The Slavs are the largest ethnic community in Europe, but what do we really know about them? From whom did they originate, where was their homeland, and where did the self-name Slavs come from? We'll figure out.
The origin of the Slavs
There are many hypotheses about the origin of the Slavs. Someone refers them to the Scythians and Sarmatians who came from Central Asia, someone to the Aryans, Germans, others are completely identified with the Celts. In general, all hypotheses of the origin of the Slavs can be divided into two main categories, directly opposite to each other. One of them, the well-known Norman one, was put forward in the 18th century by German scientists Bayer, Miller and Schletzer, although such ideas first appeared during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The bottom line was the following: the Slavs are an Indo-European people that once belonged to the German-Slavic community, but broke away from the Germans during the Great Migration. Finding themselves on the periphery of Europe and cut off from the continuity of Roman civilization, they are quite backward in development, so muchthat they could not create their own state and invited the Vikings, that is, the Vikings, to rule over them.
This theory is based on the historiographical tradition of the Tale of Bygone Years and the famous phrase: Our land is great, rich, but alongside it is not. Come to reign and own us. Such a categorical interpretation, which was based on an obvious ideological background, could not but arouse criticism. Today, archeology confirms the existence of strong intercultural ties between the Scandinavians and the Slavs, but it hardly suggests that the former played a decisive role in the formation of the ancient Russian state. But disputes about the Norman origin of the Slavs and Kievan Rus do not subside, to this day.
The second theory of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, on the contrary, is of a patriotic character. And, by the way, it is much older than the Norman one of its founders was the Croatian historian Mavro Orbini, who wrote a work called the Slavic Kingdom in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. His point of view was very extraordinary: he referred to the Slavs the Vandals, Burgundians, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gepids, Getae, Alans, Verls, Avars, Dacians, Swedes, Normans, Finns, Ukrov, Marcomans, Quads, Thracians and Illyrians and many others: They were all of the same Slavic tribe, as will be seen later. Their exodus from the historical homeland of Orbini dates back to 1460 BC. Where only they did not manage to visit after that: the Slavs fought with almost all the tribes of the world, attacked Persia, ruled Asia and Africa,fought with the Egyptians and Alexander the Great, conquered Greece, Macedonia and Illyria, occupied Moravia, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltic Sea coast.
He was echoed by many court scribes, who created a theory of the origin of the Slavs from the ancient Romans, and Rurik from the emperor Octavian Augustus. In the 18th century, the Russian historian Tatishchev published the so-called Joachim Chronicle, which, in contrast to the Tale of Bygone Years, identified the Slavs with the ancient Greeks.
Both of these theories (although each of them has echoes of the truth), represent two extremes, which are characterized by a free interpretation of historical facts and information from archeology. They were criticized by such giants of Russian history as B. Grekov, B. Rybakov, V. Yanin, A. Artsikhovsky, arguing that a historian should rely not on his own preferences, but on facts in his research. However, the historical texture of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, to this day, is so incomplete that it leaves many options for speculation, without the ability to finally answer the main question: who are these Slavs after all?
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Age of the people
The next sore problem for historians is the age of the Slavic ethnos. When did the Slavs nevertheless stand out as a single people from the pan-European ethnic confusion? The first attempt to answer this question belongs to the author of the Tale of Bygone Years - the monk Nestor. Taking the biblical tradition as a basis, he began the history of the Slavs from the Babylonian pandemonium, which divided humanity into 72 peoples: From these 70 and 2 languages became the language of Slovenes. The above-mentioned Mavro Orbini generously bestowed on the Slavic tribes a couple of extra millennia of history, dating their exodus from their historical homeland in 1496: At the indicated time, the Goths left Scandinavia, and the Slavs, since the Slavs and Goths were one tribe. So, having subjugated Sarmatia to its power, the Slavic tribe was divided into several tribes and received different names: Wends, Slavs, Antes, Verls, Alans,Massaets, Vandals, Goths, Avars, Roskolans, Russians or Muscovites, Poles, Czechs, Silesians, Bulgarians In short, the Slavic language is heard from the Caspian Sea to Saxony, from the Adriatic Sea to the Germanic Sea, and within all these limits lies the Slavic tribe.
Of course, such information was not enough for historians. To study the age of the Slavs, archeology, genetics and linguistics were involved. As a result, we managed to achieve modest, but still, results. According to the accepted version, the Slavs belonged to the Indo-European community, which, most likely, emerged from the Dnieper-Donetsk archaeological culture, in the interfluve of the Dnieper and Don, seven thousand years ago during the Stone Age. Subsequently, the influence of this culture spread to the territory from the Vistula to the Urals, although no one has yet succeeded in precisely localizing it. In general, speaking about the Indo-European community, we mean not a single ethnos or civilization, but the influence of cultures and linguistic similarities. About four thousand years BC, it split into three conditional groups: Celts and Romans in the West, Indo-Iranians in the East, and somewhere in the middle,in Central and Eastern Europe, another language group emerged, from which the Germans, Balts and Slavs later emerged. Of these, around the 1st millennium BC, the Slavic language begins to stand out.
But information from linguistics alone is not enough to determine the unity of an ethnic group, there must be a continuous continuity of archaeological cultures. The lower link in the archaeological chain of the Slavs is considered to be the so-called culture of sub-klash burials, which got its name from the custom of covering cremated remains with a large vessel, in Polish flared, that is, upside-down. It existed in the V-II centuries BC between the Vistula and the Dnieper. In a sense, we can say that its carriers were the earliest Slavs. It is from her that it is possible to reveal the continuity of cultural elements up to the Slavic antiquities of the early Middle Ages.
Proto-Slavic homeland
Where did the Slavic ethnos come into being, and what territory can be called primordially Slavic? Historians' accounts vary. Orbini, referring to a number of authors, claims that the Slavs left Scandinavia: Almost all the authors, whose blessed pen brought the history of the Slavic tribe to their descendants, assert and conclude that the Slavs left Scandinavia Descendants of Japheth, the son of Noah (to which the author refers to the Slavs) moved to Europe to the north, penetrating into the country now called Scandinavia. There they multiplied innumerable as St. Augustine points out in his City of God, where he writes that the sons and descendants of Japheth had two hundred ancestors and occupied the lands located north of Mount Taurus in Cilicia, along the Northern Ocean, half of Asia, and throughout Europe up to British Ocean.
Nestor called the most ancient territory of the Slavs of the land along the lower reaches of the Dnieper and Pannonia. The reason for the resettlement of the Slavs from the Danube was the attack on them by the Volokhs. Along the same time, they settled the essence of Slovenia along the Dunaevi, where there is now Ugorsk land and Bolgarsk. Hence the Danube-Balkan hypothesis of the origin of the Slavs.
The European homeland of the Slavs also had supporters. Thus, the prominent Czech historian Pavel Shafarik believed that the ancestral home of the Slavs should be sought in Europe, in the vicinity of their related tribes of the Celts, Germans, Balts and Thracians. He believed that in ancient times the Slavs occupied vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, from where they were forced to leave for the Carpathians under the onslaught of Celtic expansion. There was even a version about two ancestral homelands of the Slavs, according to which the first ancestral home was the place where the Proto-Slavic language was formed (between the lower reaches of the Neman and the Western Dvina) and where the Slavic people themselves were formed (according to the authors of the hypothesis, this happened from the 2nd century BC era) the Vistula river basin. From there, the Western and Eastern Slavs have already left. The first settled in the region of the Elbe River, then the Balkans and the Danube,and the second banks of the Dnieper and Dniester.
The Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis about the ancestral home of the Slavs, although it remains a hypothesis, is still the most popular among historians. It is conventionally confirmed by local place names, as well as vocabulary. If you believe the words, that is, the lexical material, the ancestral home of the Slavs was located away from the sea, in a forest plain zone with swamps and lakes, as well as within the rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea, judging by the common Slavic names of salmon and eel fish. By the way, the areas of the already known culture of sub-cone burials fully correspond to these geographical features.
Slavs
The very word Slavs is a mystery. It is firmly in use as early as the 6th century AD, at least among Byzantine historians of this time there are frequent references to the Slavs, not always friendly neighbors of Byzantium. Among the Slavs themselves, this term is already in full use as a self-name in the Middle Ages, at least judging by the chronicles, including the Tale of Bygone Years.
However, its origin is still unknown. The most popular version is that it comes from the words word or glory, going back to the same Indo-European root ḱleu- hear. By the way, Mavro Orbini also wrote about this, though in his characteristic arrangement: during their residence in Sarmatia they (Slavs) took the name Slavs for themselves, which means glorious.
Among linguists, there is a version that the Slavs owe their self-name to the names of the landscape. Presumably, the toponym Slovutych was the basis - another name for the Dnieper, containing a root meaning to wash, cleanse.
A lot of noise at one time was caused by the version about the presence of a connection between the self-name of the Slavs and the Middle Greek word slave (σκλάβος). It was very popular among Western scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is based on the idea that the Slavs, as one of the most numerous peoples of Europe, constituted a significant percentage of captives and often became the object of the slave trade. Today, this hypothesis is recognized as erroneous, since most likely the basis for σκλάβος was the Greek verb meaning to get trophies of war - σκυλάο.