Rus' people | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: Subhajit Sahu
Date: 2018-12-02

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Rus' people

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SUMMARY
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Rus' people (Old East Slavic: Рѹсь; Modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian: Русь (Rus'); Old Norse: Garðar; Greek: Ῥῶς (Rhos); Arabic: الروس‎ (al-Rūs) and Arabic: الروسية‎ (al-Rūsiya)) are generally understood in English-language scholarship as ethnically or ancestrally Scandinavian people trading and raiding on the river-routes between the Baltic and the Black Seas from around the eighth to eleventh centuries CE. Thus they are often referred to in English-language research as "Viking Rus'". The scholarly consensus is that Rus' people originated in what is currently coastal Middle Sweden around the eighth century and that their name has the same origin as Roslagen in Sweden (with the older name being Roden).
Basing themselves among Slavic and Finnic peoples in the upper Volga region, they formed a diaspora of traders and raiders exchanging furs and slaves for silk, silver and other commodities available to the east and south. Around the ninth century, on the river routes to the Black Sea, they had an unclear but significant role in forming the principality of Kievan Rus, gradually assimilating with local Slavic populations. They also extended their operations much further east and south, among the Turkic Bulghars and Khazars, on the routes to the Caspian Sea. By around the eleventh century, the word Rus' was increasingly associated with the principality of Kiev, and the term Varangian was becoming more common as a term for Scandinavians travelling the river-routes.
Little, however, is certain about this history. This is to a significant extent because, although Rus' people were active over a long period and vast distances, textual evidence for their activities is very sparse and almost never produced by contemporary Rus' people themelves. Nor do primary sources always mean by the word Rus' what scholars mean by it today. Meanwhile, archaeological evidence and researchers' understanding of it is accumulating only gradually. As a trading diaspora, Rus' people intermingled extensively with Finnic, Slavic, and Turkic peoples and their customs and identity seem correspondingly to have varied considerably over time and space.
The other key reason for dispute about the origins of Rus' people is the likelihood that they had a role in ninth- to tenth-century state formation in eastern Europe (ultimately giving their name to Russia and Belarus), making them relevant to what are today seen as the national histories of Russia, Ukraine, Sweden, Poland, Belarus, Finland and Baltic states. This has encouraged fierce debate as different political interest groups compete over who the Rus' originally were, in the belief that the politics of the ancient past legitimate policies in the present.