Pictographic and ideographic writing of the Shulgan-Tash cave – 30 thousand years BC

Doklady Bashkirskogo Universiteta. 2026. Volume 11. No. 1. pp. 13-27.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33184/dokbsu-2026.1.2

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The article presents the results of deciphering the drawings and signs of the Shulgan-Tash cave. It has been established that the practical and communicative information about the gestation period of game animals, contained in the drawings and geometric signs, and the hunting compositions in the Hall of Drawings – a “story in drawings” – are pictographic writing. The drawings of the Shulgan-Tash cave from the Aurignac-Solutrean culture have a plot and a narrative; they record the norms of primitive morality and values. It is proven that the signs on the first floor of the cave record the transition from the principle of “writing with pictures” to the principle of “writing with concepts” – the formation of ideography. Several types of ideograms are distinguished in the cave: concept (birth sign, death sign, triangle within a triangle); signs of numbers, counting (the X sign); calendars (trapezoid – pregnancy calendar, lunar calendars); zodiac constellations (Taurus, Virgo). It has been substantiated that the ideographic transmission of concepts by primitive cave people was accomplished through metonymy and metaphor. It has been proven that the Shulgan-Tash cave is one of the centers of the development of ideographic writing during the Upper Paleolithic in the Southern Urals.