page_title: Early Slavs
section_title: Ethnogenesis
hierarchical_section_title: Early Slavs / Ethnogenesis
caption_attribution_description: English: Three kaptorgs (boxes for small magical objects) from a necklace. Jewellery from the tomb of the so-called Kouřim Princess. Kouřim (Kolín Disttrict) - Stará Kouřim, burial site U Libuše, around 900 AD. Čeština: Trojice kaptorg (schránky na drobné magické předměty) z náhrdelníku. Kolekce šperků z hrobu tzv. Kouřimské kněžny. Kouřim - Stará Kouřim, pohřebiště U Libuše, kolem roku 900 n. l.
context_page_description: The early Slavs were a diverse group of tribal societies who lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages in Central and Eastern Europe and established the foundations for the Slavic nations through the Slavic states of the High Middle Ages. The first written use of the name "Slavs" dates to the 6th century, when the Slavic tribes inhabited a large portion of Central and Eastern Europe. By then, the nomadic Iranian ethnic groups living on the Eurasian Steppe had been absorbed by the region's Slavic population. Over the next two centuries, the Slavs expanded southwest toward the Balkans and the Alps and northeast towards the Volga River. The Slavs' original habitation is still a matter of controversy, but scholars believe that it was somewhere in Eastern Europe.
  Beginning in the 9th century, the Slavs gradually converted to Christianity.
context_section_description: The Slavic population of eastern Europe expanded during the sixth century, bringing their customs and language. Although there is no consensus about their homeland, scholars generally looked north of the Carpathians. Russian archaeologist Valentin Sedov, using the Herderian concept of nationhood, proposed that the Venethi were the proto-Slavic bearers of the Przeworsk culture. Their expansion began during the second century AD, and they occupied a large area of eastern Europe between the Vistula and the middle Dnieper. The Venethi slowly expanded south and east by the fourth century, assimilating the neighbouring Zarubinec culture (which Sedov considered partly Baltic) and continuing southeast to become part of the Chernyakhov culture. The Antes separated themselves from the Venethi by 300 (followed by the Sclaveni by 500) in the areas of the Penkovka and Prague-Korchak cultures, respectively.
  During the seventh century BC, the Chernoles culture was loosely governed by the Scythians via trade. There was limited interaction between the Slavs, who were tribute-paying ploughmen under the Scythians, and the nomads. Their homeland in the forest steppe enabled them to preserve their language, except for phonetic and some lexical constituents and their patrilineal, agricultural customs. After a millennium, when the Hunnic Empire collapsed, an eastern-Slavic culture re-emerged and spread rapidly in the south and central-eastern Europe. According to Marija Gimbutas, "Neither Bulgars nor Avars colonized the Balkan Peninsula; after storming Thrace, Illyria and Greece they went back to their territory north of the Danube. It was the Slavs who did the colonizing ... entire families or even whole tribes infiltrated lands. As an agricultural people, they constantly sought an outlet for the population surplus. Suppressed for over a millennium by foreign rule of Scythians, Sarmatians and Goths, they had been restricted to a small territory; now the barriers were down and they poured out". In addition to their growth, the depopulation of eastern Europe (due, in part, to Germanic migration) and the lack of imperial defences encouraged Slavic expansion.
  With processual archaeology during the 1960s, scholars began to believe that "there was no need to explain culture change exclusively in terms of migration and population replacement". According to historical linguist Johanna Nichols, "Ethnic spreads can involve either the spread of a language to speakers of other languages or the spread of a population. Massive population spread or demographic replacement has probably been a rarity in human history... There is no reason to assume that the Slavic expansion was a primarily demographic event. Some migration took place, but the parsimonious assumption is the Slavic expansion was primarily a linguistic spread". Colin Renfrew proposed elite-dominance and system-collapse theories to explain language replacement.
  Pavel Dolukhanov suggested that their experience with nomads enabled the Slavs political and military experience, becoming a "dominant force and establishing a new socio-political network in the entire area of central and southeastern Europe". According to Paul Barford, "The Spartan and egalitarian (Slavic) culture ... clearly had something attractive for great numbers of the populations living over considerable areas of central Europe", resulting in their assimilation. "The analysis of Slav material culture (especially South Slavs) and results of anthropological investigations, as well as the loan-words in philological studies, clearly demonstrate the contribution of the previous populations of these territories in the make-up of some of the Slav populations".
  Byzantine chroniclers noted that Roman prisoners captured by the Sclavenes could soon become free members of Slavic society if they wished. Horace Lunt attributed Slavic spread to the "success and mobility of the Slavic 'special border guards' of the Avar khanate", (military elites), who used it as a lingua franca in the Avar Khanate. According to Lunt, only as a lingua franca could
caption: Three kaptorgs from a necklace; jewellery from the tomb of the Kouřim Princess, c. 900 AD
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