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Author Topic: Mysterious Wooden Shigir Idol - 11,000 Years Old  (Read 1101 times)

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Mysterious Wooden Shigir Idol - 11,000 Years Old
« on: September 01, 2015, 08:51:50 pm »
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/shigir-idol_55e3e761e4b0aec9f353b08d?utm_hp_ref=science
Posted: 08/31/2015 05:21 AM EDT
Ed Mazza
Overnight Editor, The Huffington Post

Mysterious Wooden Shigir Idol With 'Encrypted Message' Is 11,000 Years Old, New Tests Reveal

The statue is "an utter mystery to modern man."




[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkrkTiYJc-Y[/youtube]


A mysterious wooden statue covered in undeciphered markings is 11,000 years old, according to new tests -- or 1,500 years older than previously believed.
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/n0379-revelations-on-shigir-idol-change-our-understanding-of-ancient-civilisations/

That makes the Shigir Idol the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world, the Siberian Times reported.

The idol is more than twice as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza, three times older than the ancient city of Babylon, and five times as old as Al Khazneh, the most famous of the ruins in the ancient city of Petra





  Siberian Times   ?@siberian_times 

Revelations on Shigir Idol 'change our understanding of ancient civilizations'
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/n0379-revelations-on-shigir-idol-change-our-understanding-of-ancient-civilisations/ … 2:32 PM - 27 Aug 2015
Radiocarbon dating conducted in 1997 gave the statue an age of 9,500 years old, but the results were controversial. To confirm the statue's age, seven "minuscule" samples of wood were sent to Germany for analysis by accelerated mass spectrometry, the Siberian Times reported.

The new analysis found the sculpture to be 11,000 years old, and made from a larch that was 157 years old when it was felled by stone tools.

"This confirms that hunters and fishermen from Urals created works of art as developed and as monumental as ancient farmers of the Middle East," the website quoted the museum as saying.

The idol was found in the late 19th century in a bog in the Urals in western Siberia. Conditions in the bog preserved the wood so well that not only is the idol's carved face still very much visible, but a series of lines, squiggles and other marks that run along its nine-foot length can also be seen.

Originally, the idol was even taller -- perhaps more than 17 feet high -- but some pieces have been lost over the years.

A more complete version of the idol can be seen in sketches made by archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev more than a century ago:




Along with the face at the top, several faces are visible at various points along the sculpture.

It's not clear what the faces or the lines and markings signify, but there are a number of theories.

This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force, a unique sculpture; there is nothing else in the world like this," Professor Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Archeology told the Siberian Times last year. "It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time."

He said the markings are "nothing but encrypted information."
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/is-this-the-worlds-oldest-secret-code/

"People were passing on knowledge with the help of the idol," he said, calling it "an utter mystery to modern man."

Itogi News wrote in 2007 that some anthropologists believe straight lines on the idol could represent the land,
http://www.itogi.ru/archive/2007/33/17290.html
the horizon or the boundary between heaven and earth, while a wavy line could mean water, a snake or a lizard, and a zigzag could indicate danger.

The Encyclopedia of Stone Age Art called the idol "one of the greatest sculptures of the late Stone Age"
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/shigir-idol.htm

and said further research may determine "whether the signs represented a set of pictorial instructions, like a map."

The Encyclopedia also mentions another possibility:

"Although all commentators refer to its exceptional height, and its enigmatic geometric symbols, no one seems to have mentioned the possibility that it may be an early prototype of the totem pole, popularized by North American Indians who also originated in Siberia."

The idol is currently on display at the Sverdlovsk Regional History Museum.


......................................
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/shigir-idol.htm

Shigir Idol (c.7,500 BCE)

Contents

• Summary
• Discovery and Reconstruction
• Dating
• Characteristics of Shigir Idol
• Articles on Prehistoric Sculpture

For the earliest art from Siberia and other regions of Russia,
 please see: Oldest Stone Age Art: Top 100 Works.


Summary

The Shigir Idol is the world's oldest known wood carving, dating to the era of Mesolithic art, about 7,500 BCE. A unique item of prehistoric sculpture, the Idol was unearthed in fragments from a peat bog near Kirovgrad in 1894. Reconstructed, it stands roughly 9 feet (2.8 metres) in height and is part of the collection of prehistoric art at the History Museum in Yekaterinburg. Since 2003, it has been displayed in a purpose-built glass sarcophagus filled with inert gas. According to Michael G. Zhilin, senior researcher at the Moscow Institute of Archeology, its survival was due to the anti-bacterial effects of the peat, which prevented it from rotting. It joins an impressive list of Russian mobiliary art dating back to the Stone Age, including such treasures as: the Venus of Kostenky (22,000 BCE) and the neighbouring Venus of Gagarino (20,000 BCE), both from the Voronezh region; the Avdeevo Venuses (20,000 BCE) from Kursk region; the Zaraysk Venuses (20,000 BCE) from southeast of Moscow; the Venus of Eliseevichi (14,000 BCE) from Briansk; the Kapova Cave Paintings (12,500 BCE) from Bashkortostan; and Amur River Pottery (14,300 BCE) from the Russian Far East. For more about the chronology of Paleolithic culture, please see: Prehistoric Art Timeline (from 2.5 million BCE).

Discovery and Reconstruction

The idol was discovered in numerous fragments, in 1890, about 4 metres (13.5 feet) below the surface of a peat bog at Shigir, in the Sverdlovsk region of the Ural Mountains, roughly 100 kilometres from Yekaterinburg. There was no cave art in the vicinity, but the area had been under investigation since 1850 following the discovery of prehistoric artifacts in an open-air gold mine.

Professor Dmitry Lobanov used the main fragments to reconstruct a figure roughly 2.8 metres in height. Then, in 1914, the archeologist Vladimir Tolmachev suggested incorporating other unused fragments into the finished work - increasing its height to 5.3 metres - and drafted a number of scale drawings accordingly. Later, however, some of these pieces were accidentally destroyed, so only Tolmachev's drawings of them remain.

Dating

The Shigir Idol has been radiocarbon dated to 7,500 BCE by the Institute of the History for the Material Culture in St Petersburg, and by the Institute of Geology in Moscow, making it the oldest art of its type in the world. In 2014, German researchers from the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage began a new series of tests using accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS), to pinpoint the exact date of the statue to within a matter of decades.

Characteristics of Shigir Idol

Whatever its precise age, there is no doubt that the anthropomorphic Shigir Idol is one of the greatest sculptures of the late Stone Age. Carved by a stone tool from a piece of larch timber, found to be 159 years old, its body is flat and rectangular with a series of horizontal lines at the approximate level of the thorax, which appear to represent ribs. (In addition it appears to have 7 faces.) The rest of the wood surface is decorated with geometrical motifs such as chevrons, herring-bone and other abstract signs, none of which have been deciphered, although - according to Svetlana Savchenko, curator of the Idol at Yekaterinburg History Museum - these geometrical symbols definitely had some meaning for the sculptor. Clearly, further research is needed to examine the ethnography and symbolism involved, and to investigate whether the signs represented a set of pictorial instructions, like a map.


NOTE: Although all commentators refer to its exceptional height, and its enigmatic geometric symbols, no one seems to have mentioned the possibility that it may be an early prototype of the totem pole, popularized by North American Indians who also originated in Siberia.

The Yekaterinburg History Museum, one of 50 museums of Russian art in the city, houses the Shigirskaya Kladovaya and Shigir Collection, as well as many sculptures, ivory carvings, elk antler carvings, and items of ancient pottery from the Urals region.

Articles on Prehistoric Sculpture at link

...........
http://www.itogi.ru/archive/2007/33/17290.html


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.....................................

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/is-this-the-worlds-oldest-secret-code/

Is this the world's oldest secret code?
By Anna Liesowska22 October 2014Scientists close to precise dating of the Shigir Idol, twice as ancient as the Egyptian Pyramids.


long but great photos and text

.................................
http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/n0379-revelations-on-shigir-idol-change-our-understanding-of-ancient-civilisations/

Revelations on Shigir Idol 'change our understanding of ancient civilisations'
By Anna Liesowska28 August 2015Culture on edge of Siberia was 'as advanced' as in Middle East, then considered to be the apex of development.

again long but interesting



 


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