Early South Indian Palaeography c8.s2.54

c8.s2.54

In Siberia too, rock art is common, consisting of engravings or pecked drawings and paintings. One rock drawing shows⁶³ hunters with bows and arrows and two naked men, one with a spear. The antiquity of these pictures is not above controversy, and while a very early date may be held quite reasonable, some of them definitely belong to a much later period, about the first millennium A.D. But many recent finds have been made by Soviet archaeologists and there is no doubt that palaeolithic art existed in the Asian countries of the Soviet Union, especially in Siberia. Female statuettes similar to those of the Auringnasian period of Europe have occurred in the Russian plains, Malta, Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia and in Uzbekistan.⁶⁴ As regards the Yakutsk rock pictures, Prof. Okladnikor's team (which investigated about eighty prehistoric sites and groups of rock pictures) believes that they belong to the Bronze and Iron Ages and partly to the Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods too.⁶⁵ Miss Tatyana Passek, Secretary of the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, hails the cliffs near the village of Shiskino, on the Lena river as a museum of primitive art; she observes that "in many places, over a stretch of a kilometer and a half the cliffs are completely covered with drawings".⁶⁶ The most interesting piece, according to her, is a life size drawing of a wild horse in red paint, resembling similar drawings in palaeolithic caves in Western Europe.⁶⁷ Another instance of rock art is the Surukhtaakh Khaya cliff which is covered with drawings representing 'witch doctors, reindeer, cupolo-like structures and various symbols'.⁶⁸ The piece of the rock art from this region according to Leouhard Adams may be only a rough sketch, perhaps not quite accurate. He holds that it is not palaeolithic or neolithic art, but apparently belongs to the Bronze Age. "However incomplete the section illustrated here may be, at least one typically primitive feature is quite distinct, viz., 'X-ray' vision; that is to say, the representation of the inner parts of a body. This is one of the several characteristics which ancient Siberian art has in common with North-west American art and other American art styles."⁶⁹ What has been called 'X-ray' vision may have played a vital role in the development of pictography and ideography; Leouhard Adams rightly regards it as the highest development of 'intellectual' as opposed to optical vision. His further remarks are quite apposite to the evolution of writing also: "The accentuation of certain features in a figure often leads to the disregard of others, so that realistic representation is gradually abandoned. It is eventually replaced by symbolism where a few characteristic traits suffice to convey the idea of an object, and may be stylized and transformed into conventional signs. In an extreme stage of development an isolated claw and a single wing may symbolize a raven".⁷⁰