Space and time: organisation of the sacred space in the burying-memorial practice of the early nomads of Gorny Altai

Ancient man, in contrast to the modern one, conceived space through myths, in which it has its limits and a variety of characteristics. Mythological space is associated with a specific action, event. We can get the oldest representations of space out of the myths about the creation of the world. Gradually, with the development of the concepts of human space there is the emergence of spatial associations, such as ''own - alien'', ''far away - close'', ''day - night'', ''East - West''. The latter in combination with solar symbolism illustrates a surprisingly persistent cross-cultural association of perception of the world in the horizontal projection; the West direction is to the land of the dead, the East symbolizes revival. Mythological and real times are of different intensity, which is illustrated, for example, in the Altai heroic epos, when the hero overcomes considerable distances in an impossibly short time. The death of a member of the group launched the program of behaviour of the individual and the group as a whole. The main task of the ceremony was to show the border between the spaces of the living and the deceased, realising the opposition ''living - dead'' in this case. The funeral ritual, thus, can be described as moving from ''mine'' to ''alien'', the participants of the funeral moved along with the deceased, that is why the rituals were followed by actions restoring the border. In the course of funeral action there forms a chain of reservoirs, the final stage of which is the tomb's space. Sacralization of the whole process from death to the burial was subordinated to the idea of increasing sacredness, the absolute of which was the buried, whose body is decorated with tattoos of complex semantics, clothing specially prepared after the death, the coffin-log or the stone box, the tomb's space, the inventory complex, the border of the grave-mound to the floor, then the border of the necropolis. The funeral complex, having incorporated several space shells, is divided by them into some ''subspaces'', the centres of which coincide in one point. Accordingly, their interaction is carried out through the centre. All the shells of the ''subspaces'' are сoncentrated around it. The cycle of memorial events could be substantially distant in time and space from the burial action. In our opinion, the memorial ceremony was held in several stages, the first funeral feast took place immediately after the burial ceremony. Summing up the consideration of the space and time parameters of the burying-memorial practice of the early nomads of Altai mountains the author notes, that the basis of the space and time code was the person, who explored the space through mythological and linear perception of the world. Gradually, the system of space and time models develops, and the basis of their order is the combination of the vertical and horizontal principles of the universe.

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