Early Slavs

Battle between the Slavs and the Scythians — painting by Viktor Vasnetsov (1881)

The early Slavs were speakers of Indo-European dialects[1] who lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th centuries AD) in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the Early and High Middle Ages.[2] The Slavs' original homeland is still a matter of debate due to a lack of historical records; however, scholars generally place it in Eastern Europe,[3] with Polesia being the most commonly accepted location.[4][5]

It is generally agreed that ancient Roman writers referred to the ancestors of Slavs as Venedi.[6] The proto-Slavic term Slav shares roots with Slavic terms for speech, word , and perhaps was used by early Slavic people themselves to denote other people, who spoke languages similar to theirs. The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By then, the nomadic Iranian-speaking peoples living in the European Pontic Steppe (the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, etc.) had been absorbed by the region's Slavic-speaking population.[7][8][9][10] Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded westwards (to the Elbe river and in the Alps), and southwards (into the Balkans, absorbing Illyrian and Thracian peoples in the process),[11] and also moved eastwards (in the direction of the Volga River). Between the sixth and seventh centuries, large parts of Europe came to be controlled or occupied by Slavs, a process less understood and documented than that of the Germanic ethnogenesis in the west. Yet the effects of Slavicization were far more profound.[12]

Beginning in the 7th century, the Slavs were gradually Christianized (both by the Greek and pre-Schism Roman Orthodox Catholic Churches). By the 12th century, they formed the core populations of a number of medieval Christian states: East Slavs in the Kievan Rus', South Slavs in the Bulgarian Empire, the Principality of Serbia, the Duchy of Croatia and the Banate of Bosnia, and West Slavs in the Principality of Nitra, Great Moravia, the Duchy of Bohemia, and the Kingdom of Poland. The oldest known Slavic principality in history was Carantania, established in the 7th century by the Eastern Alpine Slavs, the ancestors of present-day Slovenes. Slavic settlement of the Eastern Alps comprised modern-day Slovenia, Eastern Friul and large parts of present-day Austria.

  1. ^ Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, eds. (11 June 2018). "81: The phonology of Slavic". Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Volumes 41-43 van Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science [HSK]. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 1415. ISBN 978-3-11-054036-9. Retrieved 29 June 2024. [Common Slavic (CSl)] [...] is better approached as a permeable dialect continuum [...]. CSl has usually been envisioned as a distinct language from the beginning of the CSl changes; its speakers have usually been essentialized as 'Proto-Slavs.' The discussions have been muddled by nationalism and essentialist notions of ethnic identity. Scholars have dated the emergence of CSl language, and thus the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, as early as ca. 1000 BCE and as late as ca. 400 CE.
  2. ^ Barford 2001, p. vii, Preface.
  3. ^ "Slav | people". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 26 August 2018.
  4. ^ Kobyliński 2005, pp. 525–526.
  5. ^ Zdziebłowski, Szymon (10 August 2018). "Archaeologists found traces of the cradle of the Slavs in Belarusian Polesie". Science in Poland. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  6. ^ Langer, William L. (1948). Encyclopedia of World History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 239.
  7. ^ Brzezinski, Richard; Mielczarek, Mariusz (2002). The Sarmatians, 600 BC-AD 450. Osprey Publishing. p. 39. [...] Indeed, it is now accepted that the Sarmatians merged in with pre-Slavic populations.
  8. ^ Adams, Douglas Q. (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Taylor & Francis. p. 523. [...] In their Ukrainian and Polish homeland the Slavs were intermixed and at times overlain by Germanic speakers (the Goths) and by Iranian speakers (Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans) in a shifting array of tribal and national configurations.
  9. ^ Atkinson, Dorothy; Dallin, Alexander; Warshofsky Lapidus, Gail, eds. (1977). Women in Russia. Stanford University Press. p. 3. [...] Ancient accounts link the Amazons with the Scythians and the Sarmatians, who successively dominated the Pontic steppe for a millennium extending back to the seventh century B.C. The descendants of these peoples were absorbed by the Slavs who came to be known as Russians.
  10. ^ Slovene Studies. Vol. 9–11. Society for Slovene Studies. 1987. p. 36. [...] For example, the ancient Scythians, Sarmatians (amongst others), and many other attested but now extinct peoples were assimilated in the course of history by Proto-Slavs.
  11. ^ Stanaszek, Łukasz Maurycy (2001). Fenotyp dawnych Słowian (VI-X w.) (PDF). Retrieved 11 April 2021.
  12. ^ Geary 2003, p. 144: [B]etween the sixth and seventh centuries, large parts of Europe came to be controlled by Slavs, a process less understood and documented than that of the Germanic ethnogenesis in the west. Yet the effects of Slavicization were far more profound