Forum 183880: Work, by a non-slavic author, but not bised antislavically

Slavic ethnogenesis by Mario Alinei 04

Thursday, 14. September 2006, 07:07:09

Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Palaeolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis
by Mario Alinei
Expanded version of a paper read at the Conference Ancient Settlers in Europe, Kobarid, 29-30 May
2003. Forthcoming in Quaderni di semantica, 26.

7The Slavic ethnogenesis in the framework of the PCT1

7.1Introduction
Three preliminary remarks are in order:
(A) the Slavic area corresponds to almost half of Europe. As such it is the continents largest, and the only one that includes three climatic zones (sub- arctic, continental and Mediterranean) and almost all ecological zones: arctic, tundra, coniferous forest, mixed forest, steppe-forest, steppe, semi-desertic, Mediterranean, alpine.
(B) In spite of their huge extension, Slavic languages are much less differentiated than, for example, the Germanic or the Romance.

1 This section summarizes parts of the two chapters of my book (Alinei 2000) devoted to the Slavic area.

(C) Slavic languages have also a unique, asymmetric areal distribution: while Southern Slavic languages (Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian) form a homogeneous bloc, sharing several common features, for Northern Slavic languages it is necessary to distinguish between a Western branch (including Czech, Sorbian and Polish), and an Eastern one (including Russian, Ucrainian and Belo-Russian), as each of the two branches shares different features with Southern Slavic.
An adequate theory of Slavic ethnogenesis will have to provide a satisfactory and coherent explanation for these three fundamental aspects of Slavic: enormous extension, extraordinary homogeneity, and areal asymmetry between South and North.

7.2The traditional theory of Slavic ethnogenesis
The old version of the traditional theory assumed, as is known, the arrival of the Slavs
in historical times, following their alleged great migration in the 5th and 6th centuries
of our era, from an unknown area. It claimed that this is the reason for their large extension and phenomenal homegenity. Even though this radical thesis is now maintained only by a minority (represented by Schenker), its more recent, variously modified version, at present favoured by the majority of Slavists, does not differ substantially from it: for what is now admitted is simply the presence of the Slavs in the Bronze and Iron Age in a small area of Eastern Europe. So that the arrival of the Slavs
is now placed eralier, i.e. in the Bronze or in the Iron Age, while the great migration would still have taken place in historical times. In short, only the last, huge wave of the Slavic migration would be dated so recently.
Though as we have seen in the preceding sections the real cause for the assumption of such a short chronology for the origins of the Slavs lies in the ignorance
of some basic modern developments concerning both linguistics and other historical sciences, Slavic specialists tend to justify it also by appealing to the recent dates of the earliest attestations of Slavic languages (9th century, when the missionaries Cyril and Methodius invented the glagolitic alfabet (from which derives the cirillic one), and translated parts of the Bible and of the orthodox lithurgy into what is called Church Slavic), as well as those of the earliest mentions of Slavic people, in the works of the historians of the 5th and 6th centuries.
However, overwhelming evidence, which I have illustrated in detail in my books
(Alinei 1996, 2000), proves that the date of the earliest attestations and the earliest mentions of historians have absolutely no relevance for the problem of dating the birth
of a language or of a people. Writing is an entirely separate phenomenon from speaking, connected as it is to the forming of highly developed stratified societies, with a dominating elite needing writing to exercise its full power, and thus to a very recent development of European history. Its appearance can thus vary from place to place. To give only three examples: (i) Baltic and Finnic languages are attested much later than Slavic, yet nobody even among traditionalists has ever thought that Baltic has arrived into Europe around that time; (ii) for Finnic, the Uralic Continuity Theory now universally accepted (see above) claims a Palaeolithic origin; (iii) even more absurdly, the first attestations or the first mentions in writings of most European sub- standard dialects belong to modern times, yet nobody dares think they have arrived or formed so recently. Therefore, we cannot consider the argument of the earliest attestations and earliest mentions as a serious one. We will return to this point further.
As to the prehistoric presence of Slavs in Europe, for a long time the preferred theory was that the earliest Slavs could be identified with the so called Lusacian culture of the Middle and Final Bronze and Iron age, typical of the Polish area and forming a part of the Urn Fields area (see for ex. Neustupnı-Neustupnı 1963, 195).
At present most specialists agree (cp. Mallory 1989, 78) with slight variations
on the opinion that the minimal area occupied by Slavs in the Iron or Bronze Age is that indicated for example by Bräuer (1961 I, 29): from Eastern Galice to the upper Don, through Volinia, Podolia, the area on the two shores of Middle Dneper (Kiev, ernigov), Poltava, Kursk and Orel. To the North would live the Balts, and to the North
of the Balts the Finnic people. To the South there would be Iranians (Scythians) and
(from the 7th century on) Sarmatians. On the Black Sea the coastal cities would be Greek and to the East of the Slavs the Iranians would extend to the Uralic Mordvins, in the area of Tambov.
For Mallory, the area would be slightly larger, i.e. between the Elbe and Middle
Dneper (Mallory 1989, 78). The earliest horizon to which Mallory arrives is that of the Trzciniec culture, of the Middle Bronze (second third of the 2nd millennium), extending from the Oder to the Middle Dneper, and sharing the main features of the Corded Ware and Battle Axe Culture. In this vision he follows many Polish and Russian scholars, who give particolar attention not only to the Trzciniec culture, but also to Battle Axe cultures such as those of Komarovo in the Carpathian area, and of Belugrudovo in Ucraine, on the Dneper (cp. Telegin 1994, 403-405). These cultures are considered the origin of the Lusacian one, so that we could say that in comparison with the preceding generation, present scholars have gone one step down in the archaological stratigraphy, reaching the earliest possibile level permitted by the general chronology of the kurgan canonic theory.
Despite the controversy on Trzciniec (which Gimbutas and Baltic scholars claim for themselves!), Mallory concludes: It is difficult to deny that there existed a geographical centre weighted between the Vistula and Dnieper which is most commonly agreed to be Proto-Slavic and which appears to display a continuity of cultural development from about 1500 BC (or earlier) to the historical appearance of the earliest Slavic peoples (Mallory 1989, 81). In more general terms, Mallory admits that
A long geographical stasis for the Slavs [...] is probably the model that would be most
readily accepted by linguists who see in the Slavic language group little reason to assume that they have moved much since their development from Proto-Indo- European (Mallory 1989, 81)2.
Before Trzciniec, in short, we would have the mysterious realm of the Old- Europeans, all speaking one or more pre-IE languages.

7.3Objections to the traditional theory

Let us now test this theory against the three points we have made at the outset: the enormous extension, the extraordinary homogeneity and the geographical asymmetry of the Slavic languages. And let us begin by

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