who were the (original) Slavs?

This is one that seems to confuse me alot. Although I have read numerous information on the Slavic peoples and their history, it still seems that I'm uncertain when it comes to knowing where exactly did the first Slavs originate from?

 haha very funny

http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=3330& ;PN=3

Read one of the last posts in this topic, it explains it really well.

 

I always thought the Slav's were the ancient Greeks of Plato and Alexander's time.

After they got kicked out of ancient Greece they headed east, became nomadic barbarians for a few centuries and returned to Europe as the Slav's.

Hey, looking for something else, I've found one link that seems to explain Slavic origins quite well: http://www.slavicsword.cjb.net/


A map from that site.

Harry Potter, you as so attracted to fiction, as your name also clearly indicates.

Of course there were slavs who came into the Hellenic territory and even settled and intermixed with the locals.
Don't forget, that peaceful interaction was never opposed by the Greeks. If you had a peaceful reason to be around (trade, marriages, emissaries, travellers, immigrants), nobody persecuted you.

Therefore, your scoptic comment was actually quite misplaced.

I don't think the map can be taken too seriously in its inclussion of all peoples and lands east of the red line (which is accurate) Obviously Lithuanians, Finns, Albanians and Greeks weren't Slavs and those areas shoul have been left uncolored or colored with less intense brown, meaning sparse penetration. Obviously whoever draw that map was kind of pan-Slavist... still the essential concepts reflected in it are valid.

A version of that same map is found in Harper Collins Atlas of World History, edited by Geoffrey Barraclough.  Definitely not Pan-Slavist.  I think it just reflects the idea that Slavs had made a massive impact in their migrations becoming the principal linguistic population in eastern Europe.  One notes that the eastern half of ancient Germania had become Slavic.  Byzantine and other independent sources admit to massive Slavic settlement in the Peloponnese itself, but eventually those Slavs became Hellenized.  The idea that their original abodes were about the Pripet Marshes have been given much attention and there seems to be a consensus on that point. 

Originally posted by Thracian the Slavs have simply been in the east/ central european areas since the beging just like the germanaic peoples in west/ cent. europe

No, it's not that simple. Cultures and peoples are more dynamic than that - and at the beginnig we were all somewhere in Africa, btw.

While the Slavic case may cause more doubts, maybe, the German case is well studied and it is very clear that they are original from Scandinavia and Lower Germany (where the natives, had recieved proto-German culture possibly around 2400 BCE) and that they started their expansion southwards, slowly after 800 BCE and more quickly just before the start of our conventional age, subduing in the proccess many Celtic tribes.

On Slavs, I do think that the theory reflected in the map is probably accurate on source and dates of expansion, at least as far as my knowledge reaches. Slavs seem to derivate from the Lausitz culture that was more or less in what is now Poland in the Bronze Age. They may have been there since maybe as soon as 3000 BCE (but 2400 is a safer date).





Edited by Maju

I can take your explanation for Greece but what about Finn and Baltic areas? For instance, what about the region named "Lithuanians" that has no red arrow pointing to it and still is fully colored in ochre?

For "Lithuanians", and the rest of the eastern Baltic coast, perhaps an oversight?  Perhaps an overgeneralization?  Linguistically, Baltic and Slavic comprise a family of its own within IE, and perhaps the author wasn't aware how much the rest of the eastern Baltic wasn't even IE.  As for "Finnish Peoples", this may represent the initial Slavic penetration of their region by such proto-Russian tribes as the Polochane, Sloviane, and the Krivichi.  The westernmost Baltic coast was the abode of the Pomorane.