It would seem that everyone knows this: Cyril and Methodius, whom the Orthodox Church calls equal to the apostles for this merit. But what kind of alphabet did Kirill come up with - Cyrillic or Glagolitic? (Methodius, this is known and proven, supported his brother in everything, but it was the monk Kirill who was the “brain of the operation” and an educated person who knew many languages). There is still debate about this in the scientific world. Some Slavic researchers say: “Cyrillic alphabet! It is named after its creator.” Others object: “Glagolitic! The first letter of this alphabet looks like a cross. Kirill is a monk. It's a sign". It is also argued that before Cyril’s work there was no written language in Rus'. Professor Nikolai Taranov categorically disagrees with this.

Modern scientists, historians and theologians of the Russian Orthodox Church argue that Rus' became Orthodox only thanks to the baptism of Rus' and the spread of Byzantine Christianity among the dark, wild, mired in paganism of the Slavs. This formulation is very convenient for distorting history and belittling the significance of the most ancient culture of all Slavic peoples. What could Christian missionaries know about the culture and Faith of the Slavic peoples? How could they understand a culture alien to them?

The series of programs “Hour of Truth”, dedicated to the ancient Slavs and the formation of Ancient Rus'. The questions of the origin of the ancient Slavs, the calling of the Varangians, the emergence of Novgorod, etc. are considered.

Russian barbarians broke into villages, camps and auls, leaving behind cities, theaters and libraries. They wore, I don’t understand why, furs and walked around in pants, while cultural Europe wrapped itself in rags...

Same-sex marriage has long been banned and tolerance was despised, and European men loved to fuck each other. The Russians lived in the dirt and very rarely washed themselves, and they did not go to the baths, which they borrowed from the Finns, out of laziness. And their cities were irregular, according to European medieval custom, in the center of the city there was a gallows with a “torture chamber”, and along the streets there were special ditches where respectable citizens drained sewage in a civilized manner.

We need to remember our history and follow our own path. Currently, we use dating years from the birth of Christ and the Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar, the so-called “old style”, has not been forgotten either. Every year in January we remember him when we celebrate the “old” New Year. Also, the media carefully reminds us of the change of years according to the Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other calendars. Of course, this broadens our horizons.

Christianity took over Rus' in 988 AD. e. during the reign of Prince Vladimir. How did this happen? The official version can be read from the official history of Russia, for example from Ishimov’s “History of Russia”, Novosibirsk, 1993. In short, the picture was supposedly like this. Before Prince Vladimir, paganism reigned and Rus' flourished.

Neighboring peoples persuaded Vladimir to convert to their faith, and many ambassadors came to him from the Kama Bulgarians, from German Catholics, from Jews and from Greeks, and everyone praised their faith. Vladimir initially assessed these beliefs by the beauty of what was invented. I consulted with the boyars. They told him: “Everyone praises his faith, but it is better to send to different lands to find out where the faith is better.” Vladimir sent ten of the smartest boyars to the Bulgarians, Germans and Greeks. Among the Bulgarians they found poor churches, dull prayers, sad faces; The Germans have many rituals, but without beauty and grandeur. Finally they arrived in Constantinople.

Grand Duke Svyatoslav is one of the most prominent figures in the rich Russian history, unfortunately virtually forgotten by our official government and historiography. If other personalities who made a huge contribution to the development of Russian civilization, such as Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, are regularly slandered, then they decided to keep silent about Svyatoslav and subjected him to oblivion. Apparently, in order not to stir up the affairs of bygone days, too many painful questions may emerge about that turning point - about the Khazar Khaganate, Judaism, Rakhdonites, the Christianization of Rus', its consequences, in Byzantium and Rome, the destroyed civilization of the Rus of Central Europe.

The history of the reduction and simplification of the alphabet of the ancient Slavs is the history of humanity’s loss of its intelligence - from the full use of the brain to the modern 3-5 percent. Our modern language is just a shadow, a projection of an ancient multidimensional language. To slow down and stop the process of degradation, you need to return to your roots - learn to communicate with images. To do this, you just need to learn the language of your forefathers and become their full-fledged heirs.

Origin of the Slavs

Until the end of the 18th century, science could not give a satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of the Slavs, although it already attracted the attention of scientists. This is evidenced by the first attempts dating back to that time to give an outline of the history of the Slavs, in which this question was raised. All statements connecting the Slavs with such ancient peoples as the Sarmatians, Getae, Alans, Illyrians, Thracians, Vandals, etc., statements appearing in various chronicles from the beginning of the 16th century, are based only on an arbitrary, tendentious interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and church literature or on the simple continuity of peoples who once inhabited the same territory as the modern Slavs, or, finally, on the purely external similarity of some ethnic names.

This was the situation until the beginning of the 19th century. Only a few historians were able to rise above the level of science of that time, in which the solution to the question of the origin of the Slavs could not be scientifically substantiated and had no prospects. The situation changed for the better only in the first half of the 19th century under the influence of two new scientific disciplines: comparative linguistics and anthropology; both of them introduced new positive facts.

History itself is silent. There is not a single historical fact, not a single reliable tradition, not even a mythological genealogy that would help us answer the question of the origin of the Slavs. The Slavs appear on the historical arena unexpectedly as a great and already formed people; we don't even know where he came from or what his relations were with other peoples. Only one piece of evidence brings apparent clarity to the question that interests us: this is a well-known passage from the chronicle attributed to Nestor and preserved to this day in the form in which it was written in Kyiv in the 12th century; this passage can be considered a kind of “birth certificate” of the Slavs.

The first part of the chronicle “The Tale of Bygone Years” began to be created at least a century earlier. At the beginning of the chronicle there is a fairly detailed legendary story about the settlement of the peoples who once tried to erect the Tower of Babel in the land of Shinar. This information is borrowed from Byzantine chronicles of the 6th–9th centuries (the so-called “Easter” chronicle and the chronicle of Malala and Amartol); however, in the corresponding places of the named chronicles there is not a single mention of the Slavs. This gap obviously offended the Slavic chronicler, the venerable monk of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. He wanted to make up for it by placing his people among those peoples who, according to tradition, lived in Europe; therefore, by way of clarification, he attached the name “Slavs” to the name of the Illyrians - Illyro-Slavs. With this addition, he included the Slavs in history, without even changing the traditional number of 72 peoples. It was here that the Illyrians were first called a people related to the Slavs, and from this time on this point of view was dominant in the study of the history of the Slavs for a long time. The Slavs came from Shinar to Europe and settled first on the Balkan Peninsula. There we must look for their cradle, their European ancestral home, in the lands of the Illyrians, Thracians, in Pannonia, on the banks of the Danube. From here later separate Slavic tribes emerged, when their original unity disintegrated, to occupy their historical lands between the Danube, the Baltic Sea and the Dnieper.

This theory was first accepted by all Slavic historiography, and in particular by the old Polish school (Kadlubek, Bohuchwal, Mierzwa, Chronica Polonorum, Chronica principum Poloniae, Dlugosh, etc.) and Czech (Dalimil, Jan Marignola, Przybik Pulkawa, Hajek of Libočan , B. Paprocki); Later it acquired new speculations.

Then a new theory appeared. We don't know where exactly it originated. It should be assumed that it arose outside the mentioned schools, because for the first time we encounter this theory in the Bavarian chronicle of the 13th century and later among German and Italian scientists (Flav. Blondus, A. Coccius Sabellicus, F. Irenicus, B. Rhenanus, A. Krantz etc.). From them, this theory was adopted by the Slavic historians B. Vapovsky, M. Kromer, S. Dubravius, T. Peshina from Chekhorod, J. Bekovsky, J. Matthias from the Sudetenland and many others. According to the second theory, the Slavs allegedly moved north along the Black Sea coast and initially settled in Southern Russia, where history first knew the ancient Scythians and Sarmatians, and later the Alans, Roxolans, etc. This is where the idea of ​​the kinship of these tribes with the Slavs arose , as well as the idea of ​​the Balkan Sarmatians as the ancestors of all Slavs. Moving further west, the Slavs allegedly split into two main branches: the South Slavs (south of the Carpathians) and the Northern Slavs (north of the Carpathians).

So, together with the theory of the initial division of the Slavs into two branches, the Balkan and Sarmatian theories appeared; both of them had their enthusiastic followers, both of them lasted until the present day. Even now, books often appear in which the ancient history of the Slavs is based on identifying them with the Sarmatians or with the Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians. Nevertheless, already at the end of the 18th century, some scientists realized that such theories, based only on the supposed analogy of various peoples with the Slavs, have no value. The Czech Slavist J. Dobrovsky wrote to his friend Kopitar in 1810: “Such research pleases me. Only I come to a completely different conclusion. All this proves to me that the Slavs are not Dacians, Getae, Thracians, Illyrians, Pannonians... The Slavs are Slavs, and the Lithuanians are closest to them. So, they need to be looked for among the latter on the Dnieper or beyond the Dnieper.”

Some historians held the same views even before Dobrovsky. After him, Safarik in his “Slavic Antiquities” refuted the views of all previous researchers. If in his early writings he was greatly influenced by the old theories, then in Antiquities, published in 1837, he rejected, with some exceptions, these hypotheses as erroneous. Safarik based his book on a thorough analysis of historical facts. Therefore, his work will forever remain the main and indispensable guide on this issue, despite the fact that the problem of the origin of the Slavs is not resolved in it - such a task exceeded the capabilities of the most rigorous historical analysis of that time.

Other scientists turned to the new science of comparative linguistics in order to find an answer that history could not give them. The mutual kinship of Slavic languages ​​was assumed at the beginning of the 12th century (see the Kievan Chronicle), but for a long time the true degree of kinship of the Slavic languages ​​with other European languages ​​was unknown. The first attempts made in the 17th and 18th centuries to find out (G. W. Leibniz, P. Ch. Levesque, Fr?ret, Court de Gebelin, J. Dankowsky, K. G. Anton, J. Chr. Adelung, Iv. Levanda, B. Siestrzencewicz etc.) had the disadvantage that they were either too indecisive or simply unreasonable. When W. Jones in 1786 established the common origin of Sanskrit, Gaulish, Greek, Latin, German and Old Persian, he had not yet determined the place of the Slavic language in the family of these languages.

Only F. Bopp, in the second volume of his famous “Comparative Grammar” (“Vergleichende Grammatik”, 1833), resolved the question of the relationship of the Slavic language with the rest of the Indo-European languages ​​and thereby gave the first scientifically substantiated answer to the question of the origin of the Slavs, which historians unsuccessfully tried to resolve . The solution to the question of the origin of a language is at the same time an answer to the question of the origin of the people speaking this language.

Since that time, many disputes have arisen about the Indo-Europeans and the essence of their language. Various views have been expressed which are now rightly rejected and have lost all value. It has only been proven that none of the known languages ​​is the ancestor of other languages ​​and that there has never been an Indo-European people of a single unmixed race that would have a single language and a single culture. Along with this, the following provisions have been adopted that form the basis of our current views:

1. Once upon a time there was a common Indo-European language, which, however, was never completely unified.

2. The development of dialects of this language led to the emergence of a number of languages ​​that we call Indo-European or Aryan. These include, not counting the languages ​​that have disappeared without a trace, Greek, Latin, Gaulish, German, Albanian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Persian, Sanskrit and Common Slavic or Proto-Slavic, which over quite a long time developed into modern Slavic languages. The beginning of the existence of the Slavic peoples dates back to the time when this common language emerged.

The process of development of this language is still unclear. Science has not yet advanced enough to adequately address this issue. It has only been established that a number of factors contributed to the formation of new languages ​​and peoples: the spontaneous force of differentiation, local differences that arose as a result of the isolation of individual groups, and, finally, the assimilation of foreign elements. But to what extent did each of these factors contribute to the emergence of a common Slavic language? This question is almost unresolved, and therefore the history of the common Slavic language is still unclear.

The development of the Aryan proto-language could occur in two ways: either through a sudden and complete separation of different dialects and the peoples speaking them from the mother trunk, or through decentralization associated with the formation of new dialect centers, which were isolated gradually, without completely breaking away from the original core, that is, not having lost contact with other dialects and peoples. Both of these hypotheses had their adherents. The pedigree proposed by A. Schleicher, as well as the pedigree compiled by A. Fick, are well known; The theory of “waves” (?bergangs-Wellen-Theorie) of Johann Schmidt is also known. In accordance with various concepts, the view on the origin of the Proto-Slavs also changed, as can be seen from the two diagrams presented below.

Pedigree of A. Schleicher, compiled in 1865

Pedigree of A. Fick

When the differences in the Indo-European language began to increase and when this large linguistic community began to split into two groups - the Satem and Centum languages ​​- the Proto-Slavic language, combined with the Proto-Lithic language, was included in the first group for quite a long time, so that it retained special similarities with the ancient Thracian (Armenian) and Indo-Iranian languages. The connection with the Thracians was closest in the outlying areas where the historical Dacians later lived. The ancestors of the Germans were in the Centum group of peoples among the closest neighbors of the Slavs. We can judge this from some analogies in the Slavic and German languages.

At the beginning of the second millennium BC. e. all Indo-European languages, in all likelihood, have already formed and divided, since during this millennium some Aryan peoples appear as already established ethnic units in Europe and Asia. The future Lithuanians were then still united with the Proto-Slavs. The Slavic-Lithuanian people to this day represent (with the exception of the Indo-Iranian languages) the only example of the primitive community of two Aryan peoples; its neighbors have always been the Germans and Celts on one side, and the Thracians and Iranians on the other.

After the separation of the Lithuanians from the Slavs, which most likely occurred in the second or first millennium BC. e., the Slavs formed a single people with a common language and only faint dialect differences, and remained in this state until the beginning of our era. During the first millennium AD, their unity began to disintegrate, new languages ​​developed (though still very close to each other) and new Slavic peoples arose. This is the information that linguistics gives us, this is its answer to the question of the origin of the Slavs.

Along with comparative linguistics, another science appeared - anthropology, which also brought new additional facts. The Swedish researcher A. Retzius in 1842 began to determine the place of the Slavs among other peoples from a somatological point of view, based on the shape of their heads, and created a system based on the study of the relative length of the skull and the size of the facial angle. He united the ancient Germans, Celts, Romans, Greeks, Hindus, Persians, Arabs and Jews into the group of “dolichocephalic (long-headed) orthognaths”, and the Ugrians, European Turks, Albanians, Basques, ancient Etruscans, Latvians and Slavs into the group of “brachycephalic (short-headed) ) orthognathates". Both groups were of different origins, so the race to which the Slavs belonged was completely alien to the race to which the Germans and Celts belonged. Obviously, one of them had to be “Aryanized” by the other and take on the Indo-European language from it. A. Retzius did not particularly try to define the relationship between language and race. This question arose later in the first French and German anthropological schools. German scientists, relying on new studies of German burials of the Merovingian era (V-VIII centuries) with the so-called “Reihengr?ber”, created, in accordance with the Retzius system, a theory of an ancient pure Germanic race with a relatively long head (dolichocephals or mesocephals) and with some characteristic external features: fairly tall, pink complexion, blond hair, light eyes. This race was contrasted by another, smaller, with a shorter head (brachycephals), darker skin color, brown hair and dark eyes; the main representatives of this race were supposed to be the Slavs and the ancient inhabitants of France - the Celts, or Gauls.

In France, the school of the outstanding anthropologist P. Broca (E. Hamy, Ab. Hovelacque, P. Topinard, R. Collignon, etc.) adopted approximately the same point of view; Thus, in anthropological science, a theory appeared about two original races that once populated Europe and from which a family of peoples speaking the Indo-European language was formed. It remained to be seen - and this caused a lot of controversy - which of the two original races was Aryan and which was “Aryanized” by the other race.

The Germans almost always considered the first race, long-headed and blond, to be a race of ancestral Aryans, and this view was shared by leading English anthropologists (Thurnam, Huxley, Sayce, Rendall). In France, on the contrary, opinions were divided. Some adhered to the German theory (Lapouge), while others (the majority of them) considered a second race, dark and brachycephalic, often called Celtic-Slavic, the original race that transmitted the Indo-European language to the northern European fair-haired foreigners. Since its main features, brachycephaly and dark coloring of hair and eyes, brought this race closer to the Central Asian peoples with similar characteristics, it was even suggested that it was related to the Finns, Mongols and Turanians. The place intended, according to this theory, for the Proto-Slavs is easy to determine: the Proto-Slavs came from Central Asia, they had relatively short heads, dark eyes and hair. Brachycephals with dark eyes and hair inhabited Central Europe, mainly its mountainous regions, and mixed partly with their northern long-headed and blond neighbors, partly with more ancient peoples, namely with the dark dolichocephals of the Mediterranean. According to one version, the Proto-Slavs, having mixed with the first, passed on their speech to them; according to another version, on the contrary, they themselves adopted their speech.

However, supporters of this theory of the Turanian origin of the Slavs based their conclusions on an erroneous or, at least, insufficiently substantiated hypothesis. They relied on the results obtained from the study of two groups of sources, very distant from each other in time: the original Germanic type was determined from early sources - documents and burials of the 5th–8th centuries, while the Proto-Slavic type was established from relatively later sources, since the early the sources were still little known at that time. Thus, incomparable values ​​were compared - the current state of one nation with the former state of another nation. Therefore, as soon as ancient Slavic burials were discovered and new craniological data came to light, supporters of this theory immediately encountered numerous difficulties, while at the same time, an in-depth study of ethnographic material also yielded a number of new facts. It was found that skulls from Slavic burials of the 9th–12th centuries are mostly of the same elongated shape as the skulls of the ancient Germans, and are very close to them; it was also noted that historical documents give descriptions of the ancient Slavs as a blond people with light or blue eyes and a pink complexion. It turned out that among the Northern Slavs (at least among the majority of them) some of these physical traits prevail to this day.

Ancient burials of the South Russian Slavs contained skeletons, of which 80–90% had dolichocephalic and mesocephalic skulls; burials of northerners on Psela - 98%; burials of the Drevlyans - 99%; burials of glades in the Kyiv region - 90%, ancient Poles in Plock - 97.5%, in Slabozhev - 97%; burials of ancient Polabian Slavs in Mecklenburg - 81%; burials of Lusatian Serbs in Leibengen in Saxony - 85%; in Burglengenfeld in Bavaria - 93%. Czech anthropologists, when studying the skeletons of ancient Czechs, found that among the latter, skulls of dolichocephalic forms were more common than among modern Czechs. I. Gellikh established (in 1899) among the ancient Czechs 28% of dolichocephalic and 38.5% of mesocephalic individuals; these numbers have increased since then.

The first text, which mentions the 6th century Slavs who lived on the banks of the Danube, says that the Slavs are neither black nor white, but dark blond:

„?? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ????, ? ?????? ?????, ???? ?? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ???????? ?????????, ???? ????????? ????? ???????“.

Almost all ancient Arabic evidence from the 7th–10th centuries characterizes the Slavs as fair-haired (ashab); Only Ibrahim Ibn Yaqub, a Jewish traveler of the 10th century, notes: “it is interesting that the inhabitants of the Czech Republic are dark.” The word “interesting” betrays his surprise that the Czechs are dark-skinned, from which one can conclude that the rest of the northern Slavs in general were not dark-skinned. However, even today among the Northern Slavs the predominant type is blond, not brown-haired.

Some researchers, based on these facts, took a new point of view on the origin of the Slavs and attributed their ancestors to the blond and dolichocephalic, so-called Germanic race, which formed in Northern Europe. They argued that over the centuries the original Slavic type had changed under the influence of the environment and crossing with neighboring races. This point of view was defended by the Germans R. Virchow, I. Kolman, T. Poesche, K. Penka, and among the Russians A. P. Bogdanov, D. N. Anuchin, K. Ikov, N. Yu. Zograf; I also subscribed to this point of view in my early writings.

However, the problem turned out to be more complex than previously thought and cannot be resolved so easily and simply. In many places, brachycephalic skulls and remains of dark or black hair were found in Slavic burials; on the other hand, it must be recognized that the modern somatological structure of the Slavs is very complex and indicates only the general predominance of the dark and brachycephalic type, the origin of which is difficult to explain. It cannot be assumed that this predominance was predetermined by the environment, nor can it be satisfactorily explained by later crossing. I tried to use data from all sources, both old and new, and, based on them, I came to the conviction that the question of the origin and development of the Slavs is much more complex than it has hitherto been represented; I believe that the most plausible and probable hypothesis is built on the combination of all these complex factors.

The Proto-Aryan type did not represent a pure type of a pure race. In the era of Indo-European unity, when internal linguistic differences began to increase, this process was influenced by different races, especially the Northern European dolichocephalic light-haired race and the Central European brachycephalic dark race. Therefore, individual peoples formed in this way during the third and second millennium BC. e., were no longer a pure race from a somatological point of view; this also applies to the Proto-Slavs. There is no doubt that they were not distinguished by either purity of race or unity of physical type, for they received their origin from the two mentioned great races, at the junction of whose lands their ancestral home was; The most ancient historical information, as well as ancient burials, equally testify to this lack of racial unity among the Proto-Slavs. This also explains the great changes that have occurred among the Slavs over the last millennium. Undoubtedly, this problem remains to be carefully considered, but the solution to it - I am convinced of this - can be based not so much on the recognition of environmental influences as on the recognition of the crossing and "struggle for life" of the basic elements available , that is, the northern dolichocephalic fair-haired race and the central European brachycephalic dark-haired race.

Thousands of years ago, the type of the first race prevailed among the Slavs, which has now been absorbed by another, more viable race.

Archeology is currently unable to resolve the question of the origin of the Slavs. Indeed, it is impossible to trace Slavic culture from the historical era to those ancient times when the Slavs were formed. In the ideas of archaeologists about Slavic antiquities before the 5th century AD. e. Complete confusion reigns, and all their attempts to prove the Slavic character of the Lusatian and Silesian burial fields in eastern Germany and to draw appropriate conclusions from this have so far been unsuccessful. It was not possible to prove that the named burial fields belonged to the Slavs, since the connection of these monuments with undoubtedly Slavic burials still cannot be established. At best, one can only admit the possibility of such an interpretation.

Some German archaeologists suggest that the Proto-Slavic culture was one of the constituent parts of the great Neolithic culture called “Indo-European” or better “Danubian and Transcarpathian” with a variety of ceramics, some of which were painted. This is also acceptable, but we have no positive evidence for this, since the connection of this culture with the historical era is completely unknown to us.