History of New Zealand. Maori culture

The collection includes myths, fairy tales and legends of the Maori - the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, telling about their morals, customs, beliefs, gods and heroes. The texts are taken from the books of the famous New Zealand folklorist writer A. Reed, a collector and popularizer of Maori folk art.

Kondratov A.M.

Moscow: Main editorial office of oriental literature of the publishing house "Nauka", 1981

"Haere mai!" - Maori greeting. "Haere mai, reader!" - this is how the myths, legends, traditions, and fairy tales collected in this book greet you, which were born in New Zealand many centuries ago and whose creators were the indigenous inhabitants of this huge island - the Maori.

“There is no doubt that the Maoris should be spoken of in poetry,” the English writer Anthony Trollope once said. The whole history of the Maoris reads like a heroic poem. Its setting is the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. The period of action is from the beginning of this millennium to the present day.

Tens of thousands of years ago, people began to populate their planet. Back in the Old Stone Age, the Paleolithic, he settled Australia and New Guinea. Slowly but surely the people of the Pacific Islands developed, moving from west to east, towards the rising sun. And New Zealand may have been the last of the lands discovered and developed by Stone Age people.

At the turn of the last and current millennia, the first people appeared on New Zealand soil. We don't know who they were. Archaeological excavations have discovered stone products and hunting tools intended for giant, elephant-sized, wingless moa birds. The moa birds became extinct - and the discoverers of New Zealand disappeared just as completely. And only in Maori legends do we find references to moa and tangata-fenua, “people of the earth” who lived on the island before the ancestors of today’s Maoris appeared here.

These ancestors lived in the country of Hawaii, legends tell. The country of Hawaii is both the legendary ancestral home of the Polynesians, and a mythical land where the spirits of ancestors live and where the souls of the dead go, and very real Polynesian islands like the Hawaiian archipelago or the island of Savaii (dialect forms of the word "Hawaii"). And the Hawaiians of Maori legends are Central Polynesia, the Tahiti archipelago.

According to Maori legends, the fisherman Kupa, who lived in Hawaii, was disturbed by the leader of a school of squid: every day he stole fish bait. And then Coupe decided to punish the robber. The chase continued for many days, the squid swam further and further south from Hawaii. And then a land appeared, unknown before, with high mountains shrouded in fog, with huge trees and countless flocks of birds. Ao-Tea-Roa - "Long White Cloud" - this is what Kupe called the land he discovered, and this poetic name has remained with New Zealand to this day.

And Kupe drove the squid leader into the Raukawa Strait, which separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand (now it is Cook Strait, but perhaps it would be fairer to call it Kupe Strait?), and there he killed the robber...

Having defeated the monstrous squid, Kupe returned to Hawaii and told about a beautiful, distant country in the south, inhabited... This is where the versions of the legends diverge. According to one of them, Ao-Tea-Roa was inhabited only by insects and birds. According to another, Kupe saw here “people of the earth,” tall, with flat noses and dark skin.

Who were these people? Here the versions of scientists already diverge. Archaeologists call them "moa hunters." A number of ethnographers suggest that the first inhabitants of New Zealand were Melanesians. And other researchers believe that Ao-Tea-Roa was originally settled by Polynesians, only not those whose memory was preserved in legends, but an earlier wave (we find a similar picture in other areas of Polynesia - on the Marquesas Islands, Hawaii, Easter Island).

Be that as it may, in Central Polynesia they learned about the existence of a large land in the south. Several centuries passed after the discovery of Kupe - and in the middle of the 14th century, many boats from Hawaii moved to Ao Tea Roa. There were hundreds of men in the boats, with wives and children, with pets; among other things, they carried with them seeds of cultivated plants. The great migration of the Maori ancestors began. This was not only the most significant event in the history of New Zealand, whose area exceeds the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe rest of the lands of Polynesia combined, it was perhaps the most heroic act in the history of the "Vikings of the South Seas" - the Polynesians.

Maori memory has preserved the names of the boats on which their ancestors arrived from Hawaii. And not only boats, but also stern oars, which also had their own names. The names of leaders - ariki, priests - tohunga and skilled helmsmen, the names of ancestors from whom modern Maori trace their ancestry were passed down from generation to generation. (When Maoris meet each other, it takes them almost a whole day to figure out which boat their great-great-great-great-grandfathers arrived on - more than two dozen generations have changed since then, but the keepers of traditions cherish in memory of the names of all ancestors!)

Waka is the name of a boat in the languages ​​of the peoples of Polynesia. And in the Maori language this word has another meaning: “union of tribes.” For from the crews of the boats that arrived from Hawaii to Ao Tea Roa, the various tribes of "iwi" originate. From each boat there are from one to a dozen tribes. But, of course, before these tribes were formed, more than one century had to pass, and these centuries passed - for almost half a thousand years, after the great migration from Hawaii, the inhabitants of Ao-Tea-Roa found themselves in complete isolation from the rest of the world.

When the first settlers arrived on Ao Tea Roa, says one of the Maori legends, it was the time of flowering of pohutukawa - trees from the myrtle family, covered with bright red flowers. Seeing them, the delighted leader of the settlers took off his headdress of feathers, a symbol of a noble family, and threw it into the sea with the words:

The color of the Hawaiian chiefs is cast aside for the color of the new land that welcomes us!

Indeed, over several centuries the Maori created a culture that differed from the common Polynesian one. The heritage received from the ancestral land of Hawaii became the distinctive heritage of the Maori, for whom New Zealand became their new homeland. For here, on Ao Tea Roa, there was a completely different world from the other islands of Polynesia lying in the tropics, be they coral atolls or volcanic islands.

The problem of land is one of the main ones for the inhabitants of Polynesia. It was the lack of land that forced brave Polynesian sailors to embark on long voyages in search of new islands. There was plenty of land in Ao Tea Roa. Is it not because the Maori ancestors remained isolated when they settled New Zealand because they had no incentive to make dangerous long journeys in the ocean?

New Zealand is a continental island, it is a kind of “microcontinent”, a fragment of an ancient continent. Fire-breathing mountains and dense forests, glaciers and geysers, wingless birds led by giant moa, relatives of dinosaurs, the hatteria lizard, cowrie pines, raising their peaks to a height of more than fifty meters and second only to American redwoods, landscapes reminiscent of the Caucasus with its snow-covered peaks, then Norway with its fiords, then Kamchatka with its volcanoes, then Scotland with its hills, bushes and lakes, then Iceland with its geysers - all this was not in Hawaii, all this was completely different from their native Polynesia. More land, more dangers, more game, more cold, more forests, more natural disasters... In the struggle with nature, the character of the Maori was forged - people who were truthful, courageous, brave and straightforward. No wonder the Maoris are referred to as the “Spartans of Polynesia”!

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