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The latter are distributed concentrically around the openings of earthenware vessels and on their walls, bencath the meandrical radial sun, next to the swastikas and celestial goats, and represent spirits of the ancestral hunters or gods, as well as feminine, solar, point-filled figures with up-stretched arms and wide-opened three fingers also have their parallels of the shining, starry sky-belt and anthropomorphic stylized figures in the rock-carvings and on the early sepulchral monuments of Portugal, Spain and a number of European countries, a fact that indicates the diffusion of the concepts about the sky into the worship of sepulchres. The pictures of animals, the celestial symbols, the human spread-armed figures (Nakhichevan, Shamiram, etc.) carved on a number of pre-historic sepulchres, or the little feminine idols placed in them, bear evidence that the cult of the ancestors and of the dead was closely connected with celestial concepts, and that the sky and the beyond the grave world were understood as forming a unity, as two equal elements of the universe. In this connection Armenian popular beliefs and worships, which refer to the ancestors and the dead, as well as to the interrelations of the soul and the body, are extremely interesting. The analogous materials, investigated by M. Abeghyan at the end of the XIX century, in spite of their Christian touch, have retained traces of the pre-historic way of thinking, which help us to understand the essence and the meaning of the rock-carved pictures. According to Abeghyan Armenians believed that the human souls were identified with constellations, were thought of as related with the stars. Not only the soul, but also the body and the bodily strength, is related with the stars: "When a hero is in trouble", writes Abeghyan, "his star grows dim, when he fights with someone, then his star fights with that of his foe in the sky". The Armenians believed that the worshipped ancestors and their stars were aids, protecting spirits, holy beings, and for that reason they were swearing by them as by their father's grave and were turning to the stars for help. Even the Middle -age living menestrel turns to the stars, begging for consolation. The Armenian conceptions (studied by the same Abeghyan) that immaculate people are living on the stars in heaven, that the soul is light itself brilliancy, that it has the shape of a shining sphere within the living man, that the souls of ancestors appear in the shape of human specters, etc. etc., are also very interesting from the point of view of the interpretation of prehistoric rock-carved pictures. The similar conceptions of the contemporary primitives appear with more unmingled and immediate forms, though they do not essentially differ from the above mentioned. According to their belief, the ancestors have become constellations, they live on the stars and the suns, they collaborate with and influence the living races and their members through their astral existence.
The Chuckchees living in the northern part of the USSR often use to say about the dead, that they went to heaven and were turned into stars; they show the star-embellished sky and say: that is a people who was very numerous in the past, whereas now scarce. All these conceptions probably have not gone very far from the way of thinking of the neolithic Azilian races, which kept in the caverns cobble-stones decorated with astral or anthropomorphic conventional figures and believed that they are keeping and preserving the strength and the ability of their ancestors. Even to-day, the savages of Tasmania prepare wood-made tchurings resembling the Azilian, decorated, spheric pebbles. They carefully keep the tchurings in the caverns, believing that they bear the souls of the dead. When the Tasmanian is asked about the meaning of the tchurings, he answers that they are their far ancestors. The Arunta races of Central Australia also have holy tchuring caverns enclosing the souls of all the male and female ancestors. They believe that the tchuring is the embodiment of the dead, the soul and the features of which have passed into their present ower and tutor. The above-mentioned materials of the Gueghamian mountains, of Vardenis and Aragats, the data offered by the Armenian philology and general ethnography, seem to confirm the fact that in the most, noticeable areas of pre-historic sanctuaries the carved images of anthropomorphic figures and star decorated belts were drawn for worshipping the souls of the ancestors and of the dead. This is observed in connection with the rock-carved images discovered all over the world, and is common for the pre-historic beliefs and religions in general.
When speaking about the essence and the meaning of the Armenian rock-carved pictures, we should not forget a most important fact, which has often been mentioned above. That is, the presence of symbolized pictograms in different groups of engravings, which are worth being deeply studied.
These pictograms are widely spread among the pre-historic monuments of Armenia and Georgia, upon fragments of rocks, earthen- ware vessels, the walls of the Dmanikian sepulchral vast halls and upon various other objects and artifacts. They are also wide-spread among numerous ancient rock-images of Asia and Europe and the monuments of contemporary Australian art. Their extensive use in the rock-carved pictures, on the walls of sepulchres and on ritual earthenware allows to believe that pictographic writing existed in pre-historic Armenia probably since the V - IV millennia B. C., which might have served for magical purposes and became a basis for the so-called Mehenian writings.
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