Sarmatian Sea.

A few centuries ago, in the south of Belarus, on the site of present-day Polesye, there was a large sea, the existence of which is evidenced by ancient maps, chronicles and archaeological finds.

The first mention of this Belarusian Sea was made by Herodotus 2500 years ago. He wrote that on the territory of our modern Polissya there is a large lake or sea. Today, historians conditionally call this sea - the Sea of ​​Herodotus, but it is probably more correct to call it the Belarusian Sea - because it was located on the territory of present-day Belarus.

Historians Krashevsky and Kirkor once wrote that peasants in the floodplain of Pripyat find anchors and entire ships - at a very great distance from the river, in the middle of the fields. Where could they come from?

Iosif Ignatievich Krashevsky (1812-1887) wrote in the book “Memoirs of Volyn, Polissya, Lithuania” (naming the territory of present-day Central and Western Belarus as Lithuania, which is absolutely correct, because this is historical Lithuania, and not Belarus):

“The swamps surrounding Pinsk, the many rivers and streams crossing the region, and their spring floods, flooding vast spaces, were probably the cause of the legend that exists now that the Black Sea once extended to Pinsk itself, but some powerful prince of Kyiv unearthed mountains and let down the waters they held back, leaving only swamps in place of the sea. As proof of this, anchors found during the processing of fields are cited, but where these anchors were found, when and by whom, is unknown.

Adam Kirkor in the third volume of "Picturesque Russia" (1882 edition, under the general editorship of P. Semenov-Tyanypansky, Vice-Chairman of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society) wrote:

“Thousands of years separate us from the era when the entire Pripyat valley, or the so-called Pinsk Polesie, was also flooded with water, the sea of ​​Herodotus, the country of waters and fogs, as Darius Gistasl calls it in his campaign against the Scythians.” And further: “The Pripyat valley presents us with a completely different world, this is the Sea of ​​Herodotus. For a naturalist, even for a poet, there is such an abundance of objects for study, for observation, which is almost impossible to find in other places.

A modern researcher of the topic A. Butevich in an article in the newspaper "Zvyazda" (2001, No. 90-91) finds evidence of the existence of the Sea of ​​Herodotus in Polissya "... i shmat at chym yashche, which is glacially off for the getam of the water rich land.”

The existence of a huge lake or sea in the region of the Brest region and to the east is also confirmed by the medieval maps of S. Munster (1540), J. Gastaldi (1562), K. Vopel (1566), G. Mercator (1609). There it is called Sarmatian. The name, apparently, is conditional and comes from the common name of Eastern Europe as Sarmatia. On the maps of the 16th century, the Sarmatian Sea-Lake has the shape of a horseshoe.

Shereshevo and Zhirovichi were located on the banks of this vast reservoir, and the rivers Yaselda, Narev and Lesnaya seemed to flow from it (or fed it?). On the maps of S. Munster and K. Vopel, the lake is called "Sarmatica palus". According to the Belarusian historian Alexander Ilyin, “the name “palus” (swamp) characterizes even then a clear tendency towards swamping and drying up of the lake, caused by geological processes, in particular, the rise of the Baltic Plate, as a result of which the water level in reservoirs and rivers decreased.” On the map of J. Gastaldi, the reservoir is called a lake: "lago" (in Italian - lake). On the Radziwill map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1613), we see a horseshoe-shaped swamp in the place of the lake, in the middle - the town of Bereza.

Ilyin writes: “The famous Wild Swamp (on the watershed of the Yaselda and Narev rivers) and, possibly, the Sporovskoye, White and Black lakes can be considered the remains of the Sarmatian Lake. On Polish military maps of the 30s. 20th century river floodplain Yaseldy is very swampy, and the river itself has several channels. The presence of the Sarmatian Lake there in antiquity is indicated by the almost complete absence of archaeological sites and finds of treasures in this area.

In the article “Disputes of Prakopiya Kesaryiskaga and Sporava”, linguist F. Klimchuk writes that the modern Sporovskoye Lake is named after the ancient name of the Slavs - disputes. This is, of course, a complete fiction, since no Slavs originally lived on the territory of Belarus: only the Western Balts lived here, and only rare islets were spread over the colonies of Slavs Poles and Polabs that appeared later.

Another interesting nuance: the southern borders of Lithuania (XI-XII centuries), outlined by N. Ermolovich, and the southern border of the horonym "Lithuania" (based on the research of N. Spiridonov) pass along the supposed coastline of the lake.

The engraving "Lithuania" in G. Shedel's book "World Chronicle" (XV century) depicts cities and castles on the lake. That is, Lithuania was presented to Western Europeans as a country on the shores of the Sarmatian lake (sea).

The famous Arab geographer and cartographer Al-Idrisi also points to the existence of the Belarusian lake-sea, calling it the name "Termi".

When and where did the sea disappear?

So, according to Herodotus, 2500 years ago the largest lake in Europe (so big that it is called a sea) was the Belarusian Sea. Its water, of course, was fresh, for it appeared during the melting of glaciers. Judging by the trend of the disappearance of the sea-lake, it was once generally huge, by the time of Herodotus it was very large, by the Middle Ages it was much larger than Lake Balaton in Hungary, during the heyday of the GDL it gradually turned into swamps. In our time, a huge part of these swamps has already been dried up, something was sown and reaped there, and now most of these lands are abandoned due to the degeneration of the Belarusian village (in the period from 1960 to 2005, 85% of Belarusian villages and farms disappeared). These lands again became virtually uninhabited.

One of our readers wrote to us, complaining about the state farms, that the reclamation of the swamps of Polesie is an environmental crime, because this destroys the thousand-year-old balance of nature, the unique flora and fauna of the swamps, etc. As you can see, the reader is mistaken: there were no swamps here several centuries ago. And there was the sea.

Why did it disappear?

Alexander Ilyin believes that this was caused by geological processes, “in particular, the rise of the Baltic Plate, as a result of which the water level in reservoirs and rivers dropped.”

This, of course, is absolutely wrong, because the Baltic Plate is rising slowly, and its rise cannot in any way cause such a rapid disappearance of the Belarusian Sea.

In my opinion, everything is much simpler. The Belarusian Sea was formed in the lowlands of Polesye even when the glaciers retreated - for completely natural reasons: water from the vast surrounding territories collected there, and as a result, several thousand years ago there was a huge, but shallow sea. When the glaciers finally left, this sea began to be fed only by the rivers flowing into it, and since the drainage was less than the evaporation of the sea, it gradually began to shallow. This is how it became shallow and shallow, in the shallow parts it became swamps - and then the swamps themselves dried up. There is an obvious tendency for the disappearance of these swamps even without any improvement.

Real lakes exist due to the rivers flowing into them. In our case, this sea-lake was the water of glaciers - that is, a huge puddle in Europe left by the Ice Age.

When did the Belarusian Sea disappear?

As the legend says, “once the Black Sea stretched all the way to Pinsk, but some powerful prince of Kyiv unearthed the mountains and released the waters they held back, leaving only swamps in place of the sea.”

All historians unanimously dismiss the legend - they say, the fiction of the people. But I believe that people do not invent anything just like that: there is always something at the basis of legends. What is in this case?

The "powerful" princes of Kyiv existed only in the period Kievan Rus, and their power on the territory of Belarus was very short-lived, only about 80 years. Polotsk very quickly freed itself from the bondage of Kyiv and regained its independence and statehood. This is with regard to the east of Polissya. And the west of Polissya during the period of Kievan Rus and the Polotsk State did not obey them: there was Yatvyagiya (Yatva) of the Yatvyags (the capital of the Dorogichin principality). There was never at all the power of the princes of Kyiv.

But during the period of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Brest region was part of Volhynia, and, I suppose, the “prince of Kyiv” here may mean the Volyn prince. By the way, on the French map of 1700, Brest is a city in Central Poland, but in our country it is not Brest, but Briescie. It was not called Brest then. Around Pripyat, the sea-lake is not indicated, because it no longer existed, but everywhere there are inscriptions: the territory of the swamps. So our Briescie is marked on the map as part of Volyn: legally, these lands were then part of Volhynia, that is, in today's terms, they were Ukrainian.

Perhaps some local Volyn prince in the Brest region in the middle of the second millennium organized the drainage of flooded lands, tearing out some channels. What remains in the people's memory. In any case, it is difficult to imagine that the princes of the era of Polotsk Vseslav-Charadey were engaged in such tasks. At that time, at the beginning of the millennium, there was neither the strength nor the sense to build canals and drain the land.

Historians Western Europe stubbornly point out that Lithuania was on a lake-sea. Take, for example, a 15th-century engraving. from the "World Chronicle" by G. Shedel. Islands with fortresses, and a large sailboat floats between them. Geographically, this drawing refers specifically to the lands of now Central and Western Belarus, because the text refers specifically to our cities.

Interestingly, some Belarusian archaeologists believe that Pinsk was founded as a port city of a large lake - but a lake that quickly disappeared and freed up large free territories for life. And it was here that several hundred thousand Prussians migrated in the XIII-XIV centuries, who still retained their national identity and their Prussian language in the villages. The Belarusian Sea, retreating, gave away territories for people - extremely comfortable for life, because it was not necessary to uproot the forest, and the soil was very fertile.

I do not think that Western European historians and cartographers used outdated data, reporting the existence of the Belarusian (or Sarmatian, as they called it) Sea in the 16th century. In the 17th century, this sea already catastrophically dries up, becoming more like a swamp of monstrous proportions. Why? We find the answer from historians: the 17th century was extremely hot and dry, constant drought caused famine and fires everywhere in Europe. We see something similar in our weather today.

Belarusian Sea and history of peoples

The existence of the Belarusian Sea, in principle, does not particularly change our basic views on historical processes in Europe, because as we consider today the division between the ethnic groups of Belarusians and Ukrainians of the swamps of Polesie, we can equally consider the sea of ​​Polesie - the essence is the same.

The current Belarusians are the ancestors of the Western Balts, and the Ukrainians are the ancestors of the Sarmatians (although the culture of the Western Balts reached archaeologically as far as Kyiv, but still the vast majority of historical Ukraine is not Baltic, but Sarmatian or Finnish in its east).

In ancient times, the north of the sea was inhabited by the western Balts, and the south by Volynians, ethnically Sarmatians (as current studies of the gene pool of the population of the regions show). The sea was extremely shallow, like the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov: on average, no more than 7-10 meters deep. But this was enough for shipping.

And here there is a very interest Ask: but where did the famous path "from the Varangians to the Greeks" lie?

Some skeptical historians (I will not name their respected names) explain the finds of anchors and ships in the fields of Polesie by saying that there was no Belarusian Sea, but it was just dragging ships overland - between rivers. But then I have a counter question: where were these ships dragged to? To continue sailing through the swamps of Polesye? And in order to swim through these swamps to the Dnieper?

Today it is impossible, but a thousand years ago it was the shortest way.

Traditionally, historians call the main route "from the Varangians to the Greeks" a route that lay much to the east: through Smolensk. Which indeed was founded by the Vikings of Scandinavia as an intermediate point. But, I think, the main route still passed here at that time. And there is a lot of evidence for this - both direct and indirect. For these current swamps of Polesye a thousand years ago were not swamps, but were navigable.

lost sea

Man needs water, because he was born from water and is three-quarters water himself. In this regard, the peoples living inside the continent are deprived. No one even thinks about a simple question: why do all people want to go on vacation to the sea, and almost all resorts are just seaside resorts?

We have a craving for big water in our blood. And there is a feeling of fatigue from life outside the big water. This is our nature.

In this, Hungary is very lucky, which has its own huge Lake Balaton - and most Hungarians find peace there without visiting sea resorts. Today, Belarus does not, of course, have such a huge lake, but there are a lot of small lakes left in the vast majority from the Ice Age. Because of the abundance of these lakes, Belarus is often called blue-eyed.

If climate transformations were “a little bit” late, then today we, like Hungary, would have a huge sea-lake in the south of Belarus. It would be overgrown along its coast with cottages and resort towns where yachts sail and rest in sanatoriums. And Belarus itself would be a country living on the money of vacationers - of which millions would be found from neighboring countries (and Poland, and Ukraine, and Russia).

Instead, fate made the sea turn into huge swamps, where a tourist can be attracted only by showing an ancient Viking anchor, accidentally dug out by a villager while plowing a field. In the swamps, alas, people are not particularly eager to spend holidays.

Instead of the Belarusian Sea, we have today a completely different heritage of Nature: Belarus is considered the main country of swamps in Europe. That is, a swamp country. But nobody knows what to do with them, swamps, and how to use them for the needs of the Motherland.

Interestingly, on different maps of 1500-1600. Lithuania is located much to the southeast than it should be. Approximately in the territory of western Ukraine.
As is known from history, in Lithuania, both the serious lobby of the Karaites and the Tatars were strangely combined. Always wondered how this could happen?
What is the connection between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Karaim-Tatar Crimea?
In addition, as it turned out, the characteristic "Odessa dialect" is a Lithuanian dialect! Which reflects not the late migration of Jews from north to south, but rather the more ancient ways of their resettlement, as part of Lithuania, to the north, to the draining lands, following the receding Sarmatian Sea. It is also interesting that this movement on the maps of "Belaya Rus" is not the first. And the general chain is very reminiscent of the path of migration to Europe of Odin and his people. launch to the Crimea from the north=east, rise to Europe to the northwest.

In addition, with regards to the name of the Baltic Sea. Belt - belt. And what does it mean now? But in those days when it got its name, it was exactly what encircled Europe, and served as a natural border between European Sarmatia and Europe.

Continuation of the material with a selection of maps.

On the eve of the first celebration of the Russian Unity Day on November 4, associated with the end of the Polish intervention and the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, a scientific conference was held in Moscow on Wednesday, organized by the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and dedicated to the stages of the formation of civil society in our country. The main thought of the assembled scientists was that it is wrong now to talk about the formation of modern Russia civil society, since it has long existed and has been functioning in our country, and one of the first and most striking manifestations of civic activity was just the militia under the leadership of Minin and Pozharsky, created at the beginning of the 17th century.

According to scientists, one cannot say that now we are only building a civil society in modern Russia. The question should be put differently - what is it like, how much and how to modernize it, and how it develops. If we state that there is no civil society in our country, then we also indirectly deny the viability of the Russian state and Russian society as such.

This state of affairs has an extremely negative impact not only on the international image of Russia, but also on its citizens, because in this case they do not have the right to respect their freedoms, rights, sovereignty, etc. Scientists also noted that the dilemma, which has been much talked about lately - "how to build a national idea and national self-consciousness in a multinational state" - was solved several centuries ago by the civil society itself and the multinational people of our country. So, just fifty years after the entry of the Kazan Khanate into Russia, its inhabitants took the side of the militia of Minin and Pozharsky.

Scientists noted that at the beginning of the 17th century, almost all sectors of society were on the side of Minin and Pozharsky, and their most active supporters were representatives of the then "middle class" - those who were associated with trade, townspeople, etc. Simultaneously with the Time of Troubles, state processes that were quite progressive for that time took place in Russia; in particular, it was then that the first experience of limiting royal power took place. It was especially noted that before the accession of the Romanov dynasty for a year and a half, the vast territory of the Russian state was led by a collegial body - the Council of All the Earth.

Separately, the fact was noted that after the end of the Time of Troubles, Russia faced a difficult dilemma, which subsequently appeared more than once in Russian history. On the one hand, during the turmoil, the people and Russian civil society made a breakthrough towards self-government, on the other hand, the country needed an early centralization, which, given the vast territory, is most appropriate to carry out under an authoritarian regime. Although at first glance it may seem that after the restoration of the monarchy and the accession of the Romanovs, Russia abolished a number of "democratic" innovations of the Time of Troubles, in reality, a consensus was found between various sectors of society, between the authorities and the population.

In particular, after the Time of Troubles, there were practically no repressions (the exceptions were those who were associated with the Poles), while the rest of the participants in the conflict, who spoke on the side of False Dmitry, the first and second militias, etc., remained within the framework of society and the state. At the end of the Time of Troubles, representatives of these opposing sides worked together in the command system and other organs of the state apparatus. Artisans, merchants, and the urban population also received significant benefits, since emergency taxes were abolished and a preferential tax was introduced, which allowed them to "get back on their feet" at first. This balancing of interests tax policy ensured the rapid growth and recovery of cities. We can say that at that time the Russian authorities applied the old principle, which is not always translated into Russian unambiguously: "Divide and rule" - another translation of this phrase sounds like: "Distinguish interests and rule according to these interests."

As for which path for Russia after each point of bifurcation - more liberal or more authoritarian - would be more correct, this is a long-standing dispute between representatives of historical science, on whose political views their assessment of certain historical events. So, if we open up Nathan Eidelman, we will see that Russian society from its very birth has strived and at one stage or another of its development has implemented "liberal" models, starting from the Novgorod and Pskov veche. The abolition of these institutions, according to the historian, was anti-progressive and detrimental to the development of the country and democracy. On the other hand, the well-known monarchist and ex-revolutionary Lev Tikhomirov is exactly the opposite: just revolutionary upheavals and uprisings did not allow grassroots democracy to develop normally, and thus it could not take on more progressive forms.

Much has been said about the fact that civil society existed both before the Time of Troubles and after it. From some of the speeches, one could conclude that if there were no civil society, the country would not face the need for many state reforms. Moreover, this applies both to the tsarist and Soviet periods, and to the present. Nevertheless, it was noted that the most striking manifestations of civic activity in the history of Russia fell on the time of wars and hardships for the country as a whole, but in more favorable conditions, this civic activity somewhat decreased.

In addition to assessments of the historical period of the beginning of the 17th century and the role of civil society of that time, a hypothesis was put forward that the constitutional development of Russia has a certain cyclicity. Each of the cycles is similar to the previous one both structurally and functionally. And if at the beginning of the 17th century the first "constitutional revolution" took place in Russia, now we are dealing with the third in its final stage. Another "constitutional revolution" took place in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century - from 1905 to 1918.

Linguists tried to understand when people learned to distinguish a new color for themselves.

When we talk about a cloudless sky, we think of it as blue without thinking. Pushkin's old man lived with his old woman "by the very blue sea"; blue and blue are among the colors of the rainbow ... These colors seem to us a familiar part of the world around us, but this was not always the case.

In 1858, the British writer William Gladstone noticed that there was not a single mention of the color blue in Homer's Iliad.

The version that Homer was blind has long been rejected by scholars: colorful and detailed descriptions of weapons, faces, animals, details of clothing, and so on are scattered across the pages of the Iliad.

However, many things are "painted" in colors that are unusual for us. So, Homeric honey is green, and the sea and sheep are purple.

Gladstone took the time to count all the references to color in the great book. It turned out that black occurs in the Iliad about 170 times, and white - 100. By a wide margin "in third place" - red (13 times), yellow and green got about 10 mentions, and purple - 7.

The researcher, having raised other ancient Greek texts, found that none of them contain the word "blue".

At the same time, noting the absence of such known colors as pink or orange, Gladstone suggested that the ability to clearly distinguish colors developed in humans relatively recently.

Not only Homer, but also his contemporaries saw the world in contrasts between light and darkness.This bold idea was developed by his contemporary, the German philologist Lazar Geiger.

He turned to the Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Hindu and Chinese texts, to the Hebrew version of the Bible. Everywhere you can find poetic and juicy descriptions of any phenomena.

“The only thing that is not there is the blue color of the sky,” the researcher summed up.

Only one ancient culture had its own word for blue: we are talking about the Egyptians, who knew how to make a blue dye. In nature, indeed, the blue color is not very common: blue eyes are not common, blue animals and flowers are rare.

For example, the famous "blue whale", known to man since the 17th century, received the word "blue" in its name only two centuries later. And the blue of the sky is a relative concept. Returning to the Iliad: in Homer's text, the sky is "broad", "great", "starry", "iron" or "copper", but never blue or blue.

Deciding to find out exactly when blue first appeared in our usual sense, Geiger discovered that in all the languages ​​he examined, the first colors were black and white, characterizing everything dark or everything light.

At the next stage of human development, red appears all over the world: the color of wine and blood. Then people looked at yellow and green, and the last one in this row is blue.

In the Old Russian language, the word "blue" can be traced at least from the 11th-12th centuries, but then people also saw colors differently. The Soviet literary critic Yu.M. Lotman, studying ancient Russian texts, notes that blue was a synonym for black or purple-red. In particular, the "blue eyes" in one of the texts belong to a drunkard with bloodshot eyes.

Speaking of gray animals and birds, our ancestors used the word "blue", and gray called the eyes, which we would now characterize as blue. And just like Homer and other ancient authors, in old Russian texts the sky is never called blue.

The colors of the rainbow deserve special mention. It is believed that there are seven of them, and this number includes blue, but this interpretation was proposed by Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Aristotle named only three colors: red, green, purple, and some African tribes still distinguish only two colors in the rainbow - dark and light.

And even Newton at first singled out only five primary colors: red, yellow, green, blue and purple, but later he included orange and indigo, by analogy with the number of notes in a musical scale. Previously, apparently, people saw the rainbow as a transition from red to purple, without unnecessary detail.

In the 21st century, the Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher returned to the question of the relationship between language and the color perception of the world in his book Through the Mirror of Language.

Starting from the research of Gladstone and Geiger, he collected a large collection of examples from modern languages ​​​​from a few peoples, finding that in most cases they do not have a separate word for blue.

So, the inhabitants of the island of Nias in Sumatra operate with only four color concepts: black, white, red and yellow. Green, blue and purple are their shades of black. And the representatives of the Ovaherero tribe in Namibia see the difference between blue and green, but consider it too insignificant to invent their own word for “the same color”, and attribute blue to green.

Among modern languages ​​spoken by a relatively large number of people, Serbian is an example: the word applied to blue objects is also used in the sense of "light".

You have to guess by the context of the phrase (the sea will be more blue than light, and the hair will be more blond than blue). In English, however, a separate adjective "blue" did not appear; it's just one of the shades of blue.

A few centuries ago, astronomers noticed how the brightness of some stars in the galaxy suddenly increased by more than a thousand times. A rare phenomenon of a multiple increase in the glow of a space object, scientists have designated as the birth of a supernova. This is in some way cosmic nonsense, because at this moment the star is not born, but ceases to exist.

Flash supernova- this is, in fact, an explosion of a star, accompanied by the release of a colossal amount of energy ~ 10 50 erg. The brightness of the glow of a supernova, which becomes visible anywhere in the universe, increases over several days. At the same time, every second, such an amount of energy is released that the Sun can produce during its entire existence.

Supernova explosion as a consequence of the evolution of space objects

Astronomers explain this phenomenon by evolutionary processes that have been going on with all space objects for millions of years. To imagine the process of the appearance of a supernova, you need to understand the structure of the star (picture below).

A star is a huge object with a colossal mass and, therefore, the same gravity. The star has a small core surrounded by an outer shell of gases that make up the bulk of the star. Gravitational forces press on the shell and core, compressing them with such force that the gaseous shell becomes hot and, expanding, begins to press from the inside, compensating for the force of gravity. The parity of the two forces determines the stability of the star.

Under the influence of huge temperatures in the core, a thermonuclear reaction begins, converting hydrogen into helium. Even more heat is released, the radiation of which increases inside the star, but is still held back by gravity. And then real space alchemy begins: hydrogen reserves are depleted, helium begins to turn into carbon, carbon into oxygen, oxygen into magnesium ... Thus, through a thermonuclear reaction, more and more heavy elements are synthesized.

Until the appearance of iron, all reactions proceed with the release of heat, but as soon as iron begins to degenerate into the elements following it, the reaction turns from exothermic to endothermic, that is, heat ceases to be released and begins to be consumed. The balance of gravitational forces and thermal radiation is disturbed, the core is compressed thousands of times, and all the outer layers of the envelope rush to the center of the star. Crashing into the core at the speed of light, they bounce back, colliding with each other. There is an explosion of the outer layers, and the substance of which the star is composed, scatters at a speed of several thousand kilometers per second.

The process is accompanied by such a bright flash that it can be seen even with the naked eye if a supernova ignited in the nearest galaxy. Then the glow begins to fade, and at the site of the explosion it forms ... And what remains after a supernova explosion? There are several options for the development of events: firstly, the remnant of a supernova can be a core of neutrons, which scientists call a neutron star, secondly, a black hole, and thirdly, a gas nebula.