In this regard, the collections of the museums of the Russian North are very valuable, i.e. those places where one can say the eternal remoteness from state centers, as well as a relatively peaceful existence (the Vologda region, for example, in its northeastern part, practically did not know wars), an abundance of forests and the protection of many settlements by swamps and impassable roads – all this contributed to the preservation for an immeasurable a number of 40 centuries of the most ancient forms of life and economy, respect for the faith of fathers and grandfathers, and, as a direct consequence of this, the preservation of ancient symbols encoded in embroidery ornaments, in patterns of fabrics and lace.

Of particular interest are embroideries that «survived» to the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, which originated from the northeastern regions of the Vologda and neighboring areas of the Archangelsk region. Many scientists wrote that these were the lands of the Finno-Ugric tribes, but the place names indicate something completely different – the overwhelming majority of toponyms here are Slavic, and many of them are very archaic. So, in the Tarnogsky district of the Vologda region, out of 137 settlements, both large and small, only six have pronounced Finno-Ugric names. It is in these areas that the traditions of ornamental patterns of ancient origin, as we will trace below, are best preserved. The ornamental compositions, which will be discussed and which were reproduced in Vologda embroidery until the 30s, adorned only sacred things. B. A. Rybakov speaks very accurately about this process: «the deposition of very early layers of human religious thinking in embroidery… is explained by the ritual nature of those objects that were covered with an embroidered pattern… Such are the wedding kokoshniks of brides, shirts, capes for a wedding carriage and A special ritual object, long ago isolated from its household counterpart, was a towel with rich and intricate embroidery corner, on the towel the „pious“ put icons.» (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981) It is these sacred ornaments that are presented in the local history museum of Vologda, and they will in the future be the main comparative material in our attempt to identify ornamental parallels between the most ancient patterns of North Russian embroidery and ornaments created by those peoples who lived later in different historical epochs in the vast territories of the Eurasian steppes and forest-steppe and spoke Indo-European languages, including those that belong to the Indo-speaking and Iranian-speaking branches of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language (or a certain number of dialects of the tribes, which entered the science under the general name of the Aryans).

So, among the peoples of Eurasia, one of the most ancient motifs of geometric-type ornaments was a rhombus or rhombic meander (the meander was explained by many as a conditional image of the top of a wave wrapped in right angles). The meander is found even on things dating back to the Paleolithic, for example, and various bone products found at the Mezina site in the Chernihiv region. Paleontologist V. Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, broken meander stripes and rhombic meanders on objects from the Mezin site arose as a repetition of the natural pattern of mammoth tusks (article «On the origin of the Mezin paleolithic ornament», Soviet Archeology, No. 1, 1965). From this, she concluded that such an ornament for the people of that era was a kind of symbol of the mammoth, the main object of hunting. It could have a magical incantatory meaning, aimed at the success of the hunt, and at the same time reflect the idea of people about wealth.

The meander pattern in its various combinations and modifications continues to exist for many millennia, spreading more and more widely among neighboring Indo-European peoples and diverging beyond their territories during the movement of the Aryans to the southeast.

We meet it as a symbol of good luck and a kind of amulet against misfortune on cult objects and ceramics (that is, in storage facilities of food and drink that are very important for people’s lives) and in later cultures.

It should be noted that already on the bone products of the aforementioned Merzin site, one can trace how the outlines of a swastika, another ornament characteristic of all Indo-Europeans, grow from a strip of a double meander depicted moving from right to left. This element is depicted in its basic form – in the form of a chair with ends bent at a right angle, and being complicated by new elements in the form of additional branches.

The swastika has taken one of the leading places in the ornament. This word is Sanskrit and in other languages it has no other meanings. It consists of two parts: «su» – good, happy and «asti» – is (third person singular from the verb «to be»); according to the rules of grammar, «y» before the vowel «a» is replaced by «b» and the result is «swasti», to which the suffix «k» and the ending «a» are added: swastika. This sign means «bestowing all good things, bringing happiness.»

If you place a dot in its four «sections», it will be a symbol of a sown field and at the same time a plea for a good harvest. By the way, if you put two swastikas one on top of the other with the top rotated by 45 degrees, you get the ancient Slavic sun sign «Kolovrat», that is. a rotating wheel (circle) with eight spokes with clockwise curved ends. The sign of the swastika, since ancient times, the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans began to designate light, the sun as a source of life and prosperity. This sign can be traced from Archangelsk to the lands of India, where it is seen everywhere – it is used to decorate temples, houses, clothes and, of course, many items related to the wedding.

Until now, people are outraged by the ugly use of the swastika by the German fascists, who at all costs tried to liken themselves to the Aryans («Aryans»), attributing to these ancient tribes of pastoralists, and then pastoralists-farmers, the features of some devilish conquerors. At the same time, speculation on a relatively small number of similar words in German and Sanskrit looks bad – there are many more such words in Slavic languages. All the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples developed in the deepest antiquity in the process of historical contacts a certain volume of similar vocabulary, but the ancestors of the Germans and other European peoples belonged to the western group of Indo-Europeans, while the ancestors of the Slavs and Aryans belonged to the eastern, much more mutually close. The so-called Aryan swastika can still be seen in the handicraft works of the Slavs. Especially the northern ones: many works of folk art are decorated with it, including patterned knitted mittens (readers can see this in the magazine «Slovo», No. 10, 1992).

There are other elements of patterns that can be traced consistently in time from the north of our country to the Black Sea, and then further along the routes of the Aryans migrating to new lands. And the fact that they have been carefully preserved in folk art suggests that great importance was attached to them in the worldview of people, especially among the ancestors of the Aryans and Slavs.

A peculiar transformation of the meander motif appears to be characteristic of Tripillya ceramics – a figurative ornament consisting of so-called «jibs».

In general, it is possible to determine the circle of ornamental main motifs with which, focusing on Tripoli, as a certain set of them, we will compare the materials of subsequent cultures. This is a meander and its varieties, meandrous spiral, intricate cross, swastika, «jibs».

In search of analogies closest in time, we naturally turn to the ceramic complexes of those cultures that existed at different time intervals on the territory of Eastern Europe and the Urals with the Ural lands. The traditions of ceramics ornamentation, which include an amazing variety of meander and swastika motifs, are found among the closest neighbors of the «Srubniks» – the population of the Andronovo culture, created by Indo-Iranians and genetically related to the Srubnaya. Synchronous in time, these two cultures existed for a long period in very vast territories of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. We have every reason to talk about the spread among the Slavs, or, more precisely, the Eastern Slavs, of the ornamental schemes described here. As in all Andronovo ornament, in North Russian folk embroidery and abusive weaving, the composition is divided into three horizontal zones, with the upper and lower ones often duplicating one another, and the middle one bears the most important patterns from their point of view in terms of significance. We do not know what the forms of ornaments on things made by people in the era of the most ancient Indo-Iranian (pan-Aryan) unity would have been, but we believe that the described elements of the ornamental patterns were hardly born overnight in the minds of the same Andronovites, but are rooted in genetically related them the culture of their common ancestors.

The aforementioned middle band of the horizontal composition can bear on itself the most diverse of the indicated ornament elements, consistent in time for different cultures, which are absolutely identical to the North Russian, Trypillian and much more Eastern and South-Eastern cultures. Special interesting is the legitimacy of such analogies, traced in the archaeological East Slavic materials. For example, a buckle in the form of intricately cut crosses, found in Novgorod in the 60s, dated to the middle of the 13th century, found a repetition of its pattern in embroidery recently made on a towel by a Vologda peasant woman.

The find of a slate spindle published by G. Polyakova in a Slavic settlement near Ryazan, which dates from the 11th-13th centuries, is interesting in that a drawing in the form of a six-pointed Orthodox cross surrounded by meander spirals and swastika motifs is scratched on the spindle. Similar examples could be continued. It remains for us to state the following: similar ornaments can arise out of mutual connection among different peoples, but it is difficult to believe that peoples separated by thousands of kilometers distances and millennia, unless these peoples are ethnogenetically related, can appear so completely independently of each other complex ornamental compositions repeating even in the smallest detail? And even performing the same functions: amulets and signs of belonging to a family or clan.

It is impossible to deny the inevitability of the emergence of ethnogenetic ties between the ancient ancestors of the Indo-Iranian tribes and the Indo-Iranian and Iranian-speaking branches that separated from their community, and, accordingly, those ethnic groups that formed in close proximity with them over the course of millennia, up to the addition of extensive and close in culture Srubnaya and Andronov communities.

When they were added, the process of their partial disintegration had to take place, expressed in the resettlement of individual tribes or even their groups as to the west, and to the east. The departure of the Aryans, for example, ended, as recognized by science, by the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. Territorially close to them for such a long time, the ancestors of the Slavs partially moved – to the west, forming groups known as the Western Slavs, and the main massif, called the Eastern Slavs, settled on the lands of Eastern Europe.

Moving to the east and south, the Aryan tribes carried away with them traditional forms of culture – the established skills of production, types of ornaments (and the understanding of the symbolism reflected in them), customs and beliefs. On their way to India and Iran, the Aryans entered into contacts with the peoples of the countries through which they passed, settling there, for different periods of time and partially mixing with this population. Therefore, here we are interested in those motifs of patterns close to the Old Slavic ones, which are revealed among the peoples living, for example, in the Caucasus or in Central Asia (although it should be remembered that beyond the Urals and to Afghanistan part lands was included in the area of the Andronov culture earlier).

Unfortunately, scientists began to trace in their works only in the last 25—30 years racial, linguistic, and cultural and other Arya-Slavic parallels, and research significantly expands the boundaries of our knowledge about our own past. Here we refrain from far-reaching conclusions and only note in conclusion that the framework of this analysis is limited by the boundaries of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of our country. Undoubtedly, the involvement of Indian to Iranian materials would significantly expand this framework.

We are deeply convinced that one should not so stubbornly hush up the hypothesis of the Indian historian B. Tilak about the likelihood of the most ancient unification of the ancestors of the Aryans (even in that distant era of their common Indo-Iranian lingualism, recognized as the original form of existence of their community) into tribal and tribal unions precisely in polar regions. Not only the possibility, but the full probability of this fact, has he convincingly proved by the many descriptions of the Arctic nature preserved in the monuments of ancient Indian literature. The most ancient ancestors of the Slavs, judging by the many rapprochements of various sides of the origins of their culture with the ancient Aryan, and then with the culture of the peoples of the Eurasian steppes, carriers of Indo-European languages (like, for example, the Andronovites, who once separated from the Indo-Iranian community), apparently, were so close to the Aryans, which passed on to their descendants and many common elements of the language and common motives of ornaments. Both language and ornaments were means of mutual communication and evidence of genetic proximity, and possibly also signs of membership, entry of the same clans, into the same tribes.