First information about the Slavs. The problem of the origin of the Slavs
The Slavs are perhaps one of the largest ethnic communities in Europe, and there are numerous myths about the nature of their origin.
But what do we really know about the Slavs?
Who the Slavs are, where they came from, and where their ancestral home is, we will try to figure it out.
Origin of the Slavs
There are several theories of the origin of the Slavs, according to which some historians attribute them to a tribe permanently residing in Europe, others to the Scythians and Sarmatians who came from Central Asia, and there are many other theories. Let's consider them sequentially:
The most popular theory is the Aryan origin of the Slavs.
The authors of this hypothesis are the theorists of the “Norman history of the origin of Rus',” which was developed and put forward in the 18th century by a group of German scientists: Bayer, Miller and Schlozer, for the substantiation of which the Radzvilov or Königsberg Chronicle was concocted.
The essence of this theory was as follows: the Slavs are an Indo-European people who migrated to Europe during the Great Migration of Peoples, and were part of some ancient “German-Slavic” community. But as a result of various factors, having broken away from the civilization of the Germans and finding itself on the border with the wild eastern peoples, and becoming cut off from the advanced Roman civilization at that time, it fell so far behind in its development that the paths of their development radically diverged.
Archeology confirms the existence of strong intercultural ties between the Germans and the Slavs, and in general the theory is more than respectable if you remove the Aryan roots of the Slavs from it.
The second popular theory is more European in nature, and it is much older than the Norman one.
According to his theory, the Slavs were no different from other European tribes: Vandals, Burgundians, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gepids, Getae, Alans, Avars, Dacians, Thracians and Illyrians, and were of the same Slavic tribe
The theory was quite popular in Europe, and the idea of the origin of the Slavs from the ancient Romans, and Rurik from the Emperor Octavian Augustus, was very popular with historians of that time.
The European origin of peoples is also confirmed by the theory of the German scientist Harald Harmann, who called Pannonia the homeland of Europeans.
But I still like a simpler theory, which is based on a selective combination of the most plausible facts from other theories of the origin of not so much the Slavic, but the European peoples as a whole.
I don’t think I need to tell you that the Slavs are strikingly similar to both the Germans and the ancient Greeks.
So, the Slavs, like other European peoples, came after the flood from Iran, and they landed in Illaria, the cradle of European culture, and from here, through Pannonia, they went to explore Europe, fighting and assimilating with the local peoples, from whom they came acquired their differences.
Those who remained in Illaria created the first European civilization, which we now know as the Etruscans, while the fate of other peoples depended largely on the place they chose to settle.
It’s hard for us to imagine, but virtually all European peoples and their ancestors were nomads. The Slavs were like that too...
Remember the ancient Slavic symbol that fit so organically into Ukrainian culture: the crane, which the Slavs identified with their most important task, exploration of territories, the task of going, settling and covering more and more new territories.
Just as cranes flew into unknown distances, so the Slavs walked across the continent, burning out forests and organizing settlements.
And as the population of the settlements grew, they collected the strongest and healthiest young men and women and sent them on a long journey, as scouts, to explore new lands.
Age of the Slavs
It is difficult to say when the Slavs emerged as a single people from the pan-European ethnic mass.
Nestor attributes this event to the Babylonian pandemonium.
Mavro Orbini by 1496 BC, about which he writes: “At the indicated time, the Goths and Slavs were of the same tribe. And having subjugated Sarmatia to its power, the Slavic tribe was divided into several tribes and received different names: Wends, Slavs, Ants, Verls, Alans, Massetians... Vandals, Goths, Avars, Roskolans, Polyans, Czechs, Silesians....”
But if we combine the data of archaeology, genetics and linguistics, we can say that the Slavs belonged to the Indo-European community, which most likely emerged from the Dnieper archaeological culture, which was located between the Dnieper and Don rivers, seven thousand years ago during the Stone Age.
And from here the influence of this culture spread to the territory from the Vistula to the Urals, although no one has yet been able to accurately localize it.
Around four thousand years BC, it again split into three conditional groups: the Celts and Romans in the West, the Indo-Iranians in the East, and the Germans, Balts and Slavs in Central and Eastern Europe.
And around the 1st millennium BC, the Slavic language appeared.
Archeology, however, insists that the Slavs are carriers of the “culture of subklosh burials,” which received its name from the custom of covering cremated remains with a large vessel.
This culture existed in the V-II centuries BC between the Vistula and the Dnieper.
The ancestral home of the Slavs
Orbini sees Scandinavia as the original Slavic land, referring to a number of authors: “The descendants of Japheth, the son of Noah, moved north to Europe, penetrating into the country now called Scandinavia. There they multiplied innumerably, as St. Augustine points out in his “City of God,” where he writes that the sons and descendants of Japheth had two hundred homelands and occupied the lands located north of Mount Taurus in Cilicia, along the Northern Ocean, half of Asia, and throughout Europe all the way to the British Ocean."
Nestor calls the lands along the lower reaches of the Dnieper and Pannonia the homeland of the Slavs.
The prominent Czech historian Pavel Safarik believed that the ancestral home of the Slavs should be sought in Europe in the vicinity of the Alps, from where the Slavs left for the Carpathians under the pressure of Celtic expansion.
There was even a version about the ancestral home of the Slavs, located between the lower reaches of the Neman and Western Dvina, and where the Slavic people themselves were formed, in the 2nd century BC, in the Vistula River basin.
The Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis about the ancestral home of the Slavs is by far the most popular.
It is sufficiently confirmed by local toponyms, as well as vocabulary.
Plus, the areas of the Podklosh burial culture already known to us fully correspond to these geographical characteristics!
Origin of the name "Slavs"
The word “Slavs” came into common use already in the 6th century AD, among Byzantine historians. They were spoken of as allies of Byzantium.
The Slavs themselves began to call themselves that in the Middle Ages, judging by the chronicles.
According to another version, the names come from the word “word”, since the “Slavs”, unlike other peoples, knew how to both write and read.
Mavro Orbini writes: “During their residence in Sarmatia, they took the name “Slavs”, which means “glorious”.
There is a version that relates the self-name of the Slavs to the territory of origin, and according to it, the name is based on the name of the river “Slavutich”, the original name of the Dnieper, which contains a root with the meaning “to wash”, “to cleanse”.
An important, but completely unpleasant version for the Slavs states that there is a connection between the self-name “Slavs” and the Middle Greek word for “slave” (σκλάβος).
It was especially popular in the Middle Ages.
The idea that the Slavs, as the most numerous people in Europe at that time, made up the largest number of slaves and were a sought-after commodity in the slave trade, has a place to be.
Let us remember that for many centuries the number of Slavic slaves supplied to Constantinople was unprecedented.
And, realizing that the Slavs were dutiful and hardworking slaves in many ways superior to all other peoples, they were not just a sought-after commodity, but also became the standard idea of a “slave.”
In fact, through their own labor, the Slavs ousted other names for slaves from use, no matter how offensive it may sound, and again, this is only a version.
The most correct version lies in a correct and balanced analysis of the name of our people, by resorting to which one can understand that the Slavs are a community united by one common religion: paganism, who glorified their gods with words that they could not only pronounce, but also write!
Words that had a sacred meaning, and not the bleating and mooing of barbarian peoples.
The Slavs brought glory to their gods, and glorifying them, glorifying their deeds, they united into a single Slavic civilization, a cultural link of pan-European culture.
The attribution of certain groups of languages to this community is controversial. The German scientist G. Krahe came to the conclusion that while the Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek languages had already separated and developed as independent ones, the Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Illyrian, Slavic and Baltic languages existed only as dialects of a single Indo-European language. The ancient Europeans, who lived in central Europe north of the Alps, developed a common terminology in the field of agriculture, social relations and religion. The famous Russian linguist, academician O. N. Trubachev, based on an analysis of the Slavic vocabulary of pottery, blacksmithing and other crafts, came to the conclusion that the speakers of early Slavic dialects (or their ancestors) at the time when the corresponding terminology was being formed were in close contact with the future Germans and Italics, that is, Indo-Europeans of Central Europe. Approximately, the separation of the Germanic languages from the Baltic and Proto-Slavic occurred no later than the 7th century. BC e. (according to the estimates of a number of linguists - much earlier), but in linguistics itself there are practically no precise methods of chronological reference to historical processes.
Early Slavic vocabulary and habitats of the Proto-Slavs
Attempts were made to establish the Slavic ancestral home by analyzing early Slavic vocabulary. According to F.P. Filin, the Slavs as a people developed in a forest belt with an abundance of lakes and swamps, far from the sea, mountains and steppes:
“The abundance in the lexicon of the common Slavic language of names for varieties of lakes, swamps, and forests speaks for itself. The presence in the common Slavic language of various names for animals and birds living in forests and swamps, trees and plants of the temperate forest-steppe zone, fish typical for reservoirs of this zone, and at the same time the absence of common Slavic names for the specific features of the mountains, steppes and sea - all this gives unambiguous materials for a definite conclusion about the ancestral home of the Slavs... The ancestral home of the Slavs, at least in the last centuries of their history as a single historical unit, was located away from the seas, mountains and steppes, in a forest belt of the temperate zone, rich in lakes and swamps...”
The Polish botanist Yu. Rostafinsky tried to localize the ancestral home of the Slavs more accurately in 1908: “ The Slavs transferred the common Indo-European name yew to willow and willow and did not know larch, fir and beech.» Beech- borrowing from the Germanic language. In the modern era, the eastern border of the distribution of beech falls approximately on the Kaliningrad-Odessa line, however, the study of pollen in archaeological finds indicates a wider range of beech in ancient times. In the Bronze Age (corresponding to the middle Holocene in botany), beech grew throughout almost the entire territory of Eastern Europe (except for the north), in the Iron Age (late Holocene), when, according to most historians, the Slavic ethnic group was formed, remains of beech were found in most of Russia, the Black Sea region, Caucasus, Crimea, Carpathians. Thus, the probable place of ethnogenesis of the Slavs may be Belarus and the northern and central parts of Ukraine. In the north-west of Russia (Novgorod lands) beech was found back in the Middle Ages. Beech forests are currently widespread in Western and Northern Europe, the Balkans, the Carpathians, and Poland. In Russia, beech is found in the Kaliningrad region and the northern Caucasus. Fir does not grow in its natural habitat in the territory from the Carpathians and the eastern border of Poland to the Volga, which also makes it possible to localize the homeland of the Slavs somewhere in Ukraine and Belarus, if the assumptions of linguists about the botanical vocabulary of the ancient Slavs are correct.
All Slavic languages (and Baltic) have the word linden to designate the same tree, which suggests that the distribution area of the linden tree overlaps with the homeland of the Slavic tribes, but due to the extensive range of this plant, the localization is blurred over most of Europe.
Baltic and Old Slavic languages
Map of Baltic and Slavic archaeological cultures of the 3rd-4th centuries.
It should be noted that the regions of Belarus and northern Ukraine belong to the zone of widespread Baltic toponymy. A special study by Russian philologists, academicians V.N. Toporov and O.N. Trubachev showed that in the Upper Dnieper region Baltic hydronyms are often formalized with Slavic suffixes. This means that the Slavs appeared there later than the Balts. This contradiction is removed if we accept the point of view of some linguists regarding the separation of the Slavic language from the common Baltic language.
From the point of view of linguists, in terms of grammatical structure and other indicators, the Old Slavic language was closest to the Baltic languages. In particular, many words not found in other Indo-European languages are common, including: roka(hand), golva(head), lipa(linden), gvězda(star), balt(swamp), etc. (close ones are up to 1,600 words). The name itself Baltic are derived from the Indo-European root *balt- (standing waters), which has a correspondence in Russian swamp. The wider spread of the later language (Slavic in relation to Baltic) is considered by linguists to be a natural process. V.N. Toporov believed that the Baltic languages are closest to the original Indo-European language, while all other Indo-European languages moved away from their original state in the process of development. In his opinion, the Proto-Slavic language was a Proto-Baltic southern peripheral dialect, which turned into Proto-Slavic around the 5th century. BC e. and then developed independently into the Old Slavic language.
Archaeological data
The study of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs with the help of archeology encounters the following problem: modern science is unable to trace back to the beginning of our era the change and continuity of archaeological cultures, the bearers of which could confidently be attributed to the Slavs or their ancestors. Some archaeologists accept some archaeological cultures at the turn of our era as Slavic, a priori recognizing the autochthony of the Slavs in a given territory, even if it was inhabited in the corresponding era by other peoples according to synchronous historical evidence.
Slavic archaeological cultures of the V-VI centuries.
Map of Baltic and Slavic archaeological cultures of the 5th-6th centuries.
The appearance of archaeological cultures, recognized by most archaeologists as Slavic, dates back only to the 6th century, corresponding to the following similar cultures, separated geographically:
- Prague-Korczak archaeological culture: the range stretches in a strip from the upper Elbe to the middle Dnieper, touching the Danube in the south and capturing the upper reaches of the Vistula. The area of the early culture of the 5th century is limited to the southern Pripyat basin and the upper reaches of the Dniester, Southern Bug and Prut (Western Ukraine).
Corresponds to the habitats of the Sklavins of Byzantine authors. Characteristic features: 1) dishes - hand-made pots without decorations, sometimes clay pans; 2) dwellings - square half-dugouts with an area of up to 20 m² with stoves or hearths in the corner, or log houses with a stove in the center 3) burials - corpse burning, burial of cremation remains in pits or urns, the transition in the 6th century from ground burial grounds to the mound burial rite; 4) lack of grave goods, only random things are found; brooches and weapons are missing.
- Penkovskaya archaeological culture: range from the middle Dniester to the Seversky Donets (western tributary of the Don), capturing the right bank and left bank of the middle part of the Dnieper (territory of Ukraine).
Corresponds to the probable habitats of the antes of Byzantine authors. It is distinguished by the so-called Ant treasures, in which bronze cast figurines of people and animals are found, colored with enamels in special recesses. The figurines are Alan in style, although the technique of champlevé enamel probably came from the Baltic states (earliest finds) through the provincial Roman art of the European West. According to another version, this technique developed locally within the framework of the previous Kievan culture. The Penkovskaya culture differs from the Prague-Korchak culture, in addition to the characteristic shape of the pots, in the relative wealth of material culture and the noticeable influence of the nomads of the Black Sea region. Archaeologists M.I. Artamonov and I.P. Rusanova recognized the Bulgar farmers as the main carriers of culture, at least at its initial stage.
- Kolochin archaeological culture: habitat in the Desna basin and the upper reaches of the Dnieper (Gomel region of Belarus and Bryansk region of Russia). It adjoins the Prague and Penkovo cultures in the south. Mixing zone of Baltic and Slavic tribes. Despite its proximity to the Penkovo culture, V.V. Sedov classified it as Baltic based on the saturation of the area with Baltic hydronyms, but other archaeologists do not recognize this feature as ethnically defining for the archaeological culture.
In the II-III centuries. Slavic tribes of the Przeworsk culture from the Vistula-Oder region migrate to the forest-steppe areas between the Dniester and Dnieper rivers, inhabited by Sarmatian and Late Scythian tribes belonging to the Iranian language group. At the same time, the Germanic tribes of the Gepids and Goths moved to the southeast, as a result of which a multi-ethnic Chernyakhov culture with a predominance of Slavs emerged from the lower Danube to the Dnieper forest-steppe left bank. In the process of Slavicization of the local Scythian-Sarmatians in the Dnieper region, a new ethnic group was formed, known in Byzantine sources as the Antes.
Within the Slavic anthropological type, subtypes are classified that are associated with the participation of tribes of various origins in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. The most general classification indicates the participation in the formation of the Slavic ethnos of two branches of the Caucasian race: southern (relatively broad-faced mesocranial type, descendants: Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians) and northern (relatively broad-faced dolichocrane type, descendants: Belarusians and Russians). In the north, participation in the ethnogenesis of Finnish tribes was recorded (mainly through the assimilation of Finno-Ugrians during the expansion of the Slavs to the east), which gave some Mongoloid admixture to East Slavic individuals; in the south there was a Scythian substrate, noted in the craniometric data of the Polyan tribe. However, it was not the Polyans, but the Drevlyans who determined the anthropological type of future Ukrainians.
Genetic history
The genetic history of an individual and entire ethnic groups is reflected in the diversity of the male sex Y chromosome, namely its non-recombining part. Y-chromosome groups (outdated designation: HG - from the English haplogroup) carry information about a common ancestor, but as a result of mutations they are modified, due to which the stages of development can be traced by haplogroups, or, in other words, by the accumulation of a particular mutation in a chromosome humanity. A person’s genotype, like his anthropological structure, does not coincide with his ethnic identification, but rather reflects the migration processes of large groups of the population during the Late Paleolithic era, which makes it possible to make probable assumptions about the ethnogenesis of peoples at their earliest stage of formation.
Written evidence
Slavic tribes first appear in Byzantine written sources of the 6th century under the name Sklavini and Antes. Retrospectively, in these sources the Antes are mentioned when describing the events of the 4th century. Presumably, the Slavs (or ancestors of the Slavs) include the Wends, who, without defining their ethnic characteristics, were reported by the authors of the late Roman period (-II centuries). Earlier tribes noted by contemporaries in the supposed area of formation of the Slavic ethnos (middle and upper Dnieper region, southern Belarus) could have contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, but the extent of this contribution remains unknown due to the lack of information on both the ethnicity of the tribes mentioned in the sources, and along the exact boundaries of the habitat of these tribes and the Proto-Slavs themselves.
Archaeologists find a geographical and temporal correspondence to the neurons in the Milograd archaeological culture of the 7th-3rd centuries. BC e., whose range extends to Volyn and the Pripyat River basin (northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus). On the issue of the ethnicity of the Milogradians (Herodotus's Neuros), the opinions of scientists were divided: V.V. Sedov classified them as Balts, B.A. Rybakov saw them as Proto-Slavs. There are also versions about the participation of Scythian farmers in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, based on the assumption that their name is not ethnic (belonging to Iranian-speaking tribes), but generalizing (belonging to barbarians).
While the expeditions of the Roman legions revealed Germany from the Rhine to the Elbe and the barbarian lands from the middle Danube to the Carpathians to the civilized world, Strabo, in describing Eastern Europe north of the Black Sea region, uses legends collected by Herodotus. Strabo, who critically interpreted the available information, directly stated that there was a white spot on the map of Europe east of the Elbe, between the Baltic and the Western Carpathians mountain range. However, he reported important ethnographic information related to the appearance of bastarns in the western regions of Ukraine.
Whoever ethnically the bearers of the Zarubintsy culture were, their influence can be traced in the early monuments of the Kyiv culture (at first classified as late Zarubintsy), early Slavic according to most archaeologists. According to the assumption of archaeologist M. B. Shchukin, it was the Bastarns, assimilating with the local population, who could play a noticeable role in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, allowing the latter to stand out from the so-called Balto-Slavic community:
“Part of [the Bastarns] probably remained in place and, along with representatives of other “post-Zarubinets” groups, could then take part in the complex process of Slavic ethnogenesis, introducing into the formation of the “common Slavic” language certain “centum” elements, which separate the Slavs from their Baltic or Balto-Slavic ancestors."
“Whether the Pevkins, Wends and Fennes should be classified as Germans or Sarmatians, I really don’t know […] The Wends adopted many of their customs, for for the sake of robbery they scour the forests and mountains that exist between the Pevkins [Bastarns] and the Fennes. However, they can rather be classified as Germans, because they build houses for themselves, carry shields and move on foot, and with great speed; all this separates them from the Sarmatians, who spend their entire lives in a cart and on horseback.”
Some historians make hypothetical assumptions that perhaps Ptolemy mentioned among the tribes of Sarmatia and the Slavs under distorted stavan(south of the ships) and sulons(on the right bank of the middle Vistula). The assumption is justified by the consonance of words and intersecting habitats.
Slavs and Huns. 5th century
L. A. Gindin and F. V. Shelov-Kovedyaev consider the Slavic etymology of the word to be the most justified strava, pointing to its meaning in Czech "pagan funeral feast" and Polish "funeral feast, wake", while allowing the possibility of Gothic and Hunnic etymology. German historians are trying to derive the word strava from Gothic sûtrava, meaning a pile of wood and possibly a funeral pyre.
Making boats using the hollowing method is not a method unique to the Slavs. Term monoxyl found in Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Strabo. Strabo points to gouging as a method of making boats in ancient times.
Slavic tribes of the 6th century
Noting the close kinship of the Sklavins and Antes, Byzantine authors did not provide any signs of their ethnic division, except for different habitats:
“Both of these barbarian tribes have the same life and laws [...] They both have the same language, which is quite barbaric. And in appearance they do not differ from each other […] And once upon a time even the name of the Sklavens and Ants was the same. In ancient times, both these tribes were called spores [Greek. scattered], I think because they lived, occupying the country “sporadic,” “scattered,” in separate villages.”
“Starting from the birthplace of the Vistula [Vistula] river, a populous Veneti tribe settled across vast spaces. Although their names now change according to different clans and localities, they are still predominantly called Sclaveni and Antes.”
The Strategikon, whose authorship is attributed to Emperor Mauritius (582-602), contains information about the habitats of the Slavs, consistent with the ideas of archaeologists on early Slavic archaeological cultures:
“They settle in forests or near rivers, swamps and lakes - generally in places that are difficult to access […] Their rivers flow into the Danube […] The possessions of the Slavs and Antes are located along the rivers and touch each other, so that there is no sharp border between them. Due to the fact that they are covered with forests, or swamps, or places overgrown with reeds, it often happens that those who undertake expeditions against them are immediately forced to stop at the border of their possessions, because the entire space in front of them is impassable and covered with dense forests.”
The war between the Goths and the Antes took place somewhere in the Northern Black Sea region at the end of the 4th century, if we relate to the death of Germanarich in 376. The question of the Ants in the Black Sea region is complicated by the point of view of some historians, who saw in these Ants the Caucasian Alans or the ancestors of the Circassians. However, Procopius expands the habitat of the antes to places north of the Sea of Azov, although without an exact geographical reference:
“The peoples who live here [Northern Azov Sea] in ancient times were called Cimmerians, but now they are called Utigurs. Further, to the north of them, countless tribes of Ants occupy the lands.”
Procopius reported the first known Ant raid on Byzantine Thrace in 527 (the first year of the reign of Emperor Justinian I).
In the ancient German epic “Widside” (the content of which dates back to the 5th century), the list of tribes of northern Europe mentions the Winedum, but there are no other names of Slavic peoples. The Germans knew the Slavs under the ethnonym Venda, although it cannot be ruled out that the name of one of the Baltic tribes bordering the Germans was transferred by them to the Slavic ethnic group during the era of the Great Migration (as happened in Byzantium with the Rus and the ethnonym Scythians).
Written sources about the origin of the Slavs
The civilized world learned about the Slavs, who had previously been cut off by the warlike nomads of Eastern Europe when they reached the borders of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines, who consistently fought off waves of barbarian invasions, may not have immediately identified the Slavs as a separate ethnic group and did not report legends about its occurrence. The historian of the 1st half of the 7th century Theophylact Simocatta called the Slavs getae (“ that's what these barbarians were called in the old days"), apparently mixing the Thracian tribe of the Getae with the Slavs who occupied their lands on the lower Danube.
The Old Russian chronicle of the early 12th century “The Tale of Bygone Years” finds the homeland of the Slavs on the Danube, where they were first recorded by Byzantine written sources:
“A long time later [after the biblical Pandemonium of Babylon], the Slavs settled along the Danube, where now the land is Hungarian and Bulgarian. From those Slavs the Slavs spread throughout the land and were called by their names from the places where they settled. So some, having come, sat down on the river in the name of Morava and were called Moravians, while others called themselves Czechs. And here are the same Slavs: white Croats, and Serbs, and Horutans. When the Volochs attacked the Danube Slavs, and settled among them, and oppressed them, these Slavs came and sat on the Vistula and were called Poles, and from those Poles came the Poles, other Poles - Luticians, others - Mazovshans, others - Pomeranians. Likewise, these Slavs came and sat along the Dnieper and were called Polyans, and others - Drevlyans, because they sat in the forests, and others sat between Pripyat and Dvina and were called Dregovichs, others sat along the Dvina and were called Polochans, after the river flowing into the Dvina , called Polota, from which the Polotsk people took their name. The same Slavs who settled near Lake Ilmen were called by their own name - Slavs."
The Polish chronicle “Greater Poland Chronicle” follows this pattern independently, reporting on Pannonia (the Roman province adjacent to the middle Danube) as the homeland of the Slavs. Before the development of archeology and linguistics, historians agreed with the Danube lands as the place of origin of the Slavic ethnic group, but now they recognize the legendary nature of this version.
Review and synthesis of data
In the past (Soviet era), two main versions of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs were widespread: 1) the so-called Polish, which places the ancestral home of the Slavs in the area between the Vistula and Oder rivers; 2) autochthonous, influenced by the theoretical views of the Soviet academician Marr. Both reconstructions a priori recognized the Slavic nature of the early archaeological cultures in the territories inhabited by the Slavs in the early Middle Ages, and some of the original antiquity of the Slavic language, which independently developed from Proto-Indo-European. The accumulation of data in archeology and the departure from patriotic motivation in research led to the development of new versions based on the identification of a relatively localized core of the formation of the Slavic ethnic group and its spread through migrations to neighboring lands. Academic science has not developed a single point of view on exactly where and when the ethnogenesis of the Slavs took place.
Genetic research also confirms the ancestral home of the Slavs in Ukraine.
How the expansion of the early Slavs from the region of ethnogenesis occurred, the directions of migration and settlement in central Europe can be traced through the chronological development of archaeological cultures. Typically, the beginning of expansion is associated with the advance of the Huns to the west and the resettlement of Germanic peoples towards the south, associated, among other things, with climate change in the 5th century and the conditions of agricultural activity. By the beginning of the 6th century, the Slavs reached the Danube, where their further history is described in written sources of the 6th century.
The contribution of other tribes to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs
The Scythian-Sarmatians had some influence on the formation of the Slavs due to their long geographical proximity, but their influence, according to archaeology, anthropology, genetics and linguistics, was mainly limited to vocabulary borrowings and the use of horses in the household. According to genetic data, common distant ancestors of some nomadic peoples, collectively called Sarmatians, and the Slavs within the Indo-European community, but in historical times these peoples evolved independently of each other.
The contribution of the Germans to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, according to anthropology, archeology and genetics, is insignificant. At the turn of the era, the region of ethnogenesis of the Slavs (Sarmatia) was separated from the places of residence of the Germans by a certain zone of “mutual fear”, according to Tacitus. The existence of an uninhabited area between the Germans and the Proto-Slavs of Eastern Europe is confirmed by the absence of noticeable archaeological sites from the Western Bug to the Neman in the first centuries AD. e. The presence of similar words in both languages is explained by a common origin from the Indo-European community of the Bronze Age and close contacts in the 4th century after the start of the migration of the Goths from the Vistula to the south and east.
Notes
- From the report of V.V. Sedov “Ethnogenesis of the early Slavs” (2002)
- Trubachev O. N. Craft terminology in Slavic languages. M., 1966.
- F. P. Filin (1962). From the report of M. B. Shchukin “The Birth of the Slavs”
The issue of the origin of the Slavs is quite controversial and today there are a large number of theories that approach the study of this issue from different points of view. Most historians agree that the search for the ancestors of the Slavs should be sought in the second millennium BC. It was then that the birth of the Slavic tribe took place, who lived in a small territory in the Vistula region. Subsequently, the Slavs developed more and more new lands, moving further west, and eventually reached the Oder River. In textbooks you can often find the assumption that the migration of our ancestors would have continued further to the west, but the ancestors of modern Germans did not allow them to cross the Oder. At the same time, the Slavs migrated to the east. An absolutely proven fact is that they reached the banks of the Dnieper.
According to V. Sedov, the first historical and geographical information about the ancient Slavs is contained in the works of Greco-Roman authors who wrote at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. e. Many historical sources record the name of the ancient Slavs - Veneds (Venetas). We read about this, in particular, from the historian of the 6th century. - Jordan. However, the Slavs themselves did not call themselves that. This ethnonym is used in relation to them only by foreign authors.
According to the Tale of Bygone Years, the homeland of the ancient Slavs, and indeed of all humanity in general, was Western Asia. Following the chronicle, the history of the Slavs begins with the Babylonian pandemonium, when they emerged from 72 peoples scattered in different directions.
Life of the Eastern Slavs. Hood. S. V. Ivanov, 1909. The location of the painting is unknown
Speaking about the ancient Slavs, they distinguish, with a certain degree of convention, the historical boundaries of the Proto-Slavs (the most distant ancestors) and the Proto-Slavs (the closest ancestors). But it’s not just a matter of blurring time boundaries. Both linguistic and ethnic boundaries are blurred. In this regard, a fundamental question arises: who should be considered the ancestors of the Slavs? The fact is that the Slavs, like, for the most part, other peoples, in the process of ethno-territorial localization, were formed from many tribes and peoples.
Sometimes the idea is expressed that the ancestors of the Slavs initially lived in some small territory, from which they settled across the vast expanses of the planet. Disagreement with this position was expressed by Academician B. A. Rybakov and supported by other authors. At the same time, another, more productive position was formulated, which is expressed in the following: no “small” ancestral home of the Slavs existed, and could not have existed according to the laws and characteristics of the long ethnogenesis of large “arrays”. Already at the dawn of their history, the ancestors of the Slavs were numerous related Indo-European tribes that inhabited vast territories from the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the south to the Baltic and White Seas in the north, from northern Italy and the Elbe (Laba) basin in the west to Asia Minor and the Volga basin in the east. And they called themselves by their tribal names. Therefore, at some historical stage, their ancestors may not have had a single collective name denoting the entire set of Proto-Slavic peoples, but rather had several collective names with dialectal differences. Moreover, the ancestors of the Slavs could have been representatives of various Indo-European and non-Indo-European ethnic groups. The same proto- and proto-Slavic peoples took part in the territorial localization of various Indo-European peoples. There are many examples of this. For example, the Krivichi participated in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs on the territory of modern Belarus, Russia, the Baltic countries and even... in the north-west of India. The situation is similar with the Polans, Northerners and other Russian-Venetian peoples who took part in the formation of various branches of the current Slavic world.
The ancient Slavs settled in settlements (analogous to a modern city). The settlements were built with great regard for safety, since an invasion of nomads could be expected at any moment. That is why such villages were located at higher elevations - on high hills, at river mouths. Fortifications were built near rivers and lakes, which provided the population with fresh water, which was also used to irrigate arable land. The clan (family) in the settlements lived in huts. The huts were quite primitive and served mainly for protection from natural phenomena (rain, snow and wind). In the hut itself there were no partitions or divisions into rooms. There was only a fireplace in it. Many of these huts were dugouts that were 1.5 meters deep, which made it possible to better retain heat in the winter.
In Central Europe approximately 1700 BC. A unified ethnic, cultural and economic environment began to form from among the related Pravenetian tribes. The stage of its development, which lasted approximately from the 13th to the 4th century BC. e., received the name of the Lusatian archaeological culture of the late Bronze and Early Iron Ages. The name goes back to the Slavic region of Lusatia - Lausitz in Germany). The Polabian Slavs mastered the lands from the Odra River (German name - "Oder") to the Laba (in German - "Elbe") and its tributary the Saale. Fortifications, settlements, and burial grounds with corpses were excavated. The basis of the Lusatian economy was agriculture and cattle breeding.
The ancient Slavs were mainly engaged in agriculture and cattle breeding. Cattle were used for work as well as food for the tribe's inhabitants. The cultivated crops were dominated by grains, the surplus of which was then sold. The ancient Slavs had an extensive network of trade routes and traded with the surrounding settled tribes. It is in the development of these trade relations that the main prerequisites for the rapid development of Slavic civilization lie. Economic ties made it possible to provide the population, in particular, with sophisticated weapons, as well as various items necessary in everyday life - fabrics, dishes and other utensils.
1) Ideas about the origin of the Slavs
There are many different ideas about the origin and ancient history of the Eastern Slavs.
a) Nestor.
The chronicler Nestor believed that the Slavs originally lived in Central and Eastern Europe from approximately the Elbe to the Dnieper and only in the first centuries of our era settled the Danube basin and the Balkan Peninsula.
b) Synopsis: Slavs and Rus
Most common in the 18th century. the theory of the origin of the Slavs was reflected in the first Russian printed history textbook, the so-called Synopsis, published in the 70s. XVII century. It is as follows: the authors who adhere to this theory draw a clear division between the Slavs and the Rus. The Rus, according to these authors, are a more ancient people. Their roots are from Mesopotamia; they come from biblical heroes: the son of Noah Japheth and Mosoch, who was the first patriarch of the Rus. The memory of this hero, according to the authors, was kept by the Russian people and was imprinted in the name of the capital of the Russian state, Moscow. Gradually the Russians settled throughout Europe. There is even an opinion that at a certain point the Rus made up the majority of the population of Europe, in particular, the so-called Etruscans of Italy are derived from the Rus, supposedly this is the encrypted name of the Rus. The Slavs are a much less ancient people, belonging to the Indo-European family of peoples. At the beginning of our era, the Rus, according to the assumption of the same authors, occupied the territory along the Danube and Dnieper.
c) V. O. Klyuchevsky
V. O. Klyuchevsky follows the news of the Gothic historian Jordan: initially the Slavs occupied the Carpathian region. He calls the Carpathians a pan-Slavic nest, from which the Slavs subsequently dispersed in different directions.
d) A. A. Shakhmatov and L. Gumilev
Academician A. A. Shakhmatov, whose opinion is also supported by L. N. Gumilyov, studying Russian chronicles, exploring the history of the Russian language and its dialects, came to the conclusion that the ancient Slavs originated in the upper reaches of the Vistula, on the banks of the Tisza and on the slopes of the Carpathians (modern eastern Hungary and southern Poland).
e) B. A. Rybakov
B. A. Rybakov, rejecting all named and unnamed points of view, defends his own. In a distant era, related tribes of the ancestors of the Indo-European peoples lived in South-Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
Their means of communication was a primitive language with a small number of words. Later, during the Neolithic period and during the Bronze Age, these tribes began to settle, the connection between them weakened, and some, initially very minor, features in the language appeared; language groups were created that reflected a different grouping of ancient tribes. The ancestors of the Slavs are supposed to be found among the Bronze Age tribes that inhabited the Odra, Vistula and Dnieper basins. At the same time, there was no division of the Slavs by language into Western and Eastern Slavs. In all likelihood, Rybakov points out, Herodotus says about the ancestors of the Slavs, describing the agricultural tribes of the Middle Dnieper in the 5th century BC. He calls them “Skoloti” or “Borysthenites,” noting that the Greeks mistakenly classify them as Scythians, although the Scythians did not know agriculture at all. The academician admits that the problem of the origin of the Slavs is very complex; There are many controversial issues here that are followed by historians, linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists.
2) The term "Slavs"
The term "Slavs" itself has not yet been satisfactorily explained.
Perhaps it is connected with the “word”, and this is how our ancestors could call themselves in contrast to other peoples whose speech they did not understand (Germans). We encounter this phenomenon not only in the Slavic world. It is known that the Arabs in the 7th-8th centuries. All other peoples who did not understand their language were called Ajams, i.e. not Arabs, literally dumb, wordless (Germans).
Later, this term began to be applied exclusively to Iranians. It is curious that according to Procopius of Caesarea (6th century), a very erudite writer, the Slavs were previously called disputes, and some people of Spola appear near the Jordan, with whom the Goths fought. It is impossible to decipher these concepts given our state of knowledge, but, obviously, the term “Slavs” did not arise immediately and did not suddenly become generally used. Perhaps the oldest name was still the Wends: this is what their ancient neighbors from the west called the Slavs - the Germans and, it seems, the eastern Balts. But some of the ancestors of the Slavs could be called this way, while others could have other names. And only later (V-VI centuries) the common name “Slavs” (Slovenes) was established.
- 3) Proto-Slavs
- a) differences between Slavs
Getting acquainted with the most ancient descriptions of our country, we will not find even a mention of the name of the Slavs in them until the first centuries of our era.
First of all, the Eastern Slavs arose as a result of the merger of the so-called Proto-Slavs, speakers of Slavic speech, with various other ethnic groups of Eastern Europe. This explains the fact that, despite all the similarity of the language and cultural elements associated with it, in other respects there are serious differences between the Slavic peoples, even of an anthropological type - such differences exist within individual groups of certain East Slavic peoples. An equally significant difference is found in the sphere of material culture, since the Slavicized ethnic groups that became an integral part of certain Slavic peoples had unequal material culture, the features of which were preserved in their descendants. It is in the sphere of material culture, as well as such an element of culture as music, that there are significant differences even between such closely related peoples as Russians and Ukrainians.
4) Area of settlement of the Slavs
There is every reason to believe that the area of settlement of the Proto-Slavs, who, as proven by linguists, separated from their related Balts in the middle of the first millennium BC. (at the time of Herodotus), was very small. Considering that there is no news about the Slavs until the first centuries AD. in written sources, and these sources, as a rule, came from the regions of the Northern Black Sea region, most of the territory of modern Ukraine, except for its north-west, must be excluded from the area of settlement of the Proto-Slavs.
a) the first news about the Wends
The first mentions of the Wends, which is what early sources called the Proto-Slavs, appeared only when the Romans, in their expansion in Europe, reached the Middle Danube, Pannonia and Noricum (present-day Hungary and Austria). It is no coincidence that Pliny the Elder and Tacitus (second half of the 1st century AD) were the first to mention the Wends.
Obviously, it was only from these areas that the first news about the Wend people was received. But even this news was extremely vague, since Roman and Greek writers could not even accurately determine whether to attribute the Wends to the Germans or the Sarmatians, leaning, however, towards the greater similarity of the Wends in their morals, customs and way of life specifically to the Germans.
Pannonia in the 1st-2nd centuries. AD was inhabited by different peoples - Germanic and Sarmatian (Iranian), Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic) received its name from the Celtic tribe of Boii, but during the time of Tacitus and later the Germans settled here, and somewhere behind them (in the northeast (?)) Wends lived.
Tacitus, talking about the Wends, mentions next to them the Estonians and Fenians, under whom the ancestors of the Baltic peoples are hidden (but not the Finns and modern Estonians). Consequently, the Wends at that time occupied approximately the territory of what is now South-Eastern Poland, South-Western Belarus and North-Western Ukraine (Volyn and Polesie). And the data of Ptolemy (second century AD) already allows us to expand the range of habitat of the Slavs, including the northern Carpathian region and part of the coast of the Baltic Sea, known at that time as the Gulf of Venice. Obviously, already during the second century the Slavs pushed aside or assimilated some part of other ethnic groups, but most likely the Germans and aborigines of the Carpathian region.
It can be assumed that Ptolemy’s data records the departure of the Goths from the Baltic Sea coast and the advance of the Slavs in their place.
b) Peutinger map
Probably, some expansion of the ethnic territory of the Slavs was also observed in the 3rd-4th centuries, but, unfortunately, there are almost no sources for this time. The so-called Peutinger Map, the final edition of which dates back to the first half of the fifth century, however, includes significant elements of earlier information dating back to the first century BC, therefore it is very difficult to use its data. The Veneds on this Map are shown to the northwest of the Carpathians, together with some part of the Sarmatians. The joint registration of the Wends and Sarmatians in the Carpathian region obviously reflects, with elements of the fifth century, the realities of the 2nd-4th centuries. before the invasion of the Huns.
c) Slavs and archaeological cultures
Archaeologists are trying to see the Slavs as bearers of various archaeological cultures, ranging from the so-called culture of under-klosh burials (IV-II centuries BC, Upper Vistula and Warta basin) to various archaeological cultures of the first half of the 1st millennium AD. However, in These conclusions are controversial. Not long ago, the fairly widespread interpretation that the Chernyakhov culture belonged to the Slavs did not have many adherents, and most scientists believe that this culture was created by different ethnic groups with a predominance of Iranians.
d) population displacement as a result of the Hun invasion
The Hunnic invasion led to significant population movements, including from the steppe and partially forest-steppe zones of our south. Most of all, this concerns the steppe regions, where, after a short-term hegemony of the Ugrians, the proto-Turks prevailed already in the 6th century. The forest-steppe of present-day Ukraine and the North Caucasus (Don region) is a different matter. Here the old Iranian population turned out to be more stable, but it too began to gradually be exposed to the Slavs who were steadily moving east. Obviously, already in the 5th century the latter reached the middle Dnieper, where they assimilated the local Iranians. It was probably the latter who founded the towns on the Kyiv mountains, since the name of Kyiv can be explained from Iranian dialects as a princely (town). Then the Slavs advanced beyond the Dnieper into the Desna River basin, which received the Slavic name (Right). It is curious, however, that the main part of the large rivers in the south retained pre-Slavic (Iranian) names. So, the Don is just a river, the Dnieper is a deep river, Ros is a bright river, Prut is a river, etc. But the names of the rivers in the north-west of Ukraine and in most of Belarus are Slavic (Berezina, Teterev, Goryn, etc.) and this is undoubtedly evidence of the very ancient habitation of the Slavs there.
If you believe various figures from folk history, then scientists from all over the world have agreed and have a common point of view regarding the origin of the Slavs. I propose to look at a short analysis of this single point of view, which was made by K. Reznikov in the book “Russian History: Myths and Facts. From the birth of the Slavs to the conquest of Siberia.”
Written evidence
Indisputable descriptions of the Slavs are known only from the first half of the 6th century. Procopius of Caesarea (born between 490 and 507 - died after 565), secretary of the Byzantine commander Belisarius, wrote about the Slavs in his book “The War with the Goths.” Procopius recognized the Slavs from the mercenaries of Belisarius in Italy. He was there from 536 to 540 and compiled a famous description of the appearance, customs and character of the Slavs. It is important for us here that he divides the Slavs into two tribal unions - Antes and Sklavins, and sometimes they acted together against enemies, and sometimes they fought among themselves. He points out that they used to be one people: “And in the old days the Sklavins and Ants had the same name. For from ancient times both of them were called “spores”, precisely because they inhabit the country, scattering their dwellings. That is why they occupy an incredibly vast land: after all, they are found on most of the other bank of the Ister.”
Procopius talks about the Slavic invasions of the Roman Empire, the victories over the Romans (Byzantines), the capture and brutal executions of prisoners. He himself did not see these cruelties and retells what he heard. However, there is no doubt that the Slavs sacrificed many prisoners, especially military leaders, to the gods. Procopius’ statement that the Slavs first crossed the Ister “with military force” in the 15th year of the Gothic War, i.e., in 550, looks strange. After all, he wrote about the invasions of the Sklavins in 545 and 547. and remembered that “already often, having made the crossing, the Huns and Antes and Sklavins did terrible evil to the Romans.” In The Secret History, Procopius writes that Illyricum and all of Thrace to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Hellas, “the Huns and Sklavins and Antes ravaged, raiding almost every year since Justinian assumed power over the Romans” (from 527 G.). Procopius notes that Justinian tried to buy the friendship of the Slavs, but without success - they continued to devastate the empire.
Before Procopius, Byzantine authors did not mention the Slavs, but wrote about the Getae who disturbed the borders of the empire in the 5th century. Conquered by Trajan in 106 AD. e., the Getae (Dacians) over 400 years turned into peaceful Roman provincials, not at all inclined to raids. Byzantine historian of the early 7th century. Theophylact Simocatta calls the new “getae” Slavs. “And the Getae, or, what is the same thing, hordes of Slavs, caused great harm to the region of Thrace,” he writes about the campaign of 585. It can be assumed that the Byzantines met the Slavs 50-100 years earlier than Procopius writes.
In the late antique world, scientists were extremely conservative: they called contemporary peoples by the usual names of ancient peoples. Who hasn’t visited the Scythians: the Sarmatians, who destroyed them, and the Turkic tribes, and the Slavs! This came not only from poor knowledge, but from the desire to show off erudition and show knowledge of the classics. Among such authors is Jordanes, who wrote in Latin the book “On the Origin and Deeds of the Getae,” or briefly “Getica.” All that is known about the author is that he is a Goth, a person of clergy, a subject of the empire, and he finished his book in the 24th year of the reign of Justinian (550/551). The Book of Jordan is an abbreviated compilation of the “History of the Goths,” which has not reached us, by the Roman writer Magnus Aurelius Cossiodorus (c. 478 - c. 578), courtier of the Gothic kings Theodoric and Witigis. The vastness of Cossiodorus's work (12 books) made it difficult to read, and Jordan shortened it, possibly adding information from Gothic sources.
Jordan leads the Goths out of the island of Scandza, from where they began their journeys in search of better land. Having defeated the Rugs and Vandals, they reached Scythia, crossed the river (Dnieper?) and came to the fertile land of Oium. There they defeated the Spolians (many see them as arguing with Procopius) and settled near the Pontic Sea. Jordan describes Scythia and the peoples inhabiting it, including the Slavs. He writes that north of Dacia, “starting from the birthplace of the Vistula River, a populous Veneti tribe settled across vast spaces. Although their names are now changing... they are still predominantly called Sklavens and Antes. The Sklavens live from the city of Novietuna (in Slovenia?) and the lake called Mursian (?) to Danaster and north to Viskla; instead of cities they have swamps and forests. The Antes, the strongest of both [tribes], spread from Danaster to Danapra, where the Pontic Sea forms a bend.”
In the 4th century, the Goths split into Ostrogoths and Visigoths. The author tells about the exploits of the kings of the Ostrogoths from the Amal family. King Germanarich conquered many tribes. There were also Veneti among them: “After the defeat of the Heruli, Hermanaric moved an army against the Veneti, who, although worthy of contempt because of [the weakness of their] weapons, were, however, powerful due to their numbers and tried to resist at first. But the great number of those unfit for war is worth nothing, especially in the case when God allows it and a multitude of armed men approach. These [Veneti], as we already told at the beginning of our presentation... are now known under three names: Veneti, Antes, Sklavens. Although now, due to our sins, they are rampant everywhere, but then they all submitted to the power of Germanarich.” Germanarich died at a ripe old age in 375. He subjugated the Veneti before the invasion of the Huns (360s), i.e., in the first half of the 4th century. - this is the earliest dated message about the Slavs. The only question is the Venets.
The ethnonym Veneti, Wends was widespread in ancient Europe. The Italian Veneti are known, who gave the name to the region of Veneto and the city of Venice; other Veneti - Celts, lived in Brittany and Britain; others - in Epirus and Illyria; their Veneti were in southern Germany and Asia Minor. They spoke different languages.
Perhaps the Indo-Europeans had a Venetian tribal union, which split into tribes that joined different language families (Italics, Celts, Illyrians, Germans). Among them could be the Baltic Veneti. Random coincidences are also possible. It is not certain that Pliny the Elder (1st century AD), Publius Cornelius Tacitus and Ptolemy Claudius (1st - 2nd century AD) wrote about the same Veneti as Jordanes, although all placed them on the southern coast of the Baltic . In other words, more or less reliable reports about the Slavs can be traced only from the middle of the 4th century. n. e. By the 6th century The Slavs were settled from Pannonia to the Dnieper and were divided into two tribal unions - the Slavens (Sklavens, Sklavins) and the Antes.
Various schemes of relations between the Baltic and Slavic languages
Linguistic data
To resolve the question of the origin of the Slavs, linguistic data are crucial. However, there is no unity among linguists. In the 19th century The idea of a German-Balto-Slavic linguistic community was popular. The Indo-European languages were then divided into the groups Centum and Satem, named based on the pronunciation of the number "one hundred" in Latin and Sanskrit. Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Greek, Venetian, Illyrian and Tocharian languages were found in the Centum group. Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, Armenian and Thracian languages are in the Satem group. Although many linguists do not recognize this division, it is confirmed by statistical analysis of basic words in Indo-European languages. Within the Satem group, the Baltic and Slavic languages formed the Balto-Slavic subgroup.
Linguists have no doubt that the Baltic languages - Latvian, Lithuanian, dead Prussian - and the languages of the Slavs are close in vocabulary (up to 1600 common roots), phonetics (pronunciation of words) and morphology (they have grammatical similarities). Back in the 19th century. August Schlözer put forward the idea of a common Balto-Slavic language, which gave rise to the languages of the Balts and Slavs. There are supporters and opponents of the close relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages. The first either recognize the existence of a common Balto-Slavic proto-language, or believe that the Slavic language was formed from Baltic peripheral dialects. The second point to the ancient linguistic connections of the Balts and Thracians, to the contacts of the Proto-Slavs with the Italics, Celts and Illyrians, and to the different nature of the linguistic affinity of the Balts and Slavs with the Germans. The similarity between the Baltic and Slavic languages is explained by a common Indo-European origin and long-term residence in the neighborhood.
Linguists disagree about the location of the Slavic ancestral home. F.P. Eagle owl summarizes the information about nature that existed in the Old Slavic language: “The abundance in the lexicon of the Common Slavic language of names for varieties of lakes, swamps, and forests speaks for itself. The presence in the Common Slavic language of various names for animals and birds living in forests and swamps, trees and plants of the temperate forest-steppe zone, fish typical for reservoirs of this zone, and at the same time the absence of Common Slavic names for the specific features of the mountains, steppes and sea - all this gives unambiguous materials for a definite conclusion about the ancestral home of the Slavs... The ancestral home of the Slavs... was located away from the seas, mountains and steppes, in a forest belt of the temperate zone, rich in lakes and swamps.”
In 1908, Józef Rostafinski proposed a “beech argument” for finding the Slavic ancestral home. He proceeded from the fact that the Slavs and Balts did not know the beech tree (the word “beech” was borrowed from German). Rostafinsky wrote: “The Slavs... did not know larch, fir and beech.” It was not known then that in the 2nd - 1st millennia BC. e. beech grew widely in Eastern Europe: its pollen was found in most of European Russia and Ukraine. So the choice of the ancestral home of the Slavs is not limited to the “beech argument”, but the arguments against the mountains and the sea still remain valid.
The process of the emergence of dialects and the division of a proto-language into daughter languages is similar to geographic speciation, which I wrote about earlier. Also S.P. Tolstov drew attention to the fact that related tribes living in adjacent territories understand each other well, but the opposite outskirts of a vast cultural and linguistic area no longer understand each other. If we replace the geographic variability of language with the geographic variability of populations, we get a situation of speciation in animals.
In animals, geographic speciation is not the only, but the most common way of the emergence of new species. It is characterized by speciation on the periphery of the species' habitat. The central zone retains the greatest similarity with the ancestral form. At the same time, populations living at different edges of a species’ range can differ no less than different related species. Often they are not able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The same laws were in effect during the division of Indo-European languages, when on the periphery (thanks to migrations) the Hittite-Luvian and Tocharian languages took shape, and in the center for almost a millennium the Indo-European community existed (including the ancestors of the Slavs) and with the supposed isolation of the Proto-Slavs as a peripheral dialect of the Baltic language community.
There is no agreement among linguists about the time of the appearance of the Slavic language. Many believed that the separation of Slavic from the Balto-Slavic community occurred on the eve of the new era or several centuries before it. V.N. Toporov believes that Proto-Slavic, one of the southern dialects of the ancient Baltic language, became isolated in the 20th century. BC e. It passed into Proto-Slavic around the 5th century. BC e. and then developed into the Old Slavic language. According to O.N. Trubachev, “the question now is not that the ancient history of Proto-Slavic can be measured on the scale of the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC. e., but that we, in principle, find it difficult to even conditionally date the “appearance” or “separation” of Proto-Slavic or Proto-Slavic dialects from Indo-European...”
The situation seemed to improve with the advent of the method of glottochronology in 1952, which made it possible to determine the relative or absolute time of divergence of related languages. In glottochronology, changes in the basic vocabulary are studied, i.e., the most specific and important concepts for life, such as: walk, talk, eat, man, hand, water, fire, one, two, I, you. From these basic words, lists of 100 or 200 words are compiled, which are used for statistical analysis. Compare lists and count the number of words that have a common source. The fewer there are, the earlier the division of languages occurred. The shortcomings of the method soon became apparent. It turned out that it does not work when the languages are too close or, on the contrary, too far away. There was also a fundamental drawback: the creator of the method, M. Swadesh, assumed a constant rate of change in words, whereas words change at different rates. At the end of the 1980s. S.A. Starostin increased the reliability of the method: he excluded all linguistic borrowings from the list of basic words and proposed a formula that takes into account the stability coefficients of words. Nevertheless, linguists are wary of glottochronology.
Meanwhile, three recent studies have given fairly similar results about the time of divergence of the Balts and Slavs. R. Gray and K. Atkinson (2003), based on a statistical analysis of the vocabulary of 87 Indo-European languages, found that the Indo-European proto-language began to decay 7800-9500 BC. e. The separation of the Baltic and Slavic languages began around 1400 BC. e. S. A. Starostin at a conference in Santa Fe (2004) presented the results of applying his modification of the glottochronology method. According to his data, the collapse of the Indo-European language began 4700 BC. e., and the languages of the Balts and Slavs began to separate from each other 1200 BC. e. P. Novotna and V. Blazek (2007), using Starostin’s method, found that the divergence of the language of the Balts and Slavs occurred in 1340-1400. BC e.
So, the Slavs separated from the Balts 1200-1400 BC. e.
Data from anthropology and anthropogenetics
The territory of Eastern and Central Europe, inhabited by the Slavs at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. e., had a Caucasian population since the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe. During the Mesolithic era, the population retained the appearance of Cro-Magnons - tall, long-headed, broad face, sharply protruding nose. Since the Neolithic, the ratio of the length and width of the cerebral part of the skull began to change - the head became shorter and wider. It is not possible to trace the physical changes of the ancestors of the Slavs due to the prevalence of the ritual of corpse burning among them. In craniological series of the X - XII centuries. Slavs are anthropologically quite similar. They had a predominance of long and medium-sized heads, a sharply profiled, medium-wide face and a medium or strong protrusion of the nose. In the area between the Oder and Dnieper rivers, the Slavs are relatively broad-faced. To the west, south and east, the size of the zygomatic diameter decreases due to mixing with the Germans (in the west), Finno-Ugrians (in the east) and the population of the Balkans (in the south). The proportions of the skull distinguish the Slavs from the Germans and bring them closer to the Balts.
The results of molecular genetic studies have made important additions. It turned out that Western and Eastern Slavs differ from Western Europeans in Y-DNA haplogroups. The Lusatian Sorbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians of Southern and Central Russia, and Slovaks are characterized by a high frequency of haplogroup R1a (50-60%). Among Czechs, Slovenes, Russians of northern Russia, Croats and Balts - Lithuanians and Latvians, the frequency of R1a is 34-39%. Serbs and Bulgarians are characterized by a low frequency of R1a - 15-16%. The same or lower frequency of R1a is found among peoples of Western Europe - from 8-12% in Germans to 1% in Irish. In Western Europe, haplogroup R1b predominates. The data obtained allow us to draw conclusions: 1) Western and Eastern Slavs are closely related in the male line; 2) Among the Balkan Slavs, the share of Slavic ancestors is significant only among Slovenes and Croats; 3) between the ancestors of the Slavs and Western Europeans over the past 18 thousand years (the time of separation of R1a and R1b) there was no mass mixing in the male line.
Archaeological data
Archeology can localize the area of a culture, determine the time of its existence, the type of economy, and contacts with other cultures. Sometimes it is possible to identify the continuity of cultures. But cultures do not answer the question of the language of the creators. There are cases when speakers of the same culture speak different languages. The most striking example is the Chatelperonian culture in France (29,000-35,000 BC). The carriers of culture were two species of humans - the Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) and our ancestor - the Cro-Magnon (Homo sapiens). Nevertheless, most hypotheses about the origin of the Slavs are based on the results of archaeological research.
Hypotheses about the origin of the Slavs
Exists four main hypotheses origin of the Slavs:
1) Danube hypothesis;
2) Vistula-Oder hypothesis;
3) Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis;
4) Dnieper-Pripyat hypothesis.
M.V. wrote about the Danube ancestral home of the Slavs. Lomonosov. Supporters of the Danube ancestral home were S.M. Solovyov, P.I. Safarik and V.O. Klyuchevsky. Among modern scientists, the origin of the Slavs from the Middle Danube - Pannonia was substantiated in detail by Oleg Nikolaevich Trubachev. The basis for the hypothesis was Slavic mythology - the historical memory of the people, reflected in the PVL, Czech and Polish chronicles, folk songs, and the ancient layer of Slavic borrowings from the language of the Italians, Germans and Illyrians identified by the author. According to Trubachev, the Slavs separated from the Indo-European linguistic community in the 3rd millennium BC. e. Pannonia remained their place of residence, but most of the Slavs migrated to the north; The Slavs crossed the Carpathians and settled in a strip from the Vistula to the Dnieper, entering into close interactions with the Balts who lived in the neighborhood.
Trubachev's hypothesis, despite the importance of his linguistic findings, is vulnerable in several respects. Firstly, it has weak archaeological cover. No ancient Slavic culture has been found in Pannonia: the reference to several Slavic-sounding place names/ethnonyms mentioned by the Romans is insufficient and can be explained by coincidence of words. Secondly, glottochronology, which Trubachev despises, speaks of the separation of the Slavic language from the language of the Baltoslavs or Balts in the 2nd millennium BC. e. - 3200-3400 years ago. Thirdly, anthropogenetic data indicate the comparative rarity of marriages between the ancestors of the Slavs and Western Europeans.
The idea of a Slavic ancestral home between the Elbe and Bug rivers - the Vistula-Oder hypothesis - was proposed in 1771 by August Schlözer. At the end of the 19th century. the hypothesis was supported by Polish historians. In the first half of the 20th century. Polish archaeologists connected the ethnogenesis of the Slavs with the expansion of the Lusatian culture into the lands of the Odra and Vistula basin during the Bronze and early Iron Ages. A major linguist, Tadeusz Lehr-Splawiński, was a supporter of the “Western” ancestral home of the Slavs. The formation of the Proto-Slavic cultural and linguistic community was presented by Polish scientists in the following form. At the end of the Neolithic (III millennium BC), the vast area from the Elbe to the middle reaches of the Dnieper was occupied by tribes of the Corded Ware culture - the ancestors of the Balto-Slavs and Germans.
In the 2nd millennium BC. e. The “shnuroviks” were divided by the tribes of the Unetice culture who came from southern Germany and the Danube region. The Trzyniec Corded Culture complex disappeared: instead, the Lusatian culture developed, covering the Odra and Vistula basins from the Baltic Sea to the foothills of the Carpathians. The tribes of the Lusatian culture separated the western wing of the “Shnurovites”, i.e. the ancestors of the Germans, from the eastern wing - the ancestors of the Balts, and themselves became the basis for the formation of the Proto-Slavs. The Lusatian expansion should be considered the beginning of the collapse of the Balto-Slavic linguistic community. Polish scientists consider the composition of the Eastern Slavs to be secondary, citing, in particular, the absence of Slavic names for large rivers in Ukraine.
In recent decades, the hypothesis about the western ancestral home of the Slavs was developed by Valentin Vasilyevich Sedov. He considered the culture of under-klesh burials (400-100 BC), which was named after the method of covering funeral urns with a large vessel, to be the most ancient Slavic culture; in Polish “klesh” means “turned upside down”. At the end of the 2nd century. BC e. Under the strong Celtic influence, the culture of under-kleshevo burials was transformed into the Przeworsk culture. It consists of two regions: the western - Oder, inhabited mainly by the East German population, and the eastern - Vistula, where the Slavs predominated. According to Sedov, the Slavic Prague-Korchak culture is related in origin to the Przeworsk culture. It should be noted that the hypothesis about the Western origin of the Slavs is largely speculative. The ideas about the German-Balto-Slavic linguistic community attributed to the Corded Ware tribes seem unsubstantiated. There is no evidence of the Slavic-speaking nature of the creators of the culture of under-klesh burials. There is no evidence of the origin of the Prague-Korchak culture from the Przeworsk culture.
The Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis has attracted the sympathy of scientists for many years. She painted a glorious Slavic past, where the ancestors were the Eastern and Western Slavs. According to the hypothesis, the ancestral home of the Slavs was located between the middle reaches of the Dnieper in the east and the upper reaches of the Vistula in the west, and from the upper reaches of the Dniester and Southern Bug in the south to Pripyat in the north. The ancestral homeland included Western Ukraine, Southern Belarus and South-Eastern Poland. The hypothesis owes its development largely to the work of the Czech historian and archaeologist Lubor Niederle “Slavic Antiquities” (1901-1925). Niederle outlined the habitat of the early Slavs and pointed out their antiquity, noting the contacts of the Slavs with the Scythians in the 8th and 7th centuries. BC e. Many of the peoples listed by Herodotus were Slavs: “I do not hesitate to assert that among the northern neighbors of the Scythians mentioned by Herodotus are not only the Neuroi in Volhynia and the Kiev region, but probably also the Budins who lived between the Dnieper and the Don, and even the Scythians, called plowmen. .. placed by Herodotus to the north of the steppe regions proper... were undoubtedly Slavs.”
The Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis was popular among Slavists, especially in the USSR. It acquired its most complete form from Boris Aleksandrovich Rybakov (1981). Rybakov followed the scheme of the prehistory of the Slavs by linguist B.V. Gornung, who distinguished the period of the linguistic ancestors of the Slavs (V-III millennium BC), Proto-Slavs (late III - early II millennium BC) and Proto-Slavs (from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC) BC). In terms of the timing of the separation of the Proto-Slavs from the German-Balto-Slavic linguistic community, Rybakov relied on Gornung. Rybakov begins the history of the Slavs with the Proto-Slavic period and distinguishes five stages in it - from the 15th century. BC e. to the 7th century n. e. Rybakov supports his periodization cartographically:
“The basis of the concept is elementary simple: there are three good archaeological maps, carefully compiled by different researchers, which, according to a number of scientists, have one or another relation to Slavic ethnogenesis. These are - in chronological order - maps of the Trzyniec-Komarovka culture of the 15th - 12th centuries. BC e., early Pshevorsk and Zarubintsy cultures (II century BC - II century AD) and a map of Slavic culture VI - VII centuries. n. e. like Prague-Korchak... Let’s superimpose all three maps on top of each other... we will see a striking coincidence of all three maps...”
Looks beautiful. Perhaps even too much. Behind the spectacular trick of overlaying cards, there are 1000 years separating the cultures on the first and second cards, and 400 years between the cultures of the second and third cards. In between, of course, there were also cultures, but they did not fit into the concept. Not everything is smooth with the second map: the Przeworsts and the Zarubins did not belong to the same culture, although both were influenced by the Celts (especially the Przeworsts), but that’s where the similarities end. A significant part of the Przeworst people were Germans, but the Zarubinians for the most part were not Germans; it is not even known whether the dominant tribe (Bastarns?) was Germanic. Rybakov determines the linguistic affiliation of culture carriers with extraordinary ease. He follows the linguist's recommendations, but Gornung is prone to risky conclusions. Finally, about the coincidence of cultures on the maps. There is geography behind it. Relief, vegetation, soil, climate influence the settlement of peoples, the formation of culture and states. It is not surprising that ethnic groups, albeit of different origins, but having a similar type of economy, develop the same ecological niches. You can find many examples of such coincidences.
The Polesie-Pripyat hypothesis has been revived and is being actively developed. The hypothesis about the original residence of the Slavs in the Pripyat and Teterev basins, rivers with ancient Slavic hydronymics, was popular in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. among German scientists. Polish literary critic Alexander Brückner joked: “German scientists would willingly drown all the Slavs in the swamps of Pripyat, and the Slavic scientists would drown all the Germans in Dollart; completely wasted work, they won’t fit there; It’s better to give up this business and not spare the light of God for either one or the other.” The Proto-Slavs really did not fit into the forests and swamps of Polesie, and now they are paying more and more attention to the Middle and Upper Dnieper region. The Dnieper-Pripyat hypothesis (more precisely) owes its revival to joint seminars of Leningrad linguists, ethnographers, historians and archaeologists, organized in the 1970s - 1980s. A.S. Gerdom and G.S. Lebedev at Leningrad University and A.S. Mylnikov at the Institute of Ethnography, and the remarkable finds of the late 20th - early 21st centuries made by Kyiv archaeologists.
At the Leningrad seminars, the existence of a Balto-Slavic linguistic community was recognized - a group of dialects that occupied the territory from the Baltic to the Upper Don at the beginning of the new era. The Proto-Slavic language originated from marginal Balto-Slavic dialects. The main reason for its appearance was the cultural and ethnic interaction of the Balto-Slavs with the Zarubintsy tribes. In 1986, the head of the seminar, Gleb Sergeevich Lebedev, wrote: “The main event, which apparently serves as an equivalent to the linguistically identified separation of the southern part of the population of the forest zone, the future Slavs, from the original Slavic-Baltic unity, is associated with the appearance in the 2nd century BC - I century of the new era of Zarubintsy culture." In 1997, archaeologist Mark Borisovich Shchukin published an article “The Birth of the Slavs,” in which he summed up the seminar discussions.
According to Shchukin, the ethnogenesis of the Slavs began with the “explosion” of Zarubintsy culture. The Zarubintsy culture was left by the people who appeared on the territory of Northern Ukraine and Southern Belarus (at the end of the 3rd century BC). The Zarubins were proto-Slavs or Germans, but with strong influence from the Celts. Farmers and cattle breeders, they also practiced crafts and made elegant brooches. But first and foremost they were warriors. The Zarubinians waged wars of conquest against the forest tribes. In the middle of the 1st century. n. e. The Zarubins, known to the Romans as Bastarni (language unknown), were defeated by the Sarmatians, but partially retreated north into the forests, where they mixed with the local population (Balto-Slavs).
In the Upper Dnieper region there are archaeological sites called late Zarubinets. In the Middle Dnieper region, the late Zarubintsy monuments pass into the related Kyiv culture. At the end of the 2nd century. The Germanic Goths move to the Black Sea region. Over a vast area from the Romanian Carpathians to the upper reaches of the Seim and Seversky Donets, a culture known as the Chernyakhov culture was taking shape. In addition to the Germanic core, it included local Thracian, Sarmatian and early Slavic tribes. The Slavs of the Kyiv culture lived alternately with the Chernyakhovites in the Middle Dnieper region, and in the Upper Transnistria there was a Zubritsky culture, the predecessor of the Prague-Korchak culture. The invasion of the Huns (70s of the 4th century AD) led to the departure of the Goths and other Germanic tribes to the west, towards the disintegrating Roman Empire, and a place for a new people appeared on the liberated lands. These people were the emerging Slavs.
Shchukin's article is still discussed in historical forums. Not everyone praises her. The main objection is caused by the extremely late dates of the divergence of the Slavs and the Balts - I - II centuries. n. e. After all, according to glottochronology, the divergence of the Balts and Slavs occurred at least 1200 BC. e. The difference is too great to be attributed to inaccuracies in the method (which generally confirms the known data on the division of languages). Another point is the linguistic affiliation of the Zarubins. Shchukin identifies them with the Bastarnae and believes that they spoke Germanic, Celtic, or a language of an “intermediate” type. He doesn't have any evidence. Meanwhile, in the area of the Zarubintsy culture, after its collapse, proto-Slavic cultures (Kiev, Protopraz-Korchak) formed. On historical forums, it is suggested that the Zarubinians themselves were Proto-Slavs. This assumption brings us back to Sedov’s hypothesis about the Slavic-speaking nature of the creators of the culture of under-klesh burials, whose descendants could be the Zarubinians.
Map of tribal settlement in Eastern Europe in 125 (territories of modern eastern Poland, western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania)