Slav: the Origin and Meaning of the Ethnonym

Abstract

The origin and meaning of the ethnonym Slav and the earliest history of the Slavic peoples have occupied numerous writers since the middle of the sixth century A.D. The literature on these topics is impressionalistically voluminous, but yet to be evaluated in a comprehensive bibliographic survey. I With the exception of the few scholars who believe they see clearly the emergence of the Slavs, the boundaries of their original habitat, and the etymology and earliest semasiologies of their national name,2 most would agree that the field of Slavic protohistory and early history is at an initial stage where scholarly consensus on some of the fundamental questions is still lacking. For example, we still do not have a satisfactory explanation for a sudden appearance of the Slavic ethnos on the well-choreographed stage of early medieval history, are unable to identify a geographical area to serve as the original habitat for speakers of the reconstructed Common Slavic language, and, last but not least, we are still hoping that a reasonable and believable etymology of the ethnonym Slav might some day be proposed and universally accepted. Until the nineteenth century Slavic origins were studied within the discipline of history, the science which medieval men believed had been established by Moses for the Christians, Herodotus for the pagans. 3 Everything worth knowing and knowable about the past of any people was thought to be obtainable from written sources left by ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans and other literate Mediterranean Basin peoples. During the last two centuries our horizons on the Slavic past have expanded, thanks to the involvement of linguistics and archeology, two disciplines that are traditionally viewed as ancillae historiae . Judging by the nature of the most recent literature on Slavic origins, it appears that linguists and archeologists now play the dominant role in this field, with historians barely present. On the surface this is as it should be, for this much-plowed ground can now be profitably turned if there are new data, and these can be provided only by linguistics and archeology. As is well known, all our written sources on early Slavic history had been widely published since the beginning of the nineteenth century.4 Nevertheless, I was urged and guided by my mentor, Professor Rado L. Lencek, to reexamine the primary written sources with the purpose of establishing not only the facts as they can be deduced from the evidence, but also to relegate to the sphere of the unknown or unknowable some of the many hypotheses with which the literature on that period abounds. There is no doubt that it is very profitable and even necessary to restudy our sources, because past scholars have not done this fully and conscientiously. What appear to be interpretations of primary sources avowedly arrived at through a given scholar's own study of Greek and Latin texts, upon closer scrutiny tum out to be statements which owe as much, if not more, to earlier interpreters of the same sources as to their original writers. Many routes have been taken by generations of scholars in their search for the origin and meaning of the ethnonym Slav. The method suggested here is to proceed from known facts toward the obscure but knowable ones and to stop when reaching the unknowable. Based on my own analysis of the primary sources, I have attempted to show how, when and where the Sclaveni branch of the Slavic race appeared.5 Therefore, I would like to submit that a search for the origin and earliest meaning of the ethnonym Slav be made within the established spatial and temporal boundaries of the first known Slavia. Since my