165x190 cm – 64, 96x74, 80 inches - Acrylic on canvas crowned by a pediment in polychrome wood. ART GALLERY / This table should be read like a book that actually exists in original format 9 cm X 12 cm / 3, 54 x 4, 72 inches. Of course you will not read it easily, knowing that today, there would be 20 people in the world, able to read and most have more than 75 years! (Some sources say 6O people!) What is more important is to know they are all priests of the Naxi culture and they write in Dongba. The Dongba script is writing the Chinese Naxi minority. Naxi, which are about 245 000, occupy the northern part of Yunnan Province, southwest of China and at the foot of Tibet. They are descendants of a branch of the Qiang minority nomadic repelled by the Chinese to the south where they become sedentary at the time of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 AD. J. -C.). They adopted the local religion, shamanism based on the primitive nature worship, folk beliefs and assimilated. Over the following centuries, the influence they received good monks during their expulsion from Tibet and representatives of Buddhist sects Hats Yellow and Red. They have their own language which belongs to the Yi branch of the Tibeto-Burman Austronesian of the Sino- Tibetan phylum. A particular religion is born of these primitive beliefs mixed with Buddhist influence: Dongba religion. Founded, according to legend, by Dongba "shilo" killer demons is a shamanistic religion and polytheistic, based on the worship of ancestors and nature. Naxi believe that all space is inhabited by gods, big or small, spirits of the dead, spirits, good or evil, and demons that affect life on a daily basis. The intermediary between the supernatural world and men is the Dongba priest or who, through the practice of rituals, soothes or exorcise spirits, gods or demons. During many ceremonies held throughout the year, Dongba dance and recite scriptures with the help of manuscripts. There is, or was, the Dongba in most villages. They gave their son their knowledge, their traditions, their instruments and manuscripts. These manuscripts or "conventional" are virtually the only media writing Dongba. There are several categories of classics from the existing two miles: classics of divination, descriptions of sacred dance, medicine or astrology, but contain many myths that tell the origin of all things. An elongated rectangular shape, they are connected by the left side, and cover with the title is beautifully decorated. The inside pages are read from left to right and top to bottom. They are divided into three or four equal parts lengthwise, themselves fragmented into unequal squares punctuating the narrative. Brown colored paper is of plant origin, and the ink is recovered a mixture of soot on the pans and bile. We write with a thin piece of bamboo cut. What is striking at first glance, the style simple, clean and pictographic writing Dongba characters. It instantly recalls Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, and we imagine invented at the same time. But nobody agrees on the date of its creation. Sometimes found dating back over a thousand years in the Tang-Song, its origin is most often estimated few centuries (sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth?), In agreement with the oldest dated manuscripts still preserved. However, the characters of writing symbolizing flora and fauna can be concluded that it was created in the current region of the Naxi. Prior to the release of Chinese writing, people could write a simple few characters to accounts or write short messages. Dongba but only knew all the secrets of writing. Reading a manuscript requires a thorough knowledge of the story. Indeed, the number of characters, about 1500 to 2000? Cannot record all the words, but only the keywords appear in the story, serving as a reminder: this is a mnemonic writing. There is no rule dictating the particular choice of the characters or their position within a box. Characters "keys" are selected by the author in his own pins. Reading or writing of a story can therefore find slight variations of Dongba to another. The writing Dongba pictographic script is the last still used in the world, but its traditional use is threatened. Indeed, Dongba, only able to decipher and write well, are now less numerous, and the last surviving are mostly elderly. A huge translation work was done by the Institute of Dongba Culture located in Lijiang, Naxi capital. Researchers at the Institute have helped three Dongba translated into Chinese most existing scriptures. This work, done in a hurry, took over ten years and has a real rescue of writing and its texts by direct witnesses of their disappearance. More than 20,000 manuscripts written with Dongba pictographs were identified. They are archived at the Institute of Dongba culture in Lijiang (Yunnan), as well as in academic libraries in Western Europe and even more in the United States. Interesting feature about the Naxi minority, the horses of the Lijiang area (which is an ancient city in Yunnan) were very reputable Judian district was formerly known as "Land of decorated horses." At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in Nanjing was the tusi to provide horses tribute. During the Qing dynasty, the third lunar month, the festival was held dragon king when participating Naxi, Tibetan, Yi and Bai. This festival included horse races, horse shows together. A large fair with racing horses and mules stood also the seventh month. Each year, he was selling more than ten thousand heads. The place of the Mountain Lion (now People's Square) stood still a great horse race where the best riders were Tibetan, Bai, Naxi, and Yi. These horses strong and courageous called "Lijiang horses" were known as excellent mountain horses. Let's come to our table, as you already know by the title, is the story of the origin of the horse on earth: This story is written in a small book of 12 pages of few centimeters. The first page is the cover that you find here, crowning the table in the form of a pediment polychrome wooden stilted report fourth and intersected by winding scrolls. The central cartouche is the translation of the title of Dongba writing table, either: “The origin of the horse”. As I like to mention that most pediment later, I said immediately that the cat upside down and legs in the air, with a distinctive ring on his body is actually part of the cover, although I am unable (for now) to give you the meaning. The second page, which is the first of our written text represents the array as a whole. Of course, you have deduced that it was still ten! But rather see the role and meaning of this mythical history of the Naxi culture! Here it is, in your shortcut to wonder: The origin of the horse which is written in Naxi : ?ua33 k?33 , is a story that is part of the ceremonial Dongba Scripture and, for the redemption of the soul of the deceased, known as the " present the horse burial. " The day of the funeral ceremony, a funeral horse is presented to the deceased by their surviving children to thank their parents to be educated. The funeral horse acts as a means to get to the land of their ancestors in the afterlife. During the ceremony, the mourners buys a horse that would become "the horse burial," and while the priest reads the Dongba history of the origin of the horse on the ground, the horse burial is fully cleansed and purified, then it is presented to the deceased. The deceased then rises for the last time on the horse burial to join the Old Kingdom finally the Ancestors. Thus, happiness and the positive energy of the deceased are passed on to their descendants. The origins of the horse on earth, narrated by the Naxi Dongba paleographer ? ? ? He Limin: “At first, the big bird rock, also called "Vermillion South" and the peacock were the father and mother of the horse. Together they raised nine pairs of white eggs, and many animals came to try to incubate, but none was able to hatch a horse. Ultimately, the eggs were transported by a large jet of water to a lake, on which the wind black and white wind blew together, creating a huge wave. The wave eggs thrown against a cliff, causing them cracking, and the birth of the horse on earth. The horse, wild horse and yak were all brothers of the same father but different mothers. Horse and wild horse competed in a showdown that has lost the wild horse and the horse and yak fell. The horse wild horse told: "Go and entrust your destiny to the man", but the wild horse replied, "The man eats the meat of animals, animal skin door, I do not confide their fate, but I would look more towards Shu, the Naxi God of nature! “ The horse said, "The man I fed wheat in a silver dish, and bring me water in a golden bowl", so that the horse entrusts his fate to man, and became the domesticated horse. A fireball fell from the sky, landed on the palm which the domesticated horse was tied. Palm literally burned earth, and so the horse has escaped. The man went into the mountains in search of the horse, taking with him a piece of salt and grains of red wheat. When the man found the horse, the horse told him he had three nightmares. The man comforted the horse, saying that dreams are not nightmares, but good omens. The man also promised to the gods that he would take care of the horse, and never eat its meat nor would his skin. The man then helped the horse to avenge his brothers, killing a yak and shooting wild horse. He then used the yak meat and heart of the wild horse to offer a sacrifice to the God of Victory, and for this, used the blood of wild horse to save the God of Victory impurities. “ For those who want to know a little more aware that there are several books written about this with an excellent English- Naxi entitled A ENGLISH-1NA- 2KHI Encyclopedic Dictionary of Joseph Francis ROCK published in 1963 by the Instituto Italiano Per It Medio Oriente Estremo Ed. However, on the seventy pictograms on the table written in Dongba, I could not decipher the third without being sure that it corresponds to writing this, depending on its position, orientation, shape or partially completed the presence of a black or white, or a line of many, and so forth. You will then understand why only a few Dongba (translation wise or priests) are only able to read this one and only pictographic writing extant in the XXI century! Some of you may wonder if I will continue painting the remaining ten pages? I confess that I hope that I am already in the process of starting "THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGER" which, as you can imagine, not a page! But this is another story ... not to paraphrase Kipling. A LIMITED EDITION SERIES 100 ORIGINAL PRINTS on Arches paper 300 grams, is offered in 54 x 74 cm, each numbered and signed. Price: € 150- / USD 195- / RUB 6052- = Mailing France and abroad under roll included Payment by check payable to: PHILHELM - 92 Melanie Street - 67000 STRASBOURG - FRANCE For more information, call me at: 0033 (0) 3 88 31 10 10 or: [email protected] - www.philhelm.com