Ancient North Caucasian

The comparison of West Caucasian (WC) with East Caucasian (EC) languages suggests that early PWC underwent a fundamental reshaping of its phonological, morphological and syntactic structures, as a result of which it became analytical, with elementary inflection and main grammatical roles being expressed by lexical means, word order and probably also by tones. The subsequent development of compounding and incorporation resulted in a prefixing polypersonal polysynthetic agglutinative language type typical for modern WC. The main evolutionary line from a NC dialect close to EC to modern WC languages was thus from agglutinative to the analytical or isolating language-type, due to a near complete loss of inflection, and then to the agglutinative polysynthetic type. Although these changes blurred the genetic relationship between WC and EC, however, it can be proven by applying standard procedures of comparative-historical linguistics.

In 1920's, I. I. Meshchaninov identified close parallels between dragon stones, or vishaps, and alleged
"vishapoids" found in the vast region stretching from the North Caucasus to Mongolia. Recent research tends
not to debate these northern parallels any longer, yet without ever having disproved the idea. As a result this
information has found its way in standard reference works and continues to be repeated over and over again in
an increasing number of encyclopedias. This paper reconsiders the evidence in detail and argues that any resemblance
between the "vishapoids" from the North Caucasus, Tuva and Mongolia and the dragon stones is purely
coincidental. These stelae were never intended to represent fish, but human beings. Typologically speaking,
these "vishapoids" are variants of anthropomorphic megaliths known as "deer stones". Deer stones are neither
chronologically, nor geographically, nor symbolically related to the dragon stones.

Павол Хнила: Оленные камни, а не вишапы: пересмотр проблемы «вишапоидов» Северного Кавказа и Монголии (Резюме).
В 1920-х гг. И. И. Мещанинов определил близкие параллели между каменными вишапами и предполагаемыми «вишапоидами », найденными в пространном регионе, расстелающемся от Северного Кавказа до Монголии. Последние исследования более не рассматривают эти северные параллели, пока без опровержения идеи. Однако эта информация нашла место в стандартных публикациях и продолжает повторяться снова и снова в возрастающем количестве энциклопедий. Данная статья пересматривает свидетельство в деталях и приводит доводы по поводу того, что любая схожесть между «вишапоидами » из Северного Кавказа, Тувы и Монголии и вишапами является совершенно случайной. Эти памятники представляли не рыбу, а человека. Типологически «вишапоиды » являются вариантами антропоморфных мегалитов, известных как «оленные камни ». Оленные камни не связаны с вишапами хронологически, географически и символически.

GRAVE GOODS' SETS IN THE BURIALS OF THE EAST MANYCH CATACOMB CULTURE: CONTENT AND COMPOSITION
    Wealth of artifacts in the graves of the Fore-Caucasus (Manych) Catacomb culture suggests that the sets of funerary offerings are, potentially, an important source for historical and cultural reconstruction. The paper reports on the calculation of correlation factors which reflect frequency of co-occurrence of artifacts as well as
construction and interpretation of graphs showing relationship between objects found in assemblages. The study relied on the database which includes description of materials from 486 individual burials of adults and children. The study took into account only the indicator of presence/absence of a certain type of find in the burial.
  Based on this, a conclusion is made on the absence of a ‘basic’ or ‘canonic’ set of artifacts typical for a considerable number of assemblages. Two main domains of interrelated items are singled out. The first domain is large and includes
the entire set of bronze tools and implements; the second domain is significantly narrower and is not represented by frequent types of finds, it includes only stone tools. The overall configuration is complemented with an item completely devoid of positive relationship, which, nevertheless, is found most frequently—an incense-burner.
  Interpreting data, the author assumes that artifacts commonly used, first of all, for ritual purposes were placed into the graves attributed to the Manych and earlier cultures, whereas the funerary practice itself was fully incorporated into the sacrifice ritual. In this case, it is likely that the ritual included many components. Given that there is no clear relationship among three groups of items (bronze tools, stone tools and incense-burners), the rituals associated with them could be performed both as a part of the overall ritual and separately; this fact manifests itself in differences
in the number of funerary offerings placed in the graves. Ritual complexity was probably dependent on the social status of the deceased.

This article explores the military system of the Narts in Ossetian heroic tales. The author analyzes the offensive and defensive armament of epic heroes, the symbolic function of weapons, army tactics and finds that the closest parallels Nart epic associated with military affairs of Sarmatian in 2nd century BC - 2nd century AD.