced beyond Rostov and was preparing to deploy deep into the Kavkaz region, a new wave of unfounded accusations arose against List: claims immediately arose that he prevented SS tank formations from breaking through to Rostov or started too late and attacked too carefully, etc., although each of us knew that he acted according to the orders given to him.
A few weeks later, List arrived with a report at the Fuhrer's headquarters in Vinnitsa; I myself was in Berlin, but on my return I had to listen to Hitler's complaints that it was I who was responsible for suggesting the name of this unsuitable person, since he made the worst impression, besides being completely unorientated: he came to him, bringing a map printed on a scale of one to a million, and did not even mark on it any dispositions of his troops, etc., etc. And when I objected that he, Hitler, himself specifically forbade carrying detailed maps on airplanes, he turned furiously to me and shouted that Goering was also present at this meeting with List and was also very indignant at all this.
Yodl's unsuccessful flight into a mountain corps based primarily in the Caucasus and fighting for the mountain passes leading to the Black Sea brought this crisis to a maximum. Jodl talked in detail with the commander of this mountain rifle corps, General Konrad, and with Field Marshal List about the hopelessness of the situation, and upon his return he reported to the Fuhrer that evening that he had to agree with List's opinion that the task assigned to him was impossible. I will omit the details of this case - Jodl, perhaps, will tell about them better than I can. In any case, Jodl's report - which in fact represented nothing but the opinion of Jodl himself and List - left the Führer speechless and then caused a terrifying outburst of rage. This again was due to a crisis of confidence and pathological suspicions that his generals were plotting against him and trying to sabotage his orders, finding, in his opinion, pitiful excuses. He was seized by the idee fixe to seize the coastal road along the Black Sea and over the western spur of the Caucasus Mountains; he believed that his generals could not understand the full merits of this strategy and for this reason opposed him. What he absolutely did not want to understand was that the enormous difficulties in material and technical supply due to mountain roads made this operation completely impossible.
As a result, his unbridled fury turned against Yodl and me - for I had been preparing this Yodl trip from the very beginning; I was ordered the next day to fly to Stalino to see List and tell him to leave the command of the army group and return home to await the Führer's good will.
I never found out who was stirring the waters against List, the commander of an army of the highest calibre, who had shown his worth in France and the Balkans. In my opinion, this witch hunt began from the political side, from Himmler or Bormann; there is no other way to explain it.
The consequences of the events described were already reflected in other places: Jodl had to disappear, although I defended him, taking full responsibility upon myself; despite the fact that my reputation was undermined, I was still refused dismissal or transfer to another position, even though Goering promised me to achieve this from the Führer. We no longer dined at the same table with him, and all our discussions were attended by stenographers. Only on January 30, 1943, did he once again condescend to shake hands with Jodl and me.
Even the Chief of the General Staff, Halder, could not remain unaffected by this hype around List. Operations, both in the Caucasus itself and north of it, did not at all satisfy Hitler's ambitious plans, and Russian attacks on Army Group South west and south of Moscow led to a difficult situation; in fact, these attacks were undertaken in order to relieve pressure on the Russians in the southern sector of the front.
Halder correctly described general position how far from satisfactory, despite the vast territories conquered during our offensive. Halder, like Jodl and myself, wanted to see where the Russians would reveal their strategic reserves, in addition to those recognizable and obvious centers of attack; in his opinion, these reserves were still not thrown into the balance. In addition, Russian methods of warfare during our great offensive in the south acquired a new character: in comparison with previous encirclement actions, the number of prisoners who came to us remained relatively small. The enemy slipped away from the trap we had set for him in advance and used the vast expanses of his territory as a strategic defense, evading our forces and avoiding destructive actions. Only near Stalingrad and in the city itself, as well as on mountain passes, did the enemy put up the most stubborn resistance, since he no longer had to fear tactical encirclement.
Although the core of the 6th Army under Paulus was able to reach the Stalingrad area, relying heavily on the strength of our allies located along the Don and reinforced by individual German divisions, its troops were too stretched out to carry out anything else than local attacks on oil fields and near Stalingrad; the overstretched front could no longer carry out crushing attacks. Halder correctly realized the danger threatening the Don flank, which was held south of Voronezh by the Hungarians and Italians, and west of Stalingrad by the Romanians. The Fuehrer never lost sight of the possible threat to the Don flank, his faith in the allies was rather weak, but he highly appreciated the defensive qualities of the Don as a barrier, at least until it freezes, so he considered such a risk justified.
Although Hitler tolerated cooperation with Halder, rather common sense than out of trust or even personal sympathy, there was a clear estrangement between them, the growing tension expressed partly in his harsh treatment of Halder and partly in unpleasant criticism of him, and sometimes even in violent quarrels. We have all seen Hitler voice his frustration at the way the offensive had been halted, and the calls for help from Army Groups North and Center – fighting hopelessly and desperately defending – calls that Halder emphasized and addressed to them with his special attention.
Hitler needed at least someone to vent his anger on. During his arguments with Jodl and myself, he had already shown his inability to control his feelings. Much of his unbearable irritability could be attributed to the hot continental climate of Vinnitsa, which he could not stand and which literally hit him in the head, as Professor Morrel explained to me several times. Medicines were useless here; and even the constant air-conditioning in his bunker and office only temporarily eased his discomfort.
In addition, any situation only strengthened our tacit understanding that the huge amount of people and materials that we invested without any hope of compensation could not be compared with the small losses of the Russians to date. Almost every day, Halder waited for new data on the enemy’s combat-ready strategic reserve formations, on the production of tanks and spare parts by the enemy (according to General Thomas) and on the capacities of the military industry in the Urals (again according to Thomas), etc.; and the Fuhrer was furious, refuting these data.
From now on, I was forbidden to distribute the "defeatist" reports of General Thomas: they were a complete illusion, he would not tolerate this, etc. He began to criticize Halder more and more often, because he was a pessimist, prophesying death, infecting the commanders-in-chief with his lamentations, etc. And at that moment I realized that the wheel had once again spun for a full cycle: they were again looking for a scapegoat, and someone would again be sent to the scrap.
When Hitler, in the presence of General Schmundt, informed me that he no longer wanted to work with Halder, I again violated my firm decision, made after the accident with Field Marshal List, never to offer anyone for any post again. I simply could not continue to sit back and close my eyes to where all this would eventually lead: I energetically supported General Manstein as Halder's successor; Hitler declined my offer, this time explaining that he could not do without him as commander. After lengthy discussions, I suggested General Paulus more insistently and received a categorical "no". Paulus, he said, would take over as General Jodl after the Battle of Stalingrad; this has already been decided, as he no longer intends to work with Jodl; he had already come to this decision and discussed the matter with Schmundt. The latter was supposed to fly to Paris the next day and deliver here General Zeitzler, the chief of staff of the "West" under the command of von Rundstedt; he wants to make Zeitzler the new Chief of the General Staff. I thought that Zeitzler was simply indispensable in the West, and I strongly warned him not to recall him from there in view of the situation there; this is not the man the Führer is looking for, he does not suit him, I said, and added that I could judge so because I knew Zeitzler very well, although I considered him an outstanding military man and a brilliant chief of staff of the army group.
But my advice was ignored; it was obvious that the Fuhrer and Schmundt were at one with each other, and the latter completed his mission in Paris.
On the same day Hitler summoned Halder to him in my presence. The Führer made a long speech during which he explained that he could no longer work with him and decided to find another Chief of the General Staff. Halder listened to this tirade without a word, then got up and left the office, saying, "I'm leaving."
Two days later, the Zeitzler era began, in close collaboration with Schmundt, who was therefore behind this choice. Zeitzler rightly attracted the attention of the Fuhrer: in the Polish campaign he was the chief of staff of the army group, and in the western campaign he was the chief of staff of the Kleist tank group, during the breakthrough through Sedan to Abbeville; he especially distinguished himself as an organizer of the Atlantic coastal defenses, which played an important role in the successful defense of Dieppe during the British raid in the summer of 1942. When everything was completed, I ultimately had more than an academic interest in who would be chosen to be the Chiefs of the General Staff of the Land troops, because I have long wanted to see someone who will enjoy the confidence of the Führer, holding this leadership position in the army.
Nothing could bring me greater relief than the opportunity to end this daily struggle with the Fuehrer's distrust.
Jodl and I also looked forward to further fruitful cooperation with him, since Zeitzler had been Jodl's operations officer for several years and was not only well acquainted with the basic concepts of the unified command of the armed forces, but was actually one of its earliest proponents. The first and saddest disappointment awaited us when we saw exactly the opposite of what we hoped for: Zeitzler not only himself separated from us, but also sought to remove us at all costs - and even more than before - from making decisions on the Eastern Front, through frequent private meetings with Hitler a deux about the situation on the Eastern Front; no doubt he believed that Jodl was exclusively interested in other theaters of war; and what is even more obvious, he was afraid of our influence on the Führer - a very unfortunate and limited point of view.
In the summer of 1942, in North Africa, Rommel's triumphant campaign with only one light infantry and two panzer divisions, with the help of Italian units involved in the operation and with the excellent support of the Kesselring air group, led to an unexpected victory. And now Rommel himself, who organized the defense of the conquered sector, west of Alexandria, and in just a year had risen from lieutenant general to field marshal, urgently needed to return to Germany in order to restore his health, badly undermined by the tropical climate. It is impossible to even imagine what this brave and highly patronized tank commander could have achieved if he had fought with his troops in the theater of war where the fate of Germany was to be decided.
The new Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces received a difficult legacy: along the northern spurs Caucasus mountains hot and fruitless battles were fought, an unstable situation developed along the weak sector of the front in the steppes between these mountains and Stalingrad, the most difficult battles near Stalingrad and in the city itself, the most serious danger hung over our allies holding the front along the Don. And most important of all was the troubling question: Where are the Russians going to launch their counteroffensive? And where are their strategic reserves?
The battle for Stalingrad consumed one division after another, drawing them like moths to a candle flame: although it was possible to reach the Volga from the north and south of Stalingrad and in the city itself, fierce and furious battles for every house were fought throughout the city and its numerous industrial regions. . The painfully achieved advance, the brilliant defensive victories in the north of the city between the loops of the Volga and the Don, strengthened our determination to capture Stalingrad - a goal that at times seemed so close. Naturally, every officer and every soldier of the Paulus army strove for this - to complete their campaign with an absolute victory. I will not state whether our Supreme High Command [i.e. e. Hitler] and to what extent the catastrophe that followed.
In November, the [Russian] counter-offensive began from a strategically excellent position, first overturning the Rumanian army and thus reaching deep into the flank of the 6th Army. Everything went to the encirclement of the army of Paulus in Stalingrad. Only one solution could avert disaster: abandon Stalingrad and use the entire Stalingrad army to break through fighting to the west.
All the horrifying events that followed as a result of the complete encirclement of Paulus's army at Stalingrad in January 1943 - a ban on a breakthrough for which it was already too late, a futile attempt to secure an air supply for this army, a belated counter-offensive with completely insufficient forces to free 6 th army, - deeply cut into my memory. I cannot describe this drama in all its colors: I do not have enough materials for this...
The surrender of Stalingrad was a heavy blow to our prestige; the annihilation of an entire army and the situation resulting from this loss meant a failure, consonant with the collapse of our campaign of 1942-1943, despite all the genius with which it was conceived and born. It is not at all surprising that our critics shouted even more, and the Russians received a tremendous incentive to wage their war; we played our last trump card and lost.
Whatever the outcome of the attempt to save Paulus's army from Stalingrad, in my opinion, there was only one way to prevent the total defeat that awaited us in the eastern campaign: to authorize a strategic retreat of all our troops to the shortest front: to the line from the Black Sea or the Carpathian Mountains to Peipsi lakes. To rebuild and fortify the front line as a line of defense, and to hold it with all available forces, commensurately fortifying with incoming reserves - this, in my opinion, was not impossible.
At this point Field Marshal Keitel's early memories break off. Two days later, Field Marshal Keitel was sentenced to death, and for the next ten days he feverishly described the events that took place at the Führer's headquarters in April 1945 after the beginning of the final collapse of Germany, the last eighteen days of the Third Reich. Keitel himself was hanged on October 16, 1946, before he could check his manuscript.
By the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. In the midst of the primitive population of Southern and Central Europe, an agricultural and pastoral culture arose, which soon spread to the Rhine in the west and to the Dnieper in the east.
Stone and bone hoes, sickles with flint blades and the remains of cereals - wheat, millet and barley, found during the study of the settlements of these tribes, leave no doubt that primitive hoe agriculture occupied an important place in their economy. The bones found in the settlements, as well as images of animals, indicate that these tribes knew all the main types of livestock: pigs, cattle and small cattle and horses. Hunting, fishing and gathering were incomparably less important in the economy. A strong settlement, settlements consisting of dwellings, usually connected to each other by passages or reaching enormous sizes, a variety of pottery, female statuettes and other cultural features complete the picture of the life and life of the ancient agricultural and pastoral tribes of Southern and Central Europe. The culture of agricultural and pastoral tribes that lived in the III millennium BC. e. along the Danube, in the rivers of the Dniester and the Bug and along the right bank of the Middle Dnieper, it received the name Tripolskaya (from the village of Trypillia, Kiev region, where archaeologist V.V. Khvoyko discovered monuments of this culture for the first time in the 90s of the last century). The Tripoli culture attracted the attention of numerous researchers, but only in Soviet times, thanks to systematic excavations carried out by T. S. Passek, E. Yu. Krichevsky, S. N. Bibikov and other Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists, it was possible to collect a large the light of which the ancient agricultural and pastoral tribes of the south-west of RUSSIA received comprehensive coverage. Excavations of settlements of agricultural and pastoral tribes have shown that the culture of these tribes existed here for a long period of time, from the beginning of the 3rd to the first quarter of the 2nd millennium BC. e., and Soviet archaeologists managed to establish two main stages in the development of the Trypillia culture and create a periodization of its monuments. The earliest settlements of the Trypillia culture were discovered along the Dniester and in the basin of the Southern Bug. Particular attention is drawn to the excavations of M. L. Makarovich settlements near the village. Grenovka and Sabatinovka II on the Southern Bug, near Psrvomaisk, excavations by S. N. Bibikov near the village. Luka-Vrublevetskaya on the Dniester near Kamenetz-Podolsk and the excavations of T. S. Passek near the village. Bernovo Luka.
Early Tripoli settlements are usually located on the banks of the river, on the first terrace above the floodplain. The early Trypillian time is characterized by large multi-hearth dwellings, consisting of semi-dugouts sunk into the soil, and ground adobe dwellings, however, semi-dugouts are the predominant type, the origin of which dates back to the time of the early Neolithic. A variety of flint and slate tools were found in the dwellings, including flint inserts for sickles, tools made of horn and bone, richly ornamented pottery, and clay figurines, mostly female. Three-colored painted ware in the early Trypillian time is not typical.
Some features of the culture, such as the nature of the deep and fluted ornamentation of pottery and figurines, bring the culture of the inhabitants of the early Trypillian settlements closer to the Neolithic agricultural tribes of the Balkan Peninsula and at the same time connect them with the ancient Mediterranean.
According to some researchers, the agricultural and pastoral tribes of the New Stone Age, who lived in the interfluve of the Danube and the Dnieper, were not only closely connected with the Mediterranean, but also had a southern origin.
Somewhat later, the agricultural and pastoral Tripoli tribes (whose settlements were found in huge numbers) spread along the course of the Middle Dnieper, the Southern Bug, the Dniester and the Prut.
At this time, the settlements of the trppol tribes were usually located on elevated places, which had in the III millennium BC. e. predominantly forest-steppe character. People built their dwellings on gentle slopes near oak thickets, on soft loess-chernozem soils convenient for hoeing, which at that time were only turning into chernozem soils. The settlements consisted of a large number of dwellings with clay floors and walls and with light gable ceilings supported by wooden pillars. The dwellings had an elongated rectangular shape and a wide variety of sizes: from 6 to 150 square meters. m. However, large houses with several stoves are especially characteristic of Trypillia settlements.
For the study of the settlements of the Trypillia tribes, the excavations of the settlement in the tract Kolomiyshchina near the village are of particular importance. Khalepye, Kyiv region. Here, on a high plateau on the right bank of the Dnieper, in a layer of chernozem, the remains of 39 rectangular adobe dwellings were found, located in two concentric circles so that there was a free area inside the settlement, apparently for cattle drives. Remains of adobe stoves, floors, walls and partitions, fragments of clay vessels, tools made of stone and bone, stone grain grinders, animal bones, etc., were found in the dwellings.
Among the stone tools found in Trypillia settlements, stone hoes mounted on a wooden handle are especially frequent. The agriculture of the Tripoli tribes was hoe farming. The earth was loosened with stone, bone and horn hoes, as well as pointed sticks. It is clear that such agriculture was still very far from real field agriculture, which arose much later, in the era of metal, and was associated with the appearance of arable implements - a plow and a plow.
Cultivated plants known to the people of Trppol can be judged by the imprints of straw and chaff on the clay and by the charred grains that survived in some vessels. It turned out that wheat, millet and barley were among the cultivated plants. The presence of rye as a cultivated plant is less reliable. The harvest was carried out with the help of bone or wooden sickles with flint liners, and the stems were cut off under the very ears. Grain graters, which served among the Tripoli tribes for grinding grain, are usually found inside dwellings; they were sometimes smeared into the floor or fixed on a special clay stand. Grain was stored in special storage pits coated with clay, or in large vessels. For baking bread, clay ovens were used, of which there were several in each Trppolsky dwelling.
Judging by ethnographic parallels, primitive agriculture of the Trypillia type could exist only as a collective production. It required the combined efforts of all the inhabitants of the house - men and women.
No less important in this period in the economy of the Tripoli tribes was cattle breeding. The bones found in Trypillia settlements, in the overwhelming majority, belong to domestic animals. In the settlement of Kolomiyshchina near the village. The halepie of domestic animal bones was about 20 times greater than the bones of wild animals. Hence, hunting was of secondary importance. Bones of a domestic bull prevailed, bones of a goat and a pig were less. The remains of wild animals are represented by the bones of roe deer, deer, elk and beaver.
Approximately the same was the statistics of the bones found in the study of numerous other Trypillia settlements, in which the bones of a domestic dog were also always found. In all likelihood, at the end of the III millennium BC. e. Trypillian tribes also became familiar with the domestic horse, known in the wild and earlier as an object of hunting.
Trypillia pastoralism was characterized by stable keeping of livestock. The inner space of the settlement, surrounded by dwellings located in a circle, was an open corral for cattle. The size of the herd was limited by this primitive state of pastoralism. The relatively rare finds of flint arrowheads speak of the insignificant role of hunting in the Trypillia economy.
However, it should be noted that in different areas of distribution of Trypillia tribes, the role of hunting was not the same. So, for example, excavations of recent years in the Middle Dniester basin at a settlement near the village. Polivanov Yar (Kelmenetsky district of the Chernivtsi region of the Ukrainian SSR) found among the stone tools a large number of flint darts and arrowheads. Analysis of coal residues showed that during the Trypillia time in the Dniester region, significant areas were covered with deciduous forests. Species such as oak, hornbeam, elm and willow stand out. In these forests on the Dniester there were such animals as red deer, roe deer, wild boar, which people hunted.
Fishing also played an insignificant role in the economy of the Tripoli tribes. Tripoli settlements were by no means always associated with a large water stream, often located next to streams. Naturally, the possibilities of fishing in these conditions were very limited. However, in those cases when the Trypillia settlements were located on the banks of the river, as, for example, near the ss. Bernovo-Luka, Soloncheni, Luka-Vrublevetskaya on the Dniester, fishing was more widespread. So, in the dugouts of Bernovo-Luk, in the cultural layer, bones and vertebrae of two fish species were found - catfish and carp, bone and copper fishhooks, clay weights from nets.
The sedentary lifestyle of the Tripoli tribes favored the flourishing of pottery. According to the manufacturing technique, the richness of forms.
The variety and perfection of ornamentation of Triiol ceramics occupies one of the first places among the pottery of the primitive tribes of Europe. Large, pear-shaped vessels were used to store grain or any liquids. Wide-mouthed vessels served to store pieces of meat and other products. There were special pots for cooking food. The dairy farm had a whole set of jars, jugs, cups and vessels with holes that were used to make cheese.
In recent years, on the basis of a detailed study of Trypillia ceramics and observations during excavations of multilayer Trypillia settlements, Soviet scientists have succeeded in identifying characteristic complexes of ceramic products for all the main stages in the development of the Trypillian culture. Thus, in the ceramics of the Early Tripoli tribes, vessels with deep spiral ornamentation and thin-walled, well-polished vessels with a fluted surface usually predominate.
Later, under the influence of the eastern Mediterranean, among the Tripoli tribes, along with the previous technique of decorating vessels, dishes made of well-washed clay, strong firing, with a painting in the form of a spiral applied with two or three colors (red, black and white) became widespread. In the later period of the existence of the Trypillia culture, the three-color painting in ceramics gradually disappeared, and the vessels were usually painted with one black, less often black and red paint. Vessels decorated with rope imprints appeared.
Pots for cooking food were made from a special mass with an admixture of finely crushed shells and were ornamented with a jagged edge of the shell, notches of nails, etc.
The tricolor painted patterns that adorn Trypillia vessels are very reminiscent of the painted ceramics of Semigradje, the middle Danube and Northern Greece.
Geographical proximity to the advanced civilizations of Western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, under the influence of which the Trypillian tribes, who were probably of southern origin, were influenced, by the way, also affected the fact that even in the earliest Trypillian settlements, separate finds of copper tools were made - awls, fishing hooks. Copper was, therefore, known to the Trypillia population, but it was still very rare and, of course, a material imported from outside.
Copper tools were made by cold forging from native copper without any impurities.
At the middle and late stages of the development of the Trypillia culture, the number of copper tools increased and along with copper awls, fish hooks, beads, copper knives, wedge-shaped axes, chisels, etc. appeared.
Copper finds testify to the wide intertribal exchange that existed at that time among the Tripoli tribes with the tribes living in the Carpathian region, where there was copper, and with the Mediterranean countries and Asia Minor.
However, the main tools of labor of the Trypillian tribes throughout their history were flint, slate, bone and horn. On Trypillia tribal settlements on the Dniester, places of their production were found, which were usually located near dwellings. At the settlement of Polivanov Yar, in one of these “workshops”, more than 3,000 production wastes were discovered - flint nodules, flakes, fragments of all sizes, dozens of blanks of a rough macrolithic appearance, cores, chippers, and finally, hundreds of flint and slate tools different types i appointment. All this makes it possible to assume that the ancient inhabitants of the Polivanov Yar settlement made these tools not only for their household, but also for exchange with their neighbors. The richest outcrops of flint and shale on the Dniester and along its tributaries served the ancient man in the Neolithic era as the necessary base for creating “workshops” for the manufacture of flint and slate tools on the site of settlements. The abundance and variety of forms of Trypillia tools from the excavations of settlements on the Dniester indicate how diverse the functions of these tools were, and therefore show the great complexity and development of the entire economic life of the Trypillia tribes. Among the Trypillia tools are known stone and horn hoes for cultivating the earth, stone grain grinders, flint sickle inserts, flint axes for splitting and slate adzes for wood processing, flint scrapers, drills, knives, files for bone and leather processing, whetstones for grinding axes. and bone punctures, the tips of darts and shooters.
The basis of the social system of the Tripoli tribes was matriarchal clan relations. And nothing testifies so clearly to the strength of tribal relations as the Trypillia collective dwellings.
They belonged to several paired families, which constituted a community of a matriarchal-clan type, like the communities of the Iroquois, who lived in large collective houses.
The tripolga house-building is characterized by variations in the size of dwellings, from the smallest to very large, associated with the gradual growth of tribal communities. Very characteristic are also the multi-focal and multi-chamberedness in such dwellings, the arrangement of things inside the house in groups, and sometimes the presence of several entrances, which indicates a combination of a primitive communal clan economy with separate living of paired families in a common dwelling.
Dwellings had, as a rule, also an economic division. In one part of the dwelling, stoves and hearths were concentrated, in the other - grain graters and vessels for storing grain, in the third - materials for the manufacture of tools, and so on, which emphasizes the commonality of the Trypillian household, despite the existence of separate paired families. The community was also a single collective, uniting all the inhabitants of one settlement, the inner space of which served as a communal paddock for livestock.
The ideological ideas of the Tripoli tribes can be judged by various cult monuments found during excavations. Such a cult monument is the ornamentation of clay vessels, which constituted complex and rather stable ornamental constructions, undoubtedly having a certain religious and magical meaning.
The images of trees, domestic animals and people on the vessels are combined with spirals, concentric circles with crosses, serpentine ribbons, various mysterious signs, and all this religious symbolism most likely expresses the ideas of the solar-cosmic cult, so natural for ancient farmers.
During the excavations of Trypillia settlements, clay figurines depicting a naked human figure are often found. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these figurines reproduce the figure of a woman, much less often they have either male characteristics, or signs of both sexes at the same time.
It can be thought that these figurines express the cult of ancestors characteristic of the primitive system, and the images of the ancestral mother are of particular importance here. Totemic representations are conveyed by clay figurines depicting various, most often domestic animals.
In some cases, wheat grains or crushed grains in the form of coarse flour were mixed into the clay from which the figurines were made. This can be seen as a manifestation of a special agricultural cult, which had the goal of causing the fertility of the fields.
Interesting monuments of the cult are clay cruciform altars found in Vladimirovna, as well as clay models of dwellings found in Popudnya, Sushkovka, Vladimirovka, and others.
Numerous traditions in the field of culture, the beginning of which was laid by the Tripoli and the Balkan and Danube tribes close to them, were preserved in the northwestern Black Sea region for a long time. Their study leads to the conclusion that the ancient agricultural tribes - Balkan, Danube and Trypillia - are the ancestors of a vast group of Thracian or Daco-Thracian tribes, well known to authors of the 1st millennium BC. e. and the beginning of our era, and later, possibly absorbed by the Slavs.
To the north of the Tripoli tribes, in Podolia and Volhynia, as well as in the basin of the Vistula, Oder and Elbe in the III millennium BC. e. other tribes lived, familiar with cattle breeding and agriculture, which constituted a number of local groups that differed significantly from one another. In general, their culture differs from Trypillia, although some tribes were engaged in agriculture. They did not break with the ancient ways of obtaining a livelihood - hunting and fishing. In the conditions of forest soils, with the technique of the Stone Age, agriculture could not have such a serious significance for them as for the Tripoli tribes. Therefore, cattle breeding gradually came to the fore in their economy.
It is believed that the Trypillia and other agricultural and cattle-breeding tribes close to them came from the south, while the Central European tribes were direct descendants of the ancient local population, who gradually mastered new forms of economy, primarily cattle breeding.
On the settlements belonging to these tribes, there are remains of extensive dwellings, often somewhat sunken into the ground. Among the stone tools, axes are common - the necessary weapons of the inhabitants of the forest belt, stone hoes, grain grinders, flint-tipped arrows, etc. Pottery was common everywhere, but more modest and not as diverse as that of the Trypillians, often hemispherical or spherical in shape. Sometimes in the settlements there are rough female figurines made of clay. In Volhynia and Podolia, the northern neighbors of the Trypillians are known mainly from the burials of the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BC. e. Burials were sometimes made in graves lined with stone slabs or covered with mounds. Clay vessels and stone axes were placed next to the deceased. There are also bones of animals, mainly domestic - cows and pigs, and food remains.
At the end of the III millennium BC. e. in Central Europe, occupied by agricultural and pastoral tribes, a population appeared with a predominance of pastoralism, with a special culture and special norms of life. In the archaeological literature, the new tribes have been called the "Cord Ware" tribes, as their pottery is usually decorated with patterns of cord impressions. On the territory of RUSSIA, new tribes spread not only along Podolia and Volhynia, where a population close to the Central European population had long lived, but also in the region of the Dniestr and Middle Dnieper regions, where the Trypillian population lived in the previous time, and to the north - in the Upper Dnieper, southeastern Baltic, as well as the Upper and Middle Volga.
According to Western European archaeologists, the Corded Ware tribes were newcomers in Central Europe who displaced and assimilated the local Neolithic population. Archaeologists of the German nationalist school considered Denmark and southern Scandinavia to be the center of origin of these tribes and considered the Corded Ware tribes as the most ancient Germans. Polish scholars hotly disputed this opinion, pointing out that the Corded Ware tribes were widespread in those places that later became known mainly as Slavic, and therefore these tribes should be seen ancient Slavs. The English archaeologist G. Child argued that new tribes spread across Central Europe not from the north, but from the south, from the regions adjacent to the Black Sea.
In the works of Soviet archaeologists, the question of the appearance in Central and Eastern Europe of a pastoralist population with a new culture received a different light. Attention was drawn to the fact that the Corded Ware tribes are by no means homogeneous over a vast area of their distribution; they form several local groups that carry in their culture the features of deep local traditions. The study of these groups led to the idea that the Corded Ware tribes are the direct descendants of the Neolithic tribes of Central Europe, Volyn and Podolia, who passed earlier than others in the era of early metal, to a new way of life - to shepherding - and significantly expanded their territory during this period. .
In Volhynia, new tribes have been known since the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. e. mainly based on the materials of burials, which are stone boxes (cysts) hidden under a mound. The settlements of the Volhynian tribes are still little explored.
In a small stone box near Voitsekhovka, near Zhytomyr, there were two sections. In one, a man was buried in a sitting position;
on either side of it were the skeletons of two women, next to them - two children, and even further - two teenagers. Finally, in another, smaller compartment, a man, perhaps a slave, was buried. Stone boxes, therefore, were collective family graves, testifying to the patriarchal system. The burial of a man was accompanied by the burial of his wives, children, perhaps slaves. Some Volhynian tribes practiced the rite of cremation: the remains of the burned corpses were put into burial urns.
The rite of burning the dead, common among the Volyn and Dnieper tribes, just like among some tribes of the Wislenye, attracts our special attention because in the following time, for many centuries, this rite was one of the most characteristic ethnographic signs of Slavic culture. Below we will talk about the fact that on the basis of the Volyn and Dnieper tribes, widely settled during the 2nd millennium BC. e. in the Dnieper basin, all those tribal groups of the 1st millennium BC arose. e. and subsequent centuries, whose belonging to the Slavic tribes finds more and more confirmation.
The things found in the graves of the Volyn tribes are not numerous, but they are extremely characteristic. Flint axes, curved flint knives and arrowheads, spherical clay vessels, necklaces made of drilled boar and bear fangs, amber pendants and belts with bone buckles were placed in the graves. The forms of things found here are typical for tribes with cattle-breeding and hunting economy.
The tribes that lived in the Middle Dnieper also had two funeral rites: inhumation and cremation.
During the excavation of a mound near Stretovka, Kyiv region, traces of ash and several burnt bones were found. Seven vessels with a corded pattern were located here in a circle. One of them contains burnt bones. Along with this, a funeral rite is known here, possibly borrowed from the primitive population of the steppes. The dead were placed in rectangular and rounded pits, sometimes lined with wood and covered with a wooden roof. Such a grave, obviously, reproduced a residential wooden house. A mound was piled on top. As in the steppe regions of the Northern Black Sea region, among the Dnieper tribes, ritual coloring of the dead in red by sending ocher was common, which was extremely rare in Western Ukraine and Volhynia.
In the mounds of the Dnieper tribes, vessels in the form of goblets and spherical round one-bottom vessels are found, which are so characteristic of the Volyn tribes. The dead were buried in fur, wool or leather clothes, sometimes in fur hats. Stone battle axes, flint axes, burdens, arrows, spears, and small flint tools were placed in the graves. Necklaces consisted of wolf teeth, fox teeth, boar fangs or bone beads.
The agricultural-pastoral and pastoral tribes of the "corded ceramics" are of great interest as the most probable ancestors of a number of ancient and modern peoples of Central Europe belonging to the Indo-European group - Slavs, Germans, Illyrians and, apparently, Leto-Lithuanians. We will return to this issue in a subsequent discussion.
In Europe, developed agriculture arose in the Neolithic period. But the transition to the age of metal, although it happened early for some tribes (3rd millennium BC), has not yet led to fundamental changes in socio-economic relations here either.
Tribes of the Caucasus during the Eneolithic.
The largest center of copper production was located on the border of Asia and Europe - in the Caucasus. This center was of particular importance because the Caucasus was directly connected with the advanced countries of the then world - with the slave-owning states of Asia Minor.
The materials of the most ancient agricultural settlements of the Shengavit type (Armenian SSR) obtained in Transcaucasia allow us to speak about the presence there at the beginning of the 3rd millennium of an agricultural culture, to a certain extent associated with the centers ancient East. Settlements of the Shengavit type are also found in the North Caucasus (the Kayakent burial ground and settlements near Derbent).
The cultural upsurge and connections with the ancient eastern centers through the Transcaucasus are especially vividly revealed in the North Caucasus by the artifacts discovered there at the beginning of the 20th century. wonderful burial mounds near Maykop and the village of Novosvobodnaya. The parallels with culture established by these excavations ancient city Mesopotamia - Lagash (silver vases and their ornamentation), a great similarity between the sculpture of bulls and lions, as well as rosettes and copper axes with the monuments of another ancient city of Mesopotamia - Ura (the period of the so-called I dynasty), the shape of pins from Novosvobodnaya, similar to those found in the city of Kish in Mesopotamia, and, finally, beads, completely similar to those found in Kish and in ancient layers the ancient Indian city of Mohenjo-Daro, testify that the Maykop barrow and the barrow near the village of Novosvobodnaya date back to about the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. e.
By this time, major changes in production and culture were taking place in the North Caucasus. This is especially clearly seen when comparing materials from the Nalchik settlement and burial ground with materials from the Dolinskoye settlement near Nalchik and from large Kuban kurgans.
The Nalchik burial ground and settlement date back to the very beginning of the Eneolithic in the North Caucasus. Only one copper object was found there. The earthenware is very rough. Cattle breeding was still slightly developed. There is no information about agriculture. All tools are made of stone, have a very archaic, Neolithic appearance and are typical for hunting and fishing life. The decorations also retain their former, Neolithic character. At the same time, some finds, perhaps, already speak of some connections with Transcaucasia and Mesopotamia. In the Nalchik burial ground, a crescent-shaped plate-pendant was found, completely similar to the Sumerian ones, made of agate. With the Sumerians (for example, from the city of Lagash), a stone drilled mace is also similar.
No traces of huts were found in the Nalchik settlement. Obviously, light huts served as shelter for its inhabitants.
A completely different picture is presented by the settlement in Dolinskoye. Its inhabitants lived in solid huts with wicker walls plastered with clay. Among a large number of stone tools, many serrated plates were found that served as blades for sickles. Hoes and grain graters were also found, testifying to the development of hoe agriculture. The grain pits near the huts also speak of agriculture. At the same time, cattle breeding also developed. The great development of pottery is evidenced by dishes that have become more diverse; along with all kinds of small vessels, large pots were made, completely similar to those found in the Maykop barrow. 
But the manufacture of copper tools reached a particularly high development at that time. In Maykop and Novosvobodnensky mounds, a large number of copper tools were found - axes, hoes, adzes, knives, daggers, pitchforks, petiole spears - such forms that are characteristic of Mesopotamia and the culture of the island of Crete of the XXVI-XXIII centuries. BC e.
The general rise of culture to a large extent determined the establishment of ties with the ancient Eastern centers, which in turn contributed to the further development of the culture of the North Caucasus. These connections, in addition to the similarities in the forms of copper tools and the analogies noted above in the decorations and shapes of silver vessels, are also manifested in the visual arts: in the drawings engraved on Maikop silver vases, in the sculptural figures of bulls, in the bas-relief images of lions and rosettes that adorn the costume and the magnificent funeral canopy. . The very richness of the grave goods and the huge size of the North Caucasian large mounds, which stand out against the general background of modest ordinary burials, especially emphasize the depth of the changes that took place then in the Caucasus in the social system of local tribes - the ancient unity of the clan was violated, social inequality appeared, tribal nobility began to stand out . The North Caucasus at this time, in the middle of the III millennium BC. e., in terms of development, of course, far ahead of other areas of mainland Europe.
Excavations in Georgia, in the mounds of Armenia and Azerbaijan (for example, in Nagorno-Karabakh) reveal the history of ancient, apparently still matriarchal, communities whose economy was based on agriculture and cattle breeding, which arose in the Transcaucasus in the Neolithic period and received in the III millennium BC. e. further development. At the same time, the sites of the Copper Age in Transcaucasia are very similar to the sites of the same time in the territory of Western Asia. The monuments of Transcaucasia, however, are distinguished by a certain originality, indicating the independence of the development of the tribes that inhabited this region. There is no doubt that the population of Transcaucasia, to an even greater extent than the tribes of the North Caucasus, used the achievements of the culture of the peoples of Mesopotamia. Transcaucasia served as the main center for the extraction of obsidian, from which, in the first half of the 3rd millennium, tools were especially readily made in various areas of Mesopotamia and in Elam. The population of Transcaucasia served as a transmitter of southern products to the north. Apparently, it is only by chance that no Eneolithic monuments have been discovered in Transcaucasia, as remarkable as the Maykop barrow of the North Caucasus.
Development of agriculture in the regions of the Lower Danube and Transnistria.
Another Eneolithic center arose in Central and Southern Europe. In the fertile areas of the Lower Danube and the Dniester region, at the end of the 4th and in the first half of the 3rd millennium, the tribes living here, along with hunting and domestic cattle breeding, also engaged in primitive agriculture.
The primeval hoe - a massive stick with a bone, horn or stone tip tied to it - served here as the only tool for cultivating the soil. If we take into account the density of the grass cover of the Central European steppes and the Dniester region, then one can easily imagine what a huge amount of work the first farmers had to spend on cultivating the soil.
These farmers no longer lived in the camps of hunters and fishermen scattered along the dunes on the banks of rivers and lakes with their temporary dwellings - dugouts, but in durable winter huts that made up large settlements. In many areas of this part of Europe, the population remained in the same place for centuries, cultivating the surrounding areas. On the Lower Danube, in the northern as well as in the middle part of Bulgaria, in Hungary, in the northeastern part of Yugoslavia, in Romania and Moldova, these settlements left powerful strata, reaching several meters in thickness and forming "residential hills", not much different from those warmer - the hills of Western Asia, which store the remains of ancient settlements of the early Copper Age. The most striking examples of these settlements are the "residential hills" of the so-called Lower Danubian culture in Bulgaria, the settlement of Vinca in Yugoslavia, the settlement of Turdosh in southern Hungary. In the second half of the 3rd millennium, the production of copper products reaches a very high level here. The so-called "copper age" of Hungary is represented at this time by tools that are not inferior to Chinese and Asia Minor.
Tripolye culture.
The culture of this type has been studied in particular detail in the so-called Trypillia settlements of Ukraine, Northern Romania and Moldova (they are named Tripoli settlements after the place of the first finds made by the Ukrainian archaeologist V.V. Khvoyko near the village of Bolshoye Trypillia, Kiev region.).
In Northern Romania, near the villages of Izvoar and Cucuteni, and in Ukraine along the Dniester, near the villages of Darabani, Nezvishki, near Polivanov Yar and in a number of other places, the remains of Trypillia settlements were burned. The study of these settlements showed that the population lived here long time. The first houses were built at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, but in a number of settlements life continued until about the 17th century. BC e. During this huge period of time, the life of Trypillians changed. This is especially noticeable in relation to metallurgy; if in the oldest layers of Cucuteni there are only individual traces of the manufacture of copper products, then in the later layers there are already bronze tools and weapons similar to the bronze products of other centers of Central Europe. The wonderful Trypillia dishes were also changed, which were originally decorated with carved stripes and ribbons, and later richly painted with complex colorful patterns.
Tripoli tribes initially occupied a relatively limited territory in the Eastern and South-Eastern Precarpathians. Their oldest settlements did not extend east of the Southern Bug. However, the achieved level of development of the economy and culture allowed them in the second half of the III millennium BC. e. master the vast territories of the right-bank Ukraine, up to the Dnieper, move south to the Danube and build their settlements in the west - in Transylvania to the Olt River. In the north, the Teterev River serves as the boundary of the Trypillia settlements. In Poland, they are found in the Krakow region.
Tripoli settlements consisted of houses located in a circle. Sometimes there are several such circles. If we assume the simultaneous existence of all houses, then some settlements, for example, the settlement near the village of Vladimirovka in Ukraine, in the Uman region, consisted of almost two hundred houses located in six concentric circles. The center of Trypillia settlements in Ukraine was usually not built up; on a vast square there were only one or two large houses, apparently serving as a meeting place for the inhabitants of the village to discuss community affairs.
The Trypillya ground adobe house consisted of several rooms, some of which served as housing, and the rest were storerooms for supplies. In each room there was a black clay oven, designed for baking bread, there were large vessels for storing grain and a grain grater; in the back of the room, near the window, there was a clay altar with figurines of female deities placed on it. The structure of the house suggests that it was inhabited by several couples. The village itself was an association of kindred families, which included several generations, headed by the eldest in the family. The widely developed cult of the woman-mother suggests that the inhabitants of the Trypillia settlements have not yet passed that stage of development of the primitive communal system, which is characterized by the highest development of the maternal clan. Only in the XVIII-XVII centuries. BC e. among the Tripoli tribes, the importance of cattle breeding in their economy increases, the role of men increases and features appear, especially in the funeral rite, that make it possible to speak of the transition of these tribes to patriarchy.
Eneolithic in Western Europe.
The tribes of Southern and Central Europe differed little from the Trypillians in terms of their level of development. Many of these tribes are characterized by a significant amount of production of copper products. In the mountains of Central Europe, especially in Rudny, already in the III millennium BC. e. copper deposits began to be successfully developed, which later served as an ore base for Central Europe for a long time.
The agricultural tribes that lived north of the Middle Danube basin also lived in large settlements, in large houses with several stoves or hearths. Particularly characteristic in this respect are the so-called Lenschel and Jordanmühl settlements in Upper Austria, Czechoslovakia, northern Hungary, southern Germany, and southwestern Poland. In the alpine zone of northern Italy, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the same picture of the economy and social structure can be reconstructed in pile settlements on lakes. The population of the regions of France, especially in the first half of the III millennium BC. e., differed by a relatively lower level of development of productive forces. The population that left the monuments of the so-called Seine-Oise-Marne culture, apparently, knew agriculture, which arose here as early as the very early Neolithic, but it was not the main branch of their economy. Hunting still played a significant role, people still lived in dugouts. The same should be said about the regions of Germany located between the Elbe and the Oder, only in the second half of the 3rd millennium did the role of agriculture and cattle breeding increase here. 
In the second half of the 3rd millennium, material culture developed more noticeably in the regions along the upper and middle reaches of the Rhine. In this "part of Germany and France, along with open settlements, vast fortified shelters arise, in which, in case of danger, the inhabitants of the surrounding settlements took refuge. Such fortifications sometimes reach enormous sizes (for example, Mayen and Urmitskoye), although a permanently inhabited village on their territory in size Thus, the vast fortified area was designed only for the temporary stay of residents of the surrounding villages, and huge defensive structures (for their construction in Urmitsa, 60 thousand cubic meters of land were dug up and strong log towers were erected and palisades) were built by the entire population of the surrounding villages.These fortified shelters, apparently, were the centers of the unification of tribal villages and testify to the high level of development of tribal life.
A special culture developed in the northern regions of France and Germany. The most characteristic here is the region of Normandy and Brittany, where during the Eneolithic greatest development reached the so-called megalithic culture. 
Agricultural in its essence, it is also characterized by the development of tribal associations, with which megalithic (i.e., built from huge stones) structures are associated. They were erected in memory of the prominent inhabitants of a clan or tribe (menhir), as a family tomb (dolmen) or in the form of a tribal sanctuary (cromlech) (Mengir is a single large stone placed. Dolmen is a crypt of large stone slabs. from menhirs placed in a circle.). The large number of these structures and the enormous weight of the stones of which they consisted, undoubtedly indicate that such structures could only be carried out by the forces of an entire tribe.
A great similarity with the life of the tribes of the megalithic culture was the life of the population of Northern Spain.
The Iberian Peninsula during the Eneolithic period was perhaps the most significant center of copper ore production in Western Europe. Here, especially between Almeria and Cartagena, there was a continuous chain of settlements of metallurgists.
In this area, in every excavated ancient hut, archaeologists find copper ore, fragments of clay crucibles for melting copper, copper ingots prepared for exchange; piles of slag and broken crucibles speak eloquently of the centuries-old and extensive development of copper production, designed by no means only for local needs. From here copper went to France (where only in the Marne mountains there were very small developments of their own), to Northern Europe and, apparently, to the Apennine Peninsula and to Greece. Finds in Spain of painted vessels and red pottery, very similar to both South Italian and Aegean, testify to the ancient connections between these regions of Europe. On the other hand, these connections clearly show the spread to many regions of Western and Central Europe, as well as to Northern Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, of peculiar so-called "bell-shaped" vessels, the initial center of manufacture of which was the southern and eastern regions of Spain.
Culture of pile postvoeks.
A vivid monument of life in the Eneolithic period of the agricultural and pastoral tribes of Europe are the famous pile settlements in Switzerland and in neighboring areas, now known in the amount of four hundred. The oldest piled buildings date back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. The rest existed at the beginning of the 2nd millennium, when the transition to the Bronze Age was already taking place in most of Europe.
A huge number of stone and bone tools, such as axes, chisels and adzes, were found in piled buildings, which were used for working wood. Many of them were fixed into wooden handles by means of special couplings or bushings made of horn. Thanks to the preservative effect of marsh soils and peat, many wooden tools and household items have been preserved - wooden utensils, tables, benches, parts of looms, boats, spindles, bows and other items. Plant grains, remnants of nets, fabrics and other materials that disappear without a trace under normal conditions have also been preserved. This allows us to restore with great completeness and accuracy the life and culture of the inhabitants of pile settlements, the basis of whose existence was mainly livestock breeding and agriculture. 
Five types of domestic animals were known: bulls, pigs, goats, sheep and dogs. All of these animals were small breeds. The emergence of such breeds of animals is believed to be due to the difficult conditions in which they existed, and first of all, poor care and malnutrition.
The land was cultivated with hoes made of wood, stone, bone or deer antler. Hoes were used to loosen the ground in areas freed from forests near lakes. Bread was reaped with flint sickles. The grain was threshed with wooden mallets and ground into flour or groats on hand-held oval-shaped stone grinders. Traces of chaff mixed with grains of weeds have been preserved in the swampy soil near the pile dwellings. Even bread baked by the inhabitants of pile settlements, which had the shape of small round cakes, survived. The cakes were made from wheat, millet and barley. Peas, lentils, carrots, parsnips, poppies and flax were also sown. There were also fruit trees - apple trees, grapes were bred. The remains of special drilling machines with a bow, which were used to drill holes in the stone, have been preserved. Fire was made with the same bow drill. Flax was spun with the help of wooden spindles, on which clay spinners were put on, which served as handwheels. Fabrics were knitted from threads with wooden crochet hooks, they were also woven on a primitive loom. Clay vessels of various shapes were made. 
With such a level of development of the economy, the existence of primitive natural exchange was also natural: there was a need for materials that were not available in the given area, and, obviously, there were some surpluses of livestock products. In the piled buildings of Western Switzerland, there are long bladed knives and polished axes made of a kind of yellowish flint, which was mined and processed in the Lower Loire, in France. From there, such products also dispersed to other regions of France, present-day Belgium and Holland. The population of Swiss pile buildings also received amber from the Baltic, Mediterranean corals and shells. However, the exchange was still very limited in scope and, of course, could not contribute to the decomposition of the primitive communal system.
Piled buildings clearly testify to the strength and strength of the primitive communal order. To cut down and sharpen hundreds and thousands of piles with stone axes, deliver them to the shore of the lake, and then drive them into the marshy soil, a huge amount of labor was required. There should have been a harmoniously organized and friendly team. In those distant times, only a tribal community, welded together by collective production and indissoluble blood ties, could be such a collective.
Each pile settlement and each village of the ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Stone Age was one cohesive whole. All members of this association built their nest among the lakes by common efforts, jointly defended it from enemy attacks. Together they plowed their fields, harvested their crops together, celebrated their communal holidays and celebrations together. 
The division of labor within the community was obviously natural. Men were engaged in hunting, fishing, performed the most difficult tasks. physical work, in particular the clearing of the soil for crops and the cultivation of arable land; they built houses and drove piles, made tools and wooden utensils from stone and bone. Women took care of the crops, reaped, threshed, ground grain on grain graters, baked bread, stored food for future use, and collected wild-growing edible herbs, fruits and berries. Probably, they also prepared clothes, made pottery.
The social affairs of the village, including the organization of labor, as in other similar societies, apparently, were led by a council of adult members of the community, and everyday life was under the control of elected elders and leaders.
It should be noted that the same piled structures were found in other areas of Europe - in Northern Italy, Southern Germany, Yugoslavia and Northern Europe - from Ireland to Sweden. There are their remains in the north of the USSR, in the Vologda region and in the Urals. Such, for example, is a pile settlement on the Modlon River (Vologda Oblast). It was located on a narrow promontory formed by the Modlona River and the Perechnaya River flowing into it. Excavations revealed two rows of houses, the foundations of which were piles driven into the ground.
All houses in the plan approached a quadrangle. The walls were made of wattle, the roof was covered with birch bark. On the floor of the houses and between the houses, various articles made of bone, stone and wood were found. Amber jewelry of Eastern Baltic origin was also found.
In general, the ancient settlement on Modlon gives a picture of the same tightly knit community life as the other pile settlements of the late Stone Age described above.
Tribes of the South Russian steppe in the III millennium.
The steppe spaces between the Dnieper and Ural rivers in the first half of the 3rd millennium were inhabited by tribes who were engaged in hunting and fishing and left us BC. e. mounds in the steppe spaces along the Volga and Don, in the left-bank Ukraine, in the bend and in the lower reaches of the Dnieper. Burials in simple earth pits are found under these barrows. In the "pit" mounds of a later origin, bones of domestic animals were found, the remains of wagons - signs indicating the beginning of cattle breeding, as well as individual copper crafts.
In the coastal zone, the Neolithic way of life was still fully preserved. The life of its population was vividly reflected by the Mariupol burial ground, left on the very shore of the Sea of Azov by a tribe that lived mainly by fishing and hunting, did not yet know metal and preserved in their rituals, in everyday life, in clothing the same features of the Neolithic period that we noted in the North Caucasus based on the materials of the Nalchik settlement and burial ground. Here the archaism of this way of life was even more profound; the tribes living in the coastal zone have not yet mastered even the production of pottery.
Only in the second half of the 3rd millennium - undoubtedly, in connection with the upsurge that has been outlined in the economy of the North Caucasus - the population of the Azov-Black Sea, Kuban and Caspian steppes begins to develop faster.
This new stage in the history of the tribes that lived in our South during the Eneolithic period is represented by the so-called catacomb mounds in the steppes between the Volga and the Dnieper (The name comes from the method of burial in these mounds: it was carried out in a kind of catacombs - chambers dug in one of the walls at the bottom of the entrance well of the burial.). At that time, tribes closely connected with the North Caucasus lived there. 
They accepted the achievements of the Caucasian tribes in copper metallurgy, agriculture and cattle breeding. These tribes, apparently, formed several associations, to a certain extent differing from each other in the details of their culture. At the same time, it can be noted that catacomb burials are found in the east in more ancient time than in the west.
Settlement of tribes to the west.
It seems that the tribes that left us the catacomb burials spread from east to west during the 23rd century. BC e. and the following centuries. In the west, they came into conflict with the Tripoli tribes, pushed them back from the Middle Dnieper and penetrated into Poland, where we also find burials in which ceramics are found, close to ceramics characteristic of the catacomb mounds and the North Caucasus.
The reason for such a wide settlement of the tribes that left the catacomb mounds must be sought in the nature of their economy. The process of development of cattle breeding began, the tribes became more mobile; agriculture played a lesser role in their lives. The needs of nomadic pastoralism caused resettlement over large areas. Because of the pastures there were military clashes. It should be noted that the domestication of animals and the guarding of herds were the work of men. Therefore, the cattle belonged to the man and was inherited not by the maternal family, but by the sons of the man. This gradually led to the concentration of property in individual families and eventually split the tribal community, which was now opposed by a large patriarchal family. It consisted of several generations of direct relatives on the paternal side, who were under the authority of the oldest. The growth of wealth and the emergence of property inequality entailed the emergence of slavery. This is marked by the frequent forced burial in the catacombs of slaves along with a man. Livestock was here the first form of wealth, which allowed the accumulation of significant surpluses.
The penetration of the tribes that left the catacomb mounds to the west was not limited to the territory of Poland. Catacomb burials can be traced as far as Slovenia. The so-called corded ornament on local utensils was most closely associated with the ornamentation of vessels from the catacomb burial mounds. This ornament was widespread at the end of the III millennium BC. e. on the territory of present-day Hungary, Austria (in Salzburg) and the northern part of Yugoslavia.
At the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. in Europe, especially in Northern and Middle Europe, cord ornamentation of dishes was widespread. In a number of areas, amphoras of North Caucasian forms appeared (for example, Saxo-Thuringian ceramics), and decorations typical of pit and catacomb burials, primarily wand-shaped pins, also spread.
Significant changes are taking place in the economy of the population of this zone. Cattle breeding is developing there and in many areas it is becoming the main branch of the economy. The economy and culture of more ancient tribal associations are changing in this direction. At the same time, similar changes are taking place in the territory that was recently occupied by the tribes that created the Trypillia culture.
All these facts indicate that at the end of the Eneolithic Europe was undergoing profound changes caused by the westward penetration of the population from the steppes of Eastern Europe, who brought with them a lot of new things in technology, agriculture, ceramic production and other areas of culture. This confirms the assumption of some linguists that the tribes who spoke the oldest Indo-European languages are of Eastern origin, and this explains the presence of related languages of the Indo-European family in the vast expanses from the Indus to Western Europe.
In Central Europe and on the Rhine, tribes that came from the east met and mingled with another, western group of tribes, apparently spreading from Spain (the so-called "tribes of the stakes of the circum-shaped cups"). This mixing could play a decisive role in the process of spreading further to the west of the Indo-European languages, which also subjugated the old languages of Neolithic Europe and formed new languages - the Celtic and other ancient Western European groups of the Indo-European family of languages.
A similar process took place at the beginning of the 2nd millennium in the forest-steppe zone of Eastern Europe. The southern tribes associated with the Dnieper-Desna group of the Middle Dnieper tribes also penetrated here. Their progress is marked by early monuments of the so-called Fatyanovo culture, discovered first in the Bryansk and then in the Moscow region (The culture is named Fatyanovo after the place of finds near the village of Fatyanovo, near the city of Yaroslavl.). Later, they spread throughout the Volg-Oka interfluve, developing cattle breeding, high forms of metallurgy and ceramic craftsmanship, still unknown to the local Neolithic society. However, here their fate was different than in Western Europe. In the forest areas of the Volga-Oka interfluve, they could not successfully apply their southern forms of economy and were absorbed by the local Neolithic tribes. Only their most eastern part, which settled in the territory of modern Chuvashia and the Lower Kama region, continued to exist later.
REPORT AT THE THEORETICAL SEMINAR, READ AT THE INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY OF THE USSR Academy of Sciences, MARCH 31, 1960
Recently, the Soviet scientific community celebrated the 75th anniversary of the publication of a work that V.I. Lenin described as "one of the main works of modern socialism" - the book by F. Engels "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in connection with the study of L G. Morgan. This book provides an example of a scientific, materialistic study of the primitive history of mankind. V. I. Lenin speaks of this work as a work in which "one can treat each phrase with confidence, with confidence that each phrase was not said at random, but on the basis of enormous historical and political material."
For us archaeologists, of particular importance is the periodization of the history of primitive society set out in this book, the division of the entire history of mankind into three periods: savagery, barbarism, civilization, and each of the first two periods into three stages in accordance with success in the production of means of subsistence. Morgan, according to Engels, "was the first who competently tried to introduce a certain system into the prehistory of mankind, and as long as a significant expansion of the material does not force changes, the periodization he proposed will undoubtedly remain in force."
The periodization of Morgan-Engels has gained the recognition of archaeologists - primitives from different countries and remains in force, despite the expansion of materials, despite the discovery of new, previously unknown cultures. At the same time, it is the subject of attacks by the enemies of Marxism.
As an example of modern bourgeois criticism of the Morgan-Engels periodization as obsolete and evolutionary, one can cite the article by K. Narr “The Beginning of Agriculture and Cattle Breeding. Old questions and new findings and research”: “Especially for those researchers who adhere to concepts similar to the concept of L. Henry Morgan, who still used his long outdated system for periodization of prehistory and early history (with three stages of “savagery”, “barbarism” and "civilizations") and locked themselves in the above considerations, it was a great surprise to see how the seemingly solid foundations of the "Neolithic" disintegrated; ergological and economic criteria no longer agree, since the newly discovered, already food-producing inhabitants lack pottery!” .
Engels characterizes the period of barbarism as "the period of the introduction of cattle breeding and agriculture, the period of assimilation of methods for increasing the production of natural products with the help of human activity." During this period, humanity takes a number of very important steps towards progress. These include: the introduction of pottery; domestication of domestic animals, cultivation of edible plants; the use of raw brick (adoba) and stone for the construction of houses, the smelting and processing of metal; the invention of alphabetic writing and its application to writing verbal creativity. Archeology allows us to establish how, when and where these steps on the path of progress were taken by mankind.
From the time of Morgan ("Anciet Society" in 1877), the presence of ceramics was a sign of the "lower stage of barbarism." Archaeologists have tended to rate the appearance of this trait very highly. Excavations over the past quarter century at Tell es Sultan (Jericho) in Palestine, Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan, Khirokitia in Cyprus at Kili Ghul Mohammed in Balochistan, and Huaca Prieta in Peru have unearthed permanent settlements with well-defined residential structures whose inhabitants have already made important steps towards food production, but did not yet know ceramics. On the other hand, examples of food gatherers using pottery are known. It seems to us that the appearance or absence of ceramics cannot always be considered a defining feature in establishing the stage of development. In this regard, the question arises that the period of barbarism cannot always begin with the appearance of ceramics, with the introduction of pottery. In some areas, the beginning of the period of barbarism is characterized by the introduction of cattle breeding and agriculture. At the same time, man begins to build houses of raw brick and stone. And only later, the settled agricultural and pastoral population, living in solidly built houses, began to produce ceramics.
So, the period of barbarism is, first of all, the period of agriculture and cattle breeding, which fully corresponds to the above-mentioned description given by Engels. Between periods of savagery and barbarism is an important qualitative change. This qualitative change is the first major social division of labor.
Having at his disposal only the data of Indo-European linguistics for the Old World, which testified to the separation of the Aryan pastoral tribes, Engels believed that "the pastoral tribes stood out from the rest of the mass of barbarians." This event starts the middle stage of barbarism in the Old World. But we can consider that the separation of agricultural tribes begins the same stage in the New.
We do not currently have data to contrast the course of social development in the western and eastern hemispheres. Therefore, we say that the first social division of labor, taken on a world-historical scale, was the separation of agricultural and pastoral tribes.
The question of what used to be - agriculture with cattle breeding (we do not know pure agriculture) or cattle breeding - is far from a simple issue that is still being debated and still cannot be considered finally resolved.
There is a hypothesis according to which cattle breeding and the nomadic state of tribes have existed in Central Asia since very remote times. It is mainly defended by representatives of the German historical school, in particular Fritz Flohr and W. Schmidt. G. Pohlhausen recently defended this hypothesis with the "accompaniment theory". According to it, hunters of large animals, roaming in herds across the tundra, arctic and boreal steppes, switched to accompanying these herds, and then to nomadic cattle breeding.
According to another hypothesis, pastoralism originated in the Middle East in agricultural communities and then spread to the steppes. According to the views of the founder of this hypothesis, E. Khan, farmers, in all likelihood, from sacred motives, tamed the animals of their environment and, thus, became the founders of cattle breeding. Cattle breeding soon made the population independent and made it possible to populate areas where agriculture was impossible. This theory is supported by Cote, Lattimore, Rich. Beardsley. The most controversial in this theory is the statement about the sacred grounds that prompted farmers to domesticate animals. Engels was certainly right in pointing to more realistic grounds.
Archaeological material seems to indicate a greater likelihood of E. Khan's hypothesis (in its realistic aspect). Thus, the zoologist C. Reid writes with reference to Fuhrer-Heimendorf that “although the dog appeared with the pre-agricultural hunter, the main food animals always appeared among the early farmers, and the domestication of the horse and reindeer ... occurred relatively late and had no effect on the most ancient agricultural communities and their immediate historical derivatives.
In any case, the first cattle were domesticated in agricultural and pastoral communities, which, it seems, cannot be said about small cattle, but we will return to this issue when we talk about the uneven development of human society from the beginning of the first social division of labor. .
The first major social division of labor - the separation of agricultural and pastoral tribes - was the transition to a new period in the history of mankind - to the period of barbarism and was of great importance. Mankind was able to move from simply appropriating the finished products of nature to the production of food. Hence the decisive significance of this event for the further development of society.
Western archaeologists, following Child, often use his expression "Neolithic Revolution", given by analogy with the industrial revolution in England to denote the concept of the first social division of labor. Child writes: "I have always tried to insist that this 'revolution' was ... a slow, continuous process whose culmination could only be determined arbitrarily." According to Child, the Neolithic revolution must take at least many decades, perhaps many centuries.
Expanding on the concept of the "Neolithic Revolution" in Man Makes Himself, Child writes: "The first revolution that transformed the human economy gave man control over his own food supply."
The purpose of this article is to show where, when and how the first social division of labor took place and what are its primary consequences.
Engels says that the first major social division of labor was the separation from the rest of the mass of barbarians of pastoral tribes with a new economy.
Could the process of formation of agricultural and pastoral tribes take place everywhere in the human ecumene? The first necessary condition for the origin of agriculture is plants that can be cultivated, and the first necessary condition for the emergence of animal husbandry is animals that can be domesticated. And these necessary conditions were not everywhere.
Let's turn to the natural sciences.
For more than a hundred years, archeology and botanical studies of cultivated plants have entered into a very fruitful alliance when, in the late 50s of the last century, many cereals were found in Swiss pile buildings. Both sciences owe this union to O. de Geer. Plant genetics and geography are particularly important in determining the origin of agriculture; the first defines the possibilities of species evolution and the scope of possible ancestors, and the second - the scope of possible wild progenitors of plants, delineating the areas in which only cultivation could begin. Soviet plant geographers, headed by N. I. Vavilov, did a great deal to determine the centers of origin of agriculture. Their merits are recognized by the whole world. Thus, one of the greatest modern experts on the origin of cultivated plants, E. Schiemann, writes that “N. I. Vavilov’s report on the “Geographical centers of our cultivated plants” at the Congress of Geneticists in 1927 gave a huge impetus to both the general study of cultivated plants and and new thoughts on the problems of rapshenits".
Natural sciences say that the vast expanses of Central Asia, Europe, humid subtropics with fertile soils, occupying a third of the land the globe, should be excluded from the area of origin of ancient agriculture. “In essence, only a narrow strip of land on the globe played a major role in the history of agriculture,” writes N. I. Vavilov. He points out that the entire world agricultural culture has developed in the seven main centers of the globe, which in themselves occupy a very limited area. But to what extent are these foci or centers independent or primary?
It seems that three completely independent centers of origin of agriculture can be distinguished.
The first center - the center of origin of wheat, rye, flax, alfalfa and many fruit trees, grapes, many garden plants - is Southwest Asian, including Inner and Eastern Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia, as well as Syria and Palestine. Cattle, sheep, goat and one kind of pig are associated with this center.
The second center is Southeast Asian: the Indochina peninsula is the birthplace of rice, a crop that feeds half of humanity, soybeans, sugar cane, cotton, mangroves. Soer and Kuhn insist on this center; they unite two centers of Vavilov, which are associated with the domestication of another type of pig - Sus vittattus.
The third independent center of the emergence of agriculture is the Central American center, which unites the southern Mexican and Peruvian centers of Vavilov. This hearth gave mankind corn, cotton, cocoa, beans, potatoes. In Peru, llamas were domesticated - alpaca, guinea pig.
The existence of such completely independent centers of origin of agriculture proves the unity of the laws governing the development of all mankind.
Agricultural culture, once formed, spreads from the centers of independent origin to the surrounding regions; secondary, non-independent foci are created. These are, for example, the Mediterranean and Abyssinian.
For the Mediterranean focus, N. I. Vavilov noted that “most of the field (and, therefore, the most ancient. - V. T.) plants in it are borrowed from other centers.” Plants that are characteristic of him and only peculiar to him - olive, fig, carob - a later phenomenon.
Now most botanists consider wild emmer to be the progenitor of cultivated tetraploid wheats. We must look for the place of its cultivation within the range of distribution of this species from Syria and Palestine to Iran and Iraq. It is most likely that its cultivation began in several places within this realm.
The Abyssinian center of origin of emmer (according to Vavilov) is very doubtful from both biological and archaeological positions as an independent and independent center of origin of agriculture. N. I. Vavilov notes that there is no archaeological evidence of the deep antiquity, the Abyssinian cultural center. We point out that there is little biological evidence. There are no wild wheats and barley in Abyssinia, and purely Abyssinian plants, teff (Eragrostis abyssinica), nougat (Guizotia abyssinica) have not gone beyond their homeland.
Since the beginning of the first social division of labor, the process of human development has become unequal. Engels points to this for the Old and New Worlds. This difference manifests itself, firstly, in the fact that centers of productive economy arise, as has already been pointed out, while the rest of mankind continues to remain at the stage of gathering.
Secondly, the unevenness of the process of human development lies in the fact that the emergence of the centers of the productive economy themselves is far from simultaneous. The oldest and most important center for the emergence of agriculture and cattle breeding is the Near East. As the most ancient, it can show us the whole process of the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, and therefore we will deal with it in the future.
Thirdly, the unequal development of mankind since the beginning of the first social division of labor is also reflected in the fact that in some places cattle breeding, apparently, arises earlier than agriculture. Evidence of this is occasionally found in the caves of the South Caspian Sea, in the kitchen heaps of North Africa, in the early tardenois or sovieterry of France (Couzol de Gramat, Tevyek) and ancient Khortum near Arkel, where the bones of domesticated sheep and goats are found.
The Middle East center is the center of origin of the oldest cultivated plants - wheat and barley and the oldest domestic animals - sheep, goats, cattle and pigs.
The wheat genus Turgidum is divided into three genetic groups: diploid, whose cells contain 2 groups of 7 chromosomes, tetraploid (respectively 4 groups) and hexaploid (6 groups). The diploid group consists of einkorn, the tetraploid group includes spelt (emmer), turgidum, durum wheat, and the hexaploid group includes bread soft wheat Tr. vulgare, Compactum, Spelta.
Bees of wheat, except for einkorn, are related by their origin to Tg. dicoccoides, a wild emmer distributed from Syria and Palestine to Iran and Iraq.
Hexaploid naked wheats were supposed at one time to have appeared in Central Asia, where the center of their multiplicity can be established. Their origin has been attributed to chromosomal aberration in emmer. J. Percival pointed out that the grass could be involved in hybridization with emmer to produce soft wheats. If so, then the place of origin shifts to the west, to Transcaucasia, where the ranges of the emmer and Aegilops overlap. Hexapploid wheats, according to G. Helbeck, appear sporadically from the very beginning of agriculture, but as abnormalities; only when transferred to another environment did they become highly developed. The transfer to Egypt was unsuccessful, and in the dynastic period there are no soft wheats in Egypt, but successful in Europe. Whenever a valid variant of naked wheat can be established in ancient finds with sufficient certainty, it turns out to be dwarf common wheat Tr. compactum. The oldest find is the Neolithic el-Omari in Egypt. It exists in the Chalcolithic of Asia Minor, in Harappa in India and in the Neolithic of Europe from the Danube to Switzerland. In the monuments of the Michelsberg culture, a whole group of morphologically different types was found.
The einkorn seems to be the only species that is completely independent in biological behavior. It cannot be crossed with any other wheat. The wild einkorn is distributed in one variant in the Balkans, and in another - from Asia Minor to Palestine and Iran. In the wild, it occurs together with emmer, but rarely in large quantities, often in the layers of the early Bronze Age of Troy, in Western Asia Minor.
The oldest finds are in Hama, in the fourth millennium layer, and in Jarmo, where she accompanies the emmer.
Wild barley grows from Central Asia to Morocco, and therefore it could be cultivated anywhere in this strip; but since there is not a single ancient culture based on barley alone, the conclusion is inevitable that behind wheat man took the first step towards its cultivation.
Aaronzon, who discovered the wild emmer, calls it a “plant of rocky soils”, which “avoids wide plains and steppes”, but grows “in the cracks of rocks, in places where the earth above the stone appears only in the form of a thin layer, in the driest, completely burnt places without any protection and constantly in the society of Hordeum spontaneum ".
Wild wheat grows in mid-latitudes, usually 750-900 m above sea level, preferably on dry and sunny slopes; barley - approximately at an altitude of 800 m. And only in these environmental conditions they could be cultivated.
Turning to zoology to get an answer to the question of the probable area of domestication of goats, sheep, cattle and pigs, we will find ourselves in some difficulty, since many questions are not resolved here, the wild ancestors of the named animals are not always reliably known and, accordingly, the area of domestication is problematic.
The closest living relative of the domestic goat or most goats is the bezoar goat Capra hircus aegagrus. But it is characterized by saber-shaped curved horns, while in domestic goats they are usually twisted. Therefore, some experts believe that the now extinct Capra prisca Adametz goat with twisted horns was the ancestor of domestic goats. Other scholars doubt its existence. In any case, the bezoar goat is found in Crete and the Cyclades and from Asia Minor to Pakistan throughout the Middle East. The goat was domesticated very early: the bones of a domestic goat were already found in Jarmo.
The wild ancestor of the domestic sheep, Ovis ammon Linne, lives in Europe only in Sardinia and Corsica; further, the area of its distribution begins in Cyprus and Asia Minor and extends to Central Asia. Only finds of Pleistocene bones of wild sheep are known to Europe. The sheep was domesticated probably as early as the goat. But evidence of this is still very scarce, and the oldest finds have been made in Amuk.
Recently there has been much debate about the origin of domestic cattle (Bos taurus) from a long-horned or short-horned ancestor (Bos primigenius, Bos brachyceros) and the possibility that the short-horned animals were cows and the long-horned animals were bulls. It is likely that researchers are right who, like Amschler, consider Bos brachyceros to be a variety or race of one species - Bos primigenius. Evidence of the domestication of this species belongs to a relatively late period - Khalafsky.
The types of domestic pig seem to have been based on various subspecies of the wild pig of North Africa and Europe. Already from an archaeological point of view, the origin of the European domestic pig from Sur scrofa vittattus, a Southeast Asian subspecies, is assumed by some scientists to be extremely improbable. The earliest evidence of pig domestication comes from Amuk A.
So, the ancestors of the two most ancient domesticated food animals - wild sheep and goats - live mainly in Western Asia, an important fact that clearly follows from what has been said above, and the ancestors of cattle and pigs live in Western Asia.
The Near East center includes the whole area of hilly flanks, mountain valleys and plains between the mountains, which surround the great irrigation system of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. All the primary settled agricultural and pastoral settlements are gathered within the natural zone of wheat and barley growth and the habitat of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle, in rather high valleys, in the foothills and between the mountains. And development had to be limited to this area until the necessary mutations and hybridizations took place so that the cultivated plants could be removed from their natural environment. According to Braidwood, the high plateaus of Anatolia and Iran were not included in the original focus of development.
These are the main provisions of the "hilly foothills theory", which now seems to be the most probable. But there is another theory called "oasis". It goes back to the early work of the famous climatologist Brooks, who postulated that new post-glacial spreads of Atlantic winds supposedly led to the drying up of North African and West Asian regions. Cultural-historical conclusions from this theory are made by archaeologists - especially Child and historians - Toynbee. According to them, humans and animals retreated to oases and river valleys, and this close coexistence was followed by domestication and cultivation. But with the growth of archaeological knowledge, the river valleys were excluded from this.
The zoologist professor Charles Reid, criticizing the oasis theory, points out that it would be biologically incorrect to expect that the trend of animals suitable for domestication was to move down to oases and river valleys with the onset of an arid climate; any such retreat would be upward, into hilly countries with ample rainfall. Further, he points out that proponents of the oasis theory or the "crowded" theory do not take into account post-pluvial temperature and precipitation fluctuations in Africa and Southwest Asia, which had profound ecological consequences. There is no evidence of domestication during the driest time, and only when the period of higher humidity began (7000-4500 BC) did domestication begin.
Considering archaeological materials related to the first social division of labor in the ancient center of the emergence of agriculture and cattle breeding, we are convinced that they can be divided into two stages: the stage of nascent agriculture and the domestication of animals, and the stage of primary settled agricultural and pastoral settlements.
The second stage, already representing the results of the first social division of labor in the ancient center, is quite well known from the materials of the settlements that lie at the base of the tell of Western Asia; the first stage is much less known. The reason is that, at the very beginning of the new stage of food production, the tools of the new economy did not develop into stable and technologically characteristic forms. The culture of the farmers is difficult to know until they have created standardized tools that do not disappear with time for cultivating the soil, reaping or harvesting. Establishing the existence of pastoralism is very difficult in dry soils where bones rot, and within natural habitats of animals suitable for domestication. There are almost no criteria for recognizing domestication from animal bones. It is a different matter if the animal is not characteristic of the biotype in which it was found, like goats and sheep for the lowlands of the Southern Caspian, where they appear clearly already in a domesticated form.
To the stage of nascent agriculture and domestication can be attributed those complexes that include objects that indirectly indicate the nascent production of poverty - both man-made and natural. The former include sickles or sickle blades, grain graters, pestles, hand mills, etc., the latter - the remains of cereals, bones, if they (by definition of specialists) can belong to domesticated animals.
The stage of primary agricultural and pastoral settlements includes materials extracted from the bases of tells - residential hills. Naturally, when an archaeologist reaches the lower horizons, his excavation narrows to the size of a well. Hence the well-known limitations of our knowledge of these monuments. The establishment of permanent settlements and the appearance of ceramics are the main criteria for the beginning of this stage.
This stage includes such settlements as Hassuna and Matarra in Northern Mesopotamia (Neolithic and Proto-Chalcolithic), Mersin, Amuk A-V in Syria and Cilicia, Ceramic Neolithic Jericho A, Sialk I in Iran. These are clearly agricultural settlements with sickles, grain grinders, grain reserves, hoes (in Khaseun), cattle-breeding (bones of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs), with houses made of raw brick or trampled clay. All these settlements are distinguished by traces of the same cultivated plants and domesticated animals, by common architectural customs and building techniques, by a common method of making ceramics, its ornamentation, by a common type of flint and polished stone tools. Therefore, some archaeologists speak of an area of common, shared tradition. These commonalities, however, do not signify a common beginning in one auspicious place; they prove only the existence of mutual connections and the rapid spread of certain achievements in the same natural and economic conditions.
Other scholars, such as Child and Kenyon, say that large numbers small beginnings of the general economy, and some of them, apparently, fail and perish. But even these scientists emphasize the impossibility of linking these separate branches and deriving them from one common trunk of development. The stage of primary settled agricultural and pastoral settlements in the ancient center of origin of the producing economy refers, according to radiocarbon dates, to the 6th-5th millennium BC. e.
In Palestine, materials from the Natufian and Takhunian cultures belong to the stage of nascent agriculture and pastoralism. Research by K. Kenyon in 1952-1957. in Tell es Sultan (Jericho) showed that at least part of the Natufians and Takhunians was the creator of a high culture, lived in vast settlements (up to 10 acres - 40 thousand square meters), surrounded by powerful walls with towers, in well houses built from raw bricks. The following layers are installed.
Phase B - Pre-Pottery Neolithic - is characterized by well built houses with large rectangular rooms, rectilinear and vertical walls and wide doors. The walls are built of brick, shaped like flattened cigars, topped with a vertical zigzag pattern of thumbnail prints. The walls and floors are covered with a thin plaster coating, cream or pinkish in color, polished to a shine. Houses are of considerable size; they have small courtyards.
According to the flint inventory, this is the classical Neolithic of Palestine (tahunian culture). This stage has up to 26 building horizons in Jericho. The finds related to phase B are extremely interesting. 10 skulls with a face "restored" in plaster. The faces are painted, the eyes are made of shells. The find is a clear evidence of the cult of ancestors. Phase B is dated (according to Xi) 5850±160 BC. e. and 6250 BC. e.
The earlier phase A - also the pre-ceramic Neolithic - is characterized by rounded houses made of typical "plano-convex" bricks. The floors of dwellings were made below the level of the surrounding soil. The wall that protected the settlement (height - 6 m) was opened and in front of it there was a moat carved into the rock 8 m wide and 2.5 m deep. 9 m). Inside the tower was a staircase of 22 superbly finished stone steps. The wall dates back to 6770 ±210 BC. e.
Proto-Neolithic layers lay below, forming the main core of the tell, consisting of countless successively changing floors with light mounds - the remains of huts.
At the northern end of the tell, Mesolithic layers were found, according to the material corresponding to the first stage of the Natufian culture. Their dates: F-69- -9850 ±240 BC. e., F-72-9800 ±240 BC e.
Numerous finds of cereals have not yet been identified, but it has already been found out that among the bone remains there are bones of potentially domesticated animals - pigs, sheep, goats and bulls. Professor F. Zeuner found evidence of goat domestication. There were pets a cat and a dog.
For Europe on great antiquity agricultural culture, in comparison with the culture of the ceramic Neolithic, was first noticed by V. Miloychich. This was first evidenced by the finds of wheat pollen in Württemberg (Federsee), the Czech Republic (Lake Kommernskoe), Austria (Lake Millstatt in Carinthia), Switzerland (Lake Burgesh), etc., dating back to the middle of the Atlantic period and even to the time of the boreal maximum.
Only in 1956, the hypothesis of a pre-ceramic agricultural Neolithic was confirmed thanks to the excavations of V. Miloichich in Thessaly, during which layers with finds of grains of cereals and bones of domestic animals were found in the deep layers of the tell near Larissa with the remains of permanent and durable buildings, with houses type of semi-dugouts and ground dwellings. Since then, a number of pre-ceramic Neolithic settlements have been found in Southeastern Europe, primarily by Theoharis in Thessaly, at Sesklo and Bercu in Romania, and some scientists doubt the Neolithic dating of the latter.
The first social division of labor, the transition to agriculture and animal husbandry, i.e., to a productive economy, led to an unprecedented growth of productive forces and, as a consequence of this, to a significant increase in the population.
The size of a community of gatherers is limited by the available supply of food, the amount of game, fish, edible roots and fruits on its territory. And no matter how hard a person tries, he cannot increase prey: any improvement in technology, an increase in the intensity of hunting and gathering leads to a progressive extermination of game, to a decrease in its quantity. Under the new economy, enormous opportunities arose for increasing the amount of food; you just need to sow more and cultivate the land more in order to get a larger supply of food.
The appropriating economy is characterized by very low population density (for example, the natives of North America have a normal population density of 0.05 to 0.1 per square mile). A manufacturing economy increases population density. On the islands of the Pacific Ocean in Neolithic societies, the population density reached 30 people or more per 1 sq. km. mile, although here the amount of land is limited.
Population growth was reflected not so much in the expansion of settlements as in an increase in their number. After all, in the absence of means of transporting products, the settlements had to be located near the fields, half of which, moreover, lay under fallow. Therefore, the population in one place was limited to a certain number (300-400 people), and its excess forced the creation of a new settlement.
The development of alluvial valleys begins very early, which a person could populate only by mastering agriculture. “Agriculture was not an “invention” of the people living next to one of the great rivers - the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus. No one would descend into the drying marshy country of Southern Mesopotamia to practice farming while he was not at the hall, what it is like. Only after that he could learn the possibilities of the delta. The movement of early farmers down into the clayey lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates, into southern Mesopotamia, is dated to the end of the Hassun phase or early Khalaf. At the end of the Khalaf period, Lower Mesopotamia was already inhabited by the bearers of the Eridu culture, but they were not the first population there. Numerous finds of microliths (known earlier and made recently) indicate the existence of more early culture, probably collectors.
The advancement of cultivated plants down into alluvial valleys with completely different natural conditions (soil, rainfall, etc.), with the need for artificial irrigation, had a huge impact on these plants, shook their heredity and served as an impetus for a number of mutations. It is likely that this abrupt change in ecology gave rise to varieties, among which were stable and more adapted to new conditions. G. Helbeck believes that in this way a six-row barley arose from a two-row cultivated barley, which he discovered in Jarmo.
More recently, evidence has been obtained of another way of settlement - along the southern coast of Anatolia, where the most ancient painted ceramics and more ancient unpainted ceramics of the Neolithic type from Mersina were discovered during exploration. Excavations in Hadjilar by J. Mellaart make it possible to connect the ancient culture of painted ceramics of the Sesklo type in Greece with the Persian painted ceramics.
The third way of settlement is much less known - through Cyrenaica along the northern coast of Africa to Tangier. But, apparently, this is evidenced by the results of excavations of the Haua Fteah cave in Cyrenaica and the cave in Tangier.
“Farmers who grew traditional cereals and herded traditional animals crossed the Egyptian valley to populate the fertile valleys and plains of North Africa,” writes the famous anthropologist K. Kuhn, who took part in the excavations of a cave in Tangier in 1947. This, of course, is not all possible ways of settlement are exhausted, but in the above-named, the process manifested itself, perhaps, most clearly and clearly.
The resettlement itself is far from being a simple migration. This is a complex process that has only recently begun to be more or less defined in the eyes of archaeologists, thanks to new discoveries that have filled significant gaps in knowledge.
From the very beginning, this process is influenced, on the one hand, by separating factors (peripherization and localization), and on the other, by unifying factors (common tradition and diffusion). But the former immediately gain an advantage, and as a result, the disintegration of the settling culture into local groups; the later the step, the more such groups arise. Initially, these groups do not have sharp boundaries, the features of one gradually increase, the features of the other gradually decrease. But the further they diverge, the more they become isolated, the sharper the boundaries become. New, almost independent, independent centers are being formed.
Thus, very early, the Mediterranean becomes the center of Impresso ceramics, a secondary center genetically linked, most likely, with the Syrian-Cilician Neolithic. Indeed, in the culture of Stentinello, Molfetta, the Ibero-Mauritanian Neolithic, in the caves of Catalonia and Valencia, in Otsaki-Magula in Greece, in the Red and Green caves in Montenegro and Herzegovina, characteristic ceramics of this type were found.
The Balkan Peninsula becomes the center of the most ancient culture of painted ceramics: Sesklo in Greece, Starchevo in Serbia, Kremikovtsy and Karanovo I in Bulgaria, Glavaneshty in Romania - these are the names of individual local cultures included in this center, which is probably genetically related to Amuk B - Mersin. In the materials of this circle of cultures we find emmer and einkorn. The existence of this center is the 5th millennium BC. e.
Undoubtedly, the Keresh culture is genetically related to the two centers mentioned above, and the Sesklo-Starchevo-Keresh center became the genetic ancestor of the Linear-band Pottery culture. With this culture, a new, productive economy spread over the vast expanses of Central Europe - from the Rhine in the west to the Upper Dnieper in the east. The time of its existence according to Xi is the second half of the 5th millennium and the turn of the 5th and 4th millennia BC. e.
Only later (during the time of the second Danubian culture) did the Lendel culture or its offshoots in Bohemia and Moravia (Moravian painted and unpainted pottery) give rise to the formation of the first northern agricultural and pastoral culture - the culture of funnel-shaped goblets, bringing to the shores of the Baltic Sea new form economy, emmer, einkorn, dwarf soft wheat, naked barley, i.e. the most ancient cereals cultivated in the most ancient center of the emergence of agriculture, which have come so far from their original homeland and have changed their ecology so much that the plants of the foothills of the Middle East became plants of the plains of the North Europe. This happened at the beginning of the Subboreal period or around the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. by Xi.
The spread of new, progressive methods of the economy is not necessarily associated with resettlement; it could also be carried out through influence from farmers, pastoralists and through borrowing from collectors. This is how it always spread when tribes at different stages of development lived side by side.
A classic and clear example is the adoption by the population that left the Ertebelle culture of cereals and domestic animals. S. Becker, a well-known Danish archaeologist, notes that the Ertebelle culture, retaining the character of a hunting culture for several centuries, acquires polished tools, cultivated cereals, domestic animals and ceramics.
The first social division of labor made regular exchange possible. First, the agricultural and pastoral tribes produced means of subsistence qualitatively different from the gathering tribes, and, Secondly, they could produce more of these funds than they needed to sustain life. This surplus was still small, but already its existence was of great importance.
The earliest commodity in the Middle East was obsidian. He was already met in Jarmo. According to the technological properties of obsidian, it can be established that it was distributed from several centers.
Each group of simple producers was economically independent of any neighbors and theoretically could exist in complete isolation. However, total isolation was never realistic. The exchange was carried out both between neighboring tribes and in stages. At the Neolithic settlement near Fayum Lake, there are shells from Red and mediterranean seas. In Neolithic Europe, excellent evidence of exchange is the shell bracelets of Spondylus Gaederopus in Southeast and Central Europe, distributed mainly along the great Danube route. Treasure finds make us think that there was an exchange of ready-made jewelry.
Tribes - carriers of the culture of funnel-shaped cups developed amber deposits. Treasures containing up to 13,000 amber beads have been found in different places.
Even G. Kossina pointed to a wide area of distribution of tools from striped Galician flint. Tools made from flint mined in Southern Denmark are common as far as Northern Sweden.
Polish scientists have mapped the distribution of flint from Krzemenok Opatowski.
Engels' work showed that the first social division of labor created the conditions necessary for the second major social division of labor, for the separation of handicrafts from agriculture. Each member of society now began to produce more products than was necessary to maintain its existence. This surplus made it possible for specialists to stand out, who could engage exclusively in their craft and not participate in the joint procurement of food by other members of society. “With the division of production into two large main branches, agriculture and handicraft, production arises directly for exchange - commodity production, and with it trade not only within the tribe and on its borders, but also overseas,” wrote Engels.
Only then, after the second social division, at the highest level of barbarism, does the city arise as a qualitatively different category. A city is not defined by the size of the place it occupies, nor by the number of its population, nor by its fortifications. Many Neolithic and medieval villages in Europe and Asia had walls, but this did not make them cities. The city is characterized by a completely different population than in the countryside. The main element in it is not farmers, fishermen and hunters, but professional rulers, officials, clergy, artisans and merchants who do not get their own food, but live on food obtained for them by tillers and pastoralists, mainly outside the city. “There is no attested example of a community of savages being civilized, adopting urban life, or inventing writing. Wherever cities were built, villages of preliterate peasants existed before. Thus civilization, wherever and whenever it arose, followed barbarism. These words were written by Child in 1950 in the article "Urban Revolution". 3-4 years after that, fortified settlements were opened, declared a city, and their culture - a civilization, and these cities and their civilization turned out to be supposedly created by savages.
Meanwhile, from all that has been said above, it is clear that we, together with K. Kenyon and M. Wheeler, cannot consider the settlements of prehistoric Jericho A and B as a city and even a nascent city, and the culture of their inhabitants as a civilization. Such statements lead to the denial of the laws of social development. It is not for nothing that such prominent archaeologists as Braidwood, Child and Woolley spoke out so sharply against them. "Civilization emerged as a particular enhancement of cultural activity, made possible by efficient food production."
The city as such begins to take shape in the Ubeid culture and appears vividly in the proto-literary period ca. 3400 BC e. At this time, the potter's wheel was already in use. Vehicles appeared (on wheels), special crafts abounded. Here we are already at the turn of civilization and we see such signs of it as the potter's wheel, the preparation of vegetable oil and wine, the developed processing of metals, turning into artistic craft; wagons and war chariots, writing, the beginnings of architecture as an art, and a city with battlements and towers are already known here, that is, all those signs that Engels considers characteristic of this period.
- V. I. Levin. Writings, 4th ed. v. 29 p. 436.
- V. I. Lenin. There.
- F. Engels. The origin of the family, private property and the state. 1952, p. 20.
- There.
- "Paideuma", VII, 2, November, 1959, p. 84.
- F. Engels. Decree. cit., p. 26.
- K. M. Kenyon. Jericho and its setting in Near Eastern history. "Antiquity", No. 120, 1956; her own. Earliest Jericho. "Antiquity", No. 129, 1959; her own. Some observations on the beginnings of settlement in the-Near East. JRAJ, v. 89, part 1, 4959; ee. Digging of Jericho. London, 1957 and preliminary excavation reports annually from 1952 to 1957 in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly.
- R.a. L. braidwood. Jarmo. A village of early farmers in Iraq. "Antiquity", No. 96, 1950; R. J. Bhaidwood. From cave to village in Prehistoric Iraq. BASOR, No. 124, 1951; his own. The Iraq-Jarmo project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Season 1954-1955, Summer", X, N 2, 1954; his own. Near Eastern prehistory. Science, v. 127, N 3312, 1958. Already at the time of printing the work, the final report on the excavations was published: R. J. Bgaidwood. A. Vg. howe. Prehistoric investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization. N 31, Chicago, 1960.
- H. I. Vavilov. The problem of the origin of world agriculture in the light of modern research. M.-L., 1932. Below, when describing the "centers" of agriculture and cattle breeding, we stick to the historical-geographical regions, without defining them by the modern political-administrative division.
- N. I. VAVILOV Decree. cit., p. 9.
- For the secondary character of the Abyssinian center, see E. Schiemann. Entstehung der Kulturpflanzen. "Ergebnisse der Biologie", XIX, Berlin, 1943, pp. 521-522.
- N. Pohlhausen. Jager, Hirten und Bauern in der aralo-kaspischen Mittelsteinzeit, 35 BRGK, 1954, Berlin, 1956, p.
- J. Parcival. The wheat plant. London, 1921.
- H. Helbaek. Archeology and agricultural botany. Ninth Annual Report of the Institute of Archeology, London, 1953, pp. 44-58; his own. Domestication of food plants in the Old World. Science, v. 130, No. 3378, 1959, pp. 359-372; his own. How farming began in the Old World. "Archaeology", v. 12, No. 3, 1959; e g o f e. Die Palaoeth- nobotanik des Nahen Ostens und Europas. Opuscula Ethnologica Memoriae Ludovici Biro sacra. Budapest, 1959, pp. 265-289.
- H. Helbaek. Ecological effect of irrigation in Ancient Mesopotamia. "Iraq", XXII, "Ur in Retrospect", 1960, pp. 187-195.
- Provisionally published in AS, VIII, 1958; IX, i1959; X, 1960; XI, 1961.
- C. Coon. The story of man. Nem York, 1954, p. 146.
- Wed E. F. Neustupny. Zur Entstehung der Kultur mit Kannelierter Keramik. "Slovenska Archeologia", VI1-2, 1959, p. 260.
- Vrshnik - culture Starčevo III (?), settlement near Shtip: according to the Heidelberg laboratory -4915 ± 150 BC e. Gornja Tuzla, Tuzla Okrug - Starčevo culture III: Gro-2059-4449±75 years BC. e. (N. Quitta. Zur Frage der alteren Bandkeramik in Mitteleuropa. PZ, XXXVII, 1960). The dating of the Linear Pottery culture is proved by a number of dates, including - Westerregeln, Stasfurt district: Gro-223-4250 ± 200 BC. e., and the date of the transition from Vinci A to Vinci B, corresponding to the transition from the Keresh culture to the early Vinci culture, in which the first imported, linear-ribbon sherds appear, is 4010 ± 85 years BC. e. Wed N. T. Waterboik. The 1959 Carbon-14 Symposium at Groningen. "Antiquity", XXXIV, No. 133, I960, p. 15 "fol.
- R. J. Bhaidwood. Jericho and its setting…, pp. 73-80.
- V. G. Childe. Civilization, cities and towns. Antiquity, No. 12-1, 1957, pp. 34-38.
- L. Woolley. The first towns? "Antiquity", JVTa 120, 1956, pp. 224, 225.
- R. J. Braidwood. Near Eastern prehistory, p. 1419.
- F. Engels. Decree. cit., p. 25.
EARLY DOMESTIC AGRICULTURAL AND CATSTORAL CIVILIZATIONS
Introduction
1 Formation of domestic civilizations of the Ancient World. neolithic revolution
2 The main features of the development of early domestic civilization centers of the Ancient World
3 Features of the protection of historical monuments of early domestic agricultural and pastoral civilizations
Conclusion
List of used literature
Introduction
The first, oldest socio-economic formation was the primitive communal system. It lasted from the time of the formation of man to the transition to a class society and, therefore, was the longest epoch in the history of mankind, due to the slow pace of development of society in its early stages. All stages of the primitive communal system are united by the collective nature of production and consumption, due to the fact that the productive forces were still very undeveloped. That is why the further development of the productive forces, the transition from a typically primitive consuming economy to a producing economy, the division of labor (primarily the separation of pastoral and agricultural peoples) complicated the entire system of social relations and ultimately led to a transition to other types of social development.
It is generally accepted that primitive society is divided into periods according to the main materials used to make tools: the Stone Age, the Eneolithic (Copper Stone Age) - transitional from stone tools to metal ones, the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. This periodization, of course, does not mean that tools from wood and bone were not made in the Stone Age, and from stone in the Bronze Age. We are talking about the predominance of one or another material.
Table 1
| ARCHAEOLOGICAL AGES | CHRONOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK |
|
| I. Stone Age | |
|
| 1. Paleolithic | 1500–100 thousand years ago |
|
| | ||
| | ||
| 2. Mesolithic | | 12–8 thousand years BC |
| 3. Neolithic* | | |
| II. Copper Age* | | |
| III. Bronze Age* | | |
| IV. Iron Age* | | from 1 thousand BC to the present day |
| * In Europe and Asia |
||
1 Formation of domestic civilizations of the Ancient World. neolithic revolution
The settlement of primitive man on the territory of the Russian Federation took place in the era of the ancient Stone Age (Paleolithic), characterized by the predominant use of stone for the manufacture of tools and weapons. Wood, bone and other materials were also used. The main occupations of small human groups were hunting and gathering. Traces of the habitation of an ancient man who came from the Transcaucasus were found in the North Caucasus and in the Kuban region. Sites of the Mousterian Paleolithic culture (100-35 thousand years ago) were discovered by archaeologists in the middle Volga region and other regions. Burial discoveries, according to scientists, testify to the development of religious beliefs. In the Upper or Late Paleolithic (40-35 - 10 thousand years ago), people of the modern type (Cro-Magnons) lived in certain areas of Eastern Europe and Siberia (the Urals, Pechora, West Siberian Lowland, Transbaikalia, the valley of the middle Lena). They own numerous archaeological sites (Avdeevskaya camp, Sungir, Kostenki, Malta, Buret, etc.). Collectives of blood relatives on the maternal or paternal lines (clan) lived in the conditions of the last (Valdai) glaciation. Adapting to the harsh natural conditions, they improved the technique of processing stone, bone, etc., mastered the construction of dwellings; introduced specialization in hunting and other crafts. During this period, hunting for large mammals prevailed: mammoths, cave bears, etc. The comprehension of the surrounding world was reflected in sculptures and cave paintings (Kapova Cave).
During the period of the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic), people adapted to the changing natural conditions associated with the retreat of the glacier and the formation of the modern relief, climate, flora and fauna. small groups hunters and fishermen moved into areas freed from glaciation. With the invention of the bow and arrows in hunting great place acquired prey of medium and small mammals, waterfowl; large areas of inland water bodies contributed to the development of fisheries. Researchers attribute the emergence of group burial grounds to this period (Oleneostrovsky burial ground, etc.).
At the last stage of the Stone Age (Neolithic), the formation of branches of the productive economy began: agriculture and cattle breeding. In the manufacture of stone tools, grinding and polishing, as well as sawing and drilling, were used. Pottery, spinning and weaving arose. For transportation, boats, skis, sledges were used. By the end of the Neolithic, individual copper items appeared. In the course of the complication of tribal society, associations of individual clans appeared - tribes. At the same time, groups of tribes led the same type of economy, which is confirmed by excavations and studies of pit-comb and other archaeological cultures of the Neolithic (Lyalovskaya, Balakhna, etc.).
In the era of the Copper Age (Eneolithic), agriculture, cattle breeding and copper metallurgy developed initially in the southern regions of Eurasia. In the 4th-2nd millennium BC. e. settlements of settled farmers and pastoralists existed in the North Caucasus; Ukraine, Moldova (Trypillian culture); steppes of the South of Russia (pit culture), etc.
According to the latest archeological data, the oldest traces of human habitation on the territory of Russia date back to pre-Shellian times (3 - 2 million years ago) and were found in Siberia, the North Caucasus and the Kuban region. In particular, the Bogatyri and Rodniki sites on Taman are 1.5 million years old. Sites of the next stage, the Shellic (730-350 thousand years ago) were found in the Voronezh, Kaluga, Tula, Volgograd regions. Approximately 150 thousand years ago, the Acheulean cultures were replaced by the Mousterian ones. Sites of this type are widespread in the European part of Russia. During these cultures, the physical type of a person also developed - local species of Australopithecus, later - archanthropes, paleoanthropes (including their own types of "Neanderthals"), who were replaced by a modern neoanthrope.
In Russia, there is the oldest neoanthropic site in the world - Kostenki in the Voronezh region (50 thousand years ago). Settling, neoanthropes formed the first archaeological culture of neoanthropes - the Kostenkovo-Streltsy culture (50 - 30 thousand years ago, sites: Markina Gora, 44 - 34 thousand years BC, Voronezh region; Eliseevichi, 35 - 25 thousand years before AD, Bryansk region; Sungir, 28 - 20 thousand BC, Vladimir region, etc.). Its genetic heir is the Kostenkovo-Avdeevka culture, which existed until the Mesolithic era. This culture includes sites: Gagarino, 22 - 21 thousand BC. e., Lipetsk region; Zaraysk, 22 - 21 thousand BC e., Moscow region; Avdeevo, 22 - 21 thousand BC e., Kursk region; Yudinovo, 14 - 13 thousand BC e., Bryansk region, etc. Anthropological type of a person - Caucasians.
NEOLITIC REVOLUTION(neolitic revolution) - a revolutionary revolution in production that occurred in late primitive society, usually associated with the transition from an appropriating to a producing economy and created the prerequisites for the formation of an early class society.
The term "Neolithic Revolution" was introduced in 1949 by the English archaeologist Gordon Child, who was close in his conceptual preferences to Marxism and proposed the term by analogy with the Marxist concept of "industrial revolution". This revolution, according to Child, "transformed the human economy, gave man control over his own food supply", thus creating the conditions for the emergence of civilization. Since the concept of "industrial revolution" by the middle of the 20th century. already became generally accepted, the term "Neolithic revolution" quickly gained popularity. Other variants of the names of this historical event (for example, "revolution in food production", "agricultural revolution") did not receive the support of specialists.
Currently, the Neolithic Revolution is considered one of the three major revolutionary changes in the economy - along with the industrial and scientific and technological revolutions.
The study of archaeological materials (especially in America) and the way of life of the surviving backward peoples has shown, however, that a rigid connection between social stratification and the transition to a productive economy is by no means found everywhere. There are peoples who continued to engage in appropriating economy, but have already gone far from primitive equality. For example, the Indians of Alaska 18-19 centuries. They were mainly engaged in fishing and hunting, but by the time the Europeans arrived, they already had such institutions as chiefdoms, wars between tribes, and patriarchal slavery.
To explain this contradiction, one should pay attention to the most general signs of a producing economy, identified by the Soviet historian V.M. Bakhta:
settled way of life;
stock creation and storage;
interval in the sequence of works;
cyclical work;
expansion of the range of activities.
Of these five signs for development social stratification only three are enough - the 1st, 2nd and 5th. The most important feature is (2): it is the accumulation of rare material goods (first of all, food) that gives rise to the division into rich and poor. Therefore, the Soviet historian V.A. Back in the 1980s, Bashilov proposed to understand by the Neolithic revolution transition from the production of a subsistence minimum to the stable production of a surplus product irrespective of the specific forms of economy under which given transition.
The logic of the concept of V.A. Bashilova is like that. Before the Neolithic Revolution, the production of excess food was random and unsustainable, because there were no technologies for the long-term preservation of scarce food. When methods are discovered for long-term storage of food reserves (smoking, salting, etc.), then a powerful incentive immediately arises not to immediately eat all the prey, as happened in early primitive society, but to accumulate it for a “rainy day”. Owners of a larger supply can guarantee a stable standard of living not only for themselves, but also for their loved ones. Therefore, they acquire a higher social status. The accumulation of wealth stimulates predatory raids on neighboring tribes in order to take away their accumulation. Thus, for the formation of social stratification, sufficient conditions may arise even if the appropriating economy is preserved.
The thesis about the stable production of a surplus product can be perceived as an indication of an increase in the level and quality of life during the Neolithic revolution: before it, people lived on the verge of starvation, and after that, as a result of the transition to more advanced technologies, life became more abundant. This understanding was widely held until the 1970s, when the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proved it wrong.
In his monograph Economics of the Stone Age(1973) M. Sahlins, summarizing ethnographic and historical information, formulated a paradoxical conclusion: the early farmers worked more, but had a lower standard of living than late primitive hunters and gatherers. The early agricultural peoples known in history worked, as a rule, for a much larger number of days than those who survived to the 20th century spent on getting food. primitive hunters and gatherers. The idea of the hungry life of backward peoples also turned out to be very much exaggerated - among farmers, hunger strikes were more severe and regular. The fact is that under the appropriating economy, people took far from nature everything that it could give them. The reason for this is not the imaginary laziness of backward peoples, but the specificity of their way of life, which does not attach importance to the accumulation of material wealth (which, moreover, is often impossible to accumulate due to the lack of technologies for long-term food storage).
A paradoxical conclusion arises, which is called the “Sahlins paradox”: during the Neolithic revolution, the improvement of agricultural production leads to a deterioration in living standards. Is it then possible to consider the Neolithic revolution a progressive phenomenon if it lowers the standard of living? It turns out that it is possible if we consider the criteria for progress more broadly, without reducing them only to average per capita consumption.
What exactly was the progressivity of the Neolithic revolution can be explained by the model proposed by the American economists and historians Douglas North and Robert Thomas ( cm. rice.).
In the early primitive society, common property dominated: due to the small population, access to hunting grounds and fishing grounds was open to everyone without exception. This meant that there was a general right to use the resource before it was captured (whoever was the first to capture it) and an individual right to use the resource after the capture. As a result, each tribe, collecting prey from the next site where it migrated, was interested in the predatory consumption of shared resources "here and now", without concern for reproduction. When the resources of the territory were depleted, they left it and went to a new place.
Such a situation, when each user is concerned with maximizing personal momentary benefits without concern for tomorrow, economists call the tragedy of common property. As long as natural resources were abundant, there were no problems. However, their depletion due to population growth led about 10 thousand years ago to the first ever revolution in production and in the social organization of society.
According to the Sahlins paradox, hunting and other types of appropriating economy provided much higher labor productivity than agriculture. Therefore, while the demographic burden on nature did not exceed a certain threshold value (in the figure, the qd value), primitive tribes did not engage in a productive economy, even if there were suitable conditions for this (say, plants suitable for cultivation). When, due to the depletion of natural resources, the productivity of hunters began to fall, then population growth required a transition from hunting to agriculture (in the graph - from an initially higher level of VMPh to a trajectory of a lower VMPa), or the extinction of hunters from starvation. In principle, a third way out is also possible - to stop the demographic pressure at the critical limit. However, primitive people rarely resorted to it due to a lack of understanding of environmental patterns.
In order to move from hunting to farming, fundamental changes in property relations are necessary. Farming is a fundamentally settled type of activity: for many years or constantly, farmers exploit the same piece of land, the harvest from which depends not only on the weather, but also on the actions of people. Fertile land is becoming a rare resource that needs protection. There is a need to protect cultivated lands from attempts to capture them by strangers and to resolve land conflicts between fellow tribesmen. As a result, it begins to take shape state as an institution whose main economic function is the protection of property rights.
D. North and R. Thomas proposed to consider the main content of the First Economic Revolution (as they called the Neolithic Revolution) the emergence of property rights that secure exclusive rights individual, family, clan or tribe to the ground. Overcoming the tragedy of common property made it possible to stop the fall of the marginal product of labor and stabilize it.
Table 2. INCREASE IN POPULATION DENSITY AND MASS DURING THE NEOLITIC REVOLUTION
The progress of the development of society in the course of the Neolithic revolution, therefore, is manifested not directly in the growth of the average per capita standard of living, but in an increase in the density and population (Table 3). The shift from hunting and gathering to farming has been estimated to increase population density hundreds of times over. Since this transition did not take place in all regions of the planet, the growth of the total population of the planet occurred more slowly - not hundreds, but only tens of times.
It should be taken into account that in different regions of the planet the Neolithic revolution took place asynchronously and with different regional specifics. There are three ancient primary foci:
Western Asia (the territory of modern Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan), where by 7-6 thousand BC. an agricultural and cattle-breeding economy was formed (growing wheat, barley and peas, breeding goats) and the first cities of the planet appeared (Chatal-Guyuk, Jarmo, Jericho);
Mesoamerica (the territory of Mexico), where by the end of the 3rd - the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. an agricultural economy based on the cultivation of maize developed; the territory of Peru, where by the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. the economy of settled agriculture (cultivation of maize) is being formed, while maintaining the great importance of fishing.
The Neolithic revolution in each of the primary centers proceeded for a long time, for 2–4 millennia. When the new manufacturing economy began to spread from these centers to the surrounding regions, the adoption of already accumulated production and social experience sharply reduced the transition time. In the modern world, backward peoples who did not survive the Neolithic revolution survived only in remote corners of the planet with special natural and climatic conditions.
2. The main features of the development of early domestic civilization centers of the Ancient World
In the 1st half of the 1st millennium BC. e. iron metallurgy spread over a large territory of Russia (except for the northern and northeastern regions), in connection with which the decomposition of primitive communal relations accelerated. At the same time, in the North - in the taiga and tundra, in harsh natural conditions, the archaic primitive way of life was preserved. In the North Caucasus, iron tools were created from the 9th-6th centuries. BC e. under the influence of iron and blacksmithing in Transcaucasia. The transition to the production of iron is traced on the material of the Koban, Srubnaya, Abashev and other cultures. The formation of the Iron Age in the Black Sea steppes coincided with the presence of the Cimmerians there, and then the Scythians. 2 economic structures were formed: cattle-breeding-nomadic in the steppes and sedentary-agricultural in the forest-steppes. The emergence of handicraft centers, which developed into urban ones, with a significant military potential, contributed to the emergence of a state among the Scythians. Scythian and Scythian-like cultures of the 7th-4th centuries. BC e. on the territory of Southeastern Europe constituted the western part of a large cultural and historical community, which was formed mainly among the nomadic pastoral tribes of Eurasia (the so-called Scythian-Siberian cultural and historical community).
In the 6th-5th centuries. BC e. ancient cities arose on the northern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea, which united in the 5th century. BC e. in the Bosporan state, which also included Sinds, Meots, and other tribes. Greek slave cities were centers of high ancient culture, they established close economic, political and cultural ties with the Scythians and other peoples. In the 4th c. BC e. began the movement from the Urals to the Volga region of the Sarmatian tribes. The Sarmatians defeated the Scythians and in the 3rd c. BC e. settled in the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region and in the North Caucasus. In the steppe zone, by the turn of the 2nd-1st centuries. BC e. became the dominant Sarmatian culture. The Scythian state, which existed from the 2nd century BC. BC e. mainly on the territory of the Crimea and along the banks of the lower Dnieper, was influenced by ancient cities and Sarmatian culture.
Iron-making production developed in the forest-steppe and forest zones of the Dnieper basin. The population of the Zarubintsy culture (2nd century BC-2nd century AD) in the upper and middle parts of the Northern Dnieper and Desenye regions is correlated by some scientists with the tribes of the Balts, by others with the Proto-Slavs. In the forest area of Eastern Europe from the 8th c. BC e. by 6th-7th centuries n. e. there were cultures associated with different ethnic groups. On the territory of the Volga-Oka interfluve, monuments of the Dyakovo culture were found, to the South and East from the middle reaches of the Oka and to the Volga (basins of the Tsna, Moksha, Sura rivers) the Gorodets culture spread. The carriers of these cultures were the Finno-Ugric tribes, the ancestors of Meri, Vesi, Meshchers, Muroms and Mordovians. Representatives of the Ananyino culture (8th-3rd centuries BC) occupied the left bank of the Middle Volga and the Kama region. They are considered the ancestors of the Udmurts and Komi. From 8-5 centuries. BC e. iron was being developed in the Far East. Here the centers of ferrous metallurgy were formed.
In the process of the great migration of peoples to the Northern Black Sea region in the 3rd century. n. e. the Goths came, in 375 the Huns. Ancient cities ceased to exist. In the 2nd half of the 3rd c. in the steppe and forest-steppe from the left tributaries of the Dnieper to the Danube, the poly-ethnic Chernyakhov culture spread. Its carriers were Dacians, Getae, Sarmatian-Alans, late Scythians, Goths, Slavs. From the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. there was a decomposition of primitive communal relations among many agricultural and pastoral peoples living in Eastern Europe and Siberia. In 550-562, the union of nomadic tribes of the Avars moved from the Urals and the Volga region to the North Caucasus and the Northern Black Sea region. In the middle of the 6th c. in Central Asia, a tribal union of the Turks created a state - the Turkic Khaganate, which played an important role in the consolidation of the Turkic-speaking population of Eurasia. In the 60s. 6th c. The Turks defeated the state of the Hephthalites in Central Asia. At the turn of the 6th-7th centuries. East Turkic and Western Turkic Khaganates arose. In 638-926, in the southern Primorye, there was a state of the Mohe tribe and another - Bohai, which successfully fought against the emperors of Tang China. In the 2nd half of the 6th c. Turkic-speaking Bulgarian Balanjar tribes moved from the Trans-Urals to the North Caucasus. In the 1st third of the 7th c. in the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov, the state formation Great Bulgaria arose. In the middle of the 7th c. nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes of the Lower Volga region, the North Caucasus, the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov and the Don steppes were included in the Khazar Khaganate. The Finno-Ugric tribes of the Middle Volga region and immigrants from Great Bulgaria created in the 10th century. state - Volga-Kama Bulgaria. At the turn of the 9th-10th centuries. there was a process of formation of the state among the Alans in the North Caucasus.
3 Features of the protection of historical monuments of early domestic agricultural and pastoral civilizations
Archaeological monuments of the Bronze Age have been discovered almost throughout Eurasia. By the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BC. e. include monuments of the Bronze Age in the Caucasus, in the Northern Black Sea region, etc. At the end of the 3rd -1st quarter of the 2nd millennium BC. e. The technology of bronze smelting was mastered by the tribes of the forest-steppe and forest zones of Eastern Europe, Western Siberia, and the Altai-Sayan region. The primitive communal form of social organization was preserved for the most part. Scientists have established the existence in the Bronze Age of independent territorially isolated population groups with peculiar features of spiritual and material culture (cultural groups, archaeological cultures, cultural and historical communities). In the southern zone (Caucasus, Central Asia, partly South Siberia) agricultural and cattle-breeding complexes with developed handicraft production arose. In the steppe, forest-steppe, and partly in the forest zones, the cattle-breeding type of economy prevailed, with the auxiliary role of agriculture. In the forest (taiga) zone, cattle breeding was combined with hunting and fishing. There were long-term settlements where handicraft production developed. In the early Bronze Age, in the Transcaucasus and the North-Eastern Caucasus, there was a Kuro-Araks agricultural and pastoral culture. Relations were maintained with the civilizations of the Middle East. In the Late Bronze Age central regions Caucasus, the Koban culture spread. On the territory of the steppes of Eastern Europe lived cattle-breeding tribes of the pit cultural and historical community, which arose back in the Copper Age. At the end of the 3rd - the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. in the Upper and Middle Volga regions and the interfluve of the Oka and Volga lived carriers of the Fatyanovo and Balanovo cultures. In the forest-steppe zone of the Don region, the Middle Volga region and the Southern Urals in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. the tribes of the Abashev cultural and historical community lived, which are characterized by a high level of development of metallurgy, based on the Ural and Volga copper deposits. In the 2nd half of the 2nd - the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. on the territory from the Urals to the Left Bank of the Dnieper, pastoral and agricultural tribes of the Srubnaya cultural and historical community were located. The Seima-Turbinsky cultural complex, which originated in the Sayano-Altai region, spread thousands of kilometers to the West. In Siberia, the Afanasiev culture in the upper reaches of the Yenisei and the Altai steppes belonged to the Eneolithic - the early stage of the Bronze Age, the Glazkov culture in the Baikal region and the Ymyyakhtakh culture in the basin of the middle Lena belonged to the early Bronze Age. The spread of metallurgy in Eastern Siberia is associated with the influence of the Okunev culture, presumably formed in the Minusinsk Basin and forced out to the East by the tribes of the Andronovo cultural and historical community. The Andronov tribes occupied in the 2nd half of the 2nd - the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. the territory from the Urals to the Yenisei and from the taiga zone to the northern regions of Central Asia (Alekseevsky settlement, etc.). The Karasuk culture (13-8 centuries BC) was found in the upper reaches of the Yenisei, Ob, in the Sayano-Altai region. In the south of the Far East in the 2nd half of the 2nd - the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. there were Sinegai, Lido, Evoron and other cultures. In the Bronze Age, the process of social division of labor intensified, the exchange between tribes increased. The craft has become an independent sphere of production. The heads of large patriarchal families possessed considerable wealth; property differentiation intensified, clashes between tribes became more frequent. In the Bronze Age, alliances of tribes arose, later described by ancient historians and geographers.
In the vicinity of the mountainous Krasnodarya, the northwestern part of the Black Sea region, the Republic of Adygea, dolmens became widespread - megalithic ritual and burial structures. They are mainly located in the mountain-forest zone. Dolmens appeared in the Western Caucasus about 5,000 years ago in the Early Bronze Age. In recent years, there has been enough literature on these mysterious representatives of the dolmen culture, archeological monuments of world significance. The most famous mass dolmen settlements within the weekend routes are Novosvobodnenskoye (more than 400 pieces), Detuaksko-Dakhovskoye (about 120 pieces); in the area of the town of Sober-Bash, some researchers counted about 40 dolmens. In dollars R. Abin found up to three dozen tombs, and not far from the village. Pshada lead excursions to 9 dolmens.
In this area, the Scythian culture (7th - 4th centuries BC) is represented by monuments that have received world recognition - the Voronezh, Elizabethan barrows, which provided reference samples of the ancient art of the animal style. These finds are kept in the Golden Treasury State Hermitage, State Museum of the East.
In the era of the early Iron Age (VIII - IV centuries BC) in the basin of the river. The Kuban and the Sea of Azov formed a vibrant culture of the Meots - tribes of farmers and cattle breeders, fishermen and artisans. They left behind numerous fortified settlements - Elizavetinsky, Vasyurinsko-Voronezhsky, Starokorsunsky on the right bank of the Kuban, Tenginsky on the river. Labe, Steppe I - III in the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov, etc.
The richest stone tombs of the Sindo-Meotian nobility were found in the Elizavetinskiye, Semibratnye, and Karagodeuashi burial mounds.
The western part of the Krasnodar Territory is the only place in the Russian Federation where ancient monuments are located: the settlements of Phanagoria (the capital of the Asian Bosporus) and Germonassa (Taman), the city of Gorgippia (Anapa), Taman Tholos and the residence of Chrysaliska (village "For the Motherland" of Temryuksky district), the oldest ship anchorages near the capes of Tuzla and Panagia.
Conclusion
So, based on the theoretical analysis carried out in control work the following conclusions have been drawn.
The periodization of the history of the Ancient World is a complex and not yet fully resolved scientific problem. There are many approaches to the periodization of history. In this paper, the following scheme is considered:
I. The oldest stage, which lasted approximately 1.5 - 2 million years, covers the initial phases of anthropogenesis. The lowest stage of savagery, the time of the prehistory of the economy and material culture;
II. The stage covered a significant part of the Stone Age (Early Paleolithic) and lasted more than 1 million years. The primitive-appropriating stage corresponded to the middle stage of savagery;
III. The emergence of modern man and the early stages of his history (late Paleolithic, Mesolithic, in some areas of the earth the entire Neolithic). The time of a developed appropriating economy, a stage of the highest savagery;
IV. Accumulation of experience in the reproduction of life's blessings, the beginning of the domestication of plants and animals, while maintaining the appropriating type of economy as a whole (late Mesolithic - early Neolithic). The lowest stage of barbarism;
V. VIII-V millennium BC e. - the beginning of the era of the productive economy, corresponding to the middle and highest levels of barbarism;
VI. In the IV-III millennium BC. e. on the basis of the development of productive forces and production relations in irrigation agriculture, the first civilizations arise, which mark the final decomposition of the primitive and the formation of a class society.
VII. At the boundaries of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, the development of nomadism began, which was another major stage in the division of labor.
In the control work, the main agricultural and cattle-breeding centers of the Ancient World are considered.
In the Russian Federation, as in other countries, there is legislation regulating the protection of historical monuments, including the history of the Ancient World.
The western part of the Krasnodar Territory is the only place in the Russian Federation where ancient monuments are located
List of used literature
1. Masson V.M. The problem of the Neolithic revolution in the light of new archeological data. - Questions of history. 1970. No. 6
2. Bashilov V.A. The pace of the historical process in the most important centers of the "Neolithic revolution". - In the book: The Historical Fates of the American Indians. Problems of Indian studies. M., 1985
3. Sahlins M. Economics of the Stone Age. M., 1999
4. Korotaev A.V. Social evolution: factors, patterns, trends. M., 2003
5. Trouble A.M. Cultural-historical rhythms (tables). M., 1995.
6. History of Russia / Under the general. ed. V.V. Rybnikov. Saratov, 1997
7. Mikhailova N.V., Beda A.M., Zhurov A.N. Monuments of the past: Protection of historical heritage. M., 1997.
8. Semennikova L.I. Russia in the World Community of Civilizations: Textbook for Universities. M., 1994.
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