Man of ideas

Julia Latynina - memory of Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanova

On October 7, Academician V.V. died in Los Angeles Ivanov is a linguist, an anthropologist, a semiotic, one of the founders of the Tartu school and one of the last in the world of scientists of a revival type. He was a man who professionally versed in the most distant areas of science: from machine translation to anthropology; From the physiological features of the structure of the brain to the origin of the Indo -Europeans, in a word, from keta to the Hittites.

That is, from the Ket Paleo -Asian languages, which speak the endangered peoples on the Yenisei (Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich went there on expeditions and recorded languages ​​and myths), to the Hittite language, in which in the XIII century BC They spoke in the Hittite kingdom - the superpower of the then ancient East. Once, I remember, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich told me that they have a small community of experts in the Hittite language in Los Angeles, and they sometimes gather and speak Hhett.

He was my supervisor. Someone joked that Latynina was well prepared to engage in modern Russian economies-she studied the mythology of Ivanov.

Somehow in the Kremlin he was awarded as an outstanding scientist Tsatsk, and he, with academic calm, asked Putin about Khodorkovsky.

But I would like to talk about some other things that we discussed as a professor and a student, as well as the rights of our neighbors: it so happened that we lived a wall in the wall, and from a sad gas attack, which this year drove me and my parents on the street at two in the morning, relatives of V.V. were also injured. Ivanova. He himself, for this year, did not come to Russia for health reasons. Otherwise, it would have been poured. As if, who retained the absolute liveliness of the mind and memory, but always poorly moved, and by ninety years - especially - they would evacuate to the outside, and what consequences were, I can’t imagine.

So: from a gas attack to anthropology.

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich, precisely as an anthropologist and culturalist, had several important ideas related to the rejection of the dictatorship.

Firstly, he believed that among the highest monkeys-that is, our closest relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans-the role of alpha male was greatly reduced. It may seem strange because you take any book by Jane Guddlal, and you will find there a convincing description of the alpha male. But here everything is known in comparison. In the lower monkeys, the alpha male is really very pronounced. As for the chimpanzees, they are talking more about the coalition. The alpha male can almost never receive power if he does not enter into complex political unions. It is clear the importance of this circumstances for the organization of power in humanity.

Secondly, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich was very expensive the fact that in the first cities of mankind there are no royal palaces. This thing is how amazing, so archaeologically proven. There are no royal palaces in the ancient layers of Jericho-perhaps the first city in the history of mankind, neither in Chatal-Guyuk, nor in the oldest layers of the Sumerian cities, nor in the Dindo-European cities of India, for example, Mohenggo-Daro.

And this, of course, is not by chance - in the Sumerian cities there were no kings in the usual meaning of the word. But they had priests and temples. The city was organized according to very strict sacred rules. As for political life, it was regulated by the meeting (as a rule, a collection of elders and a collection of warriors) and the elected chapter. The Sumerian “Lugal”, which is usually translated as a “king”, can be translated as “president” with no less reason. Gilgamesh, a very real historical person who ruled in the XXVII century. BC In the city of Uruk, he was a Lugal, and not King Uruk, and the epic about Gilgamesh describes how in the war with the city of Kish he consults with a local bicameral parliament. Another thing is that the meadow, like many presidents, loved to become lifelong and even hereditary.

With this sacred, the principle of organizing the initial cities-states, another archaeological find was associated, which was extremely inspired by Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich-we are talking about Göbekli-tepe.

This extraordinary archaeological discovery was made recently, in 1996, archaeologist Claus Schmidt. A lot is said about him in the noise of Noel Juval Harari, who made noise “A Brief History of Humanity”. Klaus Schmidt digging a hill, located in the southeastern Anatolia, that is, exactly in the place where the Neolithic revolution began: the closest relative of one of the species dominated by a man of wheat still grows in the wild in the mountains in 20 miles from there.

Schmidt excavated a giant sacred complex of hundreds of columns decorated with zoomorphic images; Many columns were crowned with T-shaped crosses from limestone. So what, you ask? Humanity built temples and cooler. But the fact is that the excavated part of the Göbekli Tepe dates from 10-8 millennia BC.; Below are layers, which, presumably, are older for 3-4 millennia. In other words, this giant cult center was erected by hunters and collectors.

Göbekli-Tepe refutes everything that we knew about the Neolithic Revolution. We always believed that humanity first learned to sow wheat, after which the population density increased, the excess product appeared, social stratification began, and the priests began to build temples. That is how - in the line of strict materialism - the inventor of this term, archaeologist and Marxist Gordon Child, imagined a Neolithic revolution.

Göbekli Tepe shows that the case was the opposite. Humanity first built temples, or rather, what the Bible is called Massobot - pillars for worship. In order to build a temple, it was necessary to collect in one place huge, by the standards of a collective economy, group. And so that these groups could eat something, I had to learn to sow grain.

V.V. Ivanova was very inspired by this idea - that humanity began to unite in huge groups on the basis of an idea. This, by the way, is another important difference between a person and chimpanzees.

The fact is that human behavior in small groups is very much different from the behavior of chimpanzees in the pack. The difference between a person and chimpanzees begins when the team becomes large. Chimpanzees usually live in packs of 25-30 individuals (in exceptional cases - up to 100). A flock of larger size immediately breaks up. A person can easily gather in a community of ten or one hundred thousand, a million and more individuals. And each such community is organized by an idea. The idea of ​​God, demonstrations, concert, army, commercial company, nation, state - anything. But - an idea.

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich believed that people truly unite ideas, not leaders. And that it is ideas that give humanity a competitive advantage. On this, in fact, his deep despair was based at the sight of what was happening to our country.