Curta F. - Making of the Slavs

The written history of Slavs starts with the Türkic people. The revisionist histories of the 19th-20th centuries minimized, bypassed, and ignored that fact, but a first turn to the sources underneath those peculiar historical studies brings about numerous Türkic people, Türkic names, and Türkic-driven events. Even the first descriptions of the Slavs, before they were discerned from their Türkic overlords, describe these farming tribes as nomads; the later sources link them with the forests and swamps. The offered mirror of the Dr. Florin Curta work, freely and widely available on the Web, is the most cool-headed, purely academic work without nationalistic biases, political inclinations, and quasi-scientific machinations. In an ideal world, it would rest on a pile of ash from the most made-to-order production of the post-WWI period, and from a good portion of the preceding century. Albeit after the fall of the Soviet dominance many restrictions fell aside, the scientific machinery still largely holds on to the entrenched myths started during the reign of the Peter I of Russia. That is the more reason for anyone interested in the Slavic history to be acquainted with an objective study.

The bottom line of the study: Neither the sources, nor archeology allow to equate “Sclavenes” and “Antes” with the origin of the Slavs. The work and the heart of the its Conclusion are confirming the fact that before 12th c., “no “Slavs” called themselves by this name, no group took on the label imposed by outsiders”, and “the first clear statement that “we are Slavs” comes from the twelfth-century Russian Primary Chronicle”. Behind the supra-ethnical names “Sclavenes” and “Antes” of the 6th-12th cc. stand numerous ethnically-assorted local horse pastoralist nomadic tribes, generically named Wends and Winidi (Wendeln “Wanderers” Vandals) by the contemporaries, and in the case of the Sclavenes identified with Severeis, Cutrigurs, and Suvars, relatively small Türkic tribes of the Western Hunnic circle. The numerous multi-ethnic local sedentary agrarian tribes called Slavs were made in a Türkic cauldron, and are known from the distinctly Greek and Roman mirrors, with terminology largely formed from their perspective.

Aside from numerous origin theories advanced in the last centuries, one quite unpopular theory stands out. It grew from the fact that in Türkic, süläü is “word, speak”, and applied to some strangers it would denote those you can communicate with: süläü = “word, speak” > Sl. “slovo” > Slav, Slovak, Slovene, etc. According to this theory, a part of the Balts (Balto-Slavs speaking Baltic, not Slavic) fell into a Türkic orbit, became bilingual, and was accordingly labeled by their Türkic counterparts as “speaking, speakers” or something close. A corroborating testimony comes from one of the early recorded designations for the Slavs, Σκλαβόι, which is a combination of Skla-, like in Sclavenes, and Türkic boi = “tribe, people”; without the Greek prosthetic “κ” in “Σκ-”, the Σλαβόι is a fair approximation of some dialectal version of Süläüboi > Slaboi > Slav. There are few more corroborating indicators: the load of Türkic lexus in all Slavic languages, the load of Türkic lexus in the Latvian Baltic language, the clearly pidgin nature of the early Slavic with marginal syntax and grammar (termed “analytic morphology”), the exonymous nature of the ethnonym “Slav”, and a few more. Without any references to the Slavs prior to the Atilla's time, it is natural that the timing of the initial Türkic influence is ascribed to the Western Hunnic period; but no less logical is the murky period when Sarmats expanded to the northern Central Europe, and the Vandal Burgunds interspersed with the Baltic Lujites; the Huns may have only inherited the future Slavs along with the other Türkic tribes, and have flushed the Slavs to the western attention. That hypothesis takes the initial period to the 2nd c. BC, and allows more generations to grow in a melting pot. The numerous facts and events studied by Dr. Florin Curta contain indicators that support this origin theory. According to F. Curta, Slavic appeared as a lingua franca for numerous linguistic groups between the lower Danube and the Baltic sea, and that explains the impressive uniformity of the Old Chirch Slavonic across a vast area and numerous linguistic families. The feasibility of the F. Curta's model is solidly supported by the later example of the Russian amalgam of disparate people and the Russian language, which in a course of few centuries became a lingua franca across a vast area and numerous linguistic families from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. In respect to the Slavic origins, the work of Dr. Florin Curta contravenes not only the orthodox Slavistics of the past two centuries, but also the M. Alinei's “Paleolithic Continuity Theory”, and agrees with it by recognizing the autochthonous origin of the Slav's numerous components.

From their inception, the budding Slavic people have included multiple Türkic tribes of the Central Europe; the first Slavic polity “Samo state” Duloba ca 620-653 was headed by Shambat, a “Wendish king” and a junior brother of Kurbat (aka Gr. Kubrat), it was a Türkic Bulgar splinter state of the Great Bulgaria, and as early as ca 620 it was known as a Slavic and Wendish (Germanic wendeln “Wanderers” ~ Vandal) state, pointing that by 620, the Slavs were already viewed as a distinct conglomerate; that also tends to move the Slavic origin deeper, to the Sarmatian times. At least a part of the Slavs were Celts/Gauls, descendents of the Asian migrants marked by R1b Y-DNA chromosome who crossed to Iberia ~4800 bp (~2800 BC) from Africa and looped back toward the Eastern Europe (Galicia).

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	Florin Curta The making of the Slavs: history and archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, r. 500—700 Ed. D.E. Luscombe, Research Professor of Medieval History, University of Sheffield Cambridge University Press, 2001, Copyright © Florin Curta 2001 CONTENTS • СОДЕРЖАНИЕ INDEX