The Ancient Treasures of Perm

Written by Andrei Kokov

The historical Perm formed a much wider entity than, for instance, the modern Perm region, situated to the west of the Ural mountains. The legendary Perm (or Biarmia as Scandinavian Vikings called it) covered a considerable part of the eastern Europe, which Russians mentioned in the 12-14th century as Perm the Great. The term "perm" comes from Russian chronicles where it sounded originally like "perem" (with soft 'm'). Continuing traditions of their Viking forefathers, the Novgorod merchants and river pirates were seeking for land rich with fur and silver, as well as for new tax sources. Obviously the name "perm" was adopted from the Veps tribes living in the basin of the gateway river of Suhona. On the way eastwards the Novgorod boats met the locals who talked about some "perämaa" laying far there, what means in western Finnish dialects "back country" or "lands far away". Nowadays the ancient Perm is represented mostly by archeological excavations and legends, but the descendants of the Perm still exist as Komis, Permyaks and Udmurts, together forming a population of about 1.5 million in Russia and representing the eastern branch (or Perm group) of the nations speaking Finnish languages. Also there are many modern Russians around the Kama river and in the Ural region (Kirov, Perm and Ekaterinburg administrative regions) who obviously descend from the same people and call themselves Permians but do not identify themselves as Finnish people any more. Note, that the term Finns doesn't mean here the modern population of Suomi (Finland), but the whole family of North-European nations.

The culture formed there in the forest region had no clear ties to European traditions; people are known to have been living there since the Ice Age without remarkable (except small-scaled trade) contacts to the outer world up to the III-IV centuries AD. However, the motives of mythology and the elements of art (mostly bronze and silver casting) are pointing to some basic relations with the Aryan nations (mostly Scythians), and, what is amazing, some features can be better identified with the native cultures of America. One of the enigmatic questions is about where the old sculptors got such odd figures as dragons (often looking as crocodiles and jaguars) and pterodactyl-like birds, while logically their animal figures were supposed to be ones of the North - such as elks and bears.

The Perm nations, known today as Komi (including Permyaks) and Udmurts, descend from ancient Finns, who once about 3000 years ago influenced some aboriginal local tribes of Kama basin and had ancestored some of their anthropological features. Speading of the Ugrian tribes from Siberia to Europe about 1800 years ago had increased their genetical variety (in general, Ugrian tribes had darker hair and skin, were smaller in body size and racially were of more Asian type than Finns). The strong ethnic mix-up continued during the Tartar and Slavonic colonization of Permian lands in the XIV-XVII centuries. In whole, the genealogy of the Perm people is not well knownl, but antropologically they usually form a kind of a transitional race between northern Europeans and Asian tribes of Siberia. By vocabulary the Perm languages are not so much related to Finnish or Estonian as, for instance, Mordovian languages are but, on the other hand, they have linguistic relations with Ugrian languages (Hungarian in Europe and Khantys in Siberia) and, to some extent, with Lappish languages, too. What comes to the structure of these languages, they go in the same mainstream of agglutinative (additive-made) languages (Uralic, Altaic, Korean and Japanese) which spreads from the Northern Europe (Lapland, Finland) through the European Russia to Kazakhstan and from Siberia to Mongolia and Japan.

Here we show briefly some of the finds belonging to various collections (mostly Perm regional museums, Hermitage and State Historical Museum, Moscow) and different time periods. All the finds are of Animal Style typical to the ancient Perm art, tightly bound with national shamanist traditions. The end of shamanism came with Orthodox Christianity brought by Russians in XIV-XVII cc.

To see the images, click "Next" button.  

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The Animal-styled symbols in the State Emblems of modern Finnish republics of Russian Federation

Komi Republic	Udmurt Republic	Republic of Karelia

The Animal-styled symbols in modern Finnish jewelry design

More about ancient Finnish cultures and the Animal style:

 National Museum of Finland (in Finnish, very large file)
 Internetix-Finnish research project on ancient Finno-Ugric art (in Finnish, has topic-related links)
 The archaeological finds of objects belonged to Muroma people (modern Vladimir region, in Russian)
 The State Symbols of Komi Republic (an article in Russian)

  Back to Andrei Kokov's "Finno-Ugrian" start page