Moscow: Languages of Slavic Culture. 2012. 528 p, ill.

The monograph summarizes the results of forty years of research conducted by the author since 1974 on Socotra and other islands of the archipelago located between East Africa and Southern Arabia. Even his first book about Socotra, published in the 1970s, attracted many readers who wanted to find their own remote island, like such literary heroes as Hayy Zu Yaqzan from the medieval story of the Arab Ibn Tufail, Andrenio from the novel of the Spaniard Baltasar Gracian or the famous Robinson Crusoe from the epic of the Englishman Daniel Defoe.

V. V. Naumkin visited Socotra for the second time in 1976, but it took several more years for the long-standing interest of Russian science in scientific research in South Arabia (declared by the Russian Geographical Society in the middle of the XIX century)to be organized. In 1982, at the initiative of the arabist P. A. Gryaznevich, the Soviet-Yemeni Complex Expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences was created, bringing together scientists of various profiles - historians and archaeologists, geomorphologists and botanists, anthropologists, linguists and ethnographers. She trained talented Yemeni specialists and created the Russian School of South Arabian Studies. Research on the islands of the Socotra archipelago was led by V. V. Naumkin, and his group started working in 1983.

Field research on the island is attractive for any scientist, because the islands have clear borders that protect their cultural identity: endemics are characteristic not only of the island's fauna and flora, but also of the traditional way of life of the islanders. The book under review significantly deepens our understanding of the historical and ethnographic areas or cultural space of an ethnic group. Especially because the ethnic group considered in it, despite the powerful influence of the Arabic language, has not lost its native speech. "Many layers of the general Semitic vocabulary in Socotrian have retained their content, if not initial, then changed to a lesser extent than in other living Semitic languages," the author notes (p.239). The preservation of original meanings in isolated areas can also be extended to some components of socionormative culture and material technologies. It seems that this is the same specific quality for island habitats as the gigantism and dwarfism identified by biologists.

The book begins with a description of Socotri nature: its soils (red soil), reliefs (plateaus, hills, fractured granites, karst caves), blown by monsoon winds, its plants (dracaena, acacia, agave, incense burzerovys trees that give incense of different varieties, myrrh tree, wild orange, hibiscus). Of the 825 native plant species, 37% are not found anywhere else (p. 28). But there are almost no endemic mammals here, Socotrian endemics are birds, reptiles, insects (among them harmful spiders, whose bite, as Socotrians believe, kills a camel, giant centipedes and venomous scorpions, special gadflies, which shepherds are terrified of) and a variety of mollusks. Human activity, the author notes, is the main threat to the fragile balance of the island world (pp. 32-33).

Sections devoted to Socotra's past-from ancient times to the end of the colonial era-convince readers that classical narrative sources are sometimes less informative than data from archeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and folklore. If primitive people, as Russian scientists have found out, appeared on the island in the era of Oldovan, do not

later than 1.4 million years ago, the ancestors of the modern Socotrians, speakers of the Proto-Southern Arabian language, arrived here from Southern Arabia only at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC(pp. 490-492). Interestingly, the long-standing migration from the mainland was reflected in the ideas of the Socotri highlanders about the cultural past. V. V. Naumkin heard from tribal elders the legend that their distant ancestors were exiled to this island from an earthly paradise located somewhere in the north (p. 75).

Gigantism in the island's material culture is evidenced by the remains of megalithic structures and burials under large stone sarcophagi, waiting for their researcher. Later, according to V. V. Naumkin and archaeologist A.V. Sedov, the main center of the island could be the Khazhrya settlement, which they surveyed in 1985 (p. 170-178) and studied in detail by Russian archaeologists led by Yu.A. Vinogradov in 2006, 2008-2010 (p. 188-219). In 2010, ceramics typologically similar to the ceramics of the port of Kana on the coast of Arabia were discovered at the Kosh settlement (far west of Socotra); this settlement was probably associated with international trade in the II-V centuries (p. 226). For a time, Socotra was under the rule of Hadhramaut, which existed in Arabia as a separate state until the fourth century AD, but the influence of the South Arabian civilization on Socotra, as well as on Mahra and Dhofar, was nominal. The extensive international relations of Socotra, which traded in aloe, incense, dragon tree gum and giant turtle shells, are evidenced by the epigraphic material identified by Belgian cavers in the Khok karst cave in 2001-2002. There's between the I's. B.C. and VI century A.D. foreign navigators left hundreds of inscriptions in the Indian Brahmi, South Arabian, Ethiopian, Greek, Palmyra and Bactrian languages. The corpus of approximately 250 texts and drawings became one of the main sources of trade in the Indian Ocean basin in the first centuries of the New era. The collective work that comprehensively covers this source appeared six months after the publication of the peer-reviewed book [Foreign Sailors, 2012], but its main conclusions were taken into account by V. V. Naumkin, who also relies on the results of his own visit to the Khok Cave.

Socotra has long been perceived by travelers as an island of spirits and legends (the legendary firebird Phoenix, white turtles, etc.), sorcerers and witches who control the winds and storms. Firmly preserved local beliefs were supplemented by the religious ideas of the colonists, who introduced the Socotrians to the pantheons of their gods, and later to the monotheism of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity (probably Nestorian in nature: this is how they interpret the function of a public building in the 9th century). Khajrya-4 Russian archaeologists [Vinogradov, 2012, pp. 112-115]), as well as Islam.

During the age of Discovery, the island was used by Portuguese navigators on their way to India; in 1886, Great Britain signed a treaty of friendship with the Mahri leader Ali ibn Abdallah Bin Afrir, who bore the title of "Sultan of Socotra and Kishna". Newspaper readers learned about the vicissitudes of navigation near Socotra after the high-profile shipwrecks of the German steamer Oder in 1887, and the British ship Aden ten years later, but despite the unreliability of communications, the British authorities tried to export Socotra aloe and dragon tree gum, as well as organize local beekeeping [Social and economic affairs..., 1993, p. 736]. British records show that in 1943 the British government secretly discussed the possibility of using this "vast and sparsely populated island" for the emigration of European Jews, but the Secretary of State for the Colonies considered that "such a step would have monstrous consequences for relations not only with the Sultan and his people, but also with the native peoples." the rulers and peoples of the entire Aden protectorate" and "more than a century of work to establish good relations with the peoples of Southern Arabia, especially with those who live in the neighborhood of Aden, will go to waste" [Social and economic affairs..., 1993, p. 737-738]. It should be noted that as early as 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, Sultan al-Qasiri of Hadramaut signed an appeal refuting rumors that the British had chosen Hadramaut as a place for Jewish emigration [Rodionov, 2006, p.133-134].

The book highlights how complex the problem of the Islanders ' anthropogenesis is: "We can assume three possible factors in the formation of the anthropological type of modern Socotrians: 1) the presence of an ancient substrate of unknown origin, possibly related to Southern Arabia and manifested to the greatest extent in the mountainous regions of the island; 2) the penetration of new migrants, who settled mainly on the coast, and their mixing with the local population; 3) the influence of isolation and endogamy, which created the prerequisites for the development of features of a distinctive type. Any anthropological research involves the search for ways to

revealing the picture of the interaction of these factors" (p. 81). A comparison of the data collected on Socotra by the Russian expedition with the characteristics of some populations in Asia and Africa confirms these considerations. For a more concrete picture, further efforts to collect paleoanthropological material are needed. However, the material already obtained becomes particularly important for racial classification when compared with new genetic data. According to anthropologist A. G. Kozintsev, bicentrism, i.e. the theory of two centers of racial formation in the west and the east, "did not stand the test of time, but the hypothesis of an ancient equatorial bridge between two tropical regions of the world (Africa and South Pacific) turned out to be more viable, "especially since" leading experts in dermatoglyphics and odontology interpreted South Arabian materials with the help of points of view of the theory of the southern equatorial belt" [Kozintsev, 2013, p. 67].

The characteristics of Socotran socionormative culture and life support culture given in the book are of particular interest to the ethnographer, especially the records of 1974 and 1976 and the results of the 1983-1987 field seasons among the inland pastoralists. "Considering that these pastoral tribes are the bearers of the most traditional forms of social and economic life, as well as the keepers of ancient culture, rituals and customs, oral and song folklore, they were the main object of our research," notes V. V. Naumkin (p.229). In the section " Seasons, migrations and spatial orientation of pastoralists "(p. 238-242), he gives a vivid example of his field ethnographic work related to regular seasonal migrations: "The most comprehensive explanation of informants was as follows:" Mezhire is a migration when people go from one place located in honey to another located in Meda. in shete, and when people move from shete to mede, it's already crazy." It remains to find out what honey and shete are. "V. V. Naumkin refuses the interpretation of Wolf Leslau, who believed that honey is "wind from the south", andshete - "wind from the north", convincingly proving: "The difference between the Mezhire and Merkieh nomads is not directly determined by the opposite of their orientation along the Severyug axis. The first type of migration is from top to bottom, from the mountains to the plains, from the cold to the heat, from the waterless zone to the zone where there is water and food (in a given season), i.e. to winter pastures. The second view is from the bottom up, from the plains to the mountains, from the heat to the cool, from the dry zone to the zone where there is water and food (in this season), i.e. on summer pastures. Seasonal migrations only in most cases (but not all) they coincide with the north-south direction; in addition, you can go to winter pastures both in the north and in the south direction " (pp. 239-240).

The author of the book reveals the differences in the traditional attitude of Socotrians to goats and sheep. Unlike sheep, goats have names and are divided into status groups. The highest place is occupied by mahzaza, or mudra: her ancestor was bitten by the djinn Di-d-bakht, women do not have the right to milk her, boil her and drink her milk; then there is megredo: it is forbidden to milk her to women during the period of " uncleanness "(monthly), and, finally, the usual goat, and goats with a privileged status, according to V. V. Naumkin, becomes today it is less and less (p. 252).

Socotrian cows (also distinguished by their names) are short and look smaller than a donkey, confirming the theory of island dwarfism (they existed on the islands of Pemba and Madagascar), although they are found in the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and in Arabia (Hadramaut, Mahra, Dofar). Note that the Socotri terms for ownership marks and cattle brands are usually of Arabic origin (pp. 297-298) and are similar to those still used in the Arabian Peninsula - in Mahr and partly in Hadhramaut. The Socotrian vocabulary on palm farming includes many Arabic terms used in neighboring Hadramaut, and this is also true for the names of date varieties [Rodionov and Sedov, 1995]. Tobacco production imported from the mainland of Gail Ba Wazir is carried out on the island by Sayyids from the Abu Bekr family (one of the members of this extensive family, Huseyn Bin Shaikh Bu Bekr, was for many years a friend and adviser of the author of these lines in the "ethnographic field" of western Hadramaut) [Rodionov, 2007, p. 2, 119].

The similarity between the traditional occupations of Socotra residents and the South Arabian coast is indicated even by such a specific occupation for Socotra women as making wool blankets, known in Yemen as shamla, using a floor frame, described by V. V. Naumkin (p. 312-315): a similar craft also existed in Hadramaut on the plateaus north of Mukalla (in the Middle East). In 1998, P. I. Pogorelsky and the author of these lines got acquainted with this technology in women of the ba Wazir family from the village of Rahba Bin Janid). The techniques of blacksmithing on the island and its terminology are generally similar to Hadhramaut, although the nomenclature of Socotrian products is different.-

It has already been developed [Rodionov, 2007, p. 34-36, 97-98]. But unlike on the mainland, women are engaged in pottery on Socotra - they sculpt products without the help of a potter's wheel (pp. 318-321).

V. V. Naumkin managed to see in action the now-obsolete Socotrian device ishkhar for extracting (drilling) fire with a "male stick" inserted into a "female" tablet - a very archaic sexual connotation (pp. 306-307), echoing the Socotrian marriage customs of "laying" (tyrekh) and the bride's" maskhas " (maskhas) (pp. 438-439), another proof of how conventional the division into material and spiritual culture is and how permeable the boundaries between them are.

Island gigantism can be seen in the cut of a woman's dress: "its back half, which is almost twice the length of the front half, allows you to wrap this part of the dress around your hips" (p. 322). A vestige of such a cut is the Hadhramaut "dress with a tail", i.e. with an extension at the back along the hem, which makes the back part seem to be equipped with a train. Some names of attributes of a woman's costume (for example, an openwork headscarf nuqba) or its details (a silver-embroidered ribbon, etc.) also coincide with those accepted in Hadhramaut (cf.: [Rodionov and Schoenig, 2011, p. 59-76]).

The 1990s, described in the book as the beginning of a period of " deep Islamization "(p.347), changed the life of the island, reflected not only in material technologies, but also in socionormative culture, primarily in the field of family and marriage relations. Prior to this, Socotri women enjoyed considerable freedom, including entering into premarital and extramarital affairs, initiating divorces, etc. (pp. 347-365). V. V. Naumkin's remark: "The fraternal family formed after the death of the father in a complex family is a very common variant on Socotra" (p.409) confirms the hypothesis about the origin of orthocousal marriage among the Arabs (Rodionov, 1999). In the Socotri family organization of the 1980s, the author traces a cyclical pattern: the growth of the paired family led to the formation of the father's family, which after the death of the patriarch turned into a fraternal family and again divided into simple (paired) families (p.420).

The stages of the traditional marriage ceremony, described in detail by V. V. Naumkin before the "deep Islamization" (pp. 436-442), reveal archaic motifs of bride-stealing (imitated by young people from among the bride's close relatives) and matrilocality of marriage (the first two wedding nights with the symbolic realization of the groom's marriage rights take place in the bride's house, and moving to the husband's house be postponed for up to a month). There were also echoes of marriage by visiting Socotra: "If circumstances do not allow the wife to be brought to her husband's house for some time, he can visit her at her parents' house, stay there for the night, but does not move there." (p. 441). On the mainland, such a ritual archaism persisted until the early 1990s of the last century in al-Mishkas, the eastern district of Hadramaut near Mahra, where the author of these lines conducted ethnographic research. There, on a relatively small but landscape-diverse territory, various economic and cultural types were represented: semi-sedentary pastoralists who combined camel farming and caravan transportation with the breeding of goats, sheep and dairy dwarf cows; sedentary and semi-sedentary farmers of the highlands and valleys who combined terrace farming with remote cattle breeding, as well as fishermen and plow farmers of the coast. similar in many ways to Socotra. Al-Mishkas share many features of customary law with Socotra and Mahra: the high status of women (who had the right to complain to the tribal council about negligent husbands if they did not fulfill their marital duties), late circumcision in adolescents (under the recitation of special qasids) , and even the greeting "nose to nose" [Rodionov, 1993, p. 67-75].

V. V. Naumkin identifies nine genres in folk poetry of the archipelago (p. 462-475), which are generally characterized by lapidary, lack of agreement, and ambiguity (p.485). He admires the local poetic tradition, which "for a long time has been successfully transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, without being supported by the written tradition" (p.472). The most archaic samples of poetry recorded by the researcher are in Socotri, while local poems in Arabic combine the special and general: local roots - with South Arabian ones, which provide for competition and improvisation. Thus, the dispute between two Socotrian poets in Arabic (p. 471-472) is extremely similar to the typical verses of Hadramaut with an appeal to Allah and the opinion of the tribal leader-hakam [Rodionov, 2009, p. 32-43]. I will only note that the "sultan of Ruma" (p. 472) found in Socotrian verses, according to my Hadramaut authors, is the same as the "Sultan of Ruma" (p. 472). according to informants, this is the "sultan of Turkey", not the "sultan of Byzantium".

The genre of the review is not complete without critical comments, in this case purely private against the background of the enormous work done by the researcher. So, a well-known British Arabist

Robert (who preferred to be called "Bob" even by his younger colleagues) Bertrand Sargent (1915-1993) is called Ralph (p.60), and in the bibliography, the title of his book "The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast" has one of two f's (correct: "The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast"). To make it easier to navigate the multitude of facts contained in a peer - reviewed monograph, it would not hurt to have appropriate indexes-subject, nominal, terminological, etc., for which it would be advisable to unify the transcription used in the text.

In general, one cannot but agree with the author's conclusions that " the task of scientists <...> is to help preserve the unique Socotran nature, archaeological sites and original poetry intact, as well as to record for science and for future generations those outgoing features of the traditional culture of the inhabitants of the archipelago that we could have recently come into contact with <...>"(p. 497). The first part of the task requires collective international efforts, while the second part is largely completed by the efforts of V. V. Naumkin and his Russian team. However, there is still a lot of research work ahead.

We expect a lot from the forthcoming work on the Socotra language and folklore by V. V. Naumkin, L. E. Kogan and D. V. Cherkashin, which will undoubtedly provide valuable material for the world map of folklore motifs compiled by Yu. E. Berezkin. New research is needed on Socotran magic (rain-inducing rites, name taboos, amulets) and related folk medicine. Further studies of Abd-el-Khoury, an islet in the island's cultural area, the connecting cultural link between Hadhramaut (part of the islet's population comes from al - Mishkas) and Socotra, its toponymic practices (external and internal double toponyms, the names of wells from Bi'r 'Ajuz, or the Old Woman's Well), etc. are promising, not to mention already about the archaeological site at Abd al-Khoury. Scientists will have to fill in numerous gaps in the history of Socotra (for example, to answer the question of why and how developed terrace farming flourished and died out here). And this is only a small part of the possible program - after all, island areas limited by water are essentially inexhaustible.

list of literature

Vinogradov Yu. A. Opening of the Nestorian (?) Church on the island of Socotra / / New Hermes. Vestnik antichnoi istorii, arkheologii i klassicheskoi filologii [Bulletin of Ancient History, Archeology and Classical Philology]. V. Svyato-Alsksisvskaya Pustyn. SPb., 2012.

Kozintsev A. G. Rasovaya klassifikatsiya v svete novykh geneticheskikh dannykh [Racial classification in the light of new genetic data]. Nauchnye issledovaniya i muzeynye proekty MAE RAS v 2012 godu [Scientific research and museum projects of the MAE RAS in 2012].

Rodionov M. A. The tribes of al-Mishkas: al-khumum and sa'in. Ethnographic notebooks. Issue 1. SP6, 1993.

Rodionov M. A. Once again about the orthocuse marriage of the Arabs / / Algebra of kinship. Kinship. Kinship systems. Systems of kinship terms. Issue 3. St. Petersburg, 1999.

Rodionov M. A. Demons of words on the edge of Arabia. Hadhramaut Society and Poetry. St. Petersburg: Nauka Publ., 2009 (Kunstkamcrafttropolitana).

Foreign Sailors on Socotra: the Inscriptions and Drawings from the Cave Hoq / Ed. by I. Strauch. Bremen: Utc Hempen Vcrlag, 2012. (Vcrglcichende Studicn zu Antikc und Orient; 3).

Rodionov M. The Kathiri Document Denouncing the Emigration to Hadramawt (May 4, 1939) // ТЕМА, Journal of Judeo-Yemenite Studies / Ed. by Y. Tobi. Assosiation for Society and Culture. No. 9. Nctanya 2006.

Rodionov M. The Western Hadramawt: Ethnographic Field Research, 1983-1991 // Orientwissenschaftliches Hefte. Hallc-Wittcnbcrg: OWZ dcr Martin Luther Univcrsitact. Hft 24. 2007.

Rodionov M., Scdov A. [Rsc. on:] Vitaly Naumkin. Island of the Phoenix. An Ethnographic Study of the People of Socotra / Tr. from Russian by V. Epstein. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1993. (Ithaca Press Middle East Cultures Scries. Vol. 16) // ТОПOI. Orient-Occident. 1995. No. 5.

Rodionov M., Schocnig H. The Hadramawt Documents, 1904-1951: Family Life and Social Customs under the Last Sultans. Ergon: Orient Institut Beirut, 2011 (Bcirutcs tcxtc und Studicn 130).

Social and economic affairs, 1941-1944. War Cabinet. Committee on Palestine. Socotra. Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonics, October 1943 // Records of Yemen 1798-1960 / Ed. by D. Ingrams, L. Ingrams. Vol. 9. 1933-1945. Slough: Archive editions, 1993.

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