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356 meant to Europe and America and the world generally, we may hesitate to accept this unqualified assertion. But if we confine our attention to the East, it is safe to admit it as true within that area.

The vast area of Europe now known as Russia is peopled mainly by a Sclavonic race belonging to the Indo-Germanic, or Aryan, stock, but with a considerable admixture of Finnish and Scandinavian elements from the north-west, and Mongolians from the east. Most of the names that occur in the early legendary history are of a Scandinavian type. The very name Russia, formerly traced to the Rhoxolani who prove to be an Iranian people, is now generally identified with the Finnish Ruotsi, the name given by the Finns to the Swedes, and is supposed to be a corruption of part of a word meaning "rowers" —representing seafaring men, Vikings of the north, therefore people who had drifted far from the scenes of their ancestry.

Russia was late in coming into contact with civilisation. The name "Scythian" was vaguely used by the Greeks for the people north of the Euxine, but little was known of them. The Russian records begin with the chronicle attributed to Nestor, a monk born about 1056, who lived at Kiev and died about  1114, so that his time coincides with the beginning of the Norman period in England and the conquest of the Seljuk Turks in Armenia. He is regarded as the Livy or Herodotus of Russia, the father of its history, the writer who collects the legends of antiquity and brings the story down to the period of authentic history; but more is attributed to this celebrated monk than is now allowed to be his own work. Still Nestor is the first of the chroniclers. Here, then, we are more than a thousand years after the time of Christ before we come upon any record of Russian history.