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Page 3

In the afro-asian rock-carved images of that period, we meet almost everywhere with various game-hunting scenes, which testify to the highest development of that branch of economy. From that point of view, the Gueghamian rock-carved pictures hold a considerable place. Here the hunters are represented bare, in mobile and typical shapes, as well as dressed, wearing different kinds of head coverings, sometimes even high-pointed foot-wears, and also animal or bird - resembling masks. They are armed with big or small, seldom finely-shaped bows, clubs, spears, thongs. Nets and elementary pit-traps are shown in some of the pictures. Especially numerous are the pictures of hunters and dogs chasing (alone or in pairs) bisons, wild bulls, reindeers or their small herds. Often the lonely hunter is figured with only a rope against the wild bull, or amidst a big herd of animals, ready to send the arrow. However, we also happen to meet splendid and dynamic, large compositions, with dozens of animals, a multitude of hunters and dogs shrewdly encircling the game and depicted within consecutively connected scenes of premeditated game-hunting operations, wherein are figured panic-struck, headlong fleecing, deadly frightened, wounded or killed, or on the contrary, ready to attack, furious animals.
In such pictures, all the living creatures are very often represented impressively dynamical, quick-acting, with characteristic movements, causing an aesthetic pleasure to the observer. The herds of reindeers chased by the hunter, moving beneath their own exuberant and splendid corns, often give the impression of a thick forest, in the ramified panorama of which are scarcely noticed the hunter and the dog. In the rock-carved pictures of a later period horse-riding hunters are also met with. All of these pictures are so typical, characteristic and explicit for the hunting-animal raising mode of life, that they seem to be "canvases" reproducing the real facts. However, the geometrical symbols of the sun, of the moon and of the other heavenly bodies, the token-bearing figures of anthropomorphic deities, of fantastic animals and of men and women, definitively disclose the unreal, religious -magic nature of the game-hunting scenes. The main essence of these pictures lies in that the prehistoric hunter tries by means of simulative sorcery, to attain the real, calling for help his remote and close ancestors who were assumed to live in the sky-belt and were remembered in the legends as intrepid game-hunters and skilful animal-raisers. The powerful forces of nature, i. e. the patronizing spirits and the divinities, were also called for help. The game-hunting ceremonials and the ritual dances are connected namely with these conceptions; they are not often, but with exceptional vigor represented in the rock-carved pictures of the Gueghamian mountains and have their precise analogues in the rock inscriptions of Asia and Africa, and in the ethnography of contemporary hunting races that still carry on a prehistoric way of life. The hunting races of the Lannes even nowadays continue to carve similar images for their secret rituals, ceremonials and immolations before going to hunt. They offer presents and sacrifices even to the "prehistoric" engravings and carve on their weapons the figures of those animals, that they want to kill.


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