Veles's book: a genius forgery or a real ancient monument?

03. 04. 2017
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality

The origin of this manuscript is shrouded in mystery. The Book of Veles (or also the Book of Vles or the Book of Veles) is one of the most controversial historical documents in the world. Thirty-five wooden panels about five millimeters thick and approximately 22 x 38 centimeters in size had holes for strap connection.

These tables included prayers and short stories about the oldest Slavic history. But the original of the book saw only one person who told her about her at the time. Can it be considered a true historical document?

Military trophy from an unknown homestead

All testimonies from the history of Veles' book come from an emigrant, author of works of art and researcher of Slavic folklore, Yuri Petrovich Miroljubov.

According to his version, during the Russian Civil War in 1919, the White Guard Colonel Fyodor (Ali) Izenbek found in the destroyed seat of the princes of Donsko-Zacharzhevsky (according to other testimonies from him himself in the seat of the Neljudov-Zadonsky or Kurakin), which was located in Orlovská, or in the Curonian Spit, old wooden boards covered with unknown written characters.

The text was scratched or cut, then painted with brown paint and eventually covered with varnish or oil.

Izenbek picked up the plates and did not take them out of his hands throughout the war. In exile, he settled in Brussels, where the manuscript showed JP Miroljubova.

He understood the value of the find and immediately decided to keep it for history. Izenbek forbade taking plates out of the house, even for a short time. Miroljubov came to him and their owner locked him in the house while he was rewriting the manuscript. The work lasted fifteen years.

  1. August 1941 Izenbek died of a stroke. Belgium was already a Nazi occupied territory. According to Miroljub's memories, the gestapo of the Veles Book was collected and handed over to the Ancestor Legacy (Ahnenerbe).

After 1945, the Soviet command seized part of the archives of this organization, transported it to Moscow and kept it secret. Access to them does not yet exist. It is possible that the plates of Veles's book have remained intact and are still in the same archive.

According to Miroljub's statement, he was able to copy 75% of the text of the tables. Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence that there is someone else besides Miroljub's.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Miroljub's manuscript did not photograph him, even if it only took him fifteen minutes, instead of fifteen years (subsequently he introduced a single random image of one of the tables). And besides, he made it known about the existence of Veles's book only after Izenbek's death, who could no longer confirm or refute the fact.

The life of the Slavs

The preserved text contains six chapters. The first tells about the march of Old Slavic tribes from Sedmirič, the second describes their journey to Syria, where they fall into captivity of King Nebukadnesar of Babylon.

The third is devoted to legends about the origin of Slavic tribes, the fourth and fifth describe wars with Greeks, Romans, Goths and Huns who wanted to occupy the territory of Russia. Finally, the sixth chapter is about the period of Smut (also known as the Conflict Period, when the inhabitants of the ancient Russians were under the yoke of the Khazar Empire. The book ends with the arrival of the Varagians, who subsequently became princes in Russian cities.

Research and first publications

In 1953, Yuri Mirolyubov traveled to the United States and became acquainted with the rewritten texts of the publisher AA Kura (former Russian General Alexander Alexandrovich Kurenkov), who began printing them in the magazine Žar-ptica. The first article was called The Colossal Historical Stunt.

Historians and linguists alike have begun to pay attention to Veles' book. In 1957, the work of S. Lesný (pseudonym of SJ Paramonov, a Russian emigrant living in Australia) saw the light of day. The history of the "Russians" in undistorted form, where several chapters are devoted to the manuscript. It was S. Lesný who called the find Veles's book (according to the first word "Vlesknigo" on plate no. 16) and claimed that they were real texts, written by volches, who were servants of the god of wealth and wisdom Veles.

Of the written testimonies, historians have at their disposal only the records of Miroljubov and the photograph of one of the plates supplied by him. However, if the tables are true, then it is possible to say that the ancient inhabitants of Russia had their own document, even before the arrival of Cyril and Methodius.

But the authenticity of Veles's book is questioned by official science.

Text photography expertise

In 1959, a collaborator of the Institute of Russian Language of the AN USSR, LP Zhukovska, carried out an expert in plate photography. Its results were published in the journal Otázky jazykovědy. The conclusions said that the photo was not a photo of a plate, but a picture on paper! With the help of special radiation, traces of folds were found in the photograph. Can a wooden board be bent?

For some reason, the question arises: Why did Miroljubov need to publish a photo of a paper copy for a slide? And did these plates actually exist?

An argument against the authenticity of Veles's book may be the historical information it contains, which is not confirmed by any other sources. The description of the events is too vague, the names of Roman or Byzantine emperors or commanders are not mentioned. The book obviously lacks accuracy or facts. The manuscript is written in a special alphabet, which represents a special variant of Cyrillic. But it contains the graphical form of individual letters, which are neither Cyrillic nor Hellenic alphabet. Supporters of the authenticity of the text call such an alphabet "cheerful".

  1. P. Zhukovska and later OV Tvorogov, AA Alexeyev and AA Zaliznjak performed a linguistic analysis of the text of the manuscript and independently reached a common conclusion. Above all, it is undoubtedly a Slavic lexicon, but its phonetics, morphology and syntax are chaotic and do not coincide with existing data on Slavic languages ​​from the 9th century.

However, the individual linguistic peculiarities are so contradictory to each other that the language of the manuscript can hardly be any natural language. It is probably the result of the activity of a forger, who did not know much about the structure of Old Slavic dialects and speech. Some peculiarities of phonetics and morphology of the text (eg hardening of hisses) obviously belong to later language processes.

Other oddities can be found. The names of the Indo-Iranian gods are presented in their present form (in the Slavic languages ​​Indra, for example, he looked like Jadr´, Sur´ja like Syľ, etc.). The texts use historical and geographical terms that originated in later times (this can be verified in the books of Greek or Eastern authors).

This means that linguistic expertise confirms the conclusions about counterfeiting. The person who created Veles's book deliberately set himself the goal of creating the effect of a little-understood past. He arbitrarily added or removed endings, omitted and confused vowels, and also made phonetic changes following the pattern of Polish, Czech, and Serbian words, with the majority of cases - with errors.

The author!

Naturally, the question arises: who could be the author of the counterfeit?

Colonel Ali Izenbek himself? But he, as is well known, had no interest in publishing the texts and, what's more, he did not want them to be taken out of the house at all. And was a military officer who had no philological training at all able to invent a new language and write a work at a high level of the national epic?

  1. P. Žukovska combines the forgery with the name of the collector and falsifier of Slavic sites AI Sulakadzeva, living at the beginning of 19. (1771 - 1829), an important collector of manuscripts and historical documents, known for numerous fallacies.

In the catalog of his collection of manuscripts, Sulakadzev points to some Work on the forty-five beech plates of Jagipa, Gana, the direction of the 9th century. It is true that Veles' book consists of a smaller number of plates, but the time is the same in both cases. It is known that after the collector's death, the widow sold a collection of fake manuscripts at low prices.

Most scientists (Fr. V. Tvorogov, AA Alexeyev, etc.) agree that the text of Veles's book is forged by JP Miroljub himself in the 50s, all the more so as he was the only one who seemed to see the remembered plates. And it was he who used the manuscript for both money and his own glory.

And what if it's not a fake?

Proponents of the truth of the Book of Veles (BI Jacenko, JK Begunov, etc.) claim that it was written by several authors over a period of about two to five centuries. and was completed in Kiev in about 880 (before the occupation of the city by Oleg, about which nothing is said in the book).

These scientists think that their meanings are not only comparable to the chronicle known as the Legend of the Early Years, but that it is even higher. Veles's book is about events from the beginning of 1. millennium BC, so that's why Russian history is richer about one thousand five hundred years!

Any manuscript researcher knows that almost all of them came to us as much later copies and reflects the linguistic layers of transcription times. The reputation of ancient years exists in the inventory of works of the 14th century and also contains some linguistic changes of this period. Likewise, the Book of Velesa should not be evaluated only in the linguistic context of the 9th century.

The main thing is that it gives scientists the opportunity to explore the early history of the Russian nation. And if the authenticity of the plaques is proven, then this history will shift to a new, higher level.

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