Popular myths about the characteristics and history of the Slavs

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Slavs are the largest ethno-linguistic community in Europe, but scientists are still arguing about the origin of the Slavs and their early history. What can we say about mere mortals. Unfortunately, misconceptions about the Slavs are not uncommon.

The most peaceful

One of the most common misconceptions is the opinion that the Slavs are a peaceful ethno-linguistic community. It is not difficult to refute it. It is enough to look at the area of settlement of the Slavs. The Slavs are the largest ethno-linguistic community in Europe. The conquest of territories in history has rarely been carried out by peaceful diplomatic means. They had to fight for new lands, and the Slavs throughout their history showed combat prowess.

Already in the 1st millennium AD, the Slavs almost completely captured the former European provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and formed their independent states on them. Some of them still exist today.

An important indicator of the fighting efficiency of the Slavs is the fact that the military elite of the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries, were recruited from Christians who lived mainly in Greece, Albania and Hungary. As a special privilege, the Janissaries could also take children from Muslim families in Bosnia, but, what is important, only Slavs.

All Slavs are fair-haired and fair-skinned

It is also a delusion that the Slavs are entirely fair-haired, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. This opinion is found among radical supporters of the purity of Slavic blood.

In fact, among the South Slavs, dark hair and eyes color, skin pigmentation is a widespread phenomenon.

Some ethnic groups, such as, for example, the Pomaks, are not at all similar in phenotype to the textbook "Slavs", although they belong to Caucasians, and speak the Slavic language, which preserves in the lexicon, including Old Slavonic lexemes.

Slavs and slave are cognate words

Until now, among Western historians there is an opinion that the word "Slavs" and the word "slave" (slave) have the same root. I must say that this hypothesis is not new; it was popular in the West as far back as the 18th-19th centuries.

This opinion is based on the idea that the Slavs, as one of the most numerous European peoples, were often the object of the slave trade.

Today this hypothesis is recognized as erroneous, English “slave”, German “Sklave”, Italian “schiavo” on the one hand, and Russian “Slavs”, Polish “słowianie”, Croatian “slaveni”, Kashubian “słowiónie” on the other are not interconnected in any way.

Linguistic analysis shows that the word "slave" in Middle Greek comes from the ancient Greek verb σκυλεύειν (skyleuein) - meaning "to get spoils of war, to plunder", the 1st person singular of which looks like σκυλεύω (in Latin transliteration skyleúō), another variant σκυλάω (skyláō).

The Slavs did not have a written language before Glagolitic and Cyrillic

The opinion that the Slavs did not have a written language before the appearance of the Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabet is disputed today. Historian Lev Prozorov cites a fragment of an agreement with Byzantium the Prophetic Oleg as proof of the existence of writing. It deals with the consequences of the death of a Russian merchant in Constantinople: if a merchant dies, then one should "deal with his property as he wrote in his will."

The presence of writing is indirectly confirmed by archaeological excavations in Novgorod. There were found writing-rods, with which the inscription was applied to clay, plaster or wood.

These writing instruments date from the middle of the 10th century. The same finds were found in Smolensk, Genzdovo and other places.

It is difficult to say for certain what kind this writing was. Some historians write about syllabic writing, about writing with "features and vestments", there are also supporters of the Slavic runic writing. The German historian Konrad Schurzfleisch, in his dissertation in 1670, wrote about the schools of the Germanic Slavs, where children were taught runes. As proof, he cites a sample of the Slavic runic alphabet, similar to the Danish runes of the XIII-XVI centuries.

Slavs - descendants of the Scythians

Alexander Blok wrote: "Yes, we are Scythians!" Until now, one can come across the opinion that the Scythians were the ancestors of the Slavs, however, there is a lot of confusion in historical sources with the very definition of the Scythians. In the same Byzantine chronicles, the Slavs, Alans, Khazars, and Pechenegs could already be called Scythians.

In the "Tale of Bygone Years" there are references to the fact that the Greeks called the peoples of Russia "Scythia": "Oleg went to the Greeks, leaving Igor in Kiev; He took with him a multitude of Varangians, and Slavs, and Chudi, and Krivichi, and Meru, and Drevlyans, and Radimichs, and Polyans, and Northerners, and Vyatichi, and Croats, and Dulebs, and Tivertsy, known as Tolmachi - all of them were called Greeks "Great Scythia".

But that says little. There are too many “ifs” in the hypothesis of the origin of the Slavs from the Scythians.

To date, the Vistula-Dnieper hypothesis about the ancestral home of the Slavs is recognized as the most reliable. It is confirmed by both lexical parallels and archaeological excavations.

According to the lexical material, it was established that the ancestral home of the Slavs was away from the sea, in a forest plain zone with swamps and lakes, within the rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea.

Archeology also supports this hypothesis. The bottom link in the archaeological chain of the Slavs is considered to be the so-called “culture of sub-horse burials,” which got its name from the custom of covering cremated remains with a large vessel. In Polish "flare" means "upside down". It dates back to the 5th-2nd centuries BC.

The Scythians already existed at this time and took an active part in the historical process. After the invasion of the Goths in the 3rd century, they most likely went to the mountainous regions of the Caucasus. Of the modern languages, the Ossetian language is the closest to Scythian.