Where is the ancestral home of the Slavs? What versions are put forward by scientists about this? Read the article and you will find out the answers to these questions. The ethnogenesis of the Slavs is the process of the formation of an ethnic Old Slavic community, which led to the separation of this people from the mass of Indo-European tribes. Today there is no generally accepted version of the maturation of the Slavic ethnic group.
First evidence
The ancestral home of the Slavs is of interest to many specialists. This people was first attested in Byzantine documents of the 6th century. Retrospectively, these sources mention the Slavs in the 4th century. Earlier information refers to the peoples who participated in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs (Bastarns), but the degree of their involvement in different historical restorations varies.
Written confirmations of the authors of the VI century from Byzantium speak of an already established people, divided into Antes and Slavs. Wends are mentioned as the ancestors of the Slavs in a retrospective direction. The evidence of the authors of the Roman era (I-II centuries) about the Wends does not allow themconnect with some old culture of the Slavs.
Definition
The ancestral home of the Slavs has not yet been precisely determined. Archaeologists call some archaic cultures starting from the 5th century Russian originals. In academic teaching, there is no single point of view on the ethnic pedigree of the bearers of earlier civilizations and their connection with later Slavic ones. Linguists also have different opinions about the time of the emergence of a language that could be called Slavic or Proto-Slavic. Current scientific versions suspect the separation of Russian speech from Proto-Indo-European in a colossal range from the 2nd millennium BC to the 2nd millennium BC. e. until the first centuries A. D. e.
The history of education, the origin and range of ancient Rusyns are studied by special methods at the intersection of various sciences: history, linguistics, genetics, paleoanthropology, archeology.
Indo-Europeans
The ancestral home of the Slavs excites the minds of many today. It is known that in the Bronze Age in Central Europe there was an ethno-linguistic community of the Indo-European race. The assignment of individual speech groups to it is controversial. The German professor G. Krae concluded that while the Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, Greek and Armenian languages had already separated and developed independently, the Celtic, Italic, Illyrian, Germanic, B altic and Slavic languages were only dialects of a single Indo-European language. The ancient Europeans, who inhabited central Europe north of the Alps, created a common terminology in the area of agriculture, religion and social relations.
Eastern race
And where was the ancestral home of the Eastern Slavs located? The tribes of this people, who managed to merge into a single whole (according to many scientists), made up the main population of medieval Ancient Russia. As a result of the subsequent political stratification of these people, three peoples were formed by the 17th century: Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.
Who are Eastern Rusyns? This is a cultural and linguistic society of Russians who use East Slavic languages in their speech. The designation "Russian Slavs" was also used by some early researchers. An Eastern Slav… Few people know about his history. The reason for this is not only the lack of own writing, but also the remoteness from the civilized centers of that period.
Eastern Slav is described in Byzantine, Arabic and Persian written sources. Some information about him was found using a comparative analysis of Slavic languages and in archaeological data.
Expansion
The ancestral home of the Slavs and their resettlement are discussed by many researchers. Some believe that the expansion occurred due to a population explosion caused by climate warming or the emergence of the latest agricultural technology, while others believe that it was the fault of the Great Migration of Peoples, which devastated part of Europe in the first centuries of our era during the invasions of the Sarmatians, Germans, Avars, Huns, Bulgars and Russians.
Presumably the origin and ancestral home of the Slavs are associated with the population of the Przeworsk culture. This people in the west bordered on the Celtic and Germanic tribalworld, in the east - with the Finno-Ugric peoples and the B alts, in the southeast and south - with the Sarmatians. Some prospectors think that during this period there was still a continuous Slavic-B altic combination, that is, these tribes were not yet completely fragmented.
At the same time, there was an expansion of the Krivichi in the Smolensk Dnieper region. The Tushemla civilization previously existed in this area, the ethnicity of which archaeologists look at in different ways. It was replaced by a purely Slavic old culture, and the Tushemla settlements were destroyed, since at that time the Slavs did not yet live in cities.
Conclusions
The most ancient Slavic tribes were studied by the famous academician linguist ON Trubachev. He analyzed the Slavic vocabulary of blacksmithing, pottery and other crafts and concluded that the speakers of the Old Slavic dialects (or their forefathers) at the time when the appropriate terminology was being formed were actively in contact with the Italics and Germans, that is, the Indo-Europeans of Central Europe. He believes that the tribes of the ancient Russians separated from the Indo-European society in the Danube region (the northern part of the Balkans), after which they migrated and mixed with other ethnic groups. Trubachev says that it is impossible to identify by means of linguistics the moment of separation of the Proto-Slavic dialect from the Indo-European one due to their archaic proximity.
Many linguists argue that common Slavic speech began to form in the first centuries AD. e. Some call the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. According to glottochronology, Slavic was a separate languagein the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Some linguists give earlier dates.
Vocabulary analysis
There are different versions of the ancestral home of the Slavs. Many tried to determine the ancient fatherland of the Russians by analyzing their old vocabulary. F. P. Filin believes that this people developed in a forest belt with an abundance of swamps and lakes, far from the sea, steppes and mountains.
On the basis of the famous beech argument, the Polish botanist Yu. Rostafinsky tried to localize the forefathers of the Slavs in 1908: “The Slavs transferred the common Indo-European name of beech to willow, willow and did not know beech, fir and larch.” The word "beech" is borrowed from German speech. Today, the eastern border of the irradiation of this tree is located approximately on the line Odessa - Kaliningrad, however, testing of pollen in fossil finds indicates its wider range in antiquity.
In the Bronze Age, beech grew in almost all lands of Eastern Europe (except northern ones). In the Iron Age, during the formation of the Slavic ethnos (according to most historians), beech remains were found in most of Russia, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Crimea and the Black Sea region. It follows that the likely place of Slavic ethnogenesis may be the south-west of Russia, the northern and central regions of Ukraine, Belarus.
In the Russian north-west (Novgorod possessions) beech grew back in the Middle Ages. Today there are beech forests in Northern and Western Europe, Poland, the Carpathians, and the Balkans. In its natural habitat, fir does not grow on the lands of the Carpathians and the eastern borderPoland to the Volga. Thanks to this nuance, the homeland of the Rusyns can be located somewhere in Belarus or Ukraine, if the guesses of linguists about the botanical lexicon of this people are correct.
In all Slavic languages (and B altic) there is a word "linden", denoting the same tree. Hence the hypothesis about the overlapping of the range of linden with the homeland of Russian tribes appeared, but due to the impressive prevalence of this plant, it was not taken into account.
Report of Soviet philologists
The ancestral home of the Slavs and their ethnogenesis are of interest to many specialists. The lands of northern Ukraine and Belarus belong to the area of widespread B altic toponymy. A specific study of the Soviet academicians philologists O. N. Trubachev and V. N. Toporov showed that the B altic hydronyms in the Upper Dnieper region are often decorated with Slavic suffixes. This means that these people appeared there later than the B alts. This discrepancy is eliminated if we recognize the considerations of individual linguists about the separation of the Proto-Slavic dialect from the general B altic one.
V. N. Toporov's opinion
B. N. Toporov believed that the B altic speech was closest to the original Indo-European, while all other Indo-European languages in the process of development moved away from their original state. He argues that the Proto-Slavic dialect was the B altic southern peripheral dialect, which passed into Proto-Slavic from about the 5th century BC. e. and then independently transformed into the ancient language of the Rusyns.
Versions
Disputes about the origin andthe ancestral home of the Slavs continues today. In the Soviet era, two main versions of the ethnogenesis of Rusyns were widespread:
- Polish (defines the ancestral home of the Slavs in the interfluve of the Oder and Vistula).
- Autochthonous (arose under the influence of the theoretical views of the Soviet scientist Marr).
Both reconstructions agreed in advance with the Slavic origin of the early archaic cultures in the lands inhabited by the Rusyns in the Middle Ages, and some of the original antiquity of the dialect of this people, autonomously formed from the Proto-Indo-European.
The accumulation of information in research and the deviation from patriotically conditioned explanations led to the emergence of new versions based on the allocation of a relatively concentrated core of the maturation of the Slavic ethnos and its distribution through migrations to neighboring territories.
Academic discipline has not produced a unified point of view on the place and time of the formation of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Today, there are no generally accepted conditions for attributing old cultures to this people. In this regard, a sign of the lack of dialect of the ancient Rusyn language may be promising.
It was not possible to create a convincing version of the ethnogenesis of Russians on the basis of information from any one scientific subject. Current theories try to integrate the knowledge of all historical disciplines. In general, it is assumed that the Slavic ethnos appeared due to the merger of ethnically different Indo-European communities at the turn between the Scytho-Sarmatians and the B alts, with the participation of Finnish, Celtic and othersubstrates.
Hypotheses of scientists
Scientists are not sure that the Slavic ethnic group BC. e. existed. This is evidenced only by the contradictory assumptions of linguists. There is no evidence that the Slavs are descended from the B alts. Using different sources, professors build hypotheses about the roots of Russians. However, they not only unequally determine the place of the Slavic ancestral home, but also name different times for the separation of the Slavs from the Indo-European community.
There are many hypotheses according to which the Rusyns and their forefathers have existed since the end of the III millennium BC. e. (O. N. Trubachev), from the end of the II millennium AD. e. (Polish academicians T. Ler-Splavinsky, K. Yazhzhevsky, Yu. Kostshevsky and others), from the middle of the II millennium BC. e. (Polish professor F. Slavsky), from the VI century. BC e. (L. Niederle, M. Vasmer, P. J. Shafarik, S. B. Bernstein).
The earliest scientific guesses about the ancestral homeland of the Slavs can be found in the works of Russian historians of the 18th-19th centuries. V. O. Klyuchevsky, S. M. Solovyov, N. M. Karamzin. In their research, they rely on The Tale of Bygone Years and conclude that the Danube River and the Balkans were the ancient homeland of the Rusyns.
