Onfim

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Drawings. No. 199

Onfim (Altnowgorod dialect онѳиме , also Anthemius ) was a boy who lived in Novgorod in what is now Russia in the 13th century .

Drawings and texts by him on a total of 17 pieces of birch bark have been preserved. The drawings show simple representations of animals or people, the texts are alphabet exercises , psalm quotations and his name. Onfim was about 6 or 7 years old at the time. One of the drawings shows a knight on horseback stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with researchers speculating that Onfim portrayed himself as a knight. The scriptures are clearly homework: Onfim practiced by pronouncing the alphabet, repeating syllables, and writing psalm texts that were probably familiar to him. His writing includes sentences such as "Lord, help your servant Onfim" and fragments from Psalms 6: 2 and 27: 3; in fact, most of Onfim's writing consists of quotations from the Book of Psalms.

The drawings stand out from a total of over 1100 texts on birch bark from the Kievan Rus from the 11th to 15th centuries.

  • Various drawings

  • Drawing, no. 200: Reiter, with the name "Onfim" on the right, above the alphabet from A to K

  • Drawing, no. 206: "Now that the sixth hour," a series of verse syllables and pictures.

  • Drawing, No. 210: Spelling Lessons and Drawings

literature

  • Jos Schaeken: Stemmen op berkenbast. Reports uit middeleeuws Russia: Dagelijks leven en communicatie . Leiden University Press, Amsterdam 2012, ISBN 978-90-8728-161-8 ( PDF (19.3 MB), digitized version ).
  • Valentine Yanine: "The Dig at Novgorod". In Thomas Riha. Readings in Russian Civilization, Volume 1: Russia Before Peter the Great, 900-1700 . Chicago 2009, pp. 47-59. ISBN 978-0-226-71843-9 .

Web links

Commons : Drawings by Onfim  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jos Schaeken: berkenbast Stemmen op. Reports uit middeleeuws Russia: Dagelijks leven en communicatie . Leiden University Press, Amsterdam 2012, p. 101.
  2. ↑ Jos Schaeken: berkenbast Stemmen op. Reports uit middeleeuws Russia: Dagelijks leven en communicatie . Leiden University Press, Amsterdam 2012, p. 103.
  3. ↑ Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300 . Cambridge 2010, p. 203.
personal data
SURNAME Onfim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION drawing child in Novgorod
DATE OF BIRTH 13th Century
DATE OF DEATH 13th Century