Vistula Veneti
The Vistula Veneti, also called Baltic Veneti or Venedi, were an
Roman historical sources
Pliny the Elder places the Veneti along the Baltic coast. He calls them the Sarmatian Venedi (Latin: Sarmatae Venedi).[4] Thereafter, the 2nd century Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy in his section on Sarmatia, places the Greater Ouenedai along the entire Venedic Bay, which can be located from the context on the southern shores of the Baltic. He names tribes south of these Greater Venedae both along the eastern bank of the Vistula and further east.[5]
The most exhaustive Roman treatment of the Veneti comes in
Here
Byzantine historical sources
Among the Byzantine authors, the
Later in Getica, he returns to the Veneti by stating that though "off-shoots of one stock [these people] have now three names, that is Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni" and noting that they, at one time, had been conquered by the Goths under Ermanaric.[9] Consistent with the view that the Veneti were an umbrella term for these three peoples, he later also recalls the defeat of the Antes at the hands of a Gothic chieftain named Vinitharius, i.e., conqueror of the Veneti.[10]
Though Jordanes is the only author to explicitly associate the Veneti with what appear to have been Sclaveni and Antes, the Tabula Peutingeriana, originating from the 3rd to the 4th century AD, separately mentions the Venedi on the northern bank of the Danube somewhat upstream of its mouth and the Venadi Sarmatae along the Baltic coast.[11]
Archaeology
In the region identified by Ptolemy and Pliny, east of the Vistula and adjoining the Baltic, there was an Iron Age culture known to archaeologists as the West Baltic Cairns Culture or West Baltic Barrow Culture, and the Przeworsk and Zarubintsy cultures east of the Vistula river. The Baltic cultures are associated with the Proto-Balts. These herders lived in small settlements or in little lake dwellings built on artificial islands made of several layers of wooden logs attached by stakes. Their metals were imported, and their dead were cremated and put in urns covered by small mounds.[12] The Przeworsk and Zarubintsy cultures are associated with Proto-Slavs, though the Przeworsk culture was a mix of several tribal societies and is also often linked to the Germanic tribe of Vandals.
Ethnolinguistic character
During the Middle Ages the region east of the mouth of the Vistula river was inhabited by people speaking
Proto-Slavic and Baltic languages
Linguists agree that Slavic languages evolved in close proximity with the Baltic languages. The two language families probably evolved from a common ancestor, a phylogenetic Proto-
Historic references to the Early Slavs
Modern historians most often link the Veneti to Early Slavs, based on Jordanes' writings from the 6th century:
The Slavs, an eastern branch of the Indo-European family, were known to the Roman and Greek writers of the 1st and 2d centuries A.D. under the name of Venedi as inhabiting the region beyond the Vistula. In the course of the early centuries of our era the Slavs expanded in all directions, and by the 6th century, when they were known to Gothic and Byzantine writers as Sclaveni, they were apparently already separated into three main divisions...
It is also clear that the Franks in later centuries (see, e.g., Life of Saint Martinus, Fredegar's Chronicle, Gregory of Tours), Lombards (see, e.g., Paul the Deacon), and Anglo-Saxons (see Widsith's Song) referred to Slavs both in the Elbe-Saal region and in Pomerania generally, as Wenden or Winden (see Wends), which was a later corruption of the word Veneti. Likewise, the Franks and Bavarians of Styria and Carinthia referred to their Slavic neighbours as Windische.
It has not been shown that either the original Veneti or the Slavs themselves used the ethnonym Veneti to describe their ethnos. Of course, other peoples, e.g. the Germans (called so first by the Romans), did not have a name for themselves other than localized tribal names.[18]
Controversies
Roland Steinacher states that "The name Veneder was introduced by Jordanes. The assumption that these were Slavs can be traced back to the 19th century to
Considering Ptolemy's Ouenedai and their location along the Baltic sea, the German linguist, Alexander M. Schenker, asserts that the vocabulary of the Slavic languages shows no evidence that the early Slavs were exposed to the sea. Schenker claims that
Others scholars have interpreted these as Prussian tribes (Sudini) as they follow other known Prussian tribes in Ptolemy's listing (e.g., the Galindae (Γαλίνδαι)). Moreover, that conclusion (Gołąb, Schenker), if correct, may only account for the Byzantine Slavs of Jordanes and Procopius since Jordanes clearly (see above) understands Veneti as a group at least as broad as today's Slavs but does not understand the converse to be the case (i.e., his "Slavs" are localized around Byzantium and north through Moravia only) since his Slavs remain a subset of the broader category of Veneti.[23] It also is clear that the Byzantine term "Slav" had gradually replaced the Germanic "Winden"/"Wenden" as applied to all the people we would, today, consider Slavs.[24][18]
It has been argued that the Veneti were a
In the 1980s and 1990s some
See also
- Veneti (disambiguation)
- Vends
- Wends
Notes
- ^ Kmietowicz, Frank A. (1976). Ancient Slavs. Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Worzalla Publishing Company. p. 125.
Jordanes left no doubt that the Antes were of Slavic origin when he wrote: 'ab unastirpe exorti, tria nomina ediderunt, id est Veneti, Antes, Sclaveni' (although they derive from one nation, now they are known under three names, the Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni.)
- ^ Langer, William L. (1948). Encyclopedia of World History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 239.
The Slavs, an eastern branch of the Indo-European family, were known to the Roman and Greek writers of the 1st and 2d centuries A.D. under the name of Venedi as inhabiting the region beyond the Vistula.
- ^ Alexander M. Schenker, The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology (1995), 1.4., including a reference to J. Ochmański, Ochmański, Historia Litwy, 2nd ed. (Wrocław, 1982)
- ^ Pliny, Natural History, IV: 96–97.
- ^ Ptolemy, Geography, III 5. 21.
- ^ Tacitus, Germania, 46.
- ^ Curta 2001: 38. Dzino 2010: 95.
- ^ Getica 5
- ^ Getica 23
- ^ Getica 48
- ^ Gołąb 1992: 287–291, 295–296.
- ^ Przemyslaw Urbanczyk, Iron Age Poland in Pam Crabtree and Peter Bogucki (eds), Ancient Europe, 8000 B.C. to A.D. 1000: An Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World (2004).
- ^ Gołąb 1992: 300.
- ^ Andersen 2003
- ^ Gołąb 1992: 175; for detailed examples see p. 79-86.
- ^ Parczewski 1993.
- ^ Langer, William L. (1948). Encyclopedia of World History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Co. p. 239.
- ^ a b Gottfried Schramm Venedi, Antes, Sclaveni, Sclavi in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 43, Heft 2, 1995>
- ^ Steinacher 2004; see also Origins of Vandals.
- ^ Steinacher 2002: 31–35.
- ^ Schenker 1996: 3-5
- ^ Gołąb 1992: 291.
- ^ Jordanes, Getica 5
- ^ Paul Barford, Early Slavs
- ^ Zbigniew Gołąb, The Origins of the Slavs: A Linguist's view (1992) pp. 888, 263-268
- ^ Z. Skrbiš, 41–56 and M. Svašek, 144.
References
- Agnes, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1999). "Webster's New World College Dictionary". Cleveland: MacMillan USA, 1999. ISBN 0-02-863118-8.
- Andersen, Henning (2003), "Slavic and the Indo-European Migrations", Language contacts in prehistory: studies in stratigraphy, John Benjamins Publishing Company, ISBN 1-58811-379-5.
- Curta, Florin (2001). The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dzino, Daniel (2010). Becoming Slav, Becoming Croat: Identity Transformations in Post-Roman and Early Medieval Dalmatia. Brill, 2010.
- Gołąb, Zbigniew (1992). The Origins of the Slavs: A Linguist's view. Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1992. ISBN 0-89357-231-4.
- Krahe, Hans (1957). Vorgeschichtliche Sprachbeziehungen von den baltischen Ostseeländern bis zu den Gebieten um den Nordteil der Adria. Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1957.
- Krahe, Hans (1954). Sprache und Vorzeit: Europäische Vorgeschichte nach dem Zeugnis der Sprache. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1954.
- Okulicz, Jerzy (1986). Einige Aspekte der Ethnogenese der Balten und Slawen im Lichte archäologischer und sprachwissenschaftlicher Forschungen. Quaestiones medii aevi, Vol. 3, p. 7-34.
- Pokorny, Julius (1959). Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern, München : Francke, 1959.
- Parczewski, Michał (1993). Die Anfänge der frühslawischen Kultur in Polen. Wien: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, 1993. Veröffentlichungen der österreichischen Gesellschaft für Ur- und Frühgeschichte; Bd. 17.
- Pleterski, Andrej (1995). Model etnogeneze Slovanov na osnovi nekaterih novejših raziskav / A model of an Ethnogenesis of Slavs based on Some Recent Research. Zgodovinski časopis = Historical Review 49, No. 4, 1995, p. 537-556. COBISS 4601165
- Schenker, Alexander M. (1996). The Dawn of Slavic: an Introduction to Slavic Philology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-300-05846-2.
- Skrbiš, Zlatko (2002). The Emotional Historiography of Venetologists: Slovene Diaspora, Memory and Nationalism. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 39, 2002, p. 41-56. [1]
- Steinacher, Roland (2002). Studien zur vandalischen Geschichte. Die Gleichsetzung der Ethnonyme Wenden, Slawen und Vandalen vom Mittelalter bis ins 18. Jahrhundert(doctoral thesis). Wien, 2002.
- Steinacher, Roland (2004). Wenden, Slawen, Vandalen. Eine frühmittelalterliche pseudologische Gleichsetzung und ihr Nachleben bis ins 18. Jahrhundert. In: W. Pohl (Hrsg.): Auf der Suche nach den Ursprüngen. Von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters (Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 8), Wien 2004, p. 329-353.
- Svašek, Maruška. Postsocialism politics and emotions in Central and Eastern Europe, Berghahn Books, 2006, ISBN 1-84545-124-4