Ethnogenesis and mythogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies

Indo-European languages ​​(aka Aryan) are divided into groups (from east to west)
- Indian: the actual language of the Aryans who came to India in the 15-12 centuries BC, main. monument - hymns of the Rig Veda, also known as the Book of Hymns. Later, the Vedic language was transformed into Sanskrit (a language that was always literary! and not colloquial), and even later a bunch of different Indian dialects and languages ​​developed, of which you are most interested - Gypsy. Yes, it is an Indo-European language of the Indian group.
- Iranian. Persia, "Avesta" and this is exactly what Zarathushtra said, and not as Nietzsche wrote. From the republics of the Soviet Union, the language of the Iranian group is Tajik, in the Caucasus the language of the Iranian group is Ossetian. The Iranian people were Scythians(but not any other nomads!)
- Armenian. What language it is presented in - guess for yourself ;-)
- Slavic. Let's talk about it separately. You can read about the division into Eastern, Southern and Western Slavs on Wikipedia.
- Baltic. Very close to the Slavic, of all the Indo-European groups, these two separated most recently. Baltic languages ​​- Lithuanian And Latvian(but not Estonian - it is from the Finnish group), several more have become extinct.
- Albanian. Presented in one language. Perhaps it would be useful to clarify that Albanians do not live in the Belarusian city of Bobruisk, but in the west of the Balkan Peninsula, bordering the Montenegrin Slavs and other fragments of Yugoslavia.
- Greek. It is represented by two main languages: Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. In fact, there were more of them, but that’s for linguists.
- Romanesque. This Italy, from Latin to the present day, Spain with the one joining her Portugal, France, Romania, Moldova(sorry, Moldova).
- Germanic. Well, what is the most common language of the Germanic group? No, not German. Who said "English"? Student, let's take your record book, your grade is excellent. Everyone also belongs to the German group Scandinavian(for the list - again on Wiki). Let us remember separately that the language of the Germanic group is Yiddish(and that is precisely why Hebrew was revived in Israel, because it is indecent for them to actually chat in German).
- Celtic, dear to the heart of every lover of the Middle Ages. If you love The Romance of Tristan and Isolde as much as I do, the list of Celtic languages ​​is very easy to remember: it only takes place in Celtic lands. That is, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (the Cornish language is extinct) plus the Brittany peninsula in France.
That's it, there's an ocean next :-)
I haven't mentioned a few extinct groups that aren't particularly relevant to non-philologists.

Now about the resettlement. There are several hypotheses about where the Indo-Europeans began to settle around the world, but one way or another this is the territory of southern Russia, Ukraine and the surrounding area. It happened quite a long time ago - 7000 years ago. Therefore, although the ancestral home is located in modern Slavic lands, to say that “everyone descended from the Slavs” is a little frivolous. At this time, all these groups do not yet exist, there are only Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Gradually they begin to spread out and after a couple of thousand years the Indo-Iranians are already beyond the Caspian Sea, the ancestors of the Greeks are in the Balkans, and in Central Europe too - either the ancestors of the Celts or the Italians...
In the historical year 2000 (BC, of ​​course), a great event happened - the chariot was invented. As for the date - you know, I’m joking, but this is really the period. And then the settlement of the Indo-Europeans became more fun. The Indo-Iranians quickly divided into Iranians themselves and those who rode off to India in chariots, becoming, logically, Indians. In the west, the Celts also gave the autochthons a light - there is such a colorful Celtic text “War chariot with sickles.” It is, of course, much later, but terribly impressive. As a result, some swallowed almost the entire Hindustan, while others swallowed all of Europe right up to Ireland.
A noble thing is the chariot.
But you also asked me about the Slavs.
A logical question: after all, someone lived in the same Dnieper-Black Sea region - were they Slavs? Or at least the ancestors of the Slavs?
The answer is something like this. Herodotus in the 5th century BC wrote about neuroses (they turn into wolves and all that), and many consider this information about the ancestors of the Slavs. Your humble servant also wrote that the testimony of Herodotus should be understood as a ritual dressing up in skins, and the wolf is the ancestor of the Slavs (for me, but also for wolves, Slavs and... mat).
But this is a hypothesis. There is something about the Slavs in the 1st-2nd centuries AD, but I am not familiar with these texts. But everything really begins in the fifth century, when the Slavs clearly act as a people with their own language and culture.

On the similarities between the Slavs and Indian Aryans. Yes, it's big. Yes, “An Indian is a brother to a Russian,” as they bawled during the time of Khrushchev. But. We must understand that the “similarity between Sanskrit and Russian” is a dozen roots that appeared in newspaper publications about 30 years ago, and other similarities are understandable only to a philologist. Well, for example, what Russian word is related to the name of the Indian goddess of sacred speech Vach? Answer: the verb “to blather”, that is to say “to speak”. Will you see this similarity at first sight? Well, that's all there is to it...

The True History of the Russian People

Yu. D. Petukhov

BY THE ROADS OF THE GODS

Ethnogenesis and mythogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies.

Metagalaxy 1998

UD K 931 "The True History of the Russian BBK 63.3(0)3 People." Index 45898

Compiled by Dm. Andreev Photos by N. I. Tsepeleva and Yu. D. Petukhov

P31 Petukhov Yu. D. On the roads of the Gods: Ethnogenesis and mythogenesis of the Indo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies: Monograph. - M.: Publishing house "Metagalaktika", 1998. - 256 p., ill., photo, incl. - (series "The True History of the Russian People", issue 1).

The monograph of the famous historian Yu. D. Petukhov sets out the essence of his discovery in the field of Indo-European studies and the entire ancient history of mankind: the ancestral group of Indo-Europeans, who gave birth to almost all the peoples of Europe and many peoples of Asia, were the Proto-Slavs-Russians who lived in the 15th-2000s BC . e. in Asia Minor, in the Balkans, the Apennines, in Central Europe, throughout the Mediterranean, in the Northern Black Sea region... All, without exception, the languages ​​of the Indo-European language family, including “ancient Greek” and Sanskrit, developed from the single language of the Proto-Russians. There are also the origins of all mythologies, including “ancient”, Indo-Aryan, Germanic, Celtic, etc.

The monograph is written vividly, imaginatively, captivatingly, and is supplied with many illustrations and photographs. It is of undoubted interest not only for specialists - linguists, historians, ethnologists - but also for the widest layers of readers interested in the secrets and mysteries of History.

"On the Roads of the Gods" is an intellectual bestseller of the late 20th century.

ISBN 5-85141-022-1 UDC 931

BBK 63.3(0)3 (c) Yu. D. Petukhov, 1998 (c) Design "Metagalaxy", 1998

Index 45896

Preface

You are holding in your hands not just a book, not just another scientific treatise, which presents yet another version of another author on the most complex problem of historical science. No! Before you is a Discovery that has no analogues in world practice in terms of its significance. None of the discoveries in physics, chemistry, astronomy and many other sciences can have the same significance as the solution to the origin and formation of humanity itself, since for us, the bearers of reason, man, homo sapiens, and his race are primary. Everything else is secondary: the Universe exists outside of us and without us. But we make discoveries in Him and we make them for ourselves. A person has not yet fully figured out who he is, where his roots are... many “links” are missing, the research apparatus and search methodology are imperfect... And the more significant is the contribution of the author of the monograph, the author of this discovery to modern science: now we can We can safely say that the genesis of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, moreover, the Boreals, that is, the process of human formation in the last thirty thousand years is known to us. Yes, we have every reason to talk about this, because in his research the author used material that cannot be falsified or varied. And therefore, its discovery gives us a picture of the True History of Mankind, it allows us to connect together and arrange into a logical diagram thousands of previously unconnected facts of the history of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Along the way, this discovery resolves hundreds of other problems that currently exist in history, archeology, anthropology, linguistics and related disciplines - problems generated by the absence of a basic historical doctrine, based not on the conclusions of historians and not on subjective chronicles, but on the real course of History. Now such a base exists. World science has received not only a fulcrum and a reference point, but also a lever with the help of which much can be turned around in our worldview, bringing it closer to the objective, the real.

Yu. D. Petukhov devoted about twenty years to the study of the Proto-Indo-European community and the ethnic groups that emerged from it. And not in vain. The results are more than impressive. You will see this for yourself after reading the monograph. Unlike the overwhelming majority of domestic and foreign scientists, he managed to conduct his scientific research not only in the quiet of offices and libraries, but also directly on the ground, in the centers of the origin and existence of Proto-Indo-Europeans - in Jericho, Catal-Uyuk, Alache, Khirokitiya, Hattussa , Yazylykae, etc. He walked, rode, sailed along the paths, roads, paths of ancient settlers who scattered all over the world, taking away from their distant ancestral home the roots of their language, their mythology... taking away their gods. That's why the book is called "Roads of the Gods." Linguistic and mythological analysis made it possible to penetrate into depths inaccessible to any chronicles and annals - language cannot be falsified, just like the very archaism of the original ethnicity, preserved by its direct descendants.

The irrefutability of Yu. D. Petukhov’s conclusions in his scientific work allows us, even before widespread discussion in the world academic press, to assert that he made a discovery of a global nature. The problem of Proto-Indo-Europeans and Bo-Reals, the main problem of Indo-European studies, has been resolved. Only one question remains - is the scientific community of the world ready to accept the perfect discovery.

Editorial

Our path leads to the goddesses of Persephone, To the blind springs, under the canopies of mournful groves of Rain and willows, where ferns, horsetails and black yew clothed the forest slopes... There we go, to the sunsets of dark days In the meeting of yearning shadows.

Maximilian Voloshin

For almost two centuries, the scientific world of the planet has been struggling with an “unsolvable” riddle: the ancient Indo-Europeans - who are they, where are they from? In scientific, pseudo-scientific and pseudoscientific discussions, tens of thousands of crossed copies have been broken, hundreds of hypothetical buildings have been built and destroyed, dozens of the most authoritative opinions have been trampled upon, and countless works of varying importance have been published. But with all this, it would be wrong to say that “academic science” is confidently approaching the solution to one of the most complex and confusing questions in history. Almost two centuries of Indo-European studies! And the “academics” are still trampling at the very foot of the mysterious and incomprehensible Sphinx.

During all this time, the scientific sieve has eliminated about two dozen of the most reliable hypotheses about the origin of the Indo-Europeans and their future paths. And although some of these hypotheses have now acquired the right of almost immutable dogmas and wander from publication to publication, accompanied by more and more new comments, it must be admitted that at this stage they remain just assumptions. And to be more precise, some hypothetical schemes built by the authors using, of course, completely reliable factual material that fits within the framework of these schemes and does not destroy the structure. And no matter how attractive such schemes may be, we must be aware of the fact that, say, even the most carefully drawn plan of a city is not yet the city itself, or - an example from another area - no matter how satisfied we are with the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom , it is very far from the atom itself, it is only an extremely simplified diagram of this incomprehensible microscopic object. But if we take a plan or a map of the city, draw it up, having the city itself as a completely real object in front of us, and study the properties of the atom with the help of instruments that again mark phenomena that actually exist today, then, taking on the construction of an “Indo-European” hypothetical tower, even The author, burdened with scientific titles, should probably remember that many of the stones laid in the foundation may turn out to be only ghosts or diagrams built in turn. Scheme multiplied by scheme! Schematics squared. And it is difficult to do anything, because not every day science brings us new and completely reliable discoveries - the door of history is open only in one direction.

Schematicism leads us to one-sidedness and a black and white vision of the world: either this way or that way! either only according to scheme number one, or only according to scheme number two! either Normanism or anti-Normanism! etc. ad infinitum. Schools and schemes are fighting each other, not wanting to give an inch. And thus they lose! In life there is no “only this way” or “only that way”. In life there is “this way and that,” to put it simply. “The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is in Asia Minor!” states one researcher. "No, only in the Balkans, and nowhere else!" - the other one repeats. “It’s not like that,” says a third, “in Central Europe!” And everyone finds an innumerable number of arguments to prove their particular scheme.

For us, who have undertaken to summarize some data on Indo-European studies and the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, and also trying, in turn, to express some thoughts and assumptions, it would be good to adhere to the wise advice of F. M. Dostoevsky, who once said that life is much more complicated than even the smartest of schemes , into which we are trying to squeeze it.

But this does not mean at all that we will push away the time-tested models of human history, no. Without taking into account the accumulated experience of generations, without the knowledge that our predecessors gave us, there is no way forward. Another thing is to separate genuine knowledge from naked, purely mental constructions and false stereotypes. This is not an easy matter! For example, how can one prove to a contemporary that primitive man never lived in caves, that these caves were temples, storage facilities, temporary shelters, but in no case housing? How to do this if the false stereotype about the “caveman” has been hammered into the brains of generations for decades and continues to be hammered to this day?! And false generalizing schemes are built on such false stereotypes. Serious researchers from time to time try to protest against such profanation. But how can they compete with the media and textbooks, which present ideas from a hundred years ago year after year!

Let's not talk about organizing history education in our country; this is a hopeless undertaking. It is not from textbooks or lectures that our contemporary learns about discoveries and discoveries, not just new, recent ones, but ten, twenty, forty and sixty years ago, but from small-circulation scientific and popular science books and brochures, from rare historical periodicals. And therefore, he, a contemporary, is to this day not just in the dark, but for the most part in captivity of erroneous or outdated ideas, which, of course, facilitate the perception of some historical processes, but are infinitely far from the true events of history.

Here is the basic scheme, familiar to us from an early age, from high school. Stages of development of human society: primitive darkness and ignorance - Ancient Egypt - Ancient East - Ancient Greece - Rome - barbarians, mainly Gauls and Germans, and barbarian kingdoms - the European Middle Ages, etc. We will not go far to the East or to the South, and within the framework of the problem that interests us, let’s take a closer look at the places of settlement of the peoples of the Indo-European language family and their closest neighbors. So, what do we have from the textbooks? Yes, almost a periodic system similar to the system of D.I. Mendeleev, where each nation-element is assigned a strictly indicated place in a certain tablet - temporal and geographical. Well, everything is so clear and strict that you are amazed! And naturally, in Ancient Egypt - the Egyptians, in the Ancient East - Sumerians, Assyrians, Phoenicians and Jews, in Greece - the Greeks, in Rome - the Romans, between the last two ethnic groups, in a half-line, the Etruscans were generally incomprehensible and unexplained for a schoolchild, by the way, completely erased from the latest edition, then in Europe the Franks, Alemanni, Angles... Somewhere from the very edge the Slavs loom slightly, and even then the southern ones, appearing only in the 5th-6th centuries. n. e. only with their resettlement to the Balkans, and then the Avars, Huns, Hungarians... And all - in groups, groups, periods, classes and subgroups. May the reader forgive me for the involuntary comparison, but it feels like you are walking along some kind of time axis through a schematically built zoo, or rather an anthropological park, in which everyone sits strictly in their own cages and enclosures without the right to go outside and in each such cage-enclosure sign: such and such, from such and such a time to such a time! At best, the same sign indicates: then and then he repelled (or did not repulse) the attack of the inhabitants of the neighboring cell. I don’t argue, perhaps it is precisely this simplified breakdown that contributes to a better assimilation of the material by schoolchildren, as well as by students, but it is precisely this that makes it impossible to see historical reality as a complex and multi-ethnic process.

At the final stage of the formation of ancient Greek culture, we see the “classical” Greeks and somehow spontaneously attribute priority to them, the Greeks, in all previous stages. It’s the same with the Romans and other “classical” peoples. Instead of multidimensionality (tm) and polyphony in textbooks there are continuous planes, sometimes intersecting, but this does not cease to be planes.

Everything is classified in the scheme, everything is distributed and delimited, each people is assigned a sort of serial number, each is assigned its own not only ecological, but also historical “niche.”

Somewhere at the end of the 8th, or even the 10th century. It is unclear from where the figure of a wild and bestial Eastern Slav appears, as if he had fallen from the sky onto his land. So we see in the picture from the textbook a certain creature in a long shirt, picking the ground with a rough wooden stick, and in appearance it does not even look like a plow. This creature also collects mushrooms, hangs tubs and beats fish in the river with a pointed twig. This is the idea a young man gets about his ancestors - an idea that is not ten or sixty years old, but turns two hundred years old at lunchtime, which was suitable for Miller-Schletzer times and which is stubbornly dragged from textbook to textbook to this day. Truly an immortal scheme!

We will not go into details now and refute those false stereotypes that do not stand up to the slightest criticism. Let’s just say that beings who appeared out of nowhere in one or two centuries could simply not, under any circumstances, have created Gardarika - a “country of cities” - on a vast area and the most ancient literature in Europe, second in antiquity only to the literature of ancient times *, but superior in the same respect to English, French, German, etc. literature. And all these are immutable facts. But the scheme lives! It is replicated, imposed. But within the framework of this very scheme there is no life!

And you can fight inside the cage-scheme, like an animal beats and rushes in its enclosure, like a fish in a cage, and still not understand, not see, not comprehend anything. What to do, what to do? Yes, it’s very simple - you need to get out of the cage-scheme, move away from it and, without losing sight of well-known models and schemes, take a closer look at life in all its diversity.

* Currently, more and more serious researchers are coming to the conclusion that “ancient” works were written in the Middle Ages. And therefore, Russian literature in antiquity is not inferior to them (editor's note).

That's what we'll try to do. And to begin with, let us remind the reader a little of the basics of Indo-European studies, that little that is quite reliable and practically beyond doubt.

Most researchers agree that the Indo-Europeans, as a single linguistic and ethnic community, existed within the chronological boundaries of the V-IV millennia BC. e. Sometimes the borders are expanded in one direction or the other for a whole thousand years. But if the search towards the ancientization of the problem gives results at least in terms of elucidating the roots of the Indo-Europeans themselves (that is, in the question of the origin of the Proto-Indo-Europeans), then rejuvenation, as a rule, does not bring the desired fruits, because already in the 3rd millennium BC. e. we come across a divergence of Indo-European dialect groups, and consequently, a divergence of the ethnic groups themselves, which stood out from the general Indo-European one.

One mighty root gave rise to many branches and even more shoots. We obviously do not now touch on an important detail of our “plant” - the trunk, which will be discussed below.

But we must pay tribute to the linguists who, perhaps, have achieved the greatest success in Indo-European studies. Thanks to them, we can quite clearly navigate this spreading tree, or at least not get too lost, because we have proven and clear milestones. But let us immediately add that we are talking about the Indo-European language family. And therefore, one should not always unambiguously identify language and people, since it happens that these concepts do not correspond: a non-Indo-European ethnic group that fell under the influence of Indo-Europeans can be a native speaker of their language, and vice versa. In each specific case, you need to remember this.

So, over the five to seven thousand years of existence of the peoples of this family, it has grown extraordinary. Let's name the main branch groups. From the Italic branch came Latin, Ocian and Umbrian languages. The first of them served as the basis for French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, and Italian. From the Celtic branch came Breton and Welsh, Irish and Scottish shoots. The Hittite-Luwian and Tocharian branches limited themselves to the languages ​​contained in the names of the branches themselves. The same can, perhaps, be said about the Armenian, Albanian and ancient Greek branches - lush shoots did not come out of them. But the Indian branch blossomed with all its might - Sanskrit, Bengali, Nepali, Hindi, Punjabi, Assamese, Gypsy and other languages. The Iranian branch gave almost the same flowering - it is decorated with Avestan, Kurdish, Persian, Ossetian, Pashto, Tajik, Scythian languages. There are three shoots on the Baltic branch - Latvian, Lithuanian and Prussian. Two more mighty branches that could rightfully be called trunks now. This is the Germanic one, which gave the languages ​​English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese. And the Slavic branch with its Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian languages. Just listing not all the languages ​​of the family took up quite a lot of space. The territory occupied by their carriers is completely vast, even if you do not include the New World and Australia in it, but limit yourself only to the ancestral lands occupied by Indo-European peoples at the beginning of our era.

But they did not occupy these territories immediately, because the process of settlement lasted for thousands of years, and there was some starting point, if not a point, then a very real and tangible place where the original community was formed. That is, the question arises about the ancestral home, one of the key questions of Indo-European studies and all historical science in general. Where is this promised land for most of the current European nations?! There is no answer, at least not a sufficiently convincing and unambiguous one. The mysterious and mysterious ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans - will we ever find it?

And then there are riddles that are no less complex and impossible to solve, stretching in a whole chain. How did they settle? In what directions and in what order? How? And what traces did you leave on your way? Which peoples were swallowed up during their unstoppable movement? What part of themselves, where and when, was absorbed? And the main question is - who were they, after all, these mysterious ancestors of ours - the Indo-Europeans?

Initially, the ancestral home was sought in the East and Central Asia; researchers were attracted to those places for some reason, mainly by their proximity to Iran and India. It was assumed that it was located in the Caspian Sea region or in ancient Bactria, on its land. There were absolutely fantastic theories about a snow-covered and high-mountain ancestral home somewhere in the Himalayas. All these assumptions disappeared by themselves when linguists got down to business more thoroughly and established that in the Proto-Indo-European language there were no designations for Central Asian animals and plants, much less for the Himalayan or other equally exotic ones. And the search immediately moved to South-Eastern Europe: from the Danube to the Caspian Sea. There were, however, searches in the far west of Europe and in its north. But the presence there of fairly thick substrate layers, layers of pre-Indo-European languages, as well as traces of the late penetration of the Indo-Europeans themselves, made such searches fruitless:

Spain and Iceland with all adjacent regions immediately fell out of the sphere of interest of Indo-Europeans. The northeast of Europe was densely populated by Finno-Ugric peoples, this was evidenced by hydronyms - the names of rivers, lakes, swamps, streams, and tributaries. The central and eastern parts of Europe, as well as its entire vast South, remained. Since ancient times, the Balkan-Carpathian region, together with Asia Minor, has been an area distinguished by numerous cultural connections. Most researchers have focused their attention on it. But neither Western Asia, nor the Aegean, nor the Northern Black Sea region, which is part of the larger Circumpontic zone and also covered by research, were left without attention.

There is no need to retell the contents of countless volumes compiled by search engines. We can only say one thing: Central Europe and Western Asia somehow gradually faded into the background, without disappearing from view, however. And the main efforts of researchers turned to the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. At this point the matter stalled. The debate continues. No answer.

But, despite this, research was carried out in parallel on another problem: how did the Indo-Europeans settle? The times of overly self-confident German scientists who declared their land to be the navel of the Universe, from which culture-trader civilizers spread to all corners of the earth, are long gone. The fables about the warlike proto-Teutons, who, under the name of the archaeological culture of “battle axes,” allegedly brought civilization to the Proto-Slavic peoples by force, have been forgotten. It turned out that this completely genuine culture had nothing to do with the “Teutons”, and many even believe that it spread in the opposite direction. But German historians, archaeologists, and linguists have also done something to solve the problem, despite the obvious nationalist approach. And in particular, they were able to find the strength in themselves to recognize the existence of the Proto-Slavs in those days, which our textbook compilers simply cannot decide to do. In other words, the theory of German culture-trade has not justified itself over the past decades.

Yes, the days of romanticism are gone! The romantic theories of “Aryan conquests” have also sunk into oblivion. They looked too beautiful - armadas of conquerors, armed to the teeth and united not only by extraordinary discipline, but also by some incredible national spirit for those times - in the language of L.N. Gumilyov, some frantic super-passionaries - conquered one unknown with fire and sword and exotic country after another, everywhere they established their own strict but fair order, simultaneously introducing the natives to culture. Sheer romance of feat and achievements! All this was best suited for novels and films, tickled the nerves of enthusiastic dreamers, but had nothing to do with life. Life was much simpler. No romance, no sentimentality! Only the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth poured into it a stream of the romantic genre, which reached the twentieth century and subsided under the pressure of practicality.

There were no warlike beasts. This has been established quite accurately. And there were nomadic pastoralists who moved from place to place, if not at a snail’s pace, then in any case not at the speed of military formations or the nomadic Turks of the Middle Ages with their rapid raids. These same cattle breeders, who raised cows, bulls, pigs, and also, which is extremely important, horses, moved from pasture to pasture in families, clans, tribes, moving away from some center in different directions. Of course, they also had clashes with the local population of the regions that they developed. There was everything: skirmishes, battles, and protracted strife. But there was one thing that was missing - the systematic and purposeful conquest of lands with the aim of subjugating the tribes and peoples living on them. That is why, from the most ancient Proto-Indo-European terminology, not the names of weapons came down to us, but words denoting harness, livestock, vegetation of pastures and surrounding areas, names of fish caught in rivers, animals living in forests. This resettlement took very long periods of time, during which languages ​​managed to change beyond recognition and the appearance of people changed - the latter due to mixing with the aborigines.

There is, however, another theory about the spread of Indo-European languages ​​not through the settlement of the speakers themselves, but through the transfer of languages ​​and dialects from neighbor to neighbor, that is, as a result of peaceful convergence, the infusion of individual speakers into neighboring peoples. Of course, such a method of transmission existed. And we have no right to exclude him. But here we need to remember the dangers of schematism and that there is no “either this or nothing!” We can say with a huge degree of confidence: languages ​​were spread by all existing methods, and those who, wittingly or unwittingly, insist only on the “only correct” theory of theirs are simply misleading us. After all, it is quite difficult to imagine that a language on its own, without a native speaker, would spread from, say, the Balkans to the Hindustan Peninsula - the likelihood of such an “independent journey” is negligible. Of course, the Indo-Europeans moved around. There is no subject for dispute here. Another thing is - did they all move, maybe some of them remained in place, at least not too far from this place? Let us remember this point in our reasoning; we will have to return to it more than once. As, indeed, with many other key provisions contained in this introduction.

How many Indo-Europeans were there, at least approximately? We can’t even name the order! Everything is hidden by the veil of centuries and millennia. But time is not the only thing to blame here. The fact is that this question was faced at the dawn of Indo-European studies. Researchers who asked this question immediately came to the conclusion that it was impossible to determine this number without anthropological data. And in order to identify the anthropological type of the Indo-European, it is necessary to find its ancestral home. The ring was closing. Through long comparisons and accumulation of statistics in the places of the most dense settlement of Indo-European peoples, studying the remains found there, comparisons with the main European races living today, it was possible to clarify only one thing: no special Indo-European anthropological type existed. It could be distinguished by comparison with neighboring large races, for example, Western Asian, Ethiopian, Laponoid. But it was not possible to isolate him from the European races. The legend about some special pranation crumbled into the smallest pieces, leaving no hope for any one of the modern peoples, or rather, a group of explorers representing this people, for the priority of their tribe, their nation in terms of direct inheritance. Except for one people...

Apparently, the ancient Indo-Europeans were already there, in the V-IV millennia BC. e., a mixed people, consisting of representatives of many European, and perhaps not only European, ethnic groups. And the single core around which a community, new at that time, took shape, was probably not only consanguinity, but primarily language and culture. There is also no doubt that the primary mixedness, if it can be called that, was, as settlement progressed, overlapped by the secondary mixedness, which came from the infusion of other ethnic groups into the community. It was this ability to assimilate and assimilate that was, perhaps, the most characteristic feature inherent in the Indo-Europeans. This ability served them well, since unlike closed, closed ethnic groups, sooner or later doomed to extinction, they were unusually resilient and had a social antidote to any cataclysms. This ability, one must think, is largely due to the current representatives of the world's largest language family. And what is especially important for us who have undertaken this research is that it is this feature, precisely this property that will help us understand a lot in the European history of the last five to seven thousand years. There is something to think about: after all, this is a considerable period of time, and it was not a separate ethnic group that arose in that distant time that made its way through the thickness of millennia and preserved itself to some extent - no, they have long since disappeared from the face of the earth, but made its way to us, in modernity, so to speak, is a human alloy. An alloy baked in the crucible of time.

Copies: total - 1 Petukhov Yu.D. Roads of the Gods: Ethnogenesis And mythogenesisIndo-Europeans. Resolution of the main problem of Indo-European studies: Monograph...

Doctor of History, Prof. L.L. Zaliznyak

Part 1. IN SEARCH OF THE HOMELAND

Preface

This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of complex problems of Indo-European studies to a wide range of educated readers. Since the early 90s of the last century, when the author of this work became interested in Indo-European studies, several of his articles have been published. Most of them are intended not for a narrow circle of professional Indo-Europeanists (linguists, archaeologists), but for a wide audience of readers interested in ancient history and, above all, students of historians and archaeologists from history departments of universities in Ukraine. Therefore, some of these texts exist in the form of separate chapters of textbooks for history faculties of Ukraine. One of the incentives for this work was the unprecedented explosion in the post-Soviet space of fantastic quasi-scientific “concepts” of countless myth-makers.

The fact that most modern researchers, to one degree or another, include the territory of Ukraine in the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans, also played a role, and some even narrow the latter to the steppes between the Southern Carpathians and the Caucasus. Despite the fact that archaeological and anthropological materials obtained in Ukraine are actively interpreted in the West, Indo-European studies has not yet become a priority issue for Ukrainian paleoethnologists, archaeologists, and linguists.

My vision of the problem of the origin and early history of the Indo-Europeans was formed on the basis of the developments of many generations of Indo-Europeans from different countries. Without in any way claiming to be the author of most of the points raised in the work and having no illusions regarding the final solution to the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans or an exhaustive analysis of all the vast literature on Indo-European studies, the author tries to give a critical analysis of views on the origin of the Indo-Europeans from the standpoint of archeology and other sciences.

There is a huge literature in different languages ​​of the world dedicated to the search for the country from where the ancestors of related Indo-European peoples 5-4 thousand years ago settled the space between the Atlantic in the west, India in the east, Scandinavia in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south. Considering the limited amount of work aimed at a wide audience, the bibliography of the article is narrowed to the most important works on the topic. The specific genre and limited volume of the work excludes the possibility of a full historiographical analysis of the problems raised in it, which would require a full-fledged monographic study.

The direct predecessors of this article were the author’s works published over the last quarter of a century (Zaliznyak, 1994, pp. 78-116; 1998, pp. 248-265; 2005, pp. 12-37; 1999; 200; 2012, pp. 209- 268; Zaliznyak, 1997, p.117-125). The work is actually an expanded and edited translation into Russian of one of the two chapters of a course of lectures for history faculties of Ukraine dedicated to Indo-European studies, published in 2012 ( Leonid Zaliznyak Ancient history of Ukraine. - K., 2012, 542 pp.). The full text of the book can be found on the Internet.

The term Ukraine is used not as the name of a state or ethnonym, but as a toponym denoting a region or territory.

I would like to sincerely thank Lev Samoilovich Klein, a classic of modern archeology and ancient history that I deeply respected from my student days, for the kind offer and the opportunity to place this far from perfect text on this site.

Discovery of the Indo-Europeans

The high level of human development at the beginning of the third millennium was largely predetermined by the cultural achievements of European civilization, the founders and creators of which were, first of all, the peoples of the Indo-European language family - the Indo-Europeans (hereinafter referred to as I-e). In addition, the settlement of other peoples largely predetermined the modern ethnopolitical map of Europe and Western Asia. This explains the extreme scientific significance of the problem of the origin of the Indo-European family of peoples for the history of mankind in general and for the primitive history of Ukraine in particular.

The mystery of the origin of i-e has been worrying scientists in many countries for more than two centuries. The main difficulty in solving it lies, first of all, in the complexity and interdisciplinarity of the problem. That is, to solve it it is necessary to involve data and methods from various scientific disciplines: linguistics, archeology, primitive history, anthropology, written sources, ethnography, mythology, paleogeography, botany, zoology, and even genetics and molecular biology. None of them separately, including the latest sensational constructions of geneticists, are able to solve the problem on their own.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 coincided with the 200th anniversary of the great discovery of Indian Supreme Court Justice Sir William Jones, which Hegel compared to the discovery of the New World by Columbus. Reading the book of religious hymns of the Aryan conquerors of India, the Rig Veda, W. Jones came to the conclusion about the relatedness of the genetic predecessors of other languages ​​- Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Germanic, Slavic. The work of the English lawyer was continued by German linguists of the 19th century, who developed the principles of comparative analysis of languages ​​and finally proved the origin of i-e from one common ancestor. Since then, both modern and dead languages ​​have been thoroughly studied. The latter are known from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda of the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, later written down in Sanskrit, the hymns of the Avesta at the turn of the 2nd-1st millennium BC, the proto-Greek language of ancient Mycenae of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writings Hittites of Anatolia of the 2nd millennium BC, Tocharian sacred texts of Xinjiang of Western China.

Classification of Indo-European languages ​​and peoples

In the middle of the nineteenth century. German linguist A. Schleicher proposed the principle of reconstructing Proto-Indo-European vocabulary using the method of comparative linguistic paleontology. The use of comparative linguistics made it possible to develop a diagram of the genetic tree of languages. The consequence of centuries of efforts by linguists was the classification of languages, which basically took shape by the end of the 19th century. However, to this day there is no consensus among experts about the number of not only languages, but also linguistic groups and peoples. Among the most recognized is the classification scheme, which covers 13 ethno-linguistic groups of peoples: Anatolian, Indian, Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Illyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Tocharian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic (Fig. 1). Each of these groups consists of many closely related living and dead languages.

Anatolian(Hittite-Luwian) group includes Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, as well as the so-called “minor languages”: Pisidian, Cilician, Maeonian. They functioned in Asia Minor (Anatolia) during the 2nd millennium BC. The first three languages ​​are known from the texts of 15,000 clay cuneiform tablets obtained by the German archaeologist Hugo Winkler in 1906. During the excavations of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, the city of Hattusa, east of Ankara. The texts were written in Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) cuneiform, but in an unknown language, which was deciphered in 1914 by the Czech B. Grozny and was called Hittite or Nesian. Among the mass of ritual and business texts in the Hittite language, a few records were found in the related Hittite languages ​​Luwian and Palayan, as well as in the non-Indo-European Hattian. The autochthons of Asia Minor, the Hutts, were conquered at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. the Hittites, but influenced the language of the Indo-European conquerors.

The early Anatolian Hittite, Luwian, and Palalayan languages ​​functioned in Asia Minor until the 8th century. BC. and in ancient times gave rise to the Late Anatolian Lydian, Carian, Cilician and other languages, the speakers of which were assimilated by the Greeks in Hellenistic times around the 3rd century. BC.

Indian(Indo-Aryan) group: Mithani, Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Hindi, Bikhali, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bhili, Khandeshi, Pahari, Kafir or Nuristani, Dardic languages, Gypsy dialects .

The Mittani language was spoken by the ruling elite of the Mittani state, which in the 15th–13th centuries. BC. existed in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. The Indian group of languages ​​comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. advanced from the north into the Indus Valley. The oldest part of their hymns was recorded in the 1st millennium BC. Vedic language, and in the III century. BC. – IV Art. AD - literary language Sanskrit. The sacred Vedic books of the Brahmanas, Upanishads, sutras, as well as the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana are written in classical Sanskrit. In parallel with literary Sanskrit, living Prakrit languages ​​functioned in early medieval India. From them come the modern languages ​​of India: Hindi, Urdu, Bykhali, Bengali, etc. Texts in Hindi have been known since the 13th century.

Kafir, or Nuristani, languages ​​are common in Nuristan, a mountainous region of Afghanistan. In the mountains of Northern Afghanistan and the adjacent mountainous regions of Pakistan and India, the Dardic languages, which are close to Kafir, are widespread.

Iranian(Irano-Aryan) group of languages: Avestan, Old Persian, Median, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Bactrian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Saka, Massagetian, Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanian, Ossetian, Yaghnobi, Afghani, Mujan, Pamir, New Per, Tajik, Talysh, Kurdish, Baluchi, Tat, etc. The Iranian-Aryan group is related to the Indo-Aryan group and comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. settled Iran or Airiyan, which means “country of the Aryans”. Later, their hymns were recorded in the Avestan language in the sacred book of the followers of Zarathustra, the Avesta. The ancient Persian language is represented by cuneiform writings of the Achaemenid period (VI–IV centuries BC), including historical texts of Darius the Great and his successors. Median is the language of the tribes that inhabited Northern Iran in the VIII–VI centuries. BC. before the emergence of the Persian Achaemenid kingdom. The Parthians lived in Central Asia in the 3rd century. BC e. – III Art. AD, until their kingdom was conquered in 224 by the Sassanids. Pahlavi is the literary language of Persia during the Sasanian era (III–VII centuries AD). At the beginning of our era, Sogdian, Khorezmian and Bactrian languages ​​of the Iranian group also functioned in Central Asia.

Among the North Iranian languages ​​of the Eurasian steppe, the dead languages ​​of the nomadic Sakas, Massagetae, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and direct descendants of the last Ossetians of the North Caucasus are known. The Yaghnobi language of Central Asia is a direct continuation of the Sogdian language. Many modern Iranian languages ​​are descended from Farsi, the language of early Middle Ages Persia. These include Novopersky with literary monuments from the 9th century. AD, close to it Tajik, Afghan (Pashto), Kurdish, Talysh and Tat of Azerbaijan, Baluchi, etc.

In history Greek There are three main eras of the language: Ancient Greek (XV century BC – IV century AD), Byzantine (IV–XV centuries AD) and Modern Greek (from the XV century). The ancient Greek era is divided into four periods: archaic (Mycenaean or Achaean), which dates back to the 15th–7th centuries. BC, classical (VIIII–IV centuries BC), Hellenistic (IV–I centuries BC), late Greek (I–IV centuries AD). During the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the following dialects were common in the Eastern Mediterranean: Ionian-Attic, Achaean, Aeolian and Dorian. The Greek colonies of the Northern Black Sea region (Thira, Olbia, Panticapaeum, Tanais, Phanagoria, etc.) used the Ionian dialect, since they were founded by immigrants from the capital of Ionia, Miletus in Asia Minor

The most ancient monuments of the Greek language were written in the Cretan-Mycenaean linear letter “B” in the 15th–12th centuries. BC. Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", describing the events of the Trojan War in the 12th century. BC. were first recorded in the 8th–6th centuries. BC. the ancient Greek alphabet, which laid the foundation for the classical Greek language. The classical period is characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect throughout the Greek world. It was on it that during the Hellenistic period the pan-Greek Koine was formed, which, during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, where it dominated in Roman and Byzantine times. The literary language of Byzantium strictly corresponded to the norms of the classical Attic dialect of the V–IV centuries. BC. It was used by the court of the Byzantine emperor until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The modern modern Greek language was finally formed only in the 18th–19th centuries.

Italian(Romance) group of languages ​​includes Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin and the Romance languages ​​derived from the latter: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Provençal, French, Romanian, etc. Inscriptions related to Oscan, Volscian, Umbrian, Latin, appeared in Central Italy in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. During the process of Romanization of the provinces in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Latin dialects spread throughout the Roman Empire. In the early Middle Ages, this “kitchen Latin” became the basis for the formation of the Romance group of languages.

Celtic the group of languages ​​consists of Gaulish, Irish, Breton, Equine, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish), and the O.Men dialect. Ancient sources first mention the Celts in the 5th century. BC. in the territories between the Carpathians in the east and the Atlantic coast in the west. In IV–III centuries. BC. There was a powerful Celtic expansion to the British Isles, to the territory of France, the Iberian, Apennine, and Balkan peninsulas, to Asia Minor, in the central regions of which they settled under the name of the Galatians. The La Tène archaeological culture of the 5th–1st centuries is associated with the Celts. BC, and the area of ​​their formation is considered to be the northwestern foothills of the Alps. As a result of the expansion of first the Roman Empire, and later the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), the Celts were forced out to the extreme north-west of Europe.

The language of the Gauls assimilated by the Romans from the territory of France at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. known very little from a few inclusions in Latin texts. The Breton, Cornish, and Welsh languages ​​of the Breton peninsulas in France, Cornwall and Wales in Great Britain descended from the language of the Britons, who dispersed under the onslaught of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th–7th centuries. The Scottish and Manx languages ​​are close to Irish, which is recorded in written sources of the IV, VII, XI centuries.

Illyrian the group of languages ​​covers the Balkan-Illyrian, Mesapian, Albanian languages. The Illyrians are a group of Indo-European tribes, which, judging by ancient sources, at least from the 7th century. BC. lived in the Carpathian Basin, on the Middle Danube, in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 2). Its archaeological correspondence is the so-called eastern Hallstatt VIII–V centuries. BC. The Illyrian tribes were assimilated by the Romans and later by the South Slavs. The Albanian language is an Illyrian relic that has been significantly influenced by Latin, Greek, Slavic and Thracian dialects. Albanian texts have been known since the 15th century. Mesapian is a branch of the Illyrian language massif of the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula, which is preserved in the form of grave and household inscriptions of the 5th–1st centuries. BC. in the east of the Apennine Peninsula in Calabria.

In Phrygian The group includes the Thracian dialects of the Dacians, Getae, Mesians, Odrysians, and Tribalians, who in ancient times lived in Transylvania, the Lower Danube and the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula. They were assimilated by the Romans in the 2nd–4th centuries. and the Slavs in the early Middle Ages. Their Romanized descendants were the medieval Volochs - the direct ancestors of modern Romanians, whose language, however, belongs to the Romance group. The Phrygians are a people whose ancestors (flies) in the 12th century. BC. came from the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor. I.M. Dyakonov believed that they took part in the destruction of Troy and the Hittite kingdom (History of the Ancient East, 1988, vol. 2, p. 194). Later, the state of Phrygia with its capital Gordion arose in the north of Anatolia, which was destroyed by the Cimmerians around 675 BC. Phrygian inscriptions date back to the 7th–3rd centuries. BC.

Armenian a language related to Phrygian, and through it connected with the Thracian dialects of the Balkans. According to ancient sources, the Armenians came to Transcaucasia from Phrygia, and the Phrygians came to Asia Minor from Thrace, which is confirmed by archaeological materials. I.M. Dyakonov considered the Armenians to be the descendants of the Phrygians, some of whom, after the fall of Phrygia, moved east to Transcaucasia to the lands of the Huritto-Urartians. The Proto-Armenian language was partially transformed under the influence of the aboriginal language.

The oldest Armenian texts date back to the 5th century, when the Armenian alphabet was created by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots. The language of that time (grabar) functioned until the 19th century. In the XII–XVI centuries. Two dialects of modern Armenian began to form: Eastern Ararat and Western Constantinople.

Tocharian language is the conventional name for dialects, which in the 6th–7th centuries. AD functioned in Chinese Turkestan (Uighuria). Known from religious texts of Xinjiang. V.N. Danilenko (1974, p. 234) considered the ancestors of the Tocharians to be the population of the Yamnaya culture, which in the 3rd millennium BC. reached Central Asia, where it was transformed into the Afanasyev culture. In the sands of Western China, mummies of light-pigmented northern Caucasians of the 1st millennium BC were found, the genome of which shows similarities with the genome of the Celts and Germans of northwestern Europe. Some researchers associate these finds with the Tocharians, who were finally assimilated in the 10th century. Uyghur Turks.

Germanic languages ​​are divided into three groups: northern (Scandinavian), eastern (Gothic) and western. The oldest Germanic texts are represented by archaic runic inscriptions of Scandinavia, which date back to the 3rd–8th centuries. AD and bear the features of the common Germanic language before its dismemberment. Numerous Old Icelandic texts from the 13th century. preserved rich Scandinavian poetry (Elder Edda) and prose (sagas) of the 10th-12th centuries. From about the fifteenth century. The collapse of the Old Icelandic, or Old Norse, language began into the West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic) and East Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish) branches.

The East Germanic group, in addition to Gothic, known from the translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfila, included the now dead languages ​​of the Vandals and Burgundians.

The West Germanic languages ​​include Old English (Anglo-Saxon texts of the 7th century), Old Frisian, Old Low German (Saxon texts of the 9th century), and Old High German. The most ancient monuments of West Germanic languages ​​are the Anglo-Saxon epic of the 8th century. “Beowulf”, known from manuscripts of the 10th century, the High German “Song of the Nibelungs” of the 8th century, the Saxon epic of the 9th century. "Heliad".

Among the modern Germanic languages ​​is English, which in the 11th–13th centuries. was significantly influenced by French, Flemish is a descendant of Old Frisian, Dutch is a branch of Old Low German. Modern German consists of two dialects - in the past separate languages ​​(Low German and High German). Among the Germanic languages ​​and dialects of our time, mention should be made of Yiddish, Boer, Faroese, and Swiss.

Baltic The languages ​​are divided into Western Baltic languages ​​- dead Prussian (disappeared in the 18th century) and Yatvingian, which was widespread in the Middle Ages in the territory of North-Eastern Poland and Western Belarus, and Eastern Baltic languages. The latter include Lithuanian, Latvian, Latgalian, as well as common until the 17th century. on the Baltic coast of Lithuania and Latvia the Curonian. Among the dead are the Selonian and Golyad languages ​​of the Moscow region, and the Baltic language of the Upper Dnieper region. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Baltic languages ​​were widespread from the Lower Vistula in the west to the Upper Volga and Oka in the east, from the Baltic in the north to Pripyat, Desna and Seim in the south. The Baltic languages ​​have preserved the ancient Indo-European linguistic system more fully than others.

Slavic languages ​​are divided into Western, Eastern and Southern. East Slavic – Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian. West Slavic are divided into three subgroups: Lechitic (Polish, Kashubian, Polabian), Czech-Slovak and Serbologian. The Kashubian language, related to Polabian, was widespread in Polish Pomerania to the west of the Lower Vistula. Lusatian is the language of the Lusatian Serbs of the upper reaches of the Spree in Germany. South Slavic languages ​​- Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian. Slavic languages ​​are close to each other, since they come from one Old Slavic language, which collapsed relatively recently in the 5th–7th centuries. Presumably, the speakers of Old Slavic before its collapse were the Antes and Sklavins of the territory of Ukraine, whose archaeological counterparts were the population of the Prague-Korchak and Penkovka cultures.

Most modern Indo-Europeanists, recognizing the existence of the 13 mentioned groups of Indo-European languages, abandoned the simplified scheme of the ethnogenesis of Indo-European peoples according to the principle of the genetic tree, proposed back in the 19th century. Obviously, the process of glottogenesis and ethnogenesis occurred not only through the transformation or division of the mother language into daughter languages, but, perhaps to a greater extent, in the process of interaction of languages ​​with each other, including with non-Indo-European ones.

Scientists explain the high degree of relatedness of Indo-European languages ​​by their origin from a common genetic ancestor - the Proto-Indo-European language. This means that more than 5 thousand years ago, in some limited region of Eurasia, there lived a people from whose language all Indo-European languages ​​originate. Science was faced with the task of searching for the homeland of the Indo-European peoples and identifying the routes of their settlement. By Indo-European ancestral home, linguists mean the region occupied by the speakers of the ancestral language before its collapse in the 4th millennium BC.

History of the search for the Indo-European ancestral home

The search for this ancestral home has a two-hundred-year dramatic history, which has been repeatedly analyzed by various researchers (Safronov 1989). Immediately after the discovery of William Jones, the ancestral home was proclaimed India, and the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda was considered almost the ancestor of all languages, which supposedly retained all the features of the Indo-European proto-language. It was believed that due to the favorable climate of India, population explosions occurred, and the surplus population settled west into Europe and Western Asia.

However, it soon became clear that the languages ​​of the Iranian Avesta are not much younger than the Sanskrit Rigveda. That is, the common ancestor of all i-e peoples could live in Iran or somewhere on Middle East, where great archaeological discoveries were made at this time.

In 30-50 years. XIX century Indo-Europeans were derived from Central Asia, which was then considered the “forge of nations.” This version was fueled by historical data on migration waves that periodically arrived from Central Asia to Europe over the past two thousand years. This refers to the arrival in Europe of the Sarmatians, Turkic and Mongolian tribes of the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Torks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmyks, etc. Moreover, at this time, European interest in Central Asia grew, since its colonization by Russians began from the north and the British from the south.

However, the rapid development of linguistic paleontology in the middle of the 19th century. showed the discrepancy between Asia and the natural and climatic realities of its ancestral home. The common I-e language reconstructed by linguists indicated that the ancestral home was located in a region with a temperate climate and its corresponding flora (birch, aspen, pine, beech, etc.) and fauna (grouse, beaver, bear, etc.). In addition, it turned out that most I-e languages ​​were localized not in Asia, but in Europe. The vast majority of ancient Indo-European hydronyms are concentrated between the Rhine and the Dnieper.

From the second half of the 19th century. many researchers transfer their ancestral home to Europe. The explosion of German patriotism in the second half of the 19th century, caused by the unification of Germany by O. Bismarck, could not but influence the fate of Indo-European studies. After all, most of the specialists of that time were ethnic Germans. Thus, the growth of German patriotism was stimulated by the popularity of the concept of the origin of i-e from German territory.

Referring to the temperate climate of the ancestral home established by linguists, they begin to localize it precisely in Germany. An additional argument was the Northern European appearance of the ancient Indo-Europeans. Blonde hair and blue eyes are a sign of aristocracy both among the Aryans of the Rigveda and the ancient Greeks, judging by their mythology. In addition, German archaeologists came to the conclusion about the continuous ethnocultural development on the territory of Germany from the archaeological culture of linear-band ceramics of the 6th millennium BC. to modern Germans.

The founder of this concept is considered to be L. Geiger, who in 1871, relying on the argument of beech, birch, oak, ash eel and three seasons in the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as on the evidence of Tacitus about the autochthony of the Germans east of the Rhine, proposed Germany as possible ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (Geiger, 1871).

A significant contribution to the development of the Central European hypothesis of the origin of i-e was made by the famous German philologist Hermann Hirt. He came to the conclusion that German is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European. The languages ​​of other peoples allegedly arose in the process of mixing the language of the Indo-Germans who arrived from the north of Central Europe with the languages ​​of the aborigines (Hirt 1892).

The ideas of L. Geiger and G. Hirt were significantly developed by Gustav Kosinna. A philologist by training, G. Kossinna analyzed enormous archaeological material and in 1926 published the book “The Origin and Distribution of the Germans in Prehistoric and Early Historical Times” (Kossinna 1926), which the Nazis used as a scientific justification for their aggression to the east. G. Kosinna traces the archaeological materials of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages “14 colonial campaigns of megalithic Indo-Europeans to the east through Central Europe to the Black Sea.” It is clear that this politicized pseudoscientific version of resettlement failed along with the Third Reich.

In the 70s of the twentieth century. P. Bosch-Gimpera (1961) and G. Devoto (1962) derived it from the culture of linear band ceramics. They made an attempt to trace the phases of development of i-e from the Danube Neolithic of the 5th millennium BC. to the Bronze Age and even to the historical peoples of the Early Iron Age. P. Bosch-Zhimpera considered the culture of Tripoli to be Indo-European, since, in his opinion, it was formed on the basis of the culture of linear band ceramics.

Fig.3. Steppe mound

Almost together with Central European concept of origin and-e was born and steppe. Its supporters consider it the ancestral home of the steppe from the Lower Danube to the Volga. The founder of this concept is rightfully considered to be the outstanding German scientist, encyclopedist of Indo-European studies Oswald Schrader. In his numerous works, which were published between 1880 and 1920, he not only summarized all the achievements of linguists, but also analyzed and significantly developed them using archaeological materials, including from the Black Sea steppes. The linguistic reconstruction of the pastoral society of the ancient Indo-Europeans has been brilliantly confirmed by archaeology. O. Schrader considered the pastoralists of the Eastern European steppe of the 3rd–2nd millennium BC to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, who left thousands of mounds in the south of Eastern Europe (Fig. 3). Since both languages ​​are widespread in Europe and Western Asia, then, according to O. Schrader, their ancestral home should be located somewhere in the middle - in the steppes of Eastern Europe.

Gordon Childe, in his 1926 book “The Aryans,” significantly developed the ideas of O. Schrader, narrowing the ancestral homeland of the Indo-Europeans to the steppes of Ukraine. Based on new archaeological materials, he showed that burials under burial mounds with ocher in the south of Ukraine (Fig. 4) were left by the most ancient Indo-European pastoralists, who began to settle throughout Eurasia from here.

As a follower of G. Child, T. Sulimirsky (1933; 1968) expressed the idea that the Corded Ware cultures of Central Europe were formed as a result of the migration of the Yamniki from the Black Sea steppes to the west.

In his 1950 book, G. Child supported T. Sulimirsky and concluded that the Yamniki from the south of Ukraine through the Danube migrated to Central Europe, where they laid the foundation for Corded Ware cultures, from which most researchers derive the Celts, Germans, Balts, and Slavs. The researcher considered the Yamnaya culture of the south of Eastern Europe to be undivided i-e, which advanced not only to the Upper Danube, but also to the north of the Balkans, where they founded the Baden culture, as well as to Greece and Anatolia, where they laid the foundation for the Greek and Anatolian branches of the i-e.

A radical follower of Gordon Childe was Maria Gimbutas (1970, p.483; 1985), who considered the Yamniki to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, “who moved west and south in the 5th-4th millennium BC. from the lower Don and Lower Volga." By the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, the researcher understood the settlement of militant carriers of the Kurgan culture of the steppes of Eastern Europe to the Balkans and Western Europe, inhabited at that time by non-Indo-European groups of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic and the Funnel Beaker culture.

Due to schematism, ignorance of linguistic data and some radicalism, the works of M. Gimbutas were criticized, but her contribution to the development of the ideas of O. Schrader and G. Child is unconditional, and the steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans remains quite convincing. Among her followers we should remember V. Danilenko (1974), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1986; 1991), Yu. Pavlenko (1994), etc.

Middle Eastern version of the origin of i-e was born at the dawn of Indo-European studies. In 1822 G. Link and F. Miller placed their homeland in Transcaucasia. Under the influence of Pan-Babylonism, T. Momsen believed that they originated from Mesopotamia. However, the most detailed argument about the origin of i-e from the Middle East, more precisely from the Armenian Highlands, was presented in their two-volume encyclopedic work of 1984 by G.T. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov. Based on an in-depth analysis of a huge array of linguistic material and a generalization of the developments of predecessors, the researchers gave a broad picture of the economy, life, material culture, beliefs of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the natural landscape characteristics of their ancestral home.

At the same time, the location of the ancestral home on Armenian Highlands and the attempt to argue for the settlement of Europe by Indo-Europeans bypassing the Caspian Sea from the east does not stand up to criticism. Plants (aspen, hornbeam, yew, heather) and animals (beaver, lynx, black grouse, elk, crab) that are typical for their homeland are not typical for Transcaucasia. Corresponding hydronymy is also very scarce here. The journey around the Caspian Sea through Central Asia, the Lower Volga region and the steppes of Ukraine to the west is also not confirmed by archaeological material.

Colin Renfrew (1987) places his homeland within the fertility crescent - in the south Anatolia. This assumption is fundamental to his concept because it is based on the obvious fact of the migration of early farmers of the Middle East west to Europe and east to Asia. The researcher started from the Nostratic concept of V. Illich-Svitych (1964, 1971), according to which the linguistic kinship with the peoples of the Afroasiatic, Ellamo-Dravidian, Ural and Sino-Caucasian families is explained by their common ancestral home in the Middle East. Pointing out that the speakers of the mentioned languages ​​are also genetically related, K. Renfrew claims that their resettlement from a common ancestral home took place in the 8th-5th millennium BC. in the process of spreading the reproducing economy (Renfrew, 1987). Without refuting the very fact of the mentioned migrations, most Indo-Europeans doubt that there were Indo-Europeans among the migrants from the Middle East.

Balkan the concept of the origin of i-e is associated with the discovery in the first half of the twentieth century. Balkan-Danube Neolithic proto-civilization of the 7th-5th millennium BC. It was from here that, according to archaeological data, the Neolithization of Europe took place. This gave grounds to B. Gornung (1956) and V. Georgiev (1966) to suggest that Proto-Indo-Europeans formed on the Lower Danube as a result of mixing of local Mesolithic hunters with Neolithic migrants from the Balkans. The weak point of the concept is the extreme poverty of the Mesolithic Lower Danube. I. Dyakonov also considered the Balkans to be his ancestral home (1982).

The ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to paleolinguistics

The realities of the ancestral home must correspond to the natural landscape, socio-economic and cultural-historical characteristics reconstructed using linguistic analysis of the most ancient common elements of the basic vocabulary of different languages.

The 19th century was an era of bold reconstructions of the society, economy, culture, spiritual world, and natural environment of the early Indo-Europeans with the help of so-called linguistic paleontology. The successful works of A. Kuhn (Kuhn, 1845) and J. Grimm (Grimm, 1848) provoked numerous paleolinguistic studies, the authors of which did not always adhere to strict rules for the comparative analysis of languages. Criticism of attempts to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European realities using linguistic analysis made it possible for A. Schleicher (1863) to introduce such reconstructions within the framework of strict rules. However, the real discovery of the world of Proto-Indo-Europeans belongs to O. Schrader (1886), who summarized the results of the reconstructions of his predecessors, clarifying and checking them using materials from the Bronze Age, which at that time became available to researchers.

Using the method of linguistic paleontology, scientists were able to reconstruct the stages of the formation of the proto-language. Based on the developments of F. Saussure and A. Meillet, M.D. Andreev (1986) suggested the existence of three stages of its formation: boreal, early and late Indo-European.

The proto-language reconstructed on the basis of the general i-e vocabulary at the stage preceding its collapse in the 4th millennium BC. T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov (1984) analyzed them into separate language groups. The Proto-Indo-European dictionary indicates that its speakers lived in a temperate zone, albeit with a sharply continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers. They lived in both mountainous and flat areas, among rivers, swamps, coniferous and deciduous forests. They were well acquainted with the natural and climatic specifics of the steppes.

The economy of the Proto-Indo-Europeans at the time of the collapse was of a pastoral and agricultural nature. However, the significant development of cattle-breeding terminology indicates the dominance of this particular industry in the economy. Domestic animals include a horse, a bull, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, and a dog. Transhumance cattle breeding for meat and dairy production dominated. Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed advanced methods of processing livestock products: hides, wool, milk. The cult of the horse and the bull occupied an important place in ideology.

Agriculture has reached a fairly high level. There was a transition from hoeing to the early form of arable farming, using a rawl and a plow pulled by a pair of oxen. They grew barley, wheat, and flax. The harvest was harvested with sickles and threshed, the grain was ground with grain grinders and millstones. They baked bread. They knew gardening (apples, cherries, grapes) and beekeeping. They made a variety of pottery. They were familiar with the metallurgy of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Wheeled transport played a special role: bulls and horses were harnessed to carts. They knew how to ride a horse.

The significant role of cattle breeding in the economy determined the specifics of the social system. It was characterized by patriarchy, male dominance in the family and clan, and belligerence. Society was divided into three strata: priests, military aristocracy and simple community members (shepherds, farmers, warriors). The warlike spirit of the era was reflected in the construction of the first fortified settlements - fortresses. The uniqueness of the spiritual world consisted in the sacralization of war, the supreme warrior god. They worshiped weapons, horses, war chariots (Fig. 5), fire, and the sun-wheel, the symbol of which was the swastika.

An important element of mythology is the world tree. By the way, this indicates that the ancestral home was a fairly forested region. Plants and animals whose names are present in the Late European language recreated by linguists help to localize it more precisely.

Plants: oak, birch, beech, hornbeam, ash, aspen, willow, yew, pine, walnut, heather, rose, moss. Animals: wolf, bear, lynx, fox, jackal, wild boar, deer, elk, wild bull, hare, snake, mouse, louse fish, bird, eagle, crane, crow, black grouse, goose, swan, leopard, lion , monkey, elephant.

The last four animals are atypical for the European fauna, although lions and leopards lived in the Balkans for another 2 thousand years. back. It has been established that the words denoting leopard, lion, monkey and elephant came into the I-e proto-language from the Middle East, most likely from the Afrasians of the Levant (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 506, 510).

Thus, the flora and fauna of their ancestral home correspond to the temperate zone of Europe. This gave the basis for most modern researchers to place it between the Rhine in the west, the Lower Volga in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Bosh-Gimpera, 1961; Devoto, 1962; Grossland, 1967; Gimbutas, 1970; 1985; Häusler, 1985; Gornung, 1964; Georgiev, 1966; Mallory, 1989; Childe, 1926; Sulimirski, 1968, Zaliznyak, 1994, 1999, 2012, Pavlenko, 1994, Koncha, 2004). L.S. Klein places the ancestral home within the same limits in his fundamental monograph of 2007.

The reconstruction of the unified vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-Europeans gave grounds to assert that before their collapse they already knew agriculture, cattle breeding, ceramic dishes, copper and gold metallurgy, the wheel, that is, they were at the Eneolithic stage. In other words, the collapse occurred no later than the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 667-738, 868-870). The same is evidenced by the discovery of Hittite, Palai, Luwian and individual languages ​​due to the decipherment of texts from the library of the capital of the Hittite kingdom, Hatusa, 2nd millennium BC. Since there is convincing archaeological evidence that the Hittites came to Anatolia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, the collapse of the Proto-Indo-Europeans into separate branches began no later than the 4th millennium BC.

G. Kühn believed that Proto-Indo-European unity existed in the Upper Paleolithic, and associated it with the Magdalenian culture of France (Kühn, 1932). S.V. Koncha sees undivided Indo-Europeans in the early Mesolithic lowlands between the Lower Rhine in the west and the Middle Dnieper in the east (Koncha, 2004).

Linguistic contacts of Proto-Indo-Europeans

Archaic i-e hydronymy is concentrated in Central Europe between the Rhine in the west, the Middle Dnieper in the east, the Baltic in the north and the Danube in the south (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, p. 945).

Traces of contacts with the Finno-Ugric peoples, Kartvelians and the peoples of the Middle East (Prahattas, Prahurites, Afrasians, Sumerians, Elamites) make it possible to more accurately localize the ancestral homeland. Linguistic analysis indicates that the Proto-Finno-Ugrians, before their collapse in the 3rd millennium BC. borrowed from them a significant amount of agricultural terminology (pig, piglet, goat, grain, hay, hammer ax, etc.). A variety of i-e vocabulary is present in the Kartvelian languages ​​(Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan) (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, p. 877). Particularly important for the localization of their ancestral home is the presence in their languages ​​of parallels with the languages ​​of the peoples of the Middle East.

The famous linguist V. Illich-Svitych (1964) noted that a certain part of the agricultural and livestock vocabulary was borrowed from the proto-Semites and Sumerians. As an example of Proto-Semitic borrowings, the researcher named the words: tauro - bull, gait - goat, agno - lamb, bar - grain, cereal, dehno - bread, grain, kern - millstone, medu - honey, sweet, sekur - axe, nahu - vessel , ship, haster - star, septm - seven, klau - key, etc. According to V. Illich-Svitych, the following words were borrowed from the Sumerian language: kou - cow, reud - ore, auesk - gold, akro - cornfield, duer – doors, hkor – mountains, etc. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 272–276).

However, especially a lot of agricultural and livestock terminology, names of food products, and household items were borrowed from the Prakhatti and Prahurites, whose ancestral homeland is located in Anatolia and in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. S. A. Starostin (1988, pp. 112–163) believes that the roots of klau, medu, akgo, bar and some others given by V. Illich-Svitych are not at all Proto-Semitic or Sumerian, but Hatto-Huritic. In addition, he provides numerous examples of Hatto-Huritic vocabulary in both languages. Here are just a few of them: ekuo - horse, kago - goat, porko - pig, hvelena - wave, ouig - oats, hag - berry, rughio - rye, lino - flion, kulo - stake, list, gueran - millstone, sel - village, dholo - valley, arho - open space, area, tuer - cottage cheese, sur - cheese, bhar - barley, penkue - five and many others. Analysis of these linguistic borrowings indicates that they occurred in the process of direct contacts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the more developed Prahatto-Hurites no later than the 5th millennium BC. (Starostin, 1988, pp. 112–113, 152–154).

The nature of all these expressive linguistic parallels between the Proto-Indo-European, on the one hand, and the Proto-Ugro-Finnish, Proto-Kartvelian, languages ​​of the mentioned peoples of the Middle East, on the other, indicates that they are a consequence of close contacts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans with these peoples. That is, the sought-after ancestral homeland had to be located somewhere between the homelands of these ethnic groups, which makes it possible to more accurately localize it. It is known that the ancestral home of the Finno-Ugric peoples is the forest-steppe between the Don and the Urals, and the Kartvelians are the Central Caucasus. Regarding the mentioned Middle Eastern borrowings in other languages, their source, in our opinion, could be the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, including the bearers of the Trypillian culture of Right Bank Ukraine. After all, the Neolithic colonization of the Balkans and Danube region took place in the 7th - 6th millennium BC. from Asia Minor, the homeland of the Hatto-Hurites.

Analysis of modern versions of the ancestral home

In our time, five regions claim the honorable right to be called their ancestral home: Central Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula (I. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna, P. Bosch-Zimpera, G. Devoto), the Middle East (T. Gamkrelidze, V. Ivanov, K. Renfrew), the Balkans (B. Gornung, V. Georgiev, I. Dyakonov) and the forest-steppe and steppe zones between the Dniester and Volga (O. Schrader, G. Child, T. Sulimirsky, V. Danilenko , M. Gimbutas, D. Mallory, D. Anthony, Y. Pavlenko). Some researchers combine Central Europe with the Eastern European steppes up to the Volga into their ancestral home (A. Heusler, L. Zaliznyak, S. Koncha). Which of these versions is more plausible?

Origin concept Central Europe(lands between the Rhine, Vistula and Upper Danube) was especially popular at the end of the 19th - in the first half of the 20th century. As noted, its founders were L. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna.

The constructions of the mentioned German researchers are based on the coincidence of the natural and climatic realities of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with the nature and temperate climate of Central Europe, as well as the Northern European appearance of the early I-e (Fig. 6). Also important is the fact that the main area of ​​hydronymy coincides with the territories of several archaeological cultures. This refers to the cultures of linear-band ceramics, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae, and corded ceramics, which from the 6th to 2nd millennium BC. successively replaced each other in the indicated territories of Central Europe.

No one now doubts the Indo-European nature of the Corded Ware cultures. Their genetic predecessors were the Funnel Beaker and Globular Amphorae cultures. However, there is no reason to call the culture of linear band ceramics Indo-European, since it lacks the defining features reconstructed by linguists: the pastoral direction of the economy, the dominance of men in society, the warlike nature of the latter - the presence of a military elite, fortresses, the cult of war, weapons, war chariots, horse, sun, fire, etc. The bearers of the traditions of the linear-band ceramics culture, in our opinion, belonged to the Neolithic circle of the Balkans, the non-Indo-European nature of which is recognized by most researchers.

The location of the ancestral home in Central Europe is hampered by the presence in the I-e languages ​​of traces of close linguistic contacts with the Proto-Kartvelians of the Caucasus and the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland was the forest-steppe between the Don and the Southern Urals. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in Central Europe, then how could they have contacted the inhabitants of the Caucasus and Transdon?

Most modern scientists consider Central Europe to be the birthplace of the Corded Cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, whose bearers were the ancestors of the northern branches of the Ie: Celts, Germans, Balts, Slavs. However, Central Europe could not be the homeland of all I-e peoples because the southern I-e (Illyrians, Phrygians, Greeks, Hittites, Italics, Armenians), as well as the eastern (Indo-Iranians) cannot be derived from the Corded People either linguistically or archaeologically . In addition, in the forest-steppes and steppes of Ukraine, the i-e appeared earlier than the most ancient corded people - no later than the end of the 5th millennium BC. (Sredny Stog residents).

Near East it also could not have been its ancestral home, because here was the homeland of non-Indo-European ethnic groups: the Hattic, Khuritian, Elamite, Afroasiatic linguistic communities. Mapping of the I-e languages ​​shows that this region was the southern periphery of their ecumene. The Hittites, Luwians, Palayans, Phrygians, and Armenians appeared here quite late - in the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, that is, after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European language in the 4th millennium BC. Unlike Europe, there is almost no hydronymy here.

The cold continental climate of the ancestral home with frosty snowy winters does not correspond to the realities of the Middle East. Almost half of the plants and animals that appear in the language are missing here (aspen, hornbeam, linden, heather, beaver, black grouse, lynx, etc.). On the other hand, the I-E dictionary does not contain the names of typical representatives of the Middle Eastern fauna and flora (cypress, cedar, etc.). As for the lion, leopard, monkey and elephant, their names turned out to be borrowed from Proto-Semitic. If these animals were typical of their ancestral home, then why was it necessary to borrow them from their southern neighbors? Proto-Indo-Europeans could not live in the Middle East because the strong influence of their language can be traced to the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland is located too far north of the Middle East, which excludes the possibility of contacts with them.

Assuming that both happen to Balkan, we will ignore their linguistic connections not only with the Finno-Ugric peoples, but also with the Kartvelians of the Caucasus. It is impossible to remove their eastern branch, the Indo-Iranians, from the Balkans. This is contradicted by data from both archeology and linguistics. Both hydronyms are known only in the north of the Balkans. Most of them are distributed to the north, between the Rhine and the Dnieper. The hypothesis about the origin of the i-e from the Balkan Neolithic farmers is also contradicted by the fact that the appearance of the first i-e on the historical arena in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. e. coincided with the aridization of the climate, the separation of cattle breeding into a separate industry and its spread across the vast expanses of Eurasia, and, finally, with the collapse of the agricultural Neolithic itself in the Balkans and Danube region. What gives grounds for some researchers to consider the Balkan Peninsula as their ancestral home?

The famous researcher Colin Renfrew rightly believes that the grandiose linguistic phenomenon of the spread of languages ​​must be met by an equally large-scale socio-economic process. According to the scientist, such a global phenomenon in primitive history was the neolithization of Europe. This refers to the settlement of ancient farmers and livestock breeders from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe.

A reasoned criticism of K. Renfrew's attempts to derive i-e from the Middle East from the standpoint of new genetic research was given by R. Solaris (1998, p. 128, 129). Biomolecular analysis of paleoanthropological and paleozoological remains demonstrates the correspondence of genome changes between Europeans and domesticated animals of Near Eastern origin. This strongly suggests that Europe was colonized by Neolithic populations from the Middle East. However, substrate phenomena in Greek and other i-e languages ​​indicate that i-e came to the Balkans after they were explored by Neolithic colonists from Anatolia. The genetic kinship of the peoples of the Nostratic family of languages ​​of Eurasia is explained, according to R. Sollaris (1988, p. 132), by the existence of common ancestors of the population of Eurasia, who settled from the Western Mediterranean to the west and east at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 40 thousand years ago.

The fact that the “surplus” of the early agricultural population flowed from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe is beyond doubt. However, was it Indo-European? After all, archeology shows that from the first centers of the productive economy in the south of Anatolia, in Syria, Palestine, in the Zagrosu Mountains, it was not the Elamite, the Hattian, the Huritian, the Sumerian and the Afrasian communities that grew up. It is in the latter that the material and spiritual culture and economy of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans have direct parallels. Their anthropological type is close to the type of Neolithic inhabitants of the Middle East and differs significantly from the anthropology of the first reliable Indo-Europeans who lived in the 4th millennium BC. e. in Central Europe (Corded Ware culture) and in the forest-steppes between the Dnieper and Volga (Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures). If the Neolithic population of the Balkans and the Middle East was a bearer of the southern European or Mediterranean anthropological type (gracile, short Caucasians), then the mentioned Indo-Europeans were massive, tall northern Caucasians (Potekhina 1992) (Fig. 6). Clay figurines from the Balkans depict people with large noses of a specific shape (Zaliznyak, 1994, p. 85), which are an important defining feature of the Eastern Mediterranean anthropological type, according to V.P. Alekseev (1974, pp. 224, 225).

The direct descendant of the Neolithic proto-civilization of the Balkans was the Minoan civilization, which formed on the island of Crete around 2000 BC. According to M. Gimbutas, the Minoan linear letter “A” comes from the sign system of the Neolithic farmers of the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC. e. Attempts to decipher the texts of the Minoans showed that their language belongs to the Semitic group (Gimbutas 1985; Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 912, 968; Renfrew 1987, p.50). Since the Minoans were descendants of the Balkan Neolithic, the latter could not possibly be Indo-European. Both archaeologists and linguists came to the conclusion that before the appearance of the first i-e in Greece in the 2nd millennium BC. e. non-Indo-European tribes lived here.

Thus, culturally, linguistically, anthropologically and genetically, the Balkan Neolithic was closely related to the non-Indo-European Neolithic proto-civilization of the Middle East. It seems that the mentioned significant number of agricultural terms of Middle Eastern origin in the I-e languages ​​is explained by the intense cultural influence of Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on the ancestors of the I-e - the aborigines of Central and southern Eastern Europe.

Steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans

The most well-reasoned and popular in our time versions of the location of the ancestral homeland of the I-e peoples include the steppe version, according to which the I-e originated in the steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Volga and the Caucasus. Its founders were the aforementioned O. Schrader (1886) and G. Child (1926, 1950), who at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. expressed the idea that the first impetus for the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia came from the ancient pastoralists of the Northern Black Sea steppes and forest-steppes. Later, this hypothesis was fundamentally substantiated and developed by T. Sulimirsky (1968), V. Danilenko (1969; 1974), M. Gimbutas (1970; 1985), D. Mallory (1989), D. Anthony (1991). Its supporter was Yu. Pavlenko (1994).

According to this version, the oldest i-e were formed in the south of Ukraine as a result of complex historical processes that led to the separation of cattle breeding into a separate branch of the primitive economy. Due to the long-term agrarian colonization of the Balkans and Danube by Middle Eastern hoe farmers, the reserves of hoe farming in Central Europe were exhausted. Further expansion of the reproducing economy in the steppe and forest zones required an increase in the role of cattle breeding. This was facilitated by the progressive aridization of the climate, which led to a crisis in the agricultural economy of the Balkans and Danube region, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for the spread of various forms of livestock farming. This was also facilitated by the clearing of deciduous forests of Central Europe and Right Bank Ukraine by Neolithic farmers in the 4th-5th millennium BC. e., since wastelands on the site of former fields became potential pastures.

Neolithic hoe farmers grazed their few animals near villages. When the harvest ripened, they were driven away from the crops. Thus, the oldest transhumance form of cattle breeding arose. It is common for her to graze animals in the summer on pastures remote from permanent settlements. It was this ancient type of cattle breeding that made it possible for societies with a reproducing economy to colonize not only the Eurasian steppes, but also to move into the forests of central Europe.

The separation of cattle breeding from the ancient mixed agricultural and livestock economy of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic into a separate industry began in the south of Ukraine, on the border of the fertile black soils of the Right Bank of the Dnieper occupied by hoe farmers and the Eurasian steppes, which from that time became the home of mobile and warlike pastoral peoples. Thus, in the 4th millennium BC. e. the territory of Ukraine became the border between the sedentary, peace-loving farmers of the Danube region and the mobile, warlike pastoralists of the Eurasian steppes.

It was in the south of Ukraine that the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region, through its northeastern outpost - the Trypillian culture - directly influenced the ancestors of the most ancient pastoralists - Mesolithic and Neolithic hunters and fishermen of the forest-steppes of the Dnieper and Seversky Donets basins. The latter received from the Balkan-Danube descendants of the ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Middle East not only the skills of reproducing farming, but also Middle Eastern agricultural terminology, traced by linguists in other languages ​​(Illich-Svitych 1964; 1971; Starostin, 1988). The localization of the first shepherds-pastoralists in the steppes and forest-steppes between the Dniester, Lower Don and Kuban is in good agreement with the three main directions of Proto-Indo-European linguistic contacts. In the west they directly bordered with the speakers of agricultural vocabulary of Middle Eastern origin (Trypillians), in the northeast - Finno-Ugric, and in the southeast - Kartvelian vocabulary of the Caucasus (Fig. 2).

M. Gimbutas placed the birthplace of cattle breeding and its first carriers in the Middle Volga region, which is difficult to agree with. After all, cattle breeding was born from complex hoe farming in the process of separation into an independent branch of the economy. That is, this could only happen if the first pastoralists had direct and close contacts with large agrarian communities, such as the early agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and Danube region.

There was nothing like this in the Volga region. The nearest center of agriculture lay 800 km south of the Middle Volga region behind the Great Caucasus Range in the basins of the Kura and Araks rivers. If the first pastoralists had borrowed the productive economy along with agricultural terminology from there, then the latter would have been mainly Kartvelian. However, a significant number of common Indo-European pastoral and agricultural terms are not of Caucasian, but of Anatolian origin. Thus, they were directly borrowed by the Proto-Indo-Europeans from the Neolithic population of the Balkans and Danube - the direct descendants of the Neolithic colonists from Anatolia, most likely the Proto-Hurites.

The cattle-breeding skills acquired from the Trypillians took root and quickly developed into a separate industry in the favorable conditions of the steppes and forest-steppes of Left Bank Ukraine. Herds of cows and flocks of sheep moved intensively in search of pastures, which required pastoralists to live an active lifestyle. This stimulated the rapid spread of wheeled transport, domestication in the 4th millennium BC. e. horses, which, together with bulls, were used as draft animals. The constant search for pastures led to military clashes with neighbors, which militarized society. Pastoral farming turned out to be very productive. One shepherd was tending a flock that could feed many people. In conditions of constant conflicts over pastures and cows, the surplus of male labor was transformed into professional warriors.

Among pastoralists, unlike farmers, it was not a woman, but a man who became the main figure in the family and community, since all life support lay with the shepherds and warriors. The possibility of accumulating livestock in one hand created the conditions for property differentiation of society. A military elite appears. The militarization of society determined the construction of ancient fortresses, the spread of the cults of the supreme god of the warrior and shepherd, the war chariot, weapons, horses, the sun-wheel (swastika), and fire.

Rice. 7. Yamnaya pottery (1-4), as well as dishes and war hammers (vajras) of the Catacomb cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC. South of Ukraine. Catacomb vessels and axes - Ingul culture

These ancient pastoralists of the south of Eastern Europe of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. were not yet real nomads who spent their entire lives on horseback or on a cart in constant migrations for herds and herds of animals. Nomadism, as a way of nomadic life and a developed form of pastoral economy, was finally formed in the steppes only at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. The basis of the economy of the steppes of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. there was less mobile transhumance. It provided for more or less settled living of women and children in permanent settlements in river valleys, where they grew barley, wheat, raised pigs, goats, and fished. The male population spent more and more time with herds of cows, sheep and horses on the summer steppe pastures. In the spring, the animals, accompanied by shepherds and armed guards, were driven far into the steppe and only returned home for the winter in the fall. This semi-sedentary way of life quickly acquired more and more mobile forms due to the increasing role of cattle breeding.

These early semi-nomadic pastoralists left few settlements, but a large number of burial mounds. Especially many of them were poured by the pitmen (hundreds of thousands) in the 3rd millennium BC. e. Archaeologists recognize them by the so-called steppe burial complex. Its most important elements are the burial mound, placing the deceased in a burial pit in a crouched position, and filling the buried person with red ocher powder. Rough clay pots, often decorated with cord marks and impalations, and weapons (stone war hammers and maces) were placed in the grave (Fig. 7). Wheels were placed in the corners of the pit, symbolizing the funeral cart, and often its parts (Fig. 4). Stone anthropomorphic steles are found in the mounds, which depict a tribal patriarch with the corresponding attributes of a warrior leader and a shepherd (Fig. 8). An important feature of the first and southern Ukraine is the domestication of the horse, traces of which can be traced in the forest-steppe Dnieper region from the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. (Telegin 1973).

The unprecedented scale of settlement of the ancient I-e from the south of Ukraine to the endless steppe expanses to the Middle Danube in the west and to Altai in the east is explained by the pastoral economy, the spread of wheeled transport - carts and war chariots (Fig. 9), draft animals (bull, horse) , and later horsemanship, which determined the mobile way of life, militancy and the grandiose scale of expansion of the early I-e (Fig. 2).

From Rhine to Donets

However, limiting the I-e ancestral home to only the steppes and forest-steppes of Ukraine does not explain why the main body of the most ancient I-e hydronymics lies in Central Europe between the Rhine and the Dnieper. Such natural realities as mountains, swamps, the spread of aspen, beech, yew, heather, beavers, black grouse, etc. also do not fit with the south of Ukraine. These elements of the natural environment are more typical for the temperate and cool climate of Central Europe than for the sultry steppes of the Black Sea region. And the northern European appearance of the first i-e, as evidenced by the most ancient written sources, does not fit with the Black Sea region.

These contradictions are resolved if we assume the existence of a single ethnocultural substrate between the Lower Rhine and the Donets, on which in the 5th-4th millennium BC. The ancient Indo-Europeans of the Black Sea region and Central Europe began to form. Such a substrate began to emerge in the last third of the 20th century. during studies of Mesolithic monuments in the North German, Polish, Polesie lowlands, in the Neman and Donets basins.

The Central European lowlands, which stretch from the Thames basin through northern Germany, Poland, Polesie to the Middle Dnieper, from the final Paleolithic until the Middle Ages, were a kind of corridor through which migration waves rolled from west to east. The reindeer hunters of the Lingby culture were the first to travel this route from Jutland to the Dnieper 12 thousand years ago (Fig. 10). They settled the Central European lowlands that had just been liberated from the glacier, giving rise to related cultures of reindeer hunters of the last millennium of the Ice Age: Arensburg of Northern Germany, Svider and Krasnoselye of the Vistula, Neman, Pripyat, Upper Dnieper basins.

Rice. 10. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Bromme-Lingby type, about 11 thousand years ago. back. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p.45) Conventional signs: 1- sites of the Lingbi culture, 2- locations of the Lingbi tips, 3- directions of migration of the population of the Lingbi culture, 4- southern and eastern border of the outwash lowlands.

The Mesolithic of the Central European Lowlands began with a new wave of settlers to the east, which led to the formation of the Duvensi cultural region. It includes the related Early Mesolithic cultures of Star Car of England, Duvensey of Germany, Klosterlund of Denmark, Komornitsa of Poland, Kudlaevka of Polesie and the Neman basin (Fig. 11, 12).

The migration of bearers of the Maglemose culture traditions of the South-Western Baltic was especially powerful in the Atlantic period of the Holocene. In the boreal in the 7th millennium BC. Maglemose was transformed into the Svadborg culture of Jutland, whose population was due to the Baltic transgression around 6000 BC. migrated to the east, where it took part in the formation of the Janisławice culture of the Vistula, Neman and Pripyat basins (Fig. 13) (Kozlowsky 1978, p. 67, 68; Zaliznyak 1978, 1984, 1991, pp. 38-41, 2009, p. 206 -210). At the end of the 6th millennium BC. bearers of the Yanislavitsky traditions advanced through the Dnieper valley to Nadporozhye and further east into the Seversky Donets basin (Fig. 15). This is evidenced by the map of the distribution of characteristic Janisławice points (Fig. 14).

Rice. 13. Map of the distribution of monuments of the Janislavice culture of the 6th-5th millennium BC. Neman basin (Zaliznyak, 1991, p. 29)

Rice. 14. Map of the distribution of points with microincisal chips on plates on the territory of Ukraine. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 109) Conventional signs: 1-sites with a series of points, 2-points with 1-3 points, 3-direction of migration from the South Baltic in the 7th-5th millennium BC, 4-border Polesie, the 5th southern border of forests in the Atlanticum.

Rice. 15. Points on plates with microincisal chips from Ukrainian sites. Janislavitz type and the like. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 110)

The process of penetration of forest hunters of the Maglemose cultural traditions from Polesie to the south was probably stimulated by the movement in a southerly direction along the river valleys of broad-leaved forests in connection with the general warming and humidification of the climate at the end of the Mesolithic. As a result of the spread of forest and forest-steppe biotopes with the corresponding fauna along river valleys up to the Black and Azov Seas, conditions were created for the advance of forest hunters of the Yanislavitsa culture to the south and southeast of Ukraine.

So, in the VI-V millennium BC. The Late Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultural community was formed, which covered the low-lying areas from Jutland to the Seversky Donets (Fig. 16). It included the Mesolithic post-Maglemosis cultures of the Western and Southern Baltic states, Janislavitsa of the Vistula, Neman, and Pripyat basins, as well as the Donetsk culture of the Seversky Donets basin. The flint inventory of these cultures convincingly testifies to their relationship and genesis on the basis of the Baltic Mesolithic. Numerous finds of microliths characteristic of the Mesolithic Baltic and Polesie in Nadporozhye and even on the Seversky Donets indicate that migrants from the Baltic reached the Donets (Zaliznyak, 1991, pp. 40, 41; 2005, pp. 109–111).

In the 5th millennium BC. on the basis of post-maglemosis, but under the southern influence of cultural communities of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic, a group of forest Neolithic cultures was formed: Ertebølle of the South-Western and Tsedmar of the Southern Baltic, Dubichay of the Neman basin, Volyn of the Pripyat and Neman basin, Dnieper-Donetsk of the Middle Dnieper and Donetsk of the Seversky Donets (Fig. . 16). Among the Neolithic donors of the mentioned forest Neolithic cultures of the German, Polish, Poloska lowlands and the Middle Dnieper region, a special role was played by the cultures of linear-band ceramics and Cucuteni-Trypillia.

The existence of a cultural and genetic community on the plains from the Lower Rhine to the Seversky Donets is confirmed not only by archeology. The above-mentioned autochthonous hunting communities of the Central European lowlands and the Dnieper region were connected not only by a single type of forest hunting and fishing economy and material culture, but also by an anthropological type of population. Anthropologists have long written about the penetration of northern Caucasoids from the Western Baltic to the Middle Dnieper and South-East Ukraine in the Mesolithic and Neolithic (Gokhman 1966, Konduktorova 1973). Comparison of materials from Mesolithic and Neolithic burial grounds of the Dnieper region of the 6th-4th millennium BC. with the synchronous burials of Jutland indicates both a certain cultural and genetic relatedness of the population that left them. Not only the funeral rites were similar, but also the anthropological type of those buried (Fig. 4). These were tall, very massive, broad-faced northern Caucasians, buried in an extended position on their backs (Telegin 1991, Potekhina 1999). In the 5th millennium BC. this population advanced through the forest-steppe strip to the Left Bank Ukraine and to the east of the Middle Volga region (Syezzhee burial ground), forming the Mariupol cultural community, represented by numerous Mariupol-type burial grounds with numerous osteological remains of massive northern Europeans (Telegin, 1991). The population of early Indo-European communities of the 4th millennium BC comes from this anthropological massif. – Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures of forest-steppe Ukraine.

Thus, in the VI-V millennium BC. The northern European hunting population, which since the end of the Ice Age lived in the lowland forest expanses of the Southern Baltic and Polesie, moved along the Left Bank of the Dnieper to the Seversky Donets basin. A huge ethnocultural community was formed, which stretched from Jutland to the Donets for two thousand km and consisted of related cultures of hunters and fishermen. Under the influence of the agricultural cultures of the Balkan-Danube Neolithic from the south, the post-Maglemesian Mesolithic community moved to the Neolithic stage of development. Due to the spread of steppes due to climate aridization, these aboriginal societies of northern Europeans began to switch to cattle breeding and transformed into the most ancient cultures of the 4th millennium BC. (Srednostogovskaya on the Left Bank of the Dnieper and funnel-shaped cups in Central Europe).

Thus, the ancient Indo-Europeans of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. The carriers of the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures (arose on the basis of the Dnieper-Donets and Mariupol cultures) in the east and the funnel-shaped beaker and spherical amphorae cultures (descendants of the Ertebelle culture) in the west belonged to the North European anthropological type. At the same time, the bearers of these early Indo-European cultures exhibit some gracilization of the skeleton, which indicates their formation on the basis of local northern Caucasians under the conditions of a certain influx of a more graceful non-Indo-European population from the Danube region colonized by farmers. Massive northern Caucasians, according to E.E. Kuzmina (1994, pp. 244-247), were also carriers of the Andronovo culture of Central Asia (Fig. 9).

The Northern European appearance of the early I-e is confirmed by written sources and mythology, which indicate the light pigmentation of the Indo-Europeans of the 2nd millennium BC. Thus, in the Rig Veda, the Aryans are characterized by the epithet “Svitnya”, which means “light, fair-skinned”. The hero of the famous Aryan epic "Mahabharata" often has eyes the color of "blue lotus". According to Vedic tradition, a real Brahman should have brown hair and gray eyes. In the Iliad, the Achaeans have golden blonde hair (Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus), the Achaean women and even the goddess Hera have blonde hair. The god Apollo was also depicted as golden-haired. On Egyptian reliefs from the time of Thutmose IV (1420-1411 BC), the Hittite charioteers (Mariana) have a Nordic appearance, in contrast to their Armenoid squires. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Blonde-haired descendants of the Aryans allegedly came to the king of Persia from India (Lelekov, 1982, p. 33). According to the testimony of ancient authors, the Celts of Central and Western Europe were tall blonds. The legendary Tocharians of Xinjiang in Western China, not surprisingly, belonged to the same Northern European type. This is evidenced by their mummified bodies, which date back to approximately 1200 BC. and Tocharian wall paintings of the VII-VI centuries. AD Ancient Chinese chronicles also testify to blue-eyed blonds who in ancient times lived in the deserts of Central Asia.

The fact that the oldest Indo-Europeans belonged to the Northern Caucasians is consistent with the localization of their ancestral home between the Rhine and the Seversky Donets, where by the 6th-5th millennium BC. According to modern archeology, an ethnocultural community was formed (Fig. 16), on the basis of which the most ancient cultures arose (Mariupol, Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, funnel-shaped beakers, spherical amphorae).

To sum up, we can assume that the ancestral home of I-e was probably the German, Polish, Dnieper lowlands and the Donets basin. At the end of the Mesolithic in the 6th–5th millennium BC. these territories were inhabited by massive northern Caucasians from the Baltic states. In the 5th millennium BC. on their genetic basis, a group of related Neolithic cultures is formed, which developed under the progressive influence of the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans. As a result of contacts with the latter, in conditions of climate aridization and expansion of the steppes, the transformation of the autochthons of Proto-Indo-Europeans into the actual Indo-European early pastoral mobile society took place (Zaliznyak 1994, pp. 96-99; 1998, pp. 216-218, 240-247; Zaliznyak, 1997, p .117-125; 2005). An archaeological marker of this process is the beginning of formation in the Azov and Black Sea steppes at the end of the 5th–4th millennium BC. pastoral burial mound burial rite (mound, burials with skeletons crouched and painted with ocher, anthropomorphic steles with images of weapons and shepherd attributes, traces of the cult of the horse, bull, wheeled vehicles, weapons, etc.).

If the author of these lines considers the post-Maglemez ethnocultural community he identified to be the 6th–5th millennium BC. (Fig. 16) by Proto-Indo-Europeans, the substrate on which the Indo-Europeans themselves were formed, then another Ukrainian researcher S.V. Koncha considers the carriers of post-maglemosis as already established Indo-Europeans before their collapse into separate ethno-linguistic branches. According to S.V. Koncha, “there are strong reasons to date the Indo-European community to the early Mesolithic (VIII-VII millennium BC), and associate the beginning of its collapse with the resettlement of the Yanislavitsky population to the east, in Polesie, and further, to the Donets basin in the 6th–5th millennium BC.” The researcher believes that the cultural complex that was defining for the early I-E (mobile pastoral cattle breeding, burial mound rites, cults of the horse, bull, sun-wheel, weapon, patriarch shepherd-warrior, etc.) was acquired by the I-E later, already after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European community in the 4th–3rd millennium BC. (Concha, 2004, pp.191-203).

One way or another, in the lowlands from the Lower Rhine in the west to the Middle Dnieper and Seversky Donets in the east, a cultural and historical community can be traced archaeologically, which began to form with the end of the Ice Age and which may have been the ethnocultural basis of the Indo-European group of peoples.

The problem of the Indo-European homeland is far from its final solution. The considerations expressed above will undoubtedly be adjusted and clarified as new facts become available and the latest scientific methods are applied to solving the problems of Indo-European studies.

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, Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek languages ​​had already separated and developed as independent languages, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Illyrian, Slavic and Baltic languages ​​existed only as dialects of a single Indo-European language. The ancient Europeans, who lived in central Europe north of the Alps, developed a common terminology in the fields of agriculture, social relations and religion.

Various linguists date the beginning of the formation of the Proto-Slavic language within a wide range from the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. until the first centuries of our era; many are inclined to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e. According to glottochronology, Slavic was a separate language in the mid-late 2nd millennium BC. e., some linguists claim earlier dates.

Early Slavic vocabulary and habitats of the Proto-Slavs

Attempts were made to establish the Slavic ancestral home by analyzing early Slavic vocabulary. According to F.P. Filin, the Slavs as a people developed in a forest belt with an abundance of lakes and swamps, far from the sea, mountains and steppes:

“The abundance in the lexicon of the common Slavic language of names for varieties of lakes, swamps, and forests speaks for itself. The presence in the Common Slavic language of various names for animals and birds living in forests and swamps, trees and plants of the temperate forest-steppe zone, fish typical for reservoirs of this zone, and at the same time the absence of Common Slavic names for the specific features of the mountains, steppes and sea - all this gives unambiguous materials for a definite conclusion about the ancestral home of the Slavs... The ancestral home of the Slavs, at least in the last centuries of their history as a single historical unit, was located away from the seas, mountains and steppes, in a forest belt of the temperate zone, rich in lakes and swamps ... ".

From the point of view of linguists, in terms of grammatical structure and other indicators, the Old Slavic language was closest to the Baltic languages. In particular, many words not found in other Indo-European languages ​​are common, including: *rǫka(hand), *golva(head), *lipa(Linden), *gvězda(star), etc. (non-exclusively close are up to 1600 words). V.N. Toporov believed that the Baltic languages ​​are closest to the original Indo-European language, while all other Indo-European languages ​​moved away from their original state in the process of development. In his opinion, the Proto-Slavic language was a Proto-Baltic southern peripheral dialect, which became Proto-Slavic around the 5th century. BC e. and then developed independently into the Old Slavic language.

Archaeological data

The appearance of archaeological cultures, recognized by most archaeologists as Slavic, dates back only to the 6th century. The Prague-Korchak, Penkov and Kolochin cultures are structurally close and separated geographically. It is proposed to distinguish the earlier so-called post-Zarubinets monuments (-IV century) into a separate Kyiv culture, on the basis of which, according to some archaeologists, the above-mentioned cultures developed. Other archaeologists note the Baltic character of the Kievan culture and the lack of continuity in ceramics between the authentically Slavic cultures and the Kievan one.

The study of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs with the help of archeology encounters the following problem: modern science is unable to trace back to the beginning of our era the change and continuity of archaeological cultures, the bearers of which could confidently be attributed to the Slavs or their ancestors. Some archaeologists accept some archaeological cultures at the turn of our era and earlier as Slavic, a priori recognizing the autochthony of the Slavs in a given territory, even if it was inhabited in the corresponding era by other peoples according to synchronous historical evidence.

• Prague-Korczak archaeological culture: the range stretches in a strip from the upper Elbe to the middle Dnieper, touching the Danube in the south and capturing the upper reaches of the Vistula. The area of ​​the early culture of the 5th century is limited to the southern Pripyat basin and the upper reaches of the Dniester, Southern Bug and Prut (Western Ukraine). Corresponds to the habitats of the Sklavins of Byzantine authors.

• Penkovskaya archaeological culture: range from the middle Dniester to the Seversky Donets (western tributary of the Don), capturing the right bank and left bank of the middle part of the Dnieper (territory of Ukraine). Corresponds to the probable habitats of the antes of Byzantine authors.

• Kolochin archaeological culture: habitat in the Desna basin and the upper reaches of the Dnieper (Gomel region of Belarus and Bryansk region of Russia). It adjoins the Prague and Penkovo ​​cultures in the south. Mixing zone of Baltic and Slavic tribes.

• Ipoteshti-Kindeshti culture on the lower and middle left bank of the Danube arose as a result of the expansion of the bearers of the early Penkov culture to the west and the bearers of the Prague-Korchak culture to the south into the modern region. Romania.

• Sukowo-Dziedzicka culture in the area between the Oder and Elbe rivers it adjoins in the south the area of ​​the Prague-Korchak culture. Slavic tribes occupied lands that were depopulated by the 6th century, and apparently assimilated the local population that remained in some places. The Slavs reached the Baltic coast in the lower reaches of the Elbe sometime around the beginning of the 7th century. The northern area of ​​the Sukovo-Dziedzicka culture and the craft and household traditions of the local population caused noticeable differences in the nature of the monuments from the Prague-Korczak culture. The Germans and Scandinavians called the Slavic population of this culture Wends.

There is no consensus among historians and archaeologists on the earlier history and geography of the Proto-Slavs; views evolve as new archaeological material accumulates.

Paleoanthropological data

Thus, anthropological data allow us to conclude that there was an initial anthropological unity of the Slavs and their ancestral homeland.

Within the Slavic anthropological type, subtypes are classified that are associated with the participation of tribes of various origins in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. The most general classification indicates the participation in the formation of the Slavic ethnos of two branches of the Caucasian race: southern (relatively broad-faced mesocranial type, descendants: Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians) and northern (relatively broad-faced dolichocrane type, descendants: Belarusians and Russians). In the north, participation in the ethnogenesis of Finnish tribes was recorded (mainly through the assimilation of Finno-Ugric peoples in the process of expansion of the Slavs to the east); in the south there was a Scythian substrate, noted in the craniometric data of the Polyan tribe. However, it was not the Polyans, but the Drevlyans who determined the anthropological type of future Ukrainians.

Genetic history

The genetic history of an individual and entire ethnic groups is reflected in the diversity of the male sex Y chromosome, namely its non-recombining part. Y-chromosome groups (outdated designation: HG - from the English haplogroup) carry information about a common ancestor, but as a result of mutations they are modified, due to which the stages of development can be traced by haplogroups, or, in other words, by the accumulation of a particular mutation in a chromosome humanity. A person’s genotype, like his anthropological structure, does not coincide with his ethnic identification, but rather reflects the migration processes of large groups of the population during the Late Paleolithic era, which makes it possible to make probable assumptions about the ethnogenesis of peoples at their earliest stage of formation.

Written evidence

Slavic tribes first appear in Byzantine written sources of the 6th century under the name Sklavini and Antes. Retrospectively, in these sources the Antes are mentioned when describing the events of the 4th century. Presumably the Slavs (or ancestors of the Slavs) include the Wends, who, without defining their ethnic characteristics, were reported by the authors of the late Roman period (-II centuries). Earlier tribes noted by contemporaries in the supposed area of ​​formation of the Slavic ethnos (middle and upper Dnieper region, southern Belarus) could have contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, but the extent of this contribution remains unknown due to the lack of information on both the ethnicity of the tribes mentioned in the sources, and along the exact boundaries of the habitat of these tribes and the Proto-Slavs themselves.

Neuroi and Scythian farmers of Herodotus. 5th century BC e.

For the first time, the tribes inhabiting the lands north of the Black Sea were described in his fundamental work by the Greek historian of the mid-5th century. BC e. Herodotus. It is not known whether the Slavic ethnos had formed by this time, but assuming the autochthony of the Slavs in the area between the Dniester and Dnieper rivers, Herodotus’s information is the earliest and only written source over the next 500 years about the possible ancestors of the Slavs.

Archaeologists find a geographical and temporal correspondence to the neurons in the Milograd archaeological culture of the 7th-3rd centuries. BC e., whose range extends to Volyn and the Pripyat River basin (northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus). On the issue of the ethnicity of the Milogradians (Herodotus's Neuros), the opinions of scientists were divided: V.V. Sedov attributed them to the Balts, B.A. Rybakov saw them as Proto-Slavs. There are also versions about the participation of Scythian farmers in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, based on the assumption that their name is not ethnic (belonging to Iranian-speaking tribes), but generalizing (belonging to barbarians).

Strabo's Bastarnae. 1st century BC e.

While the expeditions of the Roman legions revealed Germany from the Rhine to the Elbe and the barbarian lands from the middle Danube to the Carpathians to the civilized world, Strabo, in describing Eastern Europe north of the Black Sea region, uses legends collected by Herodotus. Strabo, who critically interpreted the available information, directly stated that there was a white spot on the map of Europe east of the Elbe, between the Baltic and the Western Carpathians mountain range. However, he reported important ethnographic information related to the appearance of bastarns in the western regions of Ukraine.

Whoever ethnically the bearers of the Zarubintsy culture were, their influence can be traced in the early monuments of the Kyiv culture (at first classified as late Zarubintsy), early Slavic according to most archaeologists. According to the assumption of archaeologist M. B. Shchukin, it was the Bastarns, assimilating with the local population, who could play a noticeable role in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, allowing the latter to stand out from the so-called Balto-Slavic community:

“Part of [the Bastarns] probably remained in place and, along with representatives of other “post-Zarubinets” groups, could then take part in the complex process of Slavic ethnogenesis, introducing into the formation of the “common Slavic” language certain “centum” elements, which separate the Slavs from their Baltic or Balto-Slavic ancestors."

It should be noted that linguistics does not support Shchukin’s assumption about the influence of the Bastarns on the separation of the Proto-Slavic language from the Balto-Slavic, since most linguists conventionally date this process to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e., although some scientists admit the first centuries of our era.

Wends of Roman authors. -II centuries

“Whether the Pevkins, Wends and Fennes should be classified as Germans or Sarmatians, I really don’t know […] The Wends adopted many of their customs, for for the sake of robbery they scour the forests and mountains that exist between the Pevkins [Bastarns] and the Fennes. However, they can rather be classified as Germans, because they build houses for themselves, carry shields and move on foot, and with great speed; all this separates them from the Sarmatians, who spend their entire lives in a cart and on horseback.”

Some historians make hypothetical assumptions that perhaps Ptolemy mentioned among the tribes of Sarmatia and the Slavs under distorted stavan(south of the ships) and sulons(on the right bank of the middle Vistula). The assumption is justified by the consonance of words and intersecting areas.

Slavs and Huns. 5th century

L. A. Gindin and F. V. Shelov-Kovedyaev consider the Slavic etymology of the word to be the most justified strava, pointing to its meaning in Czech "pagan funeral feast" and Polish "funeral feast, wake", while allowing the possibility of Gothic and Hunnic etymology. German historians are trying to derive the word strava from Gothic sûtrava, meaning a pile of wood and possibly a funeral pyre.

Making boats using the hollowing method is not a method unique to the Slavs. Term monoxyl found in Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Strabo. Strabo points to gouging as a method of making boats in ancient times.

Slavic tribes of the 6th century

Veneds, Sklavins, Antes

For the first time, epigraphic sources report on the Slavic tribes of the Wends ( Venethae), Sklavins (Σκλαβηνοί) and Antes (Άνται) in the middle of the 6th century. Of these tribes, the last two appeared by the beginning of the 6th century on the northern borders of the Byzantine Empire along the left bank of the middle and lower Danube, which chronologically agrees well with archaeological data. The eastern border of the habitat of the Ant Slavs was called the Dnieper (Jordan) or the Northern Azov region (Procopius), the western border of the area ran from the interfluve of the Elbe and Oder (Procopius) or the sources of the Vistula (Jordan) in the north to the present-day. Slovenia in the south.

Noting the close kinship of the Sklavins and Antes, Byzantine authors did not provide any signs of their ethnic division, except for different habitats:

“Both of these barbarian tribes have the same life and laws [...] They both have the same language, which is quite barbaric. And in appearance they do not differ from each other […] And once upon a time even the name of the Sklavens and Ants was the same. In ancient times, both these tribes were called spores [Greek. scattered], I think because they lived, occupying the country “sporadic,” “scattered,” in separate villages.”
“Starting from the birthplace of the Vistula [Vistula] river, a populous tribe of Veneti settled across immeasurable spaces. Although their names now change according to different clans and localities, they are still predominantly called Sclaveni and Antes.”

The Strategikon, whose authorship is attributed to Emperor Mauritius (582-602), contains information about the habitats of the Slavs, consistent with the ideas of archaeologists on early Slavic archaeological cultures:

“They settle in forests or near rivers, swamps and lakes - generally in places that are difficult to access […] Their rivers flow into the Danube […] The possessions of the Slavs and Antes are located along the rivers and touch each other, so that there is no sharp border between them. Due to the fact that they are covered with forests, or swamps, or places overgrown with reeds, it often happens that those who undertake expeditions against them are immediately forced to stop at the border of their possessions, because the entire space in front of them is impassable and covered with dense forests.”

Slavic Slavs

The Slavs first appear on the pages of history in the work of Procopius of Caesarea “War with the Goths”. Part of the Germanic Heruli tribe, after being defeated around 510 (under the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I) by the Lombards, decided to return to their ancestral homeland on the semi-mythical island of Fule via Jutland. The defeat of the Heruls took place somewhere north of the Danube in the area of ​​modern. Slovakia, from where " Led by many leaders of royal blood, they first of all successively passed through all the Slavic tribes, and then, passing through a huge desert region, reached the country of the so-called Varni. After them they passed through the Danish tribes.“Thus, by the 6th century, Slavic tribes inhabited the lower and middle interfluves of the Elbe and Oder (the area of ​​the Prague-Korchak archaeological culture), and the Baltic coast, where, according to archaeological searches, the Western Slavs had lived since the 7th century, was still occupied by the Germans.

The war between the Goths and the Antes took place somewhere in the Northern Black Sea region at the end of the 4th century, if we relate to the death of Germanarich in 376. The question of the Ants in the Black Sea region is complicated by the point of view of some historians, who saw in these Ants the Caucasian Alans or the ancestors of the Circassians. However, Procopius expands the range of the Antes to places north of the Sea of ​​Azov, although without an exact geographical reference:

“The peoples who live here [Northern Azov Sea] in ancient times were called Cimmerians, but now they are called Utigurs. Further, to the north of them, countless tribes of Ants occupy the lands.”

Procopius reported the first known Ant raid on Byzantine Thrace in 527 (the first year of the reign of Emperor Justinian I).

In the ancient German epic “Widside” (the content of which dates back to the 5th century), the list of tribes of northern Europe mentions the Winedum, but there are no other names of Slavic peoples. The Germans knew the Slavs under the ethnonym Veneda(Winedos, Venetiorum) at least from the 7th century, although it cannot be ruled out that the name of one of the Baltic tribes bordering the Germans was transferred by them to the Slavic ethnic group during the era of the Great Migration (as happened in Byzantium with the Rus and the ethnonym Scythians).

Written sources about the origin of the Slavs

The rest of the world learned about the Slavs, who had previously been cut off by the warlike nomads of Eastern Europe when they reached the borders of the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines, who consistently fought off waves of barbarian invasions, may not have immediately identified the Slavs as a separate ethnic group and did not report legends about its occurrence. The historian of the 1st half of the 7th century Theophylact Simocatta called the Slavs getae (“ that's what these barbarians were called in the old days"), apparently mixing the Thracian tribe of the Getae with the Slavs who occupied their lands on the lower Danube.

The Old Russian chronicle of the early 12th century “The Tale of Bygone Years” finds the homeland of the Slavs on the Danube, where they were first recorded by Byzantine written sources:

“A long time later [after the biblical Pandemonium of Babylon], the Slavs settled along the Danube, where now the land is Hungarian and Bulgarian. From those Slavs the Slavs spread throughout the land and were called by their names from the places where they sat. So some, having come, sat down on the river in the name of Morava and were called Moravians, while others called themselves Czechs. And here are the same Slavs: white Croats, and Serbs, and Horutans. When the Volochs attacked the Danube Slavs, and settled among them, and oppressed them, these Slavs came and sat on the Vistula and were called Poles, and from those Poles came the Poles, other Poles - Luticians, others - Mazovshans, others - Pomeranians. Likewise, these Slavs came and settled along the Dnieper and were called Polyans, and others - Drevlyans, because they sat in the forests, and others sat between Pripyat and Dvina and were called Dregovichs, others sat along the Dvina and were called Polochans, after the river flowing into the Dvina , called Polota, from which the Polotsk people took their name. The same Slavs who settled near Lake Ilmen were called by their own name - Slavs."

The Polish chronicle “Greater Poland Chronicle” follows this pattern independently, reporting on Pannonia (the Roman province adjacent to the middle Danube) as the homeland of the Slavs. Before the development of archeology and linguistics, historians agreed with the Danube lands as the place of origin of the Slavic ethnic group, but now they recognize the legendary nature of this version.

Review and synthesis of data

In the past (Soviet era), two main versions of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs were widespread: 1) the so-called Polish, which places the ancestral home of the Slavs in the area between the Vistula and Oder rivers; 2) autochthonous, influenced by the theoretical views of the Soviet academician Marr. Both reconstructions a priori recognized the Slavic nature of the early archaeological cultures in the territories inhabited by the Slavs in the early Middle Ages, and some original antiquity of the Slavic language, which independently developed from Proto-Indo-European. The accumulation of data in archeology and the departure from patriotic motivation in research led to the development of new versions based on the identification of a relatively localized core of the formation of the Slavic ethnic group and its spread through migrations to neighboring lands. Academic science has not developed a single point of view on exactly where and when the ethnogenesis of the Slavs took place.

The contribution of the Balts to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs

It was not possible to build a convincing version of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs based on the data of any one scientific discipline; modern theories are trying to combine the data of all historical sciences. In general, it is recognized that the Slavic ethnos was formed from the mixing of ethnically different Indo-European tribes on the border between the Balts and Scythian-Sarmatians with the participation of Celtic, Finnish and other substrates. The most significant contribution was made by the Baltic tribes according to:

Scientists do not confirm (with the exception of contradictory assumptions by linguists) the existence of the Slavic ethnic group in the era BC. e. Determining the ethnic nature of the tribes that later became the people of the Slavs is quite difficult due to the lack of clearly defined ethno-defining features in the archaeological materials of Eastern Europe at the beginning of our era. Most often, previous archaeological cultures in the habitats of the Slavs in Eastern Europe are attributed to the Balts or the ancestors of the Balts, or hypotheses are put forward about a Baltic-Slavic community of that era. There is no reason to say that the Slavs descended from the Balts. Both peoples were formed on the basis of close autochthonous tribes of the Paleolithic era, and the use of the term Balts to the early population of Eastern Europe is due rather to the development and traditions of terminology in archaeology.

Place of ethnogenesis of the Slavs

Archaeological and linguistic data, according to one hypothesis, indicate the formation of the early Slavs in the area between the upper Dniester and the basin of the left tributaries of the middle Dnieper. In the basin of the left tributaries of the middle Dnieper, the earliest monuments (III-IV centuries) of the Kyiv culture were found, the close connection of which with later Slavic cultures is practically beyond doubt. The region is confirmed by the presence of topographical features (forest edges with an abundance of rivers and swamps, the range of some plants), derived for the ancestral home of the Slavs according to versions of linguistics. An auxiliary feature can be the accumulation of hydronyms (names of tributaries) of archaic early Slavic etymology in the southern Pripyat basin, identified by V.I. Toporov and O.N. Trubachev. According to archaeologist M.B. Shchukin, the Proto-Slavic tribes concentrated in those places as a result of external pressure from the migrating peoples of the 3rd century, the Goths from the west and the Sarmatians from the south.

How the expansion of the early Slavs from the region of ethnogenesis occurred, the directions of migration and settlement in central Europe can be traced through the chronological development of archaeological cultures. Typically, the beginning of expansion is associated with the advance of the Huns to the west and the resettlement of Germanic peoples towards the south, associated, among other things, with climate change in the 5th century and the conditions of agricultural activity. By the beginning of the 6th century, the Slavs reached the Danube, where their further history is described in written sources of the 6th century.

The contribution of other tribes to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs

The Scythian-Sarmatians had some influence on the formation of the Slavs due to their long geographical proximity, but their influence, according to archaeology, anthropology, genetics and linguistics, was mainly limited to vocabulary borrowings and the use of horses in the household. According to genetic data, common distant ancestors of some nomadic peoples, collectively called Sarmatians, and the Slavs within the Indo-European community, but in historical times these peoples evolved independently of each other.

According to genetics, the Finno-Ugric peoples, as well as the Eastern Baltic peoples, who were strongly mixed with them, did not take part in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs.

The contribution of the Germans to the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, according to anthropology, archeology and genetics, is insignificant. At the turn of the era, the region of ethnogenesis of the Slavs (Sarmatia) was separated from the places of residence of the Germans by a certain zone of “mutual fear,” according to Tacitus. The existence of an uninhabited area between the Germans and the Proto-Slavs of Eastern Europe is confirmed by the absence of noticeable archaeological sites from the Western Bug to the Neman in the first centuries AD. e. The presence of similar words in both languages ​​is explained by a common origin from the Indo-European community of the Bronze Age and close contacts in the 4th century after the start of the migration of the Goths from the Vistula to the south and east.

Notes

1. The Wends are associated with the Pomeranian culture, which was widespread on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea at the confluence of the Vistula before the invasion of the Goths.
2. From the report of V.V. Sedov “Ethnogenesis of the early Slavs” (2002)
3. O. N. Trubachev, ETHNOGENESIS OF THE SLAVS AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN PROBLEM, (Etymology. 1988-1990. - M., 1992. - P. 12-28
4. O. N. Trubachev. Linguistics and ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Questions of linguistics. - M., 1982, No. 4.
5. The dates of linguists are given in the book by V.V. Sedov “Slavs” (chapter Linguistics and the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs). G. Shevelev, Z. Golomb: approx. 1000 BC e.; T. Lehr-Splawiński, M. Vasmer, P. Arumaa, A. Lemprecht, V. Georgiev: 500–400. BC e.; S. B. Bernstein: the end of repeated contact of the 3rd–2nd centuries. BC e.; G. Birnbaum, Φ. P. Filin: at the turn of eras; Z. Stieber and G. Lant: the first centuries of our era.
6. S. A. Starostin, V. Blazhek, J. Navotna, V. Porzig coincides with them.
7. A. Meie, S. B. Bernshtein, O. N. Trubachev, G. A. Khaburgaev, Y. Rozvadovsky and others.
8. However, the Slavs do not know the types of swamps; there is only one word for swamp, unlike the Balts. Therefore, swampy terrain is questionable.
9. F. P. Filin (1962). From the report of M. B. Shchukin “The Birth of the Slavs”
10. Rostafinski (1908). From the report of M. B. Shchukin “The Birth of the Slavs”
11. Turubanova S. A., Ecological scenario of the history of the formation of living cover in European Russia, dissertation for the degree of candidate of biological sciences, 2002:
12. Toporov V. N., Trubachev O. N. Linguistic analysis of hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper region. M., 1962.
13. Ivanov, Toporov, 1958. From the report of M. B. Shchukin “The Birth of the Slavs”
14. V. N. Toporov, collection “Baltic languages”, -M., 2006
15. V. V. Martynov. Slavs. Ethnogenesis and ethnic history. Interuniversity collection of articles. Ed. Leningrad State University, 1989
16. Ethogenesis and ethnic history of the Eastern Slavs. 2nd ed. // East Slavs. Anthropology. - M.: Scientific world, 2002. - P. 310. - ISBN 5-89176-164-5
17. From the article by Academician T. I. Alekseeva “Anthropological composition of East Slavic peoples and the problem of their origin.”
18. Ethogenesis and ethnic history of the Eastern Slavs // Eastern Slavs. Anthropology. - 2nd ed. - M.: Scientific world, 2002. - P. 315. - ISBN 5-89176-164-5
19. Academician V.P. Alekseev, “In search of ancestors. Anthropology and history": Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs. “Soviet Russia”, M., 1972
20. Academicians V. P. Alekseev, T. I. Alekseeva
21. V. P. Alekseev, “In search of ancestors. Anthropology and history": Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs. “Soviet Russia”, M., 1972
22. I. N. Danilevsky: Ancient Rus' through the eyes of contemporaries and descendants (IX-XII centuries) Lecture 3.
23. According to one version, the people of Rus', who gave their name to the first state of the Eastern Slavs, came to the Novgorod lands (see Calling of the Varangians) from the island of Rügen. See article Rus' (people)
24. See the table and links in the article Gene pool of the Slavs
25. : Am. J.Hum. Genet., Vol. 82, Is. 1, 236-250, 10 January 2008
26. K. Rebala et. al., Y-STR variation among Slavs: evidence for the Slavic homeland in the middle Dnieper basin: J. of Hum. Gen., Vol. 52, No. 5. (May 2007), pp. 406-414.
27. Y-STR variation
28. Map of monuments of Prague-Korczak culture from the book: Sedov V.V., "Slavs in the Early Middle Ages". - M., 1995
29. The local Greeks called the Scythian farmers Borysthenes after Borysthenes, the Greek name for the Dnieper.
30. Herodotus, 4.105
31. Borysphenites lived along the right bank of the Dnieper for 11 days of sailing from the sea (Herodotus, 4.18), which approximately corresponds to the area of ​​residence up to the Dnieper rapids.

Sections 2 – 3

Old Russian state (X century - first half of the 12th century)

♦ The chronicler Nestor was the founder of the theory of ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs:

A. Autochthonous

B. Balkan-Danube

G. Central European

D. Asian migration.

♦ Russian historian V.O. Klyuchevsky was a supporter of the theory of ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs:

A. Autochthonous

B . Western migration

IN. Norman

G. Asian migration.

♦ The concept of ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, dominant in Soviet historical science:

A.Autochthonous

B. Scythian-Sarmatian

IN. Norman

G. Western migration.

♦ The historian L. Gumilyov was a supporter of the theory of ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs:

A. Central European

B. Western migration

IN. Norman

G. Autochthonous

D . Asian migration .

♦ Terms not related to the ethnonym “Normans”:

A. Vikings

B. b Ulgars

IN. Danes

G.Scythians

D. Varangians.

♦ The Slavs were called Varangians:

A. Scandinavians

B. Celts

IN. Angles and Saxons

G. francs

♦ Paganism is characterized:

A. strict monotheism

B. hierarchy of clergy

IN. refusal to deify the forces of nature

G. the presence of a cult of tribal gods.

♦ The path "from the Varangians to the Greeks":

A. Volkhovsko-Volzhsky;

B. Volkhovsko-Dneprovsky;

IN."Saracens" way;

G. Balkan-Danube.

♦ The oldest chronicle, which contains a story about the calling of the Varangians:

A. Russian truth;

B. The Tale of Bygone Years;

IN. The tale of the destruction of the Russian land.

♦ A trend in Russian and foreign historiography, whose supporters consider the Varangians to be the founders of the state in Ancient Rus':

A. migration theory

B.Norman theory

IN. natural theory

G. autochthonous theory.

♦ Scientists who formulated the Norman theory:

A. V. Tatishchev and N. Karamzin

B. G. Bayer, G. Miller and A. Schlözer

IN. S. Soloviev and V. Klyuchevsky.

♦ Russian historian V.O. Klyuchevsky was a supporter of the concept of the origin of the Old Russian state:

A. autochthonous

B. migration

IN. Norman

G. anti-Norman.

♦ Nestor on the origin of the ethnonym “Rus” (“Russian”):

A. from the Varangian tribe "Rus" from Scandinavia

B. from the Slavic tribe "Ros", living on the river. Ros

IN. from the Baltic tribe "Prussians"

G. from the Slavic word “blond” (light).

♦ Two theories about the Scandinavian (Norman) origin of the ethnonym “Rus”:

A. from the hydronym "Ros" (tributary of the Dnieper)

B. ethnonym "Rugi" (Varangian tribe from the island of Rügen)

IN. from the word “blond” (light)

G. ethnonym "ruotsi"

D. from the Proto-Slavic word “rusa” (river).

♦ Autochthonous theories of the origin of the ethnonym “Rus”:

A. from the Proto-Slavic word “blond” (light)

B. from the Proto-Slavic word “rusa” (river)

IN. ethnonym "ruotsi".

G.from the hydronym "Ros" (tributary of the Dnieper)

♦ Along which trade route were the main political centers of the East Slavic state located in the 9th–11th centuries?

A. IN Olkhov-Dnieper Mainline – the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks”

B. Great Volga Way – "from the Varangians to the Persians"

IN. Northern trade route.

♦ Terms of the agreement between the Grand Duke of Kyiv and the allied (tribal) princes at the end of the 9th - 10th centuries. provided:

A. the duty of the allied princes to annually bring tribute to Kyiv

B. the duty of the allied princes to receive the governors of the Grand Duke of Kyiv

IN. the duty of the allied princes to supply military militia to Kyiv in the event of major

national campaigns.

♦ During the reign of which prince the local tribal kingdoms were abolished:

A. Rurik

B. Vladimir Saint

IN. Yaroslav the Wise

G. Vladimir Monomakh.

♦ The first Russian chronicle was called:

A."The Tale of Igor's Campaign"

B. "The Tale of Bygone Years"

IN. "Lesson for Children" by Vladimir Monomakh

G."A Word on Law and Grace."

♦ The chronicler Nestor was a monk... of the monastery:

A. Chudova

B. Kiev-Pechersk

IN. Trinity–Sergiev

G. Solovetsky.

♦ Collection of tribute from the subject population in the Old Russian state in the 9th-10th centuries. took the form….

A. cash rent

B. sharecropping

IN. poll tax

G. polyudya

D. working rent.

♦ The Drevlyan uprising in 945 was caused by:

A. reluctance of the Drevlyans to accept Christianity

B. the reluctance of the Drevlyans to take part in the campaigns of Prince Svyatoslav

IN. Prince Igor's attempt to take tribute from the Drevlyans a second time

G. intertribal strife between the Drevlyans and Vyatichi

♦ Indicate which prince ruled in the Old Russian state in:

A. 879–912 Oleg

B. 912–945 Igor Rurikovich

IN. 980–1015 Vladimir Svyatoslavich

♦ Indicate which prince ruled in:

A. 872–879 Rurik

B. 879–912 Oleg

IN. 1019–1054 Yaroslav the Wise

♦ Indicate which prince:

A. united Novgorod and Kyiv (North and South) Oleg

B. laid the foundation for the compilation of “Russian Truth” by Yaroslav the Wise

IN. defeated the Khazar Khaganate. Svyatoslav Igorevich

♦ Reign of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich:

A. 882–912

B. 980–1015

IN. 1113–1125

G. 1125–1132

♦ The names of Cyril and Methodius are associated with:

A. the emergence of Slavic writing

B. translation of church books into Russian

IN. creation of libraries at princely courts

♦ Vladimir I was recognized as a "Saint" because:

A. adopted Christianity and made this religion the state

B. began the construction of serif lines (notched)

IN. introduced human sacrifices to Perun in Kyiv

G. carried out punitive campaigns against Slavic tribes.

♦ What is the main reason for Russia's adoption of Christianity?:

A. Prince Vladimir liked Christian worship when choosing a faith

B. this faith was imposed on Rus' by the more developed Byzantium

IN . Christianity responded to the idea of ​​unifying Rus', strengthening the power of the prince

G. Orthodoxy turned out to be closer than any other faith to Russian society.

♦ Rus' adopted Christianity from:

A. Lithuania

B. Poland

WITH. Byzantium

D. Livonian Order.

♦ The consequences of the adoption of Christianity in the Old Russian state include:

A. weakening of the power of the Grand Duke

B. worsening relations between Rus' and neighbors who adhered to a different faith

IN. worsening strife between Russian princes

G.the introduction of Rus' to Greek and Byzantine culture.

♦ Head of the Orthodox Church in the 11th century. was:

A. Patriarch of Constantinople

B. Pope

IN. Patriarch of All Rus'

G. Kyiv Patriarch.

♦ During the reign of Princess Olga there was

A. weakening of central power

B. the emergence of civil strife

IN. introduction of a new set of laws

G. streamlining the collection of tribute

♦ In 964-965 Svyatoslav marched on the Volga and defeated

A. Volga Bulgaria

B. Byzantium

IN. Hungary

G. Khazar Khaganate

♦ The heyday of Kievan Rus occurred during the reign of

A. Vsevolod's Big Nest

B. Andrey Bogolyubsky

IN. Ivan Kalita

G. Yaroslav the Wise

♦ The legislation "Russian Truth" is associated with the name:

A. Ivan Kalita

B. Yaroslav the Wise

IN. Vladimir Monomakh

G. Alexander Nevsky.

♦ Hereditary land property:

A. estate

B. fief

IN. fiefdom

G. black lands.

♦ According to "Russian Truth" in the era of Kievan Rus there were….

A.serfs

B. nobles

IN. Sagittarius

G. commoners

D. state peasants.

A. Greedy

B. tiuns

IN. procurement and rank and file

G. servants.

♦ The purchasers in Rus' were peasants:

A. who received a loan of money or grain from the boyar and worked it off

B. bequeathed their plot of land to the master

IN. bought their plot of land from the boyar

G. rented land from the boyar.

♦ In Kievan Rus they called ryadovich:

A. ordinary vigilante

B. servant

IN. contract employee

G. a captive forced into slavery.

♦ Armed detachments under the prince in Ancient Rus', participating in campaigns and administration are:

A. army

B. squad

IN. princely youths

G. older men.

♦ The senior squad of the Kyiv prince consisted of...

A. boyars

B. heads of the prince's household

IN. youths

G. elders of the city.

♦ The terms of the agreement concluded between the prince and the squad in the 10th–11th centuries provided for the obligations (choose the correct judgments):

A. The prince took upon himself the fair distribution of funds obtained jointly with the squad

B. The prince took upon himself the obligation to provide the warrior-vassal with patrimony land

IN. The squad was supposed to support and protect the prince

G. The warrior was obliged to pay the prince a tithe from the income from the exploitation of the estates.

♦ The terms of the agreement concluded between the prince and the squad in the 10th–11th centuries provided for:

A. The prince's right to collect tribute

B. The right of the squad to collect tribute

WITH. Mutual obligations of the prince and warriors

D. The prince's obligation to provide the warrior-vassal with a fiefdom.

♦ If the ancient Russian prince violates the terms of the agreement with the squad:

A. The warrior had the right to stop serving the former prince (“the right to leave”);

B. The prince expelled the squad, inviting squads of boyars to serve;

WITH. The squad had the right to expel an unwanted prince and invite a new one;

D. The prince relieved himself of the obligation to allocate part of the tribute received and to protect the former warrior.

♦ The veche interfered in the government activities of the prince in the Old Russian state (choose the correct judgments):

A. In peacetime, upon the accession to the throne of a prince by right of inheritance, a prince pleasing to the townspeople

B. In peacetime, when a strong and popular prince was in power

IN. In emergency situations (inter-princely strife, a change on the princely throne or resolving issues of war and peace)

G . When a weak, unpopular prince is in power.

♦ The Old Russian veche decided the issue of “accepting” the prince in the event of:

A. Seizure of power in the city by the prince and his squad

B. Accession to the throne of a prince by right of inheritance, a prince pleasing to the townspeople

IN. Accession to the throne of a prince in violation of the right of inheritance (“illegal” prince)

G. Accession to the throne of the prince by right of inheritance.

♦ Dynastic rule in the Russian principalities was introduced:
A. Testament of Yaroslav the Wise
B. Russian truth

IN. The decision of the Lyubechsky Congress.

♦ The Princely Congress in Lyubech decided:

A. on organizing a campaign against the Polovtsians

B. on the procedure for replacing the Kyiv throne

IN. “Each one to own his own fatherland”

G. about organizing a campaign to Byzantium (“to Tsar-grad”).

♦ The natural process of economic strengthening and political isolation of feudal possessions is called

A. feeding

B. political fragmentation

IN. centralization

G. localism

♦ Establish a correspondence between a term related to the history of Kievan Rus and its definition

1. metropolitan
2. fiefdom
3. vira

Answer options.