Ancestral home of the Slavs. Versions and disputes about the origin and ancestral home of the Slavs

Where is the ancestral home of the Slavs? What versions do scientists put forward in this regard? Read the article and you will learn the answers to these questions. The ethnogenesis of the Slavs is called the process of formation of the ethnic Slavic community, which led to the liberation of this people from the mass of Indo-European tribes. Today there is no generally accepted version of the maturing of the Slavic ethnos.

First evidence

The forefathers of the Slavs are interested in many specialists. This people was first witnessed in Byzantine documents of the VI century. In retrospect, these sources mention the Slavs in the IV 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 acknowledgments of the authors of the VI century from Byzantium speak of a well-established people, divided into antes and sklavins. The Venedines are mentioned as the ancestors of the Slavs in a retrospective direction. The proofs of the authors of the Roman era (1st-2nd centuries) about the Wends do not allow them to be combined with some old Slav culture.

Definition

The ancestral home of the Slavs is still not exactly defined. Archaeologists call Russian originals some archaic cultures, beginning with the fifth century. In the academic teaching there is no single point of view on the ethnic pedigree of the carriers of earlier civilizations and their connection with the later Slavic ones. Linguists also have different opinions about the time of the origin of the language, which could be called Slavic or Proto-Slavic. Current scientific versions suspect the isolation of Russian speech from the primordial European in a colossal range from the 2nd millennium BC. E. Before the first centuries AD. E.

The history of education, the origin and the area of ancient Rusyns are studied by special methods at the junction of various sciences: history, linguistics, genetics, paleoanthropology, archeology.

Indo-Europeans

The forefathers of the Slavs today are stirring the minds of many. It is known that in the Bronze Age in Central Europe there was the ethno-linguistic community of the Indo-European race. The attribution 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, Baltic and Slavic languages were only dialects of a single Indo-European language. The ancient Europeans, who inhabited the middle Europe to the 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? The tribes of this people, who managed to merge into a single whole (according to many scientists), were the main population of medieval Ancient Rus. As a result of the subsequent political stratification of these people, by the XVII century three people were formed: Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.

Who are the Eastern Ruthenians? This is a cultural and linguistic society of Russians, using in their speech Eastern Slavic languages. Some early researchers also used the designation "Russian Slavs". The Eastern Slav ... Little is known about its history. The reason for this is not only the lack of own writing, but also the distance from the civilized centers of that period.

The Eastern Slav is described in Byzantine, Arabic and Persian written sources. Some information about it was found with the help of a comparative analysis of the Slavic languages and in archaeological data.

Expansion

The forefathers of the Slavs and their resettlement are discussed by many researchers. Some believe that the expansion was due to the demographic explosion caused by the warming of the climate or the emergence of modern farming techniques, while others - that through the fault of the Great Migration of Nations, devastated in the first centuries of our era a part of Europe during the invasions of Sarmatians, Germans, Avars, Huns, Bulgars and Russians.

Presumably the origin and ancestral homeland of the Slavs are connected with the population of the Pshevorsk culture. This people in the west bordered on the Celtic and German tribal world, in the east - with Finno-Ugric and Balts, in the southeast and south - with the Sarmatians. Some prospectors think that during this period there was still an uninterrupted Slav-Baltic aggregate, that is, these tribes have not yet completely shattered.

At the same time, there was an expansion of Krivichi in the Smolensk Dnieper. In this area there was a Tushlinsky civilization earlier, on an ethnic belonging which archaeologists look differently. It was replaced by a purely Slavic old culture, and the Tushamli fortifications were destroyed, since at that time the Slavs did not live in cities yet.

conclusions

The oldest Slavic tribes studied the famous academician linguist ON Trubachev. He analyzed the Slavic vocabulary of blacksmith, pottery and other crafts and concluded that the carriers of Old Slavic dialects (or their forefathers) at the time when the proper terminology was formed, actively contacted the Italics and Germans, that is, the Indo-Europeans of Central Europe. He believes that the tribes of ancient Rusich were separated from Indo-European society on the Danube (northern part of the Balkans), after which they migrated and mixed with other ethnic groups. Trubachev says that it is impossible to reveal by means of linguistics the moment of separation of the Proto-Slavic dialect from the Indo-European in connection with their archaic proximity.

Many linguists argue that the Slavonic speech began to form in the first centuries BC. E. Some call the middle of the 1st millennium BC. E. According to glottochronology, the Slavonic was an isolated language in the middle of the II millennium BC. E. Some linguists call earlier dates.

Analysis of vocabulary

Versions of the ancestral home of the Slavs exist different. Many tried to identify the ancient homeland Rusich with the help of an analysis of their old vocabulary. F. P. Filin believes that this people developed in the 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 patriarchy of the Slavs in 1908: "The whole of the Indo-European name of the beech Slavs was transferred to willow, willow and did not know beech, fir and larch". The word "beech" is borrowed from Germanic speech. Today, the eastern boundary of irradiation of this tree is located approximately on the line Odessa-Kaliningrad, however, pollen testing in fossil finds indicates its wider area in antiquity.

In the Bronze Age, the beech grew on almost all the lands of Eastern Europe (except for the northern). In the Iron Age, during the formation of the Slavic ethnos (according to most historians), remains of beech are found in most of Russia, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Crimea and the Black Sea region. It follows that the probable place of Slavic ethnogeny can be the southwest of Russia, the northern and central regions of Ukraine, and Belarus.

In the Russian north-west (Novgorod possessions) the beech grew in the Middle Ages. Beech forests today are in Northern and Western Europe, Poland, the Carpathians, the Balkans. In the natural habitat, fir does not grow on the lands of the Carpathians and the eastern border of Poland to the Volga. Thanks to this nuance, the country of Rusyns can be located somewhere in Belarus or in Ukraine, if the linguists' conjectures about the botanical lexicon of this people are correct.

In all Slavic languages (and Baltsk) there is a word "linden", denoting the same tree. Hence a hypothesis appeared about overlapping the area of lime with the native land of Russian tribes, but due to the impressive prevalence of this plant, it was not taken into account.

Report of Soviet philologists

The forefathers 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 Baltic toponymy. A specific study of Soviet academicians of philologists, O. N. Trubacheva and V. N. Toporov, showed that the Baltic hydronyms in the Upper Dnieper are often decorated with Slavic suffixes. This means that this people appeared there later than the Balts. This discrepancy is eliminated if one recognizes the considerations of individual linguists about the isolation of the Slavonic dialect from the common Balts.

Opinion of VN Toporov

VN Toporov believed that the Baltic speech is the closest to the original Indo-European, while all other Indo-European languages in the development process departed from the original state. He argues that the Proto-Slavic dialect was a Baltic South-Peripheral dialect, which passed into the Proto-Slavic from about the fifth century BC. E. And then independently transformed into the ancient language of the Ruthenians.

Versions

Disputes about the origin and the ancestral home of the Slavs continue today. In the Soviet era, two main versions of the ethnogenesis of Rusyns were disseminated:

1. Polish (defines the ancestral home of the Slavs in the interfluve of the Oder and the Vistula).
2. Autochthonous (originated under the influence of the theoretical views of the Soviet scientist Marr).

Both reconstructions in advance agreed with the Slavic origin of the early archaic cultures on the lands inhabited by the Rusyns in the Middle Ages, and some ancient antiquity of the dialect of this people, autonomously formed from the primo-European one.

The accumulation of information in the studies and the deviation from patriotically explained explanations led to the appearance of new versions based on the allocation of the concentrated core of the maturing of the Slavic ethnos and its distribution by migration to neighboring territories.

Academic discipline did not produce a single point of view on the place and time of the formation of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Today there is no generally recognized condition for classifying old cultures as belonging to this people. Promising in this regard may be a sign of the dialectonicity of the ancient language of Rusyns.

It was not possible to create a convincing version of the ethnogenesis of the Russians on the basis of information from just one scientific subject. The current theories try to unite the information of all historical disciplines. In general, it is assumed that the Slavic ethnos appeared due to the merging of ethnically different Indo-European communities on the boundary between the Scythian-Sarmatians and the Balts with the participation of Finnish, Celtic and other substrates.

Hypotheses of scientists

Scientists are not sure that the Slavic ethnos BC. E. Existed. This is indicated only by the contradictory assumptions of linguists. There is no evidence that the Slavs came from the Balts. Using different sources, the professors build hypotheses about the roots of Russians. However, they not only unequally determine the place of the Slavic ancestral home, but also call different times for the Slavs to be separated from the Indo-European community.

There are many hypotheses according to which the Ruthenians and their patriarchy existed already from the end of the III millennium BC. E. (ON Trubachev), from the end of the II millennium BC. E. (Polish academicians T. Ler-Splavinsky, K. Yazhdzhevsky, 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. Fasmer, P.J. Safarik, S. B. Bernstein).

The earliest scientific conjectures about the patriotic nature of the Slavs can be found in the works of Russian historians of the XVIII-XIX centuries. VO Klyuchevsky, SM Solovyov, NM Karamzin. In their studies, they rely on the "Tale of Bygone Years" and conclude that the ancient fatherland of Rusyns were the Danube and the Balkans.