Early Slavs
The early Slavs were Indo-European peoples and speakers of the Indo-European dialects
who lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages 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. The Slavs' original homeland is still a matter of debate due to a lack of historical records, but scholars generally place it in Eastern Europe, with Polesia being the most commonly accepted location.
It is generally agreed that ancient Roman writers referred to the ancestors of Slavs as Venedi. 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 had been absorbed by the region's Slavic-speaking population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded westwards, and southwards, and also moved eastwards. 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.
Beginning in the 7th century, the Slavs were gradually Christianized by the Church. 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 Friuli and large parts of present-day Austria.
Origins
The early Slavs were known to the Roman writers of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD under the name of Veneti. Authors such as Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Ptolemy described the Veneti as inhabiting the lands east of the Vistula river and along the Venedic Bay. Later, having split into three groups during the migration period, the early Slavs were known to the Byzantine writers as Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni. The 6th century historian Jordanes referred to the Slavs in his 551 work Getica, noting that "although they derive from one nation, now they are known under three names, the Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni".Procopius wrote that "the Sclaveni and the Ante actually had a single name in the remote past; for they were both called Sporoi in olden times". Possibly the oldest mention of Slavs in historical writing Slověne is attested in Ptolemy's Geography as Σταυανοί and Σουοβηνοί, likely referring to early Slavic tribes in a close alliance with the nomadic Alanians, who may have migrated east of the Volga River. In the 8th century during the Early Middle Ages, early Slavs living on the borders of the Carolingian Empire were referred to as Wends, with the term being a corruption of the earlier Roman-era name.
The earliest, archaeological findings connected to the early Slavs are associated with the Zarubintsy, Chernyakhov and Przeworsk cultures from around the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD. However, in many areas, archaeologists face difficulties in distinguishing between Slavic and non-Slavic findings, as in the case of Chernyakhov and Przeworsk, since the cultures were also attributed to Iranian or Germanic peoples and were not exclusively connected with a single ancient tribal or linguistic group. Later, beginning in the 6th century, Slavic material cultures included the Prague-Korchak, Penkovka, Ipotești–Cândești, and the Sukow-Dziedzice group cultures. With evidence ranging from fortified settlements, ceramic pots, weapons, jewellery and open abodes.
Proto-Slavic homeland
The Proto-Slavic homeland is the area of Slavic settlement in Central and Eastern Europe during the first millennium AD, with its precise location debated by archaeologists, ethnographers and historians. Most scholars consider Polesia the homeland of the Slavs.Theories attempting to place Slavic origin in the Near East have been discarded. None of the proposed homelands reaches the Volga River in the east, over the Dinaric Alps in the southwest or the Balkan Mountains in the south, or past Bohemia in the west. One of the earliest mention of the Slavs' original homeland is in the Bavarian Geographer circa 900, which associates the homeland of the Slavs with the Zeriuani, which some equate to the Cherven lands.
According to historical records, the Slavic homeland would have been somewhere in Central-Eastern Europe. The Prague-Penkova-Kolochin complex of cultures of the 6th and the 7th centuries AD is generally accepted to reflect the expansion of Slavic-speakers at the time. See "Archaeology" section below for more details about the Slavs' original homeland.
Linguistics
began to evolve from Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed language from which originated a number of languages spoken in Eurasia. The Slavic languages share a number of features with the Baltic languages, which may indicate a common Proto-Balto-Slavic phase in the development of those two linguistic branches of Indo-European. Frederik Kortlandt places the territory of the common language near the Proto-Indo-European homeland: "The Indo-Europeans who remained after the migrations became speakers of Balto-Slavic". According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe.Proto-Slavic developed into a separate language during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Proto-Slavic vocabulary, which was inherited by its daughter languages, described its speakers' physical and social environment, feelings and needs. Proto-Slavic had words for family connections, including svekry, and zъly. The inherited Common Slavic vocabulary lacks detailed terminology for physical surface features that are foreign to mountains or the steppe: the sea, coastal features, littoral flora or fauna or saltwater fish.
Proto-Slavic hydronyms have been preserved between the source of the Vistula and the middle basin of the Dnieper. Its northern regions adjoin territory in which river names of Baltic origin abound. On the south and east, it borders the area of Iranian river names. A connection between Proto-Slavic and Iranian languages is also demonstrated by the earliest layer of loanwords in the former; the Proto-Slavic words for god ', demon ', house ', axe ' and dog are of Scythian origin. The Iranian dialects of the Scythians and the Sarmatians influenced Slavic vocabulary during the millennium of contact between them and early Proto-Slavic.
A connection between Proto-Slavic and the Germanic languages can be assumed from the number of Germanic loanwords, such as *kupiti, *xǫdogъ, *šelmъ and *xlěvъ. The Common Slavic words for beech, larch and yew were also borrowed from Germanic, which led Polish botanist Józef Rostafiński to place the Slavic homeland in the Pripet Marshes of Polesia, which lack those plants.
Common Slavic dialects before the 4th century AD cannot be detected since all of the daughter languages emerged from later variants. Tonal word stress is present in all Slavic languages, and Proto-Slavic reflects the language that was probably spoken at the end of the 1st millennium AD.
Historiography
, Procopius and other Late Roman authors provide the probable earliest references to the southern Slavs in the second half of the 6th century AD. Jordanes completed his Gothic History, an abridgement of Cassiodorus's longer work, in Constantinople in 550 or 551. He also used additional sources: books, maps or oral tradition.Jordanes wrote that "After the slaughter of the Heruli, Hermanaric also took arms against the Venethi. This people, though despised in war, was strong in numbers and tried to resist him. These people, as we started to say at the beginning of our account or catalogue of nations, though off-shoots from one stock, have now three names, that is, Venethi, Antes and Sclaveni". His claim was accepted more than a millennium later by Wawrzyniec Surowiecki, Pavel Jozef Šafárik and other historians, who searched the Slavic Urheimat in the lands that the Venethi lived during the last decades of the 1st century AD. Pliny the Elder wrote that the territory extending from the Vistula to Aeningia, was inhabited by the Sarmati, Wends, Sciri and Hirri. Jordanes in De origine actibusque Getarum, wrote that "Within these rivers lies Dacia, encircled by the lofty Alps as by a crown. Near their left ridge, which inclines toward the north, and beginning at the source of the Vistula, the populous race of the Venethi dwell, occupying a great expanse of land. Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places, yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes. The abode of the Sclaveni extends from the city of Noviodunum and the lake called Mursianus to the Danaster and northward as far as the Vistula. They have swamps and forests for their cities. The Antes, who are the bravest of these peoples dwelling in the curve of the sea of Pontus spread from the Danaster to the Danaper rivers that are many days' journey apart".
Procopius completed his three works on Emperor Justinian I's reign during the 550s. Each book contains detailed information on raids by Sclavenes and Antes on the Eastern Roman Empire, and the History of the Wars has a comprehensive description of their beliefs, customs and dwellings. Although not an eyewitness, Procopius had contacts among the Sclavene mercenaries who were fighting on the Roman side in Italy.
Agreeing with Jordanes's report, Procopius wrote that the Sclavenes and Antes spoke the same languages but traced their common origin not to the Venethi but to a people he called "Sporoi". Sporoi is equivalent to the Latin semnones and germani, and the German linguist Jacob Grimm believed that Suebi meant "Slav". Jordanes and Procopius called the Suebi "Suavi". The end of the Bavarian Geographer's list of Slavic tribes contains a note: "Suevi are not born, they are sown ".
A similar description of the Sclavenes and Antes is found in the Strategikon of Maurice, a military handbook written between 592 and 602 and attributed to Emperor Maurice. Its author, an experienced officer, participated in the Eastern Roman campaigns against the Sclavenes on the lower Danube at the end of the century. A military staff member was also the source of Theophylact Simocatta's narrative of the same campaigns.
Although Martin of Braga was the first western author to refer to a people known as "Sclavus" before 580, Jonas of Bobbio included the earliest lengthy record of the nearby Slavs in his Life of Saint Columbanus. Jonas referred to the Slavs as "Veneti" and noted that they were also known as "Sclavi".
Western authors, including Fredegar and Boniface, preserved the term "Venethi". The Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons referred to Slavs in the Elbe-Saale region and Pomerania as "Wenden" or "Winden". The Franks and the Bavarians of Styria and Carinthia called their Slavic neighbours "Windische", which is still seen today in the names given to Slovene towns and villages by German speakers. Example: Slovene Slovenj Gradec and German: Windisch-Graetz.
The unknown author of the Chronicle of Fredegar used the word "Venedi" to refer to a group of Slavs who were subjugated by the Avars. In the chronicle, "Venedi" formed a state that emerged from a revolt led by the Frankish merchant Samo against the Avars around 623. A change in terminology, the replacement of Slavic tribal names for the collective "Sclavenes" and "Antes", occurred at the end of the century; the first tribal names were recorded in the second book of the Miracles of Saint Demetrius, around 690. The unknown "Bavarian Geographer" listed Slavic tribes in the Frankish Empire around 840, and a detailed description of 10th-century tribes in the Balkan Peninsula was compiled under the auspices of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in Constantinople around 950.