Back Back
Work Staff
More About
Image Gallery

Back 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 Next

Page 2

These picture groups of the mountain sanctuaries give, by their wide scope and concreteness, a sufficiently clear idea not only of the main premises for the lasting and development of the local communities, i. e. the diversity of the opulent fauna, and hence of the natural and climatic conditions, and of the flora, but also of the economic life of that period: hunting, domestication and breeding of animals. These are the circumstances according to which was being shaped the primitive management of production and wherefrom originated the rituals and ceremonials of the hunting-animal raising and of the first land-cultivating races, as well as the concepts referring to the star-crowded sky and the universe, and the ancestral cults of the sun, the heavenly bodies, the natural forces and fertility, together with a great many aspects of prehistoric spiritual life, with which we get acquainted exclusively by means of the rock-carved images. Within the pictures of the Gueghamian mountains are conspicuous, first of all, the enormous quantity and diversity of quite different species of animals. These are: the bison, the wild bull (or cow), the Caucasian noble deer, the gigantic reindeer, the elk, the roe and the djeiran, the horse (much later), the wild ass, the fox, the wolf, the wild boar, the lynx, the leopard, a number of small-sized animals, different species of dogs, various kinds of reptiles, the duck, the goose, the stork, the swan, the partridge, etc... Some of these animals have definitely disappeared now from Armenia and their fossil remains are met only in animal burials having existed tens of thousands years ago, subsequently to their catastrophic annihilation. The perpetuation of palaeolithic, early quaternary animal figures on the rock-carved pictures of the chalcolithic bronze age evidently indicates, that climatic severe changes have not occurred during the late glacial period in Armenia, and that the herds of herbivorous big animals were preserved, serving as a basis for the further development of late-palaeolithic game-hunting, as well as for the transition from game-hunting to animal-breeding in a very early historical period. If we add to this the gathering practice developing on the basis of the existing numerous varieties of wild cereals, and the great possibilities for the transition to early agriculture, we may acknowledge that prehistoric Armenia, owning a great basis of production, became, together with Asia Ninor, the Trans-Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia, western Iran and Turkmenistan, Syria, Assyria and Palestine, one of the important hearths for the "moulding of the Hither Asian historical arena", which was impregnated within its natural borders outstretching from the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates to Mesopotamia, the valleys of the rivers Arax and Kour, from the Somkhetian and the Small Caucasus mountains unto the Taurus and the Anti-Taurus, by a great revolutionary process in the shaping of productive economy.


Back 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 Next

More About | Image Gallery | Work Staff

Copyright © Hayknet, 2000-2006. Project coordinator Dr. G. Vahanyan.
Web graphics design & HTML coding by V. Avagyan