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Page 4

The similar sights occurring everywhere within the elevated regions of Armenia emphasize, by their religious-cultural, magic essence, the significant place hold by game-hunting in the development of primitive husbandry during long millennia. It is not incidental that the excavated skeletal remains of the wild animals depicted on the Gueghamian mountains - the deer, the large roe, the bison, the leopard, the goat, the fox, the partridge, the duck, the goose, the swan - are also encountered in the excavations of the settlements of the Ararat plain, dating the 5 - 1 millennia B. C. This means that the early cultivator and animal-breeder of the Ararat plain had gained possession of the alpine meadows of the Gueghamian mountains, had created wonderful sanctuaries on the mountains and left their traces on all the mountain-paths and since they were definitively established in the fertile valley of the Arax, with their adobe habitations and their irrigated land-parcels, the possibilities of using the meadows and the hunting places, and of perpetuating the sanctuaries of the Gueghamian mountains grew everlasting, becoming root and stalk for the effective development of primitive husbandry and of the prehistoric traditions of social and spiritual life. The abundance of the rock-carved pictures of the Gueghamian mountains, the wideness of their scope, their gradual development, numerous nuances and styles, their particularities should be explained by these crucial circumstances of socio-economic order.
The most distinctive and particular aspect of the hunting scenes of the Gueghamian sanctuaries is that the prehistoric hunter often strives not to kill the victim, to isolate and spare the youngs, to hunt them with a club or a rope, without weapons, by means of traps, etc... Two tendencies of the development of primitive economy are combined in such images: hunting and preserving the game from ruthless destruction, with the potential aim of creating an everlasting and reliable source of food.
This tendency of economic development is distinctly noticed in those rock-carved pictures, in which large groups of animals are juxtaposed to astral symbols proclaiming their celestial origin. In such compositions, the animal families made up by a corresponding number of males, females and youngsters, now and then move towards the water aligned tail-to-tail, or quietly graze, mixed together, free and widespread, sometimes forming heterogeneous groups of cows, bulls, goats and other cattle, looking like communal herds of domesticated animals. All this reveals man's perilous and difficult struggle on the secular pathways of domesticating and raising animals, at a time when the prehistoric hunter and animal-breeder recurred not only to his skill, his knowledge, his ingenuity and his primitive technique, but also to the ancestors, the spirits, the gods, sorcery, etc... A considerable number of the Gueghamian rock carved pictures represents strap-hold animals with their forefect and posterior fect tied together, or fettered goats leading their herds, tall men guarding the animals, little boys and watchdogs, or men pulling the hunted animals by the muzzle, the beard, the tail or the corns with the aid of strips.


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