Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/162

 146 SLAVS identified with the Slavs by Schafarik with consider- able probability, the Budini and the Neuri. Of the former we are told that they were a large nation and had blue eyes and red hair. The description of the country they inhabited corresponds pretty closely to Volhynia and portions of White Russia. The Neuri are placed by Schafarik on the river Bug, which flows through Podolia. There at the present day we find a river named Nureff, and the surrounding country is called Nurska. This opinion is supported by Schrader, who places the original home of the Slavs in Scythia. Posche l goes so far as to consider the eastern part of Europe especially that portion of Russia which constitutes the basin of the Pripet, the Beresina, and the Dnieper as the primary abode of the Indo-European race. Dr Kurd von Schlozer interprets Herod, iv. 6 the story of Targitaus and his three children as an allusion to the Slavs. The falling of a plough with its yoke from heaven would hardly be a characteristic tale of a nomad people. We seem to have an echo of the stories of the peasants Mikoula, Selianinovich, Piast, and Pfemysl, all dear to Slavonic legend. The view that the ancestors of the Slavs are to be found among the Scythian tribes has been supported in recent times by the Russian author Zabielin. 2 He also thinks that their original settlement was in Volhynia and White Russia. The specimens of the Scythian language which have come down in Herodotus and elsewhere can certainly best be explained by Indo- European roots. The name Slav does not occur in any writer before the time of Jordanes, unless it be in the Srauavot of Ptolemy. Jordanes says of them " quorum nomina licet nunc per varias familias et loca mutentur, principaliter tamen Sclavini et Antes." It is probably connected with the root slovo, " the word," which is related to the Greek KV<D (Slav, slit, "to be called"); and in a Polabish vocabulary we get the form slivo. The Slav thus conies to mean " the intelligibly speaking man" in contrast to "the dumb man," Niemetz, which in the modern Slavonic languages has come to mean simply " German." Miklosich (Etym. Worterb.) thinks that the termination -ene in Slovene shows the word to be derived from the name of a place and rejects the explanation from slovo. Some Slavonic scholars have sought an explanation of the name in the word slava, "glory." Penka, 3 however, attempts to upset the ordinary ety- mology. According to him the Slavs are non- Aryan and belong rather to the Ugro-Finnish race. Their name, he tells us, shows that they were subjected by the Aryans and became their dependants. He considers it to be derived from the present participle of the root Tdu ("to hear," Slav. sli), and thus identifies it with " client." The name Wend is used by Tacitus, who speaks of the Peucini, the Venedi, and the Fenni. Ptolemy also alludes to the Wendic mountains. He tells us that Sarmatia, i.e., all the terri- tory east of the Vistula and north of Dacia, was inhabited by widely scattered races and that the Wenedse were established along the whole of the Wendish gulf. Jordanes calls them Winidae. The other name, Antes, applied by this historian to the Slavs, which, like the word Wend, they never used themselves, Schafarik connects with a Gothic root. Duchinski, Henri Martin, and others have denied to the Russians the right of being called Aryan. Penka, 4 as stated before, carries this opinion much further and refuses the appellation to the whole Slavonic family. Finding that many of the Slavs have chestnut-coloured curly hair and dark eyes, that the White Russians are blond, that the southern Slavs are darker and have a shorter head than those in the north, he is inclined to see in the Slavs 1 Die Arier, ein Beitrag zur historischen Anthropologie, Jena, 1878. 2 See, however, the arguments on the other side in the article SCYTHIA. 3 Op. tit., p. 126. 4 Op. tit., p. 125. a very mixed race, and quotes Procopius 5 in support of his opinion. The second of the opinions alluded to above has been Wocel's adopted by Wocel, 6 according to whom the Slavs in the view - north of Germany on the Elbe, Moldau, Sale, Spree, as also those living south of the Danube, were not living in juxtaposition in the Bronze Age, but wandered into those regions some centuries after the birth of Christ. In proof of this assertion he cites many names of objects which are common to the Slavonic languages and yet could not have been known to any people in the Bronze Period, as, for example, iron (O.S. zeleso), 7 objects made of iron, as scythe (O.S. kosa), chisel (O.S. dlato), tongs (O.S. klesta), knife (nu~z), saw (pila), hoe (motyka), sword (mefy, stirrup (stremen), spur (ostruha), needle (je/ila), anchor (kotvd). Common to all the Slavonic languages are the names for gold (zlato), silver (stribro), copper (med), tin (olovo). All these words must have been formed while the Slavonic people dwelt together in a comparatively narrow space, according to Wocel between the Baltic, the Vistula, and the Dnieper ; otherwise, according to this authoB, if we suppose that the Lutitzes, Obotrites, Sorbs, and Chekhs were autochthonous, it is difficult to see how they could have had the same names for many objects which did not exist in the Bronze Age, e.g., iron, as the Slavs on the Dnieper, the Balkans, and the Adriatic had. Wocel con- siders the Slavs to have been a pastoral people who entered Europe through the passes of the Caucasus. He compares the agricultural words which all branches of the family have in common, as ploug, " plough " (and also ralo) ; lemesh, "ploughshare"; zhito, "corn"; pshenitze, "wheat"; yechmen, "barley"; oves, "oats"; proso, "millet"; mop, " sheaf." On the other hand, as Wocel maintains, objects connected with civilization the knowledge of which only dates from the introduction of Christianity have not a common name in the Slavonic languages, such as "paper," "pavement," "steel," "velvet," &c. So also there is no common term for "property" or "inheritance," for the simple reason that the Slavs knew nothing of private property, the land being held in common under the care of the vladika or stareshina, as in the Servian zadrugas at the present day. The condition of the original Slavs has also been investi- gated from the linguistic point of view by Gregor Kreck. 8 According to this writer, besides the cereals previously mentioned the Slavs cultivated the rape (repa), the pea (sochivo, grakh), the lentil (lenshta), the bean (bob), the poppy (mak), hemp (konop), the leek (louk), &c. ; corn ground by a hand-mill or water-mill (zhrinouv, malin) into meal (manka) and baked into bread (khleb), honey (med) the collection of which was an important occupation among the Slavs, as we find by the Polish laws meat (menso), milk (mleko), and fruit (ovoshtiye) formed their food. The drinks were ol and vino 9, beer and wine. Kreck considers that the minute details of house-building point to a habit of living in fixed residences, thus the house (dom), the stable (khlev), the threshing-floor (goumno), the court (dvor), the village (ves). In opposition, however, to this view of Kreck we have the opinion of Hehn, who contends that all the words used among the Slavs for stone buildings are borrowed, and seeks to prove that till comparatively 5 Bell. Goth., iii. 14 "TO. 5e crw/nara Kal ras /c6/u.as, oOre evKol &yav ij %av6oi elffiv, oSre irt) s rb fitXav O.VTOIS iravTfXuis T^Tpairrai, dXX' vTrfpvOpot elcriv^&iravTfs." 6 Pravek Zeme CesM (The Early Days of Bohemia), Prague, 1868. It is cited by Schrader, p. 90. 7 The words not specified as Old Slavonic are Bohemian. 8 Einleitung in die slavische Litteratur-Oeschichte, Gratz, 1874 ; see Schrader, p. 92. 9 A word which some recent scholars are inclined to think of Armenian origin.