The Diversity of the Chechen culture: from ... - unesdoc - Unesco

prominent role of stone in everyday life,
and supernatural quality ascribed to it.
The Chechen language preserves
specific traces of the stone cult: tIo –
“stone”, tIa – “palm of the hand”, tIura –
“warrior”, tIom – “war”. The word tIo is the
basis of a semantic row meaning “stone” +
“palm” = “war”. Thus, the Chechen word for
“war” ascends to stone — man’s first weapon
— clasped in the palm of the hand.
Weapons, jewels and pottery
found in the tombs show that people of
the North Caucasian culture believed in
the afterlife, which they considered mere
continuation of this life — a belief that
Nakhs retained even in the Middle Ages.
Religious cults of the North
Caucasian culture stayed almost unchanged
since the Early Bronze Age — the heaven,
sun, mountain and ancestor cults.
Materials of the so-called Koban
culture (an archaeological culture of the
Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages) give an
idea of North Caucasian religious life in the
2 nd half of the 2 nd millennium through the
end of the 1 st millennium B.C. A sanctuary
and ritual articles (altars, clay human and
animal figurines, amulets, and pintader
seals with magical representations of the
cross, the swastika and the spiral) have
been unearthed on one of the shelter hills
of the Serzhen-Yurt settlement in East
Chechnya 89 .
Most probably, Koban religion
based on the worship of sun and heaven 90 ,
89 Swastika, spiral and cruciform petroglyphs are
the most frequent in the exterior of mediaeval
Chechen buildings.
90 Козенкова В.И. Культурно-исторические процессы
на Северном Кавказе в эпоху поздней бронзы
и в раннем железном веке. М., 1996. С. 40.
as shown by swastikas, spirals 91 , and
clay wheel models found among the
ritual articles of the sanctuary. Man and
animal figurines may testify to a fertility
cult of the Koban tribes. Older cults of
holy mountains, streams and groves
might have existed since the Early Bronze
Age. They survived within the Chechen
environmental culture up to the mid-20 th
century.
The solar cult, later transformed
into the idea of Supreme God, was the
principal religion of the Alanian era.
The Chechen pagan pantheon had
taken final shape in the Early Middle Ages.
Dela the supreme god transformed into
the lord of light and the upper world from
a sun and daylight deity. The name Dela
derives from De-ela (lord of the day). Iela
was the lord of darkness and the nether
world, Stela/Sela the god of thunder and
lightning, Hinnana the water goddess,
Laьttnana the earth goddess, Unnana the
deity of disease, TsIu of fire, Ielta of landtilling
and Tusholi the fertility goddess.
The mediaeval Chechen idea
of the supreme divine element was
absolutely abstract, which made it far
closer to early Christianity and Islam than
to other monotheistic religions. It could
not materialise in whatever concrete
forms and sacred images, the way it was in
the later Christianity, and did not require
any idols. Secondary deities’ role reduced
to the functions of Christian and Muslim
saints. Architecture brought the idea to
complete abstraction in pillar sanctuaries
— small stone pillars that were the final
developmental stage of pagan temples
and sanctuaries.
91 Koban symbols—mainly the swastika and the spiral
— are found in plenty on the stones of mediaeval
Chechen mountain structures.
51