d.h.s., prof. L.L. Zaliznyak

Part 1. IN SEARCH OF OUR HOMELAND

Foreword

This work is an attempt at a popular presentation of the complex problems of Indo-European studies to a wide range of educated readers. Since the beginning of the 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 designed not for a narrow circle of professional Indo-Europeanists (linguists, archaeologists), but for wide audience readers interested in ancient history and, above all, students of historians and archaeologists of the historical faculties of Ukrainian universities. Therefore, some of these texts exist in the form of separate chapters of textbooks for the historical faculties of Ukraine. One of the stimuli for this work was the unprecedented explosion in the post-Soviet space of fantastic quasi-scientific "concepts" of innumerable myth-makers.

The fact that most modern researchers to some extent include the territory of Ukraine in the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans, and some even narrow the latter to the steppes between the Southern Carpathians and the Caucasus, also played a role. Despite the fact that the archaeological and anthropological materials obtained in Ukraine are actively interpreted in the West, Indo-European studies have 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-Europeanists from different countries. Without in any way claiming to be the author of most of the provisions raised in the work and having no illusions about the final solution of 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 the 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 peoples of the world devoted to the search for a country from where the ancestors of related Indo-European peoples settled the space between the Atlantic in the west, India in the east, Scandinavia in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south 5-4 thousand years ago. Considering the limited volume of works oriented to a wide audience, the bibliography of the article is narrowed down to the most important works of the problem. A certain genre and a limited amount of work exclude the possibility of a complete historiographic 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; 268; Zaliznyak, 1997, p.117-125). The work is actually a supplemented and edited translation into Russian of one of the two chapters of lectures devoted to Indo-European studies for the historical faculties of Ukraine, published in 2012 ( Leonid Zaliznyak Ancient history of Ukraine. - K., 2012, 542 p.). The full text of the book can be found online.

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

I want to sincerely thank the classic, deeply respected by me from my student days modern archeology And ancient history Lev Samoylovich Klein for his kind offer and the opportunity to place this far from perfect text on this site.

Discovery of the Indo-Europeans

The high level of development of mankind at the beginning of the third millennium is 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 ii). In addition, resettlement and-e peoples largely predetermined the modern ethnopolitical map of Europe and Western Asia. This explains the extraordinary scientific significance of the problem of the origin Indo-European family peoples for the history of mankind in general and for primitive history 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 different 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 the Supreme Court of India in Calcutta, 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 Rigveda, W. Jones came to the conclusion about the kinship of the genetic predecessors of the i-th 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 u-e from one common ancestor. Since then, both modern and dead languages ​​have been carefully researched. The latter are known from the sacred texts of the Rigveda of the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, later recorded 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 writing Hittites of Anatolia II 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 reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European vocabulary by the method of comparative linguistic paleontology. The use of comparative linguistics made it possible to develop a diagram of the genetic tree of u-th languages. The result of centuries of efforts of linguists was the classification of u-e languages, which basically took shape by the end of the 19th century. However, even today there is no consensus among specialists about the number of not only languages, but also language groups and peoples. Among the most recognized is the classification scheme, which covers 13 ethno-linguistic groups and 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 already dead languages.

Anatolian(Hitto-Luvian) group covers the Hittite, Luvian, Palaian, Lydian, Lycian, Carian, as well as the so-called "small languages": Pisidian, Cilician, Meonian. 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 Nessian. Among the mass of ritual and business texts in the Hittite language, a few records were found in the related Hittite Luwian and Palayan languages, as well as in non-Indo-European Hattian. The autochthons of Asia Minor, the Hatti, were conquered at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. the Hittites, however, influenced the language of the Indo-European conquerors.

The Early Anatolian Hittite, Luwian, and Palalay 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 the Hellenistic period around the 3rd century. BC.

Indian(Indo-Aryan) group: Mitani, Vedic, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Hindi, Bihali, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Sindhi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bhili, Khandesh, Pahari, Kafir or Nuristani, Dardic languages, Romani dialects .

The Mitani 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 in the 2nd millennium BC. moved from the north to the Indus Valley. The oldest part of their hymns was written down in the 1st millennium BC. Vedic language, and in the 3rd century. BC. - IV Art. AD - Sanskrit literary language. The sacred Vedic books Brahmanas, Upanishads, Sutras, as well as the epic poems Mahabharata and Ramayana were written in classical Sanskrit. In parallel with literary Sanskrit, the living Prakrit languages ​​functioned in early medieval India. From them come the modern languages ​​of India: Hindi, Urdu, Byhals, Bengali, etc. Texts in Hindi are known from the 13th century.

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

Iranian(Iranian-Aryan) group of languages: Avestan, Old Persian, Median, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Bactrian, Parthian, Pahlavi, Saka, Massagetian, Scythian, Sarmatian, Alanian, Ossetian, Yagnob, Afghan, Mudjan, Pamir, Novopersky, Tajit, Talysh, Kurdish, Baloch, Tat, etc. The Iranian-Aryan group is related to the Indo-Aryan and comes from the language of the Aryans, who in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. settled Iran or Ayriyan, which means "country of the Aryans". Later, their hymns were written down in the Avestan language in the sacred book of the followers of Zarathustra, the Avesta. Median is the language of the tribes that inhabited northern Iran in the 8th–6th centuries. BC. before the advent of the Persian kingdom of the Achaemenids. The Parthians lived in Central Asia in the 3rd century. BC e. – ІІІ st. AD, until the time when their kingdom was conquered in 224 by the Sassanids. Pahlavi is the literary language of Persia of the Sasanian period (3rd–7th centuries AD). At the beginning of our era, the Sogdian, Khorezmian and Bactrian languages ​​of the Iranian group also functioned in Central Asia.

Among the northern Iranian languages ​​of the Eurasian steppe, the dead languages ​​of the nomadic Saks, Massagets, 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 medieval Persia. These include Novopersky with literary monuments from the IX century. AD, close to it Tajik, Afghan (Pashto), Kurdish, Talysh and Tats of Azerbaijan, Baloch, etc.

In history Greek There are three main eras of the language: ancient Greek (XV century BC - IV century AD), Byzantine (IV-XV century 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-8th centuries. BC, classical (VIІІІ–ІV centuries BC), Hellenistic (ІV–І centuries BC), late Greek (І–ІV centuries AD). In the classical and Hellenistic periods, 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 oldest monuments of the Greek language were written in the Cretan-Mycenaean linear script "B" in the 15th-12th centuries. BC. Homer's poems "Iliad" and "Odyssey", describing the events of the Trojan War of the XII century. BC. were first recorded in the VIII–VI centuries. BC. ancient Greek alphabet, which laid the foundation for the classical Greek language. The classical period is characterized by the spread of the Attic dialect in the Greek world. It was on it that in 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 5th–4th centuries. BC. It was used by the court of the Byzantine emperor until the fall of Constantinople under the blows of 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, Volsk, Umbrian, Latin and Romance languages ​​derived from the latter: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Provencal, French, Romanian, etc. Inscriptions related to Oscan, Volsky, Umbrian, Latin, appeared in Central Italy in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. In the process of Romanization of the provinces in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Latin dialects spread throughout the Roman Empire. IN early middle ages this "kitchen Latin" became the basis for the formation of the Romance group of languages.

Celtic the group of languages ​​is made up of Gallic, Irish, Breton, Horse, Welsh, Gaelic (Scottish), the dialect of O. Man. 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 Art. BC. there was a powerful Celtic expansion to the British Isles, to the territory of France, the Iberian, Apennine, 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 northwestern foothills of the Alps are considered the area of ​​their formation. Due to the expansion first of the Roman Empire, and later of the Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons, Jutes), the Celts were forced out to the extreme north-west of Europe.

The language of the Gauls assimilated by the Romans in 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, Welsh languages ​​of the Breton Peninsula in France, Cornwall and Wales in Great Britain originated 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 4th, 7th, and 11th 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 since the 7th century. BC. lived in the Carpathian Basin, on the Middle Danube, in the northwest of the Balkan Peninsula (Fig. 2). Its archaeological counterpart is the so-called Eastern Hallstatt of the 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, which has been significantly influenced by Latin, Greek, Slavic and Thracian dialects. Albanian texts are known from the 15th century. Mesapian is an offshoot of the Illyrian language array in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula, which has been preserved in the form of tomb 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, Meses, Odryses, Tribals, who in ancient times lived in Transylvania, on the Lower Danube and in the northeast of the Balkan Peninsula. They were assimilated by the Romans in II-IV Art. and 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, in the north of Anatolia, the state of Phrygia arose with the capital Gordion, 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 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 in Transcaucasia to the lands of the Huritto-Urartians. The Proto-Armenian language was partially transformed under the influence of the language of the natives.

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 a conventional name for i-e dialects, which in the 6th–7th centuries. AD functioned in Chinese Turkestan (Uyguria). Known from the 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 Afanasiev culture. In the sands of Western China, mummies of light-pigmented northern Caucasoids 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. Uighur Turks.

Germanic languages ​​are divided into three groups: northern (Scandinavian), eastern (Gothic) and western. The oldest Germanic texts are represented by archaic runic inscriptions from Scandinavia, which date back to the 3rd–8th centuries. AD and bear the features of the common Germanic language before its dismemberment. Numerous Old Norse texts of the 13th century. preserved the rich Scandinavian poetry (Elder Edda) and prose (sagas) of the 10th-12th centuries. Approximately from the XV century. the disintegration 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 the Gothic, known from the translation of the Bible by Bishop Ulfila, included the now dead languages ​​\u200b\u200bof 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 the West Germanic languages ​​are the Anglo-Saxon epic of the VIII century. "Beowulf", known from manuscripts of the 10th century, the High German "Nibelungenlied" of the 8th century, the Saxon epic of the 9th century. "Heliad".

Among the modern Germanic languages ​​is English, which in the XI-XIII centuries. was significantly influenced by French, Flemish - a descendant of Old Frisian, Dutch - an offshoot 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 modernity, we should mention Yiddish, Boer, Faroese, Swiss.

Baltic languages ​​are divided into Western Baltic - dead Prussian (disappeared in the 18th century) and Yatvingian, which was common in the Middle Ages in the territory of North-Eastern Poland and Western Belarus, and Eastern Baltic. The latter include Lithuanian, Latvian, Latgalian, as well as common until the 17th century. on the Baltic coast of Lithuania and Latvia Curonian. Among the dead are the Selonian and Golyadian of the Moscow region, the Baltic language of the Upper Dnieper region. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Baltic languages ​​were distributed 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 ​​more fully preserved the ancient Indo-European language system 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 Serbo-Lug. Kashubian, related to Polabian, was spoken in the Polish Pomerania west of the Lower Vistula. Lusatian is the language of the Lusatian Serbs of the upper Spree in Germany. South Slavic languages ​​- Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian. The Slavic languages ​​are close to each other, since they come from one Old Slavic language, which broke up relatively recently in the 5th–7th centuries. Presumably, the speakers of Old Slavic before its collapse were the Antes and Sclavins of the territory of Ukraine, whose archaeological counterparts were the population of the Prague-Korchak and Penkivka 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 the Indo-European peoples according to the principle of the genetic tree, proposed as early as the 19th century. Obviously, the process of glottogenesis and ethnogenesis took place not only through the transformation or division of the mother language into daughter ones, 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 affinity of the 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 faced the task of searching for the homeland of the Indo-European peoples and identifying ways of their settlement. Under the Indo-European ancestral home, linguists mean the region that was occupied by the native speakers of the parent language before its collapse in the 4th millennium BC.

The history of the search for the Indo-European homeland

The search for an ancestral home has a two-hundred-year-old 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 Rigveda was considered almost the ancestor of all languages, which allegedly 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 surpluses of the population settled westward into Europe and Western Asia.

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

In 30-50 years. XIX Art. Indo-Europeans were driven out Central Asia, which was then considered the "forge of peoples." This version was fueled by historical data on migratory waves that periodically arrived from Central Asia to Europe over the past two thousand years. This refers to the arrival of the Sarmatians, Turkic and Mongol tribes of the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Torks, Polovtsians, Mongols, Kalmyks, etc. from the north and the British from the south.

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

From the second half of the nineteenth 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 affect the fate of Indo-European studies. After all, most of the specialists of that time were ethnic Germans. So the growth of German patriotism stimulated the popularity of the concept of origin and e from the territory of Germany.

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 North Caucasian appearance of the most ancient Indo-Europeans. Blonde hair and blue eyes are a sign of aristocracy both among the Aryans of the Rig Veda and the ancient Greeks, judging by their mythology. In addition, German archaeologists came to the conclusion about the continuous ethno-cultural development in Germany from the archaeological culture of linear-band ceramics of the 6th millennium BC. to modern Germans.

The founder of this concept is 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 autochthonous nature of the Germans east of the Rhine, proposed Germany as possible ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (Geiger, 1871).

Significant contribution to the development of the Central European origin hypothesis and-e introduced famous German philologist Hermann Hirt. He came to the conclusion that the German language is a direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European. The languages ​​of other i-e peoples supposedly 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 natives (Hirt 1892).

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

In the 70s of the twentieth century. P. Bosch-Jimpera (1961) and G. Devoto (1962) deduced i-e from the culture of linear-tape ceramics. They attempted to trace the phases development and from the Danubian Neolithic of the 5th millennium BC. to the Bronze Age and even to the historical and e peoples of the early Iron Age. P. Bosch-Jimpera considered the culture of Trypillia to be Indo-European, since, in his opinion, it was formed on the basis of the culture of linear-tape ceramics.

Fig.3. steppe barrow

Almost along with Central European concept of origin and-e was born and steppe. Its supporters consider the steppe from the Lower Danube to the Volga to be the ancestral home. The founder of this concept is 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 with the involvement of archaeological materials, including those from the Black Sea steppes. The linguistic reconstruction of the pastoral society of the ancient Indo-Europeans has been brilliantly confirmed by archeology. O. Schrader considered the pastoralists of the Eastern European steppe of the 3rd–2nd millennium BC as 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 Child in the book "The Aryans" in 1926 significantly developed the ideas of O. Schrader, narrowing the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans to the steppes of Ukraine. On the basis of new archaeological materials, he showed that the burial mounds with ocher in the south of Ukraine (Fig. 4) were left by the most ancient Indo-European pastoralists, who began to settle in Eurasia from here.

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

In his 1950 book, G. Child supported T. Sulimirsky and concluded that the Pitmen from the south of Ukraine migrated through the Danube to Central Europe, where they laid the foundation for the Corded Ware cultures, from which most researchers derive the Celts, Germans, Balts, 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 i-e.

A radical follower of Gordon Child was Maria Gimbutas (1970, p. 483; 1985), who considered the Yamniks to be Proto-Indo-Europeans, “who moved west and south in the 5th-4th millennium BC. from the lower Don and Lower Volga. Under the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, the researcher understood the resettlement of the militant bearers 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 culture of funnel-shaped goblets.

Due to schematism, ignoring 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) and others.

Middle Eastern version of the origin of i-e was born at the dawn of Indo-European studies. In 1822 r. G. Link and F. Miller placed their homeland in Transcaucasia. Under the influence of Pan-Babylonism, T. Momsen believed that the i-e come from Mesopotamia. However, the most detailed argumentation of 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 a deep analysis of a huge array of linguistic material and a generalization of the achievements of their predecessors, the researchers gave a broad picture of the economy, life, material culture, beliefs of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the natural and landscape characteristics of their ancestral home.

However, the placement of the ancestral home on Armenian Highlands and an attempt to argue the way of the settlement of Europe by the 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), which are characteristic of their homeland, are not characteristic of Transcaucasia. The corresponding hydronymy is also very scarce here. Not supported by archaeological evidence travel i-e around the Caspian through Central Asia, the Lower Volga region and the steppes of Ukraine to the west.

Colin Renfrew (1987) places the i-th homeland within the boundaries of the crescent of fertility - in the south Anatolia. This assumption is fundamental to his concept, because it is based on the obvious fact of the migration of the early farmers of the Near East westward into Europe and eastward into 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 Afroasian, Elamo-Dravidian, Uralic 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 reproduction economy (Renfrew, 1987). Without refuting the very fact of the mentioned migrations, most Indo-Europeanists 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-Danubian Neolithic proto-civilization of the 7th-5th millennium BC. It was from here, according to archeology, that the Neolithicization of Europe took place. This gave grounds to B. Gornung (1956) and V. Georgiev (1966) to assume that the Proto-Indo-Europeans formed on the Lower Danube as a result of the mixing of local Mesolithic hunters with Neolithic migrants from the Balkans. The weak point of the concept is the extreme poverty of the Lower Danube Mesolithic. I. Dyakonov (1982) also considered the Balkans to be the ancestral home of i-e.

The ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to paleolinguistics

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

The 19th century was an era of bold reconstructions of society, economy, culture, the spiritual world, the natural environment of the early Indo-Europeans with the help of the so-called linguistic paleontology. The successful work of A. Kuhn (Kuhn, 1845) and J. Grimm (Grimm, 1848) provoked numerous paleolinguistic studies, the authors of which did not always adhere to the strict rules of comparative analysis of languages. Criticism of attempts to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European realities with the help of 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 the Proto-Indo-Europeans belongs to O. Schrader (1886), who summarized the results of the reconstructions of his predecessors, clarifying and verifying them with the use of materials from the Bronze Age, which at that time appeared at the disposal of researchers.

Using the method of linguistic paleontology, scientists managed to reconstruct the stages of the formation of the i-e 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 into separate language groups. The Proto-Indo-European dictionary indicates that its speakers lived in a temperate zone, although with a sharply continental climate, with cold winters and warm summers. They lived both in 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 cattle-breeding and agricultural nature. However, the significant development of pastoral terminology indicates the dominance of this particular sector in the economy. Among domestic animals there are a horse, a bull, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, a dog. Pasture cattle breeding of the meat and dairy direction dominated. Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed perfect methods of processing livestock products: skins, wool, milk. The cult of the horse and the bull occupied an important place in the ideology.

Agriculture has reached a fairly high level. There was a transition from hoe farming to an early form of arable farming, with the use of a ral and plow, which was pulled by a pair of oxen. They grew barley, wheat and flax. Harvest was harvested with sickles and threshed, 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, gold. Wheeled transport played a special role: bulls and horses were harnessed to carts. They knew how to ride.

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, militancy. The society was divided into three strata: priests, military aristocracy and ordinary community members (shepherds, farmers, warriors). The warlike spirit of the era was reflected in the construction of the first fortified settlements - fortresses. The originality of the spiritual world consisted in the sacralization of war, the supreme god-warrior. They worshiped weapons, a horse, a war chariot (Fig. 5), fire, the sun-wheel, the symbol of which was the swastika.

An important element of i-e mythology is the world tree. By the way, this indicates that the ancestral home was quite a wooded 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 leopard, lion , monkey, elephant.

The last four animals are not typical 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 entered the proto-language from the Middle East, most likely from the Afroasians of the Levant (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov 1984, pp. 506, 510).

Thus, the flora and fauna of the ancestral home corresponds to the temperate zone of Europe. This has led most modern researchers to locate 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). Within the same limits, L.S. Klein places the ancestral home in his fundamental monograph of 2007.

The reconstruction of the unified dictionary 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 stage of the Eneolithic. 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 the Hittite, Palayan, Luvian and separate languages ​​as a result of the decipherment of texts from the library of the capital of the Hittite kingdom Hatusa II millennium BC. Since there is convincing archaeological evidence that the Hittites came to Anatolia at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, the disintegration of the Proto-Indo-Europeans into separate branches began no later than the 4th millennium BC.

G. Kühn believed that the Proto-Indo-European unity existed in the Upper Paleolithic and connected it with the Madeleine culture of France (Kühn, 1932). SV 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 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).

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

The well-known linguist V. Illich-Svitych (1964) noted that a certain part of the agricultural and livestock vocabulary i-e borrowed from the Proto-Semites and Sumerians. As an example of pra-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, words were borrowed from the Sumerian language: kou - cow, reud - ore, auesk - gold, akro - field, duer – doors, hkor – mountains, etc. (Gamkrelidze, Ivanov, 1984, pp. 272–276).

However, especially a lot of agricultural and livestock terminology, the names of food products, household items, and e borrowed from the Prahatts and Prahurites, whose ancestral home 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 cited by V. Illich-Svitych klau, medu, akgo, bar and some others are not at all Proto-Semitic or Sumerian, but Hatto-Khurit. In addition, he gives numerous examples of the Hatto-Khurit vocabulary in the i-th languages. Here are just a few of them: ekuo - horse, kago - goat, porko - piglet, hvelena - wave, ouig - oats, hag - berry, rughio - rye, lino - lyon, kulo - stake, list, gueran - millstone, sel - village, dholo - valley, arho - space, area, tuer - cottage cheese, sur - cheese, bhar - barley, penkue - five and many others. An analysis of these linguistic borrowings indicates that they occurred in the process of direct contacts between the Proto-Indo-Europeans and the more developed Prahatto-Khurites no later than the 5th millennium BC. (Starostin, 1988, pp. 112–113, 152–154).

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

Analysis of modern versions and ancestral home

In our time, five regions claim the honorable right to be called the ancestral home: Central Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula (J. Geiger, G. Hirt, G. Kosinna, P. Bosch-Jimpera, 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 the Volga (O. Schrader, G. Child, T. Sulimirsky, V. Danilenko , M. Gimbutas, D. Mallory, D. Anthony, Y. Pavlenko). Some researchers unite the ancestral home of Central Europe with the Eastern European steppes to the Volga (A. Heusler, L. Zaliznyak, S. Koncha). Which of these versions is more plausible?

The concept of the origin of i-e with Central Europe(land between the Rhine, the Vistula and the 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 dictionary with the nature and temperate climate of Central Europe, as well as the North European appearance. early and(Fig. 6). Equally important is the fact that the main area of ​​i-e hydronymics coincides with the territories of several archaeological cultures. This refers to the culture of linear-ribbon ceramics, funnel-shaped goblets, spherical amphoras, corded ceramics, which from the 6th to the 2nd millennium BC. successively replaced each other in the indicated territories of Central Europe.

Nobody doubts the Indo-European character of the Corded Ware cultures. Their genetic predecessors were cultures of funnel-shaped goblets and globular amphoras. However, there is no reason to call the Indo-European culture of linear-band ceramics, since it lacks the defining features reconstructed by linguists: the cattle-breeding direction of the economy, the dominance of men in society, the militant nature of the latter - the presence of a military elite, fortresses, a cult of war, weapons, a war chariot, horse, sun, fire, etc. The carriers of the traditions of the culture of linear-band ceramics, in our opinion, belonged to the circle of the Neolithic of the Balkans, the non-Indo-European character of which is recognized by most researchers.

The location of the ancestral home in Central Europe is hampered by the presence in the i-th languages ​​of traces of close linguistic contacts with the Proto-Kartvels of the Caucasus and the Finno-Ugric peoples, whose homeland was the forest-steppes between the Don and the South Urals. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in Central Europe, then how could they contact the inhabitants of the Caucasus and the Don?

Most modern scientists consider Central Europe to be the birthplace of the Corded cultures of the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, whose carriers were the ancestors of the northern branches of the i-e: the 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, i-e appeared earlier than the most ancient cord workers - no later than the end of the 5th millennium BC. (middlemen).

Near East also could not be the ancestral home, because there was the homeland of non-Indo-European ethnic groups: the Hattian, Khurit, Elamite, Afroasian linguistic communities. Mapping of i-th languages ​​shows that this region was the southern periphery of their ecumene. I-e Hittites, Luvians, Palaians, Phrygians, Armenians appear 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. In contrast to Europe, there is almost no i-e hydronymy.

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 i-th language are missing here (aspen, hornbeam, linden, heather, beaver, black grouse, lynx, etc.). On the other hand, the i-th 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 the Proto-Semitic. If these animals were typical of the i-th 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-Ugrians, whose homeland is located too far north of the Middle East, which excludes the possibility of contact with them.

Assuming that i-e occur with 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 withdraw from the Balkans and their eastern branch - the Indo-Iranians. This is contradicted by the data of both archeology and linguistics. I-e hydronyms are known only in the north of the Balkans. Their main mass is distributed to the north, between the Rhine and the Dnieper. The hypothesis about the origin of i-e from the Balkan Neolithic farmers is also contradicted by the fact that the appearance first and e on the historical arena in the IV-III millennium BC. e. coincided with the aridization of the climate, the separation of cattle breeding into a separate industry and its spread over the gigantic expanses of Eurasia, and, finally, with the collapse of the agricultural Neolithic of the Balkans and the Danube. What gives some researchers grounds to consider the Balkan Peninsula as their ancestral home?

The well-known researcher Colin Renfrew rightly believes that the grandiose linguistic phenomenon of the spread of u languages ​​must be accompanied 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 resettlement of ancient farmers and livestock breeders from the Middle East to the Balkans and further to Europe.

Reasoned criticism of K. Renfrew's attempts to withdraw e from the Middle East from the positions of new genetic research given by R. Sollaris (1998, pp. 128, 129). Biomolecular analysis of paleoanthropological and paleozoological remains demonstrates the correspondence of changes in the genome of Europeans and domesticated animals of Near Eastern origin. This provides strong evidence of the colonization of Europe by Neolithic populations from the Middle East. However, substrate phenomena in Greek and other i-th languages ​​testify that i-e came to the Balkans after their development by Neolithic colonists from Anatolia. According to R. Sollaris (1988, p. 132), the genetic kinship of the peoples of the Nostratic family of languages ​​of Eurasia is explained by the existence of common ancestors of the population of Eurasia, which, at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 40 thousand years ago, settled from the Western Mediterranean to the west and east.

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 testifies that from the first centers of the producing economy in the south of Anatolia, in Syria, Palestine, in the mountains of Zagros, not only Elamite, Hattian, Khuritian, Sumerian and Afroasian communities grow 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 that of the Neolithic inhabitants of the Near East and differs significantly from the anthropology of the first reliable Indo-Europeans who lived in the 4th millennium BC. e. in Central Europe (the Corded Ware culture) and in the forest-steppes between the Dnieper and the Volga (Srednestogovskaya and Yamnaya cultures). If the Neolithic population of the Balkans and the Near East was a bearer of the South European or Mediterranean anthropological type (gracil, short Caucasoids), then the mentioned Indo-Europeans were massive, tall Northern Caucasoids (Potekhina 1992) (Fig. 6). Clay figurines from the Balkans depict people with a large nose of a specific shape (Zaliznyak, 1994, p. 85), which is an important defining feature of the Eastern Mediterranean anthropological type, according to V.P. Alekseev (1974, p. 224, 225).

A direct descendant of the Neolithic proto-civilization of the Balkans was the Minoan civilization, which was 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 in no way 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 Near East. It seems that the aforementioned significant number of agricultural terms of Middle Eastern origin in i-th languages ​​is explained by the intense cultural influence of the Balkan farmers, genetically related to the Middle East, on the ancestors of i-e - the aborigines of Central and southern Eastern Europe.

Steppe version of the origin of the Indo-Europeans

The most reasoned and popular in our time versions of the location of the ancestral home of i-e peoples include the steppe, according to which i-e originated in the steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Volga and the Caucasus. Its founders were the mentioned O.Schrader (1886) and G.Child (1926, 1950), who at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. expressed the idea that the first impulse to the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia came from the most 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). Yu.Pavlenko (1994) was her supporter.

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. As a result of long-term agrarian colonization by Middle Eastern hoe farmers of the Balkans and the Danube, the reserves of hoe agriculture in Central Europe were exhausted. Further expansion of the reproductive 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 the Danube region, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for the spread of various forms of animal husbandry. The same was facilitated by the reduction of deciduous forests of Central Europe and Right-Bank Ukraine by Neolithic farmers in the 4th-5th millennium BC. e., since the wastelands on the site of former fields became potential pastures.

Hoe farmers of the Neolithic grazed their few animals near the villages. During the ripening of the crop, they were driven away from the crops. Thus, the most ancient distant pasture form of cattle breeding was born. It tends 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 move into the forests of central Europe.

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

It was in the south of Ukraine that the agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and the Danube through its northeastern outpost - the Trypillia culture - directly influenced the ancestors of the most ancient pastoralists - the 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 most ancient farmers and pastoralists of the Middle East not only the skills of a reproducing economy, but also the Middle Eastern agricultural terminology, traced by linguists in th languages ​​(Illich-Svitych 1964; 1971; Starostin, 1988). The localization in the steppes and forest-steppes between the Dniester, the Lower Don and the Kuban of the first shepherds-cattle breeders is in good agreement with the three main directions of Proto-Indo-European linguistic contacts. In the west, they directly bordered on 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, with which it is difficult to agree. 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 happen only under the condition of direct and close contacts of the first pastoralists with large agrarian communities, such as the early agricultural proto-civilization of the Balkans and the Danube region.

There was nothing like it in the Volga region. The nearest center of agriculture lay 800 km south of the Middle Volga region behind the Great Caucasian Range in the basins of the Kura and Araks rivers. If the first pastoralists had borrowed the producing economy, together with the agrarian terminology, from there, then the latter would have been basically 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 the Danube region - the direct descendants of the Neolithic colonists from Anatolia, most likely Prahatto-Khurits.

The cattle-breeding skills received from the Trypillians took root and quickly developed into a separate industry in the favorable conditions of the steppes and forest-steppes of the Left-Bank Ukraine. Herds of cows and flocks of sheep moved intensively in search of pastures, which required a mobile way of life from pastoralists. 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. The pastoral economy proved to be very productive. One shepherd grazing a flock capable of feeding many people. In the context of constant conflicts over pastures and cows, the surplus of male laborers was transformed into professional warriors.

Among pastoralists, unlike farmers, not a woman, but a man 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 conditions for the property differentiation of society. The military elite appears. The militarization of society determined the construction of ancient fortresses, the spread of cults of the supreme god of the warrior and shepherd, the war chariot, weapons, horse, sun-wheel (swastika), fire.

Rice. 7. Pit-pit 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 most ancient pastoralists of the south of Eastern Europe date back to the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. were not yet real nomads who spent their whole lives on a horse or on a wagon in constant migrations behind 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. At the heart of the economy of the steppes IV-III millennium BC. e. there was a less mobile transhumant pastoralism. It provided for the more or less sedentary residence of women and children in stationary settlements in river valleys, where they grew barley, wheat, bred pigs, goats, and fished. The male population spent more and more time with herds of cows, sheep and horses on summer steppe pastures. In the spring, the animals, accompanied by shepherds and armed guards, were driven far into the steppe and only in the fall were they returned home for the winter. This semi-sedentary way of life quickly acquired more and more mobile forms due to the growing role of pastoralism.

These early semi-nomadic pastoralists left few settlements, but a large number of burial mounds. Especially a lot of them were poured by pits (hundreds of thousands) in the III millennium BC. e. Archaeologists recognize them by the so-called steppe burial complex. Its most important elements are the burial mound, the placement of the deceased in the grave pit in a crouched position, and the filling of the buried with red ocher powder. Rough clay pots, often ornamented with cord imprints and pricks, 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 wagon, and often its details (Fig. 4). Stone anthropomorphic steles are found in mounds, which depict a tribal patriarch with the corresponding attributes of a warrior leader and a shepherd (Fig. 8). An important sign of the first and-e south 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).

Unprecedented in scope, the settlement of the oldest i-e from the south of Ukraine in the endless steppe expanses to the Middle Danube in the west and to the Altai in the east is explained by the cattle-breeding economy, the spread of wheeled transport - wagons and war chariots (Fig. 9), draft animals (ox, horse) , and later horsemanship, which determined the mobile way of life, militancy and the grandiose scale of the expansion of the early i-e (Fig. 2).

From the Rhine to the Donets

However, the limitation of the i-th ancestral home only to 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, distribution of aspen, beech, yew, heather, beavers, black grouse, etc. do not fit in 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. And the northern Caucasoid appearance of the first and e, as evidenced by the oldest written sources, does not fit with the Black Sea region.

These contradictions are removed 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 most ancient Indo-Europeans of the Black Sea and Central Europe began to form. Such a substrate began to emerge in the last third of the twentieth century. in the course of studies of Mesolithic monuments in the North German, Polish, Polissya lowlands, in the basins of the Neman and Donets.

The Central European lowlands, which stretch from the Thames basin through northern Germany, Poland, Polissya to the Middle Dnieper, from the final Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, were a kind of corridor through which migration waves rolled from west to east. The reindeer hunters of the Lingbi culture were the first to travel this route from Jutland to the Dnieper 12 thousand years ago (Fig. 10). They populated 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, and Upper Dnieper basins.

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

The Mesolithic of the Central European lowlands began with a new wave of migrants to the east, which led to the formation cultural area Duvensi. It includes related early Mesolithic cultures of Star Car of England, Duvensi of Germany, Klosterlund of Denmark, Komornita of Poland, Kudlaevka of Polissya and the Neman basin (Fig. 11, 12).

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

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

Rice. 14. Map of the distribution of points with a micro-cut chip on blades on the territory of Ukraine. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p. 109) Symbols: 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 Polissya, 5th southern border of forests in Atlanticum.

Rice. 15. Points on blades with micro-chisel spalls from Ukrainian sites. Yanislavitz type and the like. (Zaliznyak, 2005, p.110)

The process of the penetration of forest hunters of the Maglemose cultural traditions from Polissya to the south was probably stimulated by a southward shift along the river valleys of broad-leaved forests due to 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 the river valleys up to the Black and Azov Seas, conditions were created for the forest hunters of the Janislavitsky culture to move to the south and south-east of Ukraine.

So, in the VI-V millennium BC. a late Melithic post-Maglemose cultural community was formed, which covered the lowlands from Jutland to the Seversky Donets (Fig. 16). It included the Mesolithic post-Maglemose cultures of the Western and Southern Baltic, Yanislavitsa 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 of the Baltic and Polissya 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 postmaglemosis, but under the southern influence of the cultural communities of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic, a group of forest Neolithic cultures was formed: Ertebölle of the South-Western and Tsedmar of the South Baltic, Dubichay of the Neman basin, Volyn of the Pripyat and Neman basins, Dnieper-Donets of the Middle Dnieper and Donetsk of the Seversky Donets (Fig. . 16). Among the Neolithic donors of the mentioned cultures of the Forest Neolithic of the German, Polish, Polosskaya lowlands and the Middle Dnieper region, the cultures of linear-band ceramics and Cukuteni-Trypillia played a special role.

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 the South-East of Ukraine in the Mesolithic and Neolithic (Gokhman 1966, Konduktorova 1973). Comparison of materials from the Mesolithic and Neolithic burial grounds of the Dnieper region of the 6th-4th millennium BC. with synchronous burials of Jutland testifies both to a certain cultural and genetic kinship of the population that left them. Not only the funeral rite, but also the anthropological type of the buried turned out to be similar (Fig. 4). They 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 moved along the forest-steppe belt 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 Caucasoids (Telegin, 1991). From this anthropological array comes the population of the early Indo-European communities of the 4th millennium BC. – Srednestog and Yamnaya cultures of the 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 Polissya, moved along the Left Bank of the Dnieper to the Seversky Donets basin. A huge ethno-cultural community was formed, which stretched from Jutland to the Donets for two thousand kilometers and consisted of related cultures of hunters and fishermen. Under the influence of agricultural cultures of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic from the south, the post-Maglemezian Mesolithic community passed to the Neolithic stage of development. Due to the spread of the steppes due to the aridization of the climate, these aboriginal societies of the northern Caucasoids began to switch to cattle breeding and transformed into the most ancient cultures of the 4th millennium BC. (Srednestogovskaya on the Left Bank of the Dnieper and funnel-shaped cups in Central Europe).

Thus, the most ancient Indo-Europeans IV-III millennium BC. the carriers of the Sredny Stog and Yamnaya cultures (arose on the basis of the Dnieper-Donetsk and Mariupol cultures) in the east and the cultures of funnel-shaped goblets and spherical amphoras (descendants of the Ertebelle culture) in the west belonged to the North European anthropological type. At the same time, some gracilization of the skeleton can be traced among the carriers of these early Indo-European cultures, which indicates their formation on the basis of local northern Caucasoids in the conditions of a certain influx of a more graceful non-Indo-European population from the Danube colonized by farmers. According to E.E. Kuzmina (1994, p. 244-247), massive northern Caucasians 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 testify to the light pigmentation of the Indo-Europeans of the 2nd millennium BC. So, in the Rig Veda, the Aryans are characterized by the epithet "Svitnya", which means "light, light-skinned." The hero of the famous Aryan epic "Mahabharata" often has eyes of the color of "blue lotus". According to the Vedic tradition, a real Brahmin should have brown hair and gray eyes. In the Iliad, the Achaeans are golden-haired blondes (Achilles, Menelaus, Odysseus), the Achaean women and even the goddess Hera are fair-haired. The god Apollo was also depicted as golden-haired. In Egyptian reliefs from the time of Thutmose IV (1420-1411 BC), the Hittite charioteers (marianu) have a Nordic appearance, in contrast to their Armenoid squires. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. the fair-haired descendants of the Aryans allegedly came to the king of Persia from India (Lelekov, 1982, p. 33). According to ancient authors, tall blonds were the Celts of Central and Western Europe. Surprisingly, the legendary Tokhars of Sindzyan in Western China also belonged to the same North European type. This is evidenced by their mummified bodies, which date back to around 1200 BC. and Tocharian wall paintings of the 7th-6th centuries. AD Ancient Chinese chronicles also testify to blue-eyed blonds who lived in ancient times in the deserts of Central Asia.

The belonging of the most ancient Indo-Europeans to the northern Caucasians is consistent with the localization of the ancestral home between the Rhine and the Seversky Donets, where by the 6th-5th millennium BC. according to the data of modern archeology, an ethnocultural community was formed (Fig. 16), on the basis of which the most ancient cultures arose (Mariupol, Srednestog, Yamnaya, funnel-shaped goblets, spherical amphorae).

Summing up, we can assume that the German, Polish, Dnieper lowlands and the Donets basin were probably the ancestral home of i-e. At the end of the Mesolithic in the VI-V millennium BC. these territories were inhabited by massive northern Caucasians from the Baltic. 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 the conditions of aridization of the climate and expansion of the steppes, the autochthonous Proto-Indo-Europeans were transformed into the Indo-European early pastoral mobile society proper (Zaliznyak 1994, p. 96-99; 1998, p. .117-125, 2005). The 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. cattle-breeding mound burial rite (mound, burials with skeletons folded and painted with ocher, anthropomorphic steles with images of weapons and shepherd's attributes, traces of the cult of a horse, bull, wheeled vehicles, weapons, etc.).

If the author of these lines considers the post-Maglemez ethnocultural community of the 6th–5th millennium BC identified by him (Fig. 16) by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the substrate on which the Indo-Europeans proper were formed, another Ukrainian researcher S.V. Koncha considers the carriers of postmaglemosis as already established Indo-Europeans before their disintegration into separate ethno-linguistic branches. According to S.V. Koncha, “there are good reasons to date the Indo-European community to the early Mesolithic (VIII–VII millennium BC), and to associate the beginning of its decay with the resettlement of the Yanislavitsky population to the east, in Polissya, and further, to the Donets basin in the 6th-5th millennium BC”. The researcher believes that the cultural complex defining for the early i-s (mobile pastoral cattle breeding, burial mounds, cults of a horse, a bull, a wheel-sun, weapons, a patriarch of a shepherd-warrior, etc.) was acquired and-e later, already after the collapse of the Proto-Indo-European community in the 4th-3rd millennium BC. (Koncha, 2004, p.191-203).

One way or another, in the lowlands from the Lower Rhine in the west to the Middle Dnieper and the 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 underpinning of the Indo-European group of peoples.

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

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Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution

higher professional education

"Syktyvkar State University"

Institute for the Humanities

Department of History, Political Science and Sociology

WORKING PROGRAM OF THE DISCIPLINE

History

Areas of training

"management"

"service and tourism"

Qualification (degree) of the graduate

Bachelor

Form of study

The program was made up of:

Doctor of History, Professor G.F. Dobronozhenko

Block of disciplines GSE

Semester 1.

Classroom lessons - 52 hours, of which:

Lectures - 34 hours,

Practical classes - 18 hours,

Form of current control: control work

Intermediate control - exam.

Syktyvkar 2014

2. Plans of seminars…………………………………………………..С. 7

3. Exemplary questions for the exam……………………………………………….С. 16

4. Educational and reference literature,

the main publications of a generalizing nature …………………………………….S. eighteen

Basic textbooks

Educational literature

The main publications of a generalizing nature for the course

Reference literature

5. Additional literature on the main sections of the discipline………….С. twenty

6. INTERNET resources ……………………………………………………………С. 31

Applications (separate application folders):

Appendix 1. Electronic texts of lectures.

Annex 2. Electronic materials for seminars.

Appendix 3. Test tasks for sections of the discipline.

1. Sociocultural methodology for the analysis of Russian society. "History" and "historical process". Theory and methodology of historical science

The subject of "history" as a science; scientific categories. Methodology of historical science: principles and methods of historical research. The concept of "historical process". Classification of the concepts of the historical process. Branches of historical science. Auxiliary historical disciplines. Historical sources: concept and classification. Historiography: ambiguity of the concept, stages of development.

2. Autotrogenesis and ethnogenesis of the Indo-European peoples

Theories of anthropogenesis. Cultural and historical communities. Indo-European linguistic community. Ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans. The collapse of the Indo-European community. Settlement of the "ancient European" group in the spaces of Central and Western Europe and the ethnogenesis of the Indo-European peoples.

Ethnic revolution AD and the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs. Discussions in historical science: migration and autochthonous concepts.

3. Old Russian state (X century - first half of the XII century)

Eastern Slavs in the pre-state period. The birth of the state - power and the struggle of two "power centers": the tribal nobility / national assembly (legislative and judicial power) and the prince / squad (military power).

Viking Age in Europe. Interethnic confederation (proto-state) in the north of Eastern Europe and Slavic-Scandinavian relations in the pre-state period. Reasons for inviting the Varangians to Novgorod. Protostate in the Middle Dnieper.

"Norman problem" in modern historiography. Theories of the origin of the ethnonym "Rus": external (Scandinavian) or autochthonous?

The unification of the North and the South and the formation of the Kiev-Novgorod state. Periodization of the history of the Old Russian state. Early Old Russian state as a union of tribal principalities. Change in the order of administration and princely power at the end of X-XI centuries. Power structures: prince - veche, princes - squad. Adoption of Christianity: the goals of religious reform and the reasons for the adoption of Christianity in the Orthodox form. Economic and social processes in the Old Russian state. "Russian Truth".

The crisis of statehood and the collapse of the Old Russian state.

To the origins of Russia [People and language] Trubachev Oleg Nikolaevich

The ethnogenesis of the Slavs and the Indo-European problem

From the book History of Russia from ancient times to the end of the 17th century author Milov Leonid Vasilievich

§ 1. The ethnogenesis and social structure of the Slavs in the territory of their original settlement

From the book Slavs. Historical and archaeological research [Illustrated] author Sedov Valentin Vasilievich

Linguistics and the problem of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs Linguistics testifies that the language of the Slavs belongs? Indo-European family, which also includes Baltic, Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Albanian, as well as common in antiquity

From the book Another History of the Middle Ages. From Antiquity to the Renaissance author Kalyuzhny Dmitry Vitalievich

Indo-European triad of gods God created heaven and earth. At first the earth was deserted, there was nothing on earth. Darkness hid the ocean, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. And then God said, “Let there be light!” and the light shone. God saw the light and knew it was good. Then God separated

author

CHAPTER II. The problem of the origin of the Slavs Disputes about the place and time of the origin of the Indo-Europeans, outlined in the previous chapter, already suggest that the conditions for the emergence of "historical" peoples also do not have unambiguous solutions. This fully applies to

From the book HISTORY OF RUSSIA from ancient times to 1618. Textbook for universities. In two books. Book one. author Kuzmin Apollon Grigorievich

TO CHAPTER II. THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF THE SLAVES The illustrative material in this case opens with an extract from The Tale of Bygone Years - the earliest proper Slavic understanding of its origin. The ancient chronicler took the Byzantine chronicle as a basis

From the book HISTORY OF RUSSIA from ancient times to 1618. Textbook for universities. In two books. Book one. author Kuzmin Apollon Grigorievich

Archeology and ethnogenesis of the Slavs ... At the first stages of ethnogenetic research, archaeologists must resolve issues on their own, regardless of the data of linguistics or other related sciences. First of all, the archaeologist needs to make every effort for ethnic

From the book HISTORY OF RUSSIA from ancient times to 1618. Textbook for universities. In two books. Book one. author Kuzmin Apollon Grigorievich

From the book of O.N. Trubacheva "Ethnogenesis and Culture of the Ancient Slavs" (M., 1991) Chapter 3 There is nothing surprising in the fact that the study of the particularly complex problem of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs in our time of synthesis of sciences proceeds in the spirit of a sharp discussion and revision of very much of what

From the book Origin and early history Slavs [Illustrated] author Sedov Valentin Vasilievich

Archeology and ethnogenesis of the Slavs Language - the most reliable sign of an ethnic unit - is used by a very specific group of people who create their own, special material and spiritual culture. Along with language and anthropological structure, culture can be considered

From the book History of Russia [for students of technical universities] author Shubin Alexander Vladlenovich

§ 1. ETHNOGENESIS OF THE EASTERN SLAVES The ancestral home of the Slavs. The ancestors of the Slavs - tribes who spoke Balto-Slavic dialects - approximately in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. separated from native speakers of Germanic languages ​​and settled in Eastern Europe. About 500 BC. e. from a single

From the book Indo-Europeans of Eurasia and Slavs author Gudz-Markov Alexey Viktorovich

Chapter 12

From the book From Mystery to Knowledge author Kondratov Alexander Mikhailovich

The Great Indo-European Comparative study of the languages ​​of Southeast Asia, their relationship, their contacts, their ancient distribution, their ancestral home is only taking its first steps. But the study of the Indo-European family of languages ​​has about two centuries. Actually, it

From the book Ancestral home of the Rus author Rassokha Igor Nikolaevich

From the book World History. Volume 2. Bronze Age author Badak Alexander Nikolaevich

Language families and the Indo-European ancestral home In the Bronze Age in Europe, excluding its outlying regions, as well as in Southwestern Siberia and Central Asia, there apparently lived a population that spoke ancient languages, from which language groups subsequently developed.

From the book Domestic History: Cheat Sheet author author unknown

3. THE PROBLEM OF THE EASTERN SLAVES ETHNOGENESIS Ethnogenesis is the whole process of the existence and development of an ethnic system from the moment of its emergence to archaeological sites stone age. By

From the book To the origins of Russia [People and language] author Trubachev Oleg Nikolaevich

Linguistics and ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Ancient Slavs according to etymology and onomastics This work is devoted to the problem of the linguistic ethnogenesis of the Slavs - an old and invariably topical issue. The theme of the fate of the Slavic Indo-Europeans cannot but be broad and

From the book History of Europe. Volume 1 Ancient Europe author Chubaryan Alexander Oganovich

CHAPTER IV ANCIENT EUROPE AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN PROBLEM The early ethnic history of the peoples of Europe is one of the problems causing lively discussions. The question of what constituted the population of Europe in the Eneolithic and Bronze Ages is connected with the problem of the formation

Ethnogenesis - the moment of origin and the subsequent process of development of any people, which led to a certain state, type, phenomenon. It includes both the initial stages of the emergence of any people, and the further formation of its ethnographic, linguistic and anthropological features.

The East Slavic peoples include Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, as well as sub-ethnic groups of small numbers: Pomors, Don Cossacks, Zaporizhian Cossacks, Nekrasov Cossacks, Russo-Ustyintsy, Markovites and some others. The territory of residence of these peoples is compact, limited from the west by Poland, the Baltic countries, the countries of Scandinavia, from the north by the Arctic Ocean, further from the east by the Dvina and Volga rivers and from the south by the Black Sea. The main part falls on the East European Plain, which dictates the main landscape of the territory (plains, deciduous forest zone). The climate is moderate.

The Eastern Slavs are characterized by two anthropological types: Atlanto-Baltic and Central European.

Atlanto-Baltic Minor Race characterized by light skin pigmentation, light shades of eyes and hair. The hair is broadly wavy and soft, the beard growth is medium to above average, the tertiary hairline is medium to weak. The face and head are quite large. The cephalic pointer points to the borders of dolicho and mesokephaly, the height of the face somewhat predominates over the width. The height of the lower part of the face is significant. The nose is usually straight and narrow, with a high nose bridge. Characteristic for populations of Russians and Belarusians.

Central European minor race close to the Atlanto-Baltic, but differs in a stronger pigmentation of the hair ("brown-haired belt"). The cephalic index is usually brachycephalic. Most facial proportions are average. The growth of the beard is average and above average, the tertiary hairline is moderate. Nose with a straight back and high bridge, its length varies. Eastern variants of this race are lighter. Typical for Russians and Ukrainians.

In addition, several complexes are distinguished (according to T.I. Alekseeva), which are based on features inherent in the population of a particular territory: the Baltic, Belozersk-Kama, Valdai-Upper Dnieper, Central Eastern European, Dnieper, steppe, Volga-Kama and Ural. Of the listed anthropological complexes, three are most common among the East Slavic population: Valdai-Verkhnednaprovsky(widely distributed throughout the Dvina-Pripyat interfluve, in the middle reaches of the Western Dvina) - among the Belarusians and the Russian population of the upper reaches of the Dnieper and the sources of the Volga, Central Eastern European(localized along the Oka and its tributaries, in the upper reaches of the Don, along the Klyazma, in the upper and middle reaches of the Volga) - in most Russian groups and Dnieper(distributed in the middle reaches of the Dnieper and along its tributaries) - among Ukrainians. The rest of the complexes noted in the territory of Eastern Europe are found in the Slavic population mainly in the contact zones. Consideration of territorial variants in the anthropological composition of the modern East Slavic population showed that, according to the entire complex of racial diagnostic features, Russians and Belarusians gravitate towards the northwestern groups, Ukrainians towards the southern ones.

The most important result of anthropological research on the territory of Eastern Europe on the problems of the ethnogenesis of the East Slavic peoples is the identification of the Eastern European type as a special independent branch within the Caucasoid race. This type is typical for the population of the central regions of the range of the Russian people.

In the central regions of Ukraine, V.D. Dyachenko singles out the Central Ukrainian type (the same type, called the Dnieper, is singled out by T.I. Alekseeva). This reflects the well-known originality of Ukrainians in anthropological features in comparison with Russians and Belarusians. In general, the features of the southern Mediterranean minor race are more pronounced among Ukrainians than among their neighbors.

The people who inhabited the north and center of the East European Plain spoke Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages. The Eastern Slavic peoples speak the Slavic languages ​​of the Indo-European group. These languages ​​are close to the Baltic ones spoken by Lithuanians and Latvians. A branch of the Slavic languages ​​stood out in the 5th - 6th centuries AD. And at that time, and in subsequent centuries, there was no distinct connection and demarcation of the tribes on a linguistic basis; the tribes were at enmity or maintained good neighborly relations, not attaching paramount importance to ethnic differences or similarities.

Almost all sources very expressively, with reference to a certain territory, fix the Slavs only from the middle of the 1st millennium AD. (most often with IV), i.e. when they appear on the historical arena of Europe as a numerous ethnic community.

The prehistory of the Eastern Slavs begins from the 3rd millennium BC. The tribes of the Proto-Slavs already knew hoe farming And cattle breeding. It has been established that within the IV millennium BC. pastoral and agricultural tribes, carriers of the Balkan-Danube archaeological culture, occupied the region of the lower reaches of the Dniester and the Southern Bug. The next stage was the resettlement of the "Trypillian" tribes - III millennium BC. These were tribes with a developed cattle-breeding and agricultural economy for their time, inhabitants of huge settlements.

During the Middle Ages, the following tribes of the Eastern Slavs stood out: Krivichi, Novgorod Slovenes, Vyatichi, Radimichi, Dregovichi, Northerners, Polyana, Tivertsy, Ulichi, Drevlyans.

More or less definitely, one can speak of a significant anthropological similarity between the East Slavic tribes that took part in the formation of the Russian population. A common complex for all Slavic groups can be considered a low, strongly profiled face, a rather wide, medium and strongly protruding nose. The values ​​of the angles of horizontal profiling and protrusion of the nose make it possible to attribute the East Slavic population to the circle of Caucasoid forms, with the exception of the Krivichi of the northeastern regions (Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir-Ryazan groups), in which Caucasoid features are somewhat weakened.

Despite the noticeable homogeneity of the physical appearance of the Eastern Slavs, there are differences between their individual groups. These are the differences in cranial index and zygomatic diameter. The combination of these sizes allows us to distinguish several anthropological complexes in the territory of interest to us: dolichocranic narrow-faced among the Vyatichi, dolichocranic with an average width of the face - among the Smolensk and Tver Krivichi and Severians.

How is the genesis of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians drawn in general terms?

The resettlement of the Slavs in Eastern Europe was carried out from Central Europe. Dolichocranial, relatively broad-faced southern forms were represented here. The former are more manifested in the tribes associated with the genesis of Belarusians and Russians, the latter - Ukrainians. As they progressed, they included in their composition the aboriginal Finno-, Balto- and Iranian-speaking population. In the southeastern areas of settlement, the Slavs also came into contact with nomadic Turkic-speaking groups. The anthropological composition of the Eastern Slavs of the Middle Ages reflects the participation of local groups to a greater extent than in subsequent centuries. Apparently, some Slavic groups of the Middle Ages, for example, the Vyatichi and Eastern Krivichi, were not so much Slavs as the Finnish population assimilated by the Slavs. Approximately the same can be said about the glades, which there is reason to consider as assimilated Chernyakhovites.

In subsequent centuries, there was an influx of the Slavic population, to some extent leveling the anthropological differences between individual East Slavic groups. However, the anthropological heterogeneity of the substrate, and some differences in the original forms, and the specifics of ethnic history could not but affect the physical appearance of the East Slavic peoples.

Russians now turn out to be a more or less anthropologically homogeneous people, genetically related to the northwestern and western population, and having absorbed the features of the local Finno-Ugric substrate. The anthropological variants distinguished in it, except for the contact zones, are apparently associated with the size of the circle of marital ties, and not with various genetic origins.

As for the Finno-Ugric substratum in the Eastern Slavs, in the Middle Ages it appears among the Vyatichi and northeastern Krivichi - the tribes that took part in the formation of the Russian people. The Vyatichi, reflecting the features of the Finno-Ugric population of the East European Plain, through the deacons go back to the Neolithic population of this territory, known from single, though gracile, Caucasoid skulls from the Volodarskaya and Panfilovskaya sites. The northeastern Krivichi reveal features characteristic of the Neolithic population of the Pit-Comb Ware culture of the forest zone of Eastern Europe. The features of the Finno-Ugric substratum can be traced in the anthropological appearance of the Russian people, but specific gravity there are fewer of them in the modern population than in the Middle Ages. This is due to the spread of the Slavic population from the western and northwestern territories, apparently in the late Middle Ages.

The Ukrainians, being associated in their genesis with the medieval Tivertsy, streets and Drevlyans, included in their anthropological composition the features of the Central European substrate - a relatively wide-faced, mesocrane, known from the Neolithic tribes of the culture of bell-shaped cups and the population of the 1st millennium BC. left bank of the Danube.

At the same time, taking into account their anthropological similarity with the glades, it can be concluded that, along with the Slavic elements, elements of the pre-Slavic substrate, apparently Iranian-speaking, took part in the formation of the physical appearance of the Ukrainian people. As already noted, the meadows are the direct descendants of the Chernyakhovites, who, in turn, reveal anthropological continuity with the Scythians of the forest belt (Alekseeva, 1971).

Belarusians, judging by the similarity of their physical appearance with the Dregovichi, Radimichi and Polotsk Krivichi, were formed on the basis of that branch of the Slavic tribes, which is associated with the northern part of the Slavic ancestral home. At the same time, the territorial differentiation of the anthropological composition of the Belarusians allows the assumption of the participation in their genesis of the Balts, on the one hand, and the East Slavic tribes of more southern territories, in particular Volhynia, on the other.

The formation of the Russian population took place on a relatively homogeneous anthropological basis, its composition to a large extent included not only morphologically, but also genetically heterogeneous elements.

Issues of the ethnic history of the Russian population are inextricably linked with the ethnic history of the Letto-Lithuanian and Finno-Ugric populations; ethnic ties were formed during the Slavic colonization of the East European Plain and are clearly manifested to this day. It is possible that the origins of these connections date back to a deeper antiquity.

Nihao, my precious readers!

Quite often one has to deal with pseudoscientific, and often completely occultist manipulations on the topic of the origin of modern Eastern European peoples and subethnoi. These manipulations pursue completely different goals, from the already repeatedly ridiculed attempts to finally prove who are the proud Aryan Rusichs here, and who are the Finno-Ugric peoples with a Tatar-Mongol admixture, to claims for civilizational primogeniture and origin from the Arctic Hyperboreans, who migrated south with the beginning of the Ice Age and teaching illiterate savages of other races how to kindle a fire, ride a horse, and mine ore. In general, versions are built different. But there are two things that unite them all. First, all these versions are categorically anti-scientific. And secondly, all these versions are categorically tired. And therefore (mainly - because of the "secondly"), your humble servant decided to prepare a review article on the ancient processes of ethnogenesis that took place in the space between the Vistula and the Urals. There are no discoveries, revelations or far-reaching conclusions in this article - this is just an abstract from open network sources, supplemented by small author's remarks. After reading this article, I have no illusions about the hypothetical cure of the mournful with the syndrome of the Vedic Aryan, but if it increases immunity to the aforementioned disease in one of my precious readers, I will be glad. Well, and, I believe, some of the facts presented will be simply curious for those who, for whatever reason, have not yet heard of them.

So, let's begin. And we will start from the very beginning. That is, since the Last Ice Age, since some theories are all tied to it. So, this era continued, as the sciences of geology and climatology unanimously assert, from about 110,000 to 10,000 BC. Actually, after that, all talk about any pre-glacial civilization in the Arctic can be closed. We will do so, after which we will go straight to about 25,000 BC. And to begin with, let's look at the map of the climatic zones that existed then.

Do you see a pink stripe on it, with a short break, crossing the whole of Eurasia? This is the tundra steppe. Or, in other words, mammoth prairies. The climate here is cold and dry, and the farther from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the colder and drier. However, to be fair, the summer is quite hot. So much so that instead of the usual mosses and dwarf trees for the tundra, cereals manage to grow here. Yes, not just grow, but grow by the beginning of autumn to almost two meters. Sunny and dry autumn turns these thickets into "hay on the vine", and standing all the long and extremely harsh winter. It is due to this "hay" that all sorts of large herbivores, like the same mammoths, survive during the winter. Have you imagined? And now look again at the map above and roughly imagine (you can use any modern map that is convenient for you) at what point in many millennia the glorious city of Vladimir will appear. Not the most comfortable place, is it? The distance to the glacier is just ridiculous. But people still lived there.

In 1955 (already AD) in the Vladimir region, at the confluence of the Sungir stream into the Klyazma River, a Paleolithic site was discovered, which was later named after the stream. Judging by the general condition and the objects found, it was actively used by ancient people for about eighteen years, after which it was abandoned. The reason for this was discovered at the place where the hearth was located in the parking lot. Here it is (the appearance was reconstructed according to the method of M. M. Gerasimov):

The boy was about 12-14 years old. Girl - 9-10. According to DNA analysis, they were brother and sister. They were buried in the same grave, head to head. Years after their death, people returned to Sungir again, but only to bury one more person - a man of about 50 years old. After that, the parking lot was abandoned forever.

But time passed, and processes took place that in our time are subconsciously perceived as a blessing, but for the people of that era they were a real disaster. The glaciers began to recede. On the one hand, this meant a general softening of the climate. On the other hand, there is the disappearance of the enclosing and nourishing landscape habitual for Kostenkovites. The tundro-steppe receded after the glacier until it completely disappeared - and with it a huge part of the Pleistocene fauna disappeared. For people from under whom their native landscape was literally pulled out, this meant a nightmarish hunger and the need to urgently progress, adapting to new conditions. There were also those who, following the receding habitual tundra-steppe, headed north. These ran into the same problems somewhat later. With which, however, they coped and subsequently founded the Culture of Pit-Comb Ware, now considered the starting point for the formation of the Finno-Ugric peoples. To the south, in the interfluve of the Oka and Volga, as a response to the changed conditions, the Ienevskaya culture was formed, strong enough to last four thousand years (from about 10,000-6000 BC) and moving from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, before, like many early Neolithic cultures, being wiped out by the climate change brought on by the global cooling of 6200 BC. The descendants of the Jenevs joined the Upper Volga culture localized in the same place, which by 4000 BC. e. was replaced by the Volosovo culture.

The boundary is in the form of 4000 BC. e. designated for a reason, since it was at that time that processes were taking place, at first imperceptible, but having a fateful character both for regional and world history. According to the kurgan hypothesis (in our time generally accepted, and, more importantly, with minor clarifications confirmed by archaeologists and paleolinguists), around this time, in the steppes between the Volga and the Dnieper, at the junction of the Srednestog and Samara cultures, an Indo-European linguistic community began to form. When the horse was domesticated around the same time and in the same region, this led to an effect that, from a historical perspective, resembles an explosion. The Indo-Europeans acquired the ability to move relatively quickly and without hassle over long distances - which they were not slow to take advantage of. And this, perhaps, makes sense to illustrate on the map:

Purple marks the original habitat of the Indo-Europeans, as it was in 4000 BC. e. In red - the territory inhabited by the Indo-Europeans by 2500 BC. e. And, finally, orange - by 1000 BC. e. Of course, the settlement over such a significant area extended over several millennia could not but lead to the disintegration of the linguistic community. So, by the end of the third millennium BC. e. from a single Indo-European ethnos, the Yamnaya culture and the Corded Ware culture stood out and took shape. Somewhat later, around 2500 BC. e., on the territory of modern Khakassia, the Afanasiev culture was formed - the farthest from the ancestral home at that time. For scale, it is worth mentioning that at about the same time, the Indo-European tribe of the Achaeans invaded the Balkans, starting the "mythical" Mycenaean period in the history of Ancient Greece. If we return to the region of interest to us, then its configuration looked like in the following way. The south and southeast were occupied by the ancestors of the Indo-Iranian tribes, who belonged to the Yamnaya culture. The north and northeast are the ancestors of the Finno-Ugric peoples, who belonged to the Pit-Comb Ware Culture. West - Culture of Corded Ware, or otherwise - Culture of battle axes - the common ancestors of the Slavs, Germans and Balts. In the center was the area of ​​the considerably expanded Volosovo culture, which became something like a bridge between the Indo-European and Finno-Ugric peoples, in which, however, as DNA studies showed, certain features characteristic of the later Slavs were traced. This, of course, may sound strange, because we have already identified the Slavic ancestors somewhat to the west. But the fact is that around 2000 BC. e. the representatives of the Fatyanovo culture, who broke away from the Slavic-German-Baltic culture of battle axes, invaded the lands of the Volosovites (which, probably, can be considered as the earliest case of "drang nah osten"). The Volosovites put up fierce resistance, and in the Fatyanovo burials dating back to the next five hundred years, warriors are often found killed by arrows with very characteristic and unambiguously identifiable tips. However, by 1500 B.C. e. Volosovtsy were finally conquered and assimilated.

Meanwhile, quite interesting events were developing in the south and southeast. The Yamnaya culture gave rise to three new ones: the Catacomb culture, whose representatives lived in the northern Black Sea region, the Abashev culture, which occupied the territory of modern Voronezh region and Bashkiria, and the Andronovo culture, which migrated to the Southern Urals. The latter are of particular interest to us - at least because they were the first Ural metallurgists. But they didn't stop there. Starting with Sintashta, founded approximately in 1800 BC. e., they built a whole network of fortified cities, including Arkaim, which received special popularity in certain circles. Quite quickly the Andronovo Country of Cities, as archaeologists called this phenomenon, became the strongest proto-state of the region, spreading its influence from the Urals to the Sayans in the east and the Pamirs with the Tien Shan in the south. Andronovo metal products were in great demand in the region and were delivered far to the west. And yet ... No, I still can’t resist and tease a little those who are convinced that Arkaim was a Slavic city. This is how the outfit of a woman of the Andronovo culture looked like (reconstruction, of course):

I confess, when I saw this for the first time, I was taken aback. And he even set out to seriously believe that official science about the people who lived there did not finish something. Indians, you mean? From the Indo-Iranian Yamnaya culture? But nothing, they say, that the shirt on the mannequin is clearly Slavic? But upon careful study of the picture, details emerge that do not leave stone unturned from this assumption. For example, the fact that, apart from the aforementioned shirt, there is nothing even similar to Slavic in the presented costume. Moreover, it is quite obviously identified as Cimmerian-Scythian. One way or another, by about 1200 Arkaim was already completely burned, and the Andronovo culture disintegrated and scattered into different sides like a piece of glass. And given that its fragments flew anywhere to the west and south, up to India, but not to the east, the nomadic descendants of the Afanasiev culture may well be responsible for this. Which, however, is not a scientific fact, but only my assumption, and I ask you to treat it condescendingly and not too seriously. Concluding the conversation about the descendants of the Afanasyevites, I want to note that it was from them that in the near-Mongolian steppes such anomalous for those places blond-Caucasian peoples like the Tochars and Dinlins came. They also made a significant contribution to the gene pool of the current Kirghiz, although you can’t say this in our time.

There were certain cataclysms and to the north. So, around 1000 BC. e. The Fatyanovo and Abashevskaya cultures fell under the blows of the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Dyakovo and, in part, Gorodets cultures. The remnants of heterogeneous Indo-Europeans (those that did not go west and did not give rise to the Baltic peoples) were forced to retreat to the Dnieper, to the region of the Catacomb culture, where the remnants of the Andronovites who migrated to the west after the death of the Land of Cities were already located. Having mixed with the local population and among themselves, the refugees formed the Srubnaya culture, which soon became quite successful and occupied the territories from the Seversky Donets to the Urals. Through the joint efforts of the Dyakovo and Srubnik people, the region became quite densely populated. At the same time, it cannot be said that the Srubnaya culture represented any one specific ethnic group - the ethnic composition of the population of the region it occupied was too diverse. Rather, it should be regarded as a supra-ethnic cultural dominant, like the earlier Volosovo culture, or the later Byzantine and Western European superethnoi. Well, or, if you like, like the modern Russian World, which, given the place of action, is probably the closest.

Being, perhaps, one of the latest cultures of the European Bronze Age, the loggers, however, were able to achieve outstanding results in a short time. Their achievements include systematic work on the cultivation of cereals and the breeding of domestic animal breeds. Following their Andronovo ancestors, the Srubniks were outstanding metallurgists, who by the late stage of their existence managed to master the work with iron (which the Achaeans then willingly and at an absolutely crazy price bought from them). They did not lag behind in the humanitarian sphere - some researchers talk about the presence of some primitive pictographic writing. It would seem that this culture had a great future.

But then something happened that in our time, researchers call the Catastrophe of the Bronze Age - when almost all more or less noticeable civilizations of that time, with amazing synchronicity by historical standards, collapsed. Once again, the climate changed, becoming cooler and drier, and the resources of the enclosing landscapes of large cultures of that time were quickly depleted. The earth could no longer feed the number of people who lived relatively comfortably on it before. This also affected the ancient cultures of the Russian Plain. Dyakovo culture was able to survive the catastrophe, but never recovered from it. So, when in the VI century A.D. e. the Slavic tribe of the Vyatichi came to these lands, the descendants of the warlike Dyakovites met them rather indifferently, and over time were peacefully assimilated. However, they have partially survived to our time in the form of the Finno-Ugric peoples of the Volga region. As for the Srubnaya culture, after the collapse of the supra-ethnic community, it turned out exactly according to Karl Marx: being determined consciousness. The predominantly Iranian-speaking pastoral steppe part of it became the basis of the future Scythian ethnos, which flourished around the time of Herodotus, who put to shame the hitherto invincible Persians and left the historical stage after the invasion of their distant Sarmatian relatives who came from the Urals. The same part of the Srubniks that inhabited the forests and forest-steppes, genetically closer to the Fatyanovo and Volosovites, occupied the lands on the banks of the Vistula, Pripyat and the upper reaches of the Dnieper, where they quickly embarked on the same path that the Dyakovites followed. In the 2nd century A.D. they were conquered without much resistance and subjected to tribute by the Goths who came from the north. But when the Black Sea Gothic kingdom of Oyum staggered under the blows of the Huns, this people shook itself, raised its head and, joining forces with the newcomers nomads, threw off the oppressors. Thus began the active phase of Slavic history.

Perhaps, at this point, some of my precious readers may have a question: so which of all the cultures, civilizations and nationalities listed in the article can be called our ancestral? I answer: everything. You will not seriously try to determine whether you are descended from a paternal grandfather or from a maternal grandfather - both of them are equally your grandfathers. Same here. All of these cultures are to some extent our ancestors, and if we remove at least some of them, then we will no longer be who we are.

Well, in the end, I can’t resist a little moralizing. As Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky once said on a completely different issue, one must love art in oneself, and not oneself in art. This principle is quite applicable in our case. There are people with unimaginable, but nothing particularly supported by self-conceit, who, out of empty pride, begin to make increased demands on the blood flowing in their veins. Like, how can it be that we, so great and powerful, come from some kind of savages? So such characters begin to invent their own ancestors, making demands on them rather than believability, but, I'm sorry, steepness. So that there were those who easily built pyramids, and flew through the air and dug the Black Sea with their bare hands. And even though such a person talks a lot and with fervor about the search for the TRUTH!!! (sorry for the caps, but this is a quote), in fact, the truth, carefully and grain by grain collected by scientists, does not interest him. He only needs fuel for his own conceit. In general, such characters primarily love themselves, not their ancestors.

A person who is really proud of the history of his people, first of all, makes demands on himself, striving to match the great ancestors, whose blood flows in his veins. And even our pre-Slavic ancestors set this bar very high. If we combine the cohesion of the Kostenkovites, Volosov's stubbornness in defending their land, Fatyanovo's militancy, Andronovo's constructive diligence and the super-speed development of the Srubniks, then this is just some kind of superman people. You can be proud of this, you can focus on it, and, most importantly, all this was actually and scientifically confirmed.

Our people have always been strong because they never needed fictional heroes - there were always enough real ones. And this is worth remembering.