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| Ethnonym | |
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The Slavic autonym is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as Slověninъ. The oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest Словѣне Slověne to describe the Slavs. Other Slavic attestations include Old East Slavic Словене Slověně for "an East Slavic group near Novgorod." However, the earliest written references to the Slavs under this name are in other languages. In the 6th century AD Procopius writing in Byzantine Greek, refers to the Σκλάβοι Sklaboi, Σκλαβηνοί Sklabēnoi, Σκλαυηνοί Sklauenoi, Σθλαβηνοί Sthlauenoi, or Σκλαβῖνοι Sklabinoi,[9] while his contemporary Jordanes refers to the Sclaveni in Latin.[10]
The Slavic autonym Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo "word," originally denoting "people who speak (the same language)," i.e. people who understand each other, in contrast to Slavic word denoting "foreign people" – němci, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic němъ – "mumbling, mute"). The latter word may be the derivation of words to denote German/Germanic people in many later Slavic languages: e.g., Polish Niemiec, Ukrainian Німець, Czech Němec, Slovak Nemec, Russian and Bulgarian Немец, Slovenian Nemec, Serbian Немац, Bosnian and Croatian Nijemac etc.[11]
Proposals for the etymology of Slověninъ propounded by some scholars enjoy much less support. B.P. Lozinski argues that the word slava once had the meaning of worshipper, in this context meaning "practicer of a common Slavic religion," and from that evolved into an ethnonym.[12] S.B. Bernstein speculates that it derives from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *(s)lawos, cognate to Ancient Greek λαός laós "population, people," which itself has no commonly accepted etymology.[13] Meanwhile others have pointed out that the suffix -enin indicates a man from a certain place, which in this case should be a place called Slova or Slava, possibly a river name. The Old East Slavic Slavuta for the Dnieper River was argued by Henrich Bartek (1907–1986) to be derived from slova and also the origin of Slovene.[14]
[edit] Tags:Greek,Indo-european,Europe,Ethnonym,East Slavic,Proto-slavic,Old Church Slavonic,Old East Slavic,Procopius,Byzantine Greek,Jordanes,Latin,Mute,Proto-indo-european,Ancient Greek,Dnieper River,Sclaveni,Byzantine, | |
| Discourse on The Early Slavs | |
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The term Slav has different meanings depending upon the context in which it is used. This term refers to a culture (or cultures) living north of the Danube River, east of the Elbe River, and west of the Vistula River during the five hundred thirties CE.[15] In addition, Slav is an identifier for the common ethnic group.[16] Furthermore, Slav denotes any language with linguistic ties to the modern Slavic language family (which has no connection to a common culture or shared ethnicity).[17] Despite the various notions of Slav, it is unclear whether any of these descriptions add to an accurate representation of that group's history, since historians, such as George Verdansky, Florin Curta, and Michael Karpovich have called into question how, why, and to what degree the Slavs were cohesive as a society between the sixth and ninth centuries CE.[18] When discussing the existing evidence which specialists use to construct a plausible history of the Slavs, the information tends to fall into three different avenues of research: the archeological, the linguistic, and the historiographic.
Archaeologically, a myriad of physical evidence exists from this time period pertaining to the Slavs. This evidence ranges from hill forts, to ceramic pots and fragments, and abodes. However, there are three major problems in studying the spread of early Slavic groups by purely archaeological methods. Archaeologists face difficulties in distinguishing what finds are truly Slavic and what are not.[19] In addition, many of these findings are either inaccurately carbon-dated or so isolated that they do not reflect organized Slavic settlement.[20] The combination of these facts makes it difficult to create a reliable chronology of ceramic materials, hill forts, houses, brooches, and other small artifacts. As a result, using archaeological finds without other forms of evidence prevents us from concluding anything about the Slavs and is consequently not wholly reliable for historical debates about this group.[21] The lack of grave sites also diminishes archaeologists' abilities to assess how the Slavs changed as a people, both in terms of their social behavior and their migratory patterns. Consequently, discerning where in northern Europe Slavic groups lived during the sixth to ninth centuries represents a challenge. The cumulative effects of these difficulties circumvents the construction of a thorough history of Slavic development in Northern Europe during this period through archaeological evidence alone.
Historiographically, a number of sources exist which describe the Slavs. However, there are several problems using these texts to build upon the available knowledge of the early Slavs, even when used in a multi-disciplinary fashion. The useful historical information about the Slavs from these texts are either mostly cryptic or lack any mention of their sources of information to confirm their findings.[22] Moreover, these works tend to discuss the Slavs only in terms of their effects on surrounding empires, in particularly with the Byzantines and the Franks. The variety of names from historiographic texts which refer to the Slavs, such as the Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi, in addition to the locales and regions which they at one point or another occupied, makes it laborious to establish a geographical boundary for major Slavic settlement. In particular, this is a troublesome task when the names of these places have not always remained the same or even survived. Most importantly, the majority of the texts utilized to describe the Slavs during this period are either second-hand accounts or describe an encounter with these groups years, decades, or centuries after it occurred. While earlier texts contextualize the Slavs' early history and later development, texts written about an event long after it had occurred are removed from the time period in question, making the relevant information less reliable. Unfortunately, neither earlier nor later texts directly aid to our understanding of the Slavs during the five hundreds to eight hundreds CE.
Linguistically, the pursuit of a Slavic history is also problematic. This pursuit has focused on three main areas of study: Slavic geographical names, names of flora and fauna, and an examination of “lexical and structural similarities and differences between Slavic and other languages.[23]” The use of ethnic identifiers in written texts during and after the 500s CE, such as the description of the Slavs as Antes, Sclaveni, and Venethi by their immediate neighbors, produces problems when dealing with a group so often perceived as a unified society. Moreover, the concept of ethnicity during this period was so fluid that different ethnicities would be ascribed to the same group depending upon the situation of the encounter, such as in Michal Parczewski's map. This map, which is a conglomeration of different written fragments about the Slav's homeland, selectively draws upon these fragments. In order to validate his preconceived theories about Slavic migration, Parczewski omitted information from his sources which directly contradicted his conclusions, thus making the map of Slavic settlement in relation to their neighbors during the sixth century CE extremely suspect.[24] Moreover, the association of particular styles of pots and burials with specific ethnonyms by archaeologists, and extremely selective use of historiographic materials, presumes a direct connection between language and ethnicity. These facts reinforce how subjective ethnic identification can be, especially in a region where many tribal groups existed and identified themselves as distinct from one another.[25]
It is important to keep in mind that the history of the early Slavs is inseparable from the political agenda behind much nineteenth and twentieth century archaeological, linguistic, and historiographic research. Florin Curta, an expert on the history of the early Slavs, contends that the process of creating such a history “was a function of both ethnic formation and ethnic identification.[26]” However, this process became extremely blurred by a myriad of interests. These agendas ranged from Pan-Slavic researchers in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,[27] to post-World War Two European nations strengthening their newfound legitimacy,[28] to contemporary politicization of historical, archaeological, and linguistic discourse.[29] As a result, the very history which professionals continue to clarify to this day was shaped by the agendas of these periods, and must undergo extreme scrutiny when assessing such interpretive histories. In order to create a nonpartisan a presentation of the Slavs, it is crucial to distinguish the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural derivation of the label Slav, how that term informed the various agendas which created it, and the implications such associations has in constructing as accurate a history as possible.
[edit] Tags:List,Eastern Europe,Slavic Language Family,Byzantines,Franks,Antes,Venethi,Michal Parczewski's Map,Ethnonyms,Pan-slavic,Early Slavs,Danube,Florin Curta,Oder,Vistula, | |
| Homeland debate | |
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The location of the Slavic homeland has been the subject of significant debate. The Prague-Penkov-Kolochin complex of cultures of the 6th to 7th centuries CE are generally accepted to reflect the expansion of Slavic-speakers at that time.[30] Serious candidates for the core from which they expanded are cultures within the territories of modern Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. The proposed frameworks are:
Slavic lands c. 500-550 AD
Slavic peoples in 6th century
Historical distribution of the Slavic languages. The larger shaded area is the Prague-Penkov-Kolochin complex of cultures of the 6th to 7th centuries, likely corresponding to the spread of Slavic-speaking tribes of the time. The smaller shaded area indicates the core area of Slavic river names (after Mallory & Adams (1997:524ff).
European territory inhabited by East Slavic tribes in 8th and 9th century.
Milograd culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs (or Balto-Slavs) were the bearers of the Milograd culture (7th century BCE to 1st century CE) of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus.
Chernoles culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs were the bearers of the Chernoles culture (750–200 BCE) of northern Ukraine, and later the Zarubintsy culture (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE).
Lusatian culture hypothesis: The pre-Proto-Slavs were present in north-eastern Central Europe since at least the late 2nd millennium BCE, and were the bearers of the Lusatian culture (1300–500 BCE), and later the Przeworsk culture (2nd century BCE to 4th century CE).
Danube basin hypothesis: postulated by Oleg Trubachyov;[31] sustained at present by Florin Curta,[32] also supported by an early Medieval Slavic narrative source - Nestor's Chronicle
[edit] Tags:Belarus,Poland,Ukraine,Milograd Culture,Chernoles Culture,Zarubintsy Culture,Central Europe,Lusatian Culture,Przeworsk Culture,Oleg Trubachyov,Nestor's Chronicle, | |
| Research history | |
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The starting point in the autochtonic/allochtonic debate was the year 1745, when Johann Christoph de Jordan published De Originibus Slavicis. The works of Slovak philologist and poet Pavel Jozef Šafárik (1795–1861) has influenced generations of scholars. The foundation of his theory was the work of Jordanes, Getica. Jordanes had equated the Sclavenes and the Antes to the Venethi (or Venedi) also known from much earlier sources, such as Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and Ptolemy.
Pavel Jozef Šafárik bequeathed to posterity not only his vision of a Slavic history, but also a powerful methodology for exploring its Dark Ages: language.[32]
The Polish scholar Tadeusz Wojciechowski (1839–1919) was the first to use place names to write Slavic history. He was followed by A. L. Pogodin and the Polish botanist, J. Rostafinski.
The first to introduce archaeological data into the scholarly discourse about the early Slavs, Lubor Niederle (1865–1944), endorsed Rostafinski’s theory in his multi-volume work The Antiquities of the Slavs. Vykentyi V.Khvoika (1850–1914), a Ukrainian archaeologist of Czech origin, linked the Slavs with Neolithic Cucuteni culture. A. A. Spicyn (1858–1931) assigned to the Antes the finds of silver and bronze in central and southern Ukraine. Czech archaeologist Ivan Borkovsky (1897–1976) postulated the existence of a pottery “Prague type” which was a national, exclusively Slavic, pottery. Boris Rybakov, has issue a theory that made a link between both Spicyn’s “Antian antiquities” and the remains excavated by Khvoika from Chernyakhov culture and that those should be should be attributed to the Slavs.[32]
From the 19th century onwards, the debate became politically charged, particularly in connection with the history of the Partitions of Poland and German imperialism known as Drang nach Osten. The question whether Germanic or Slavic peoples were indigenous on the land east of the Oder river was used by factions to pursue their respective German and Polish political claims to governance of those lands.
Geneticists entered the debate in the 21st century. See the Genetics section below.
[edit] Tags:Autochtonic,Allochtonic,Johann Christoph De Jordan,De Originibus Slavicis, | |
| Earliest accounts | |
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The relationship between the Slavs and a tribe called the Veneti east of the river Vistula in the Roman period is uncertain. The name may refer both to Balts and Slavs.
Further information: Vistula Veneti
The Slavs under name of the Antes and the Sclaveni make their first appearance in Byzantine records in the early 6th century. Byzantine historiographers under Justinian I (527-565), such as Procopius of Caesarea, Jordanes and Theophylact Simocatta describe tribes of these names emerging from the area of the Carpathian Mountains, the lower Danube and the Black Sea, invading the Danubian provinces of the Eastern Empire.
Procopius wrote in 545 that "the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a single name in the remote past; for they were both called Spori in olden times." He describes their social structure and beliefs:
For these nations, the Sclaveni and the Antae, are not ruled by one man, but they have lived from of old under a democracy, and consequently everything which involves their welfare, whether for good or for ill, is referred to the people. It is also true that in all other matters, practically speaking, these two barbarian peoples have had from ancient times the same institutions and customs. For they believe that one god, the maker of lightning, is alone lord of all things, and they sacrifice to him cattle and all other victims.
He mentions that they were tall and hardy:
"They live in pitiful hovels which they set up far apart from one another, but, as a general thing, every man is constantly changing his place of abode. When they enter battle, the majority of them go against their enemy on foot carrying little shields and javelins in their hands, but they never wear corselets. Indeed, some of them do not wear even a shirt or a cloak, but gathering their trews up as far as to their private parts they enter into battle with their opponents. And both the two peoples have also the same language, an utterly barbarous tongue. Nay further, they do not differ at all from one another in appearance. For they are all exceptionally tall and stalwart men, while their bodies and hair are neither very fair or blond, nor indeed do they incline entirely to the dark type, but they are all slightly ruddy in color. And they live a hard life, giving no heed to bodily comforts...".[33]
Jordanes tells us that the Sclaveni had swamps and forests for their cities.[34] Another 6th-century source refers to them living among nearly impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes.[35]
Menander Protector mentions a Daurentius (577-579) that slew an Avar envoy of Khagan Bayan I. The Avars asked the Slavs to accept the suzerainty of the Avars, he however declined and is reported as saying: "Others do not conquer our land, we conquer theirs [...] so it shall always be for us".[36]
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| Scenarios of ethnogenesis | |
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Areas of Slavic 'homeland', according to Mallory
The Globular Amphora culture stretches from the middle Dniepr to the Elbe in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. It has been suggested as the locus of a Germano-Balto-Slavic continuum (compare Germanic substrate hypothesis), but the identification of its bearers as Indo-Europeans is uncertain. The area of this culture contains numerous tumuli – typical for IE originators.
The Chernoles culture (8th to 3rd c. BC, sometimes associated with the "Scythian farmers" of Herodotus) is "sometimes portrayed as either a state in the development of the Slavic languages or at least some form of late Indo-European ancestral to the evolution of the Slavic stock."[37] The Milograd culture (700 BC - 100 AD), centered roughly on present-day Belarus, north of the contemporaneous Chernoles culture, has also been proposed as ancestral to either Slavs or Balts.
The ethnic composition of the bearers of the Przeworsk culture (2nd c. BC to 4th c. AD, associated with the Lugii) of central and southern Poland, northern Slovakia and Ukraine, including the Zarubintsy culture (2nd c. BC to 2nd c. AD, also connected with the Bastarnae tribe) and the Oksywie culture are other candidates.
The area of southern Ukraine is known to have been inhabited by Scythian and Sarmatian tribes prior to the foundation of the Gothic kingdom. Early Slavic stone stelae found in the middle Dniester region are markedly different from the Scythian and Sarmatian stelae found in the Crimea.
Daily Life of Eastern Slavs, by Sergei Ivanov.
The (Gothic) Wielbark Culture displaced the eastern Oksywie part of the Przeworsk culture from the 1st century AD, some modern historians dispute the link between the Wielbark culture and the Goths. While the Chernyakhov culture (2nd to 5th c. AD, identified with the multi-ethnic kingdom established by the Goths) leads to the decline of the late Sarmatian culture in the 2nd to 4th centuries, the western part of the Przeworsk culture remains intact until the 4th century, and the Kiev culture flourishes during the same time, in the 2nd-5th c. AD. This latter culture is recognized as the direct predecessor of the Prague-Korchak and Pen'kovo cultures (6th-7th c. AD), the first archaeological cultures the bearers of which are indisputably identified as Slavic.
Proto-Slavic is thus likely to have reached its final stage in the Kiev area; there is, however, substantial disagreement in the scientific community over the identity of the Kiev culture's predecessors, with some scholars tracing it from the Ruthenian Milograd culture, others from the "Ukrainian" Chernoles and Zarubintsy cultures and still others from the "Polish" Przeworsk culture.
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| Genetics | |
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This article may contain inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text. Please help improve this article by checking for inaccuracies. (help, talk, get involved!) (January 2011)
Further information: Genetic history of Europe
Haplogroup R1a Distribution
Distribution of I2a2 by region.
The modern Slavic peoples carry a variety of Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups. Yet two paternal haplogroups predominate: R1a1a [M17] and I2a2a [L69.2=T/S163.2]. The frequency of Haplogroup R1a ranges from 63.39% in the Sorbs, through 56.4% in Poland, 54% in Ukraine, 52% in Russia, Belarus, to 15.2% in Republic of Macedonia, 14.7% in Bulgaria and 12.1% in Herzegovina.[38] The correlation between R1a1a [M17] and the speakers of Tags: | |
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