Re: [tied] Re: south slavic

--- Vassil Karloukovski <v.karloukovski@...>
wrote:

> here is a Bulgarian view on the problem of Slavs vs.
> local Balkan
> folks, vs. Bulgars, Avars, taken from Usenet. The
> author, Stephan
> Nikolov, is a young historian, now at Oxford.
>
> Regards,
> Vassil K.
> As far as the history of the "Slavs" is concerned,
> sources speak of
> various "Sclaviniae". This is to indicate that when
> the Slavs
> settled in the Balkans they had no separate ethnic
> identity but
> existed as different tribes: "Severoi", "Ezeritai",
> "Milingoi",
> "Dragovitai", "seven Slavic tribes", "Smolianoi",
> "Abodriti", etc.
> , who clearly failed to develop a group of common
> ethnic identity,
> although the Byzantine and Latin observers would
> call them under
> generic term Slavs.
>
> Slavs were neither bound by any idea of common
> origin, nor their
> name "Slavs" proved stronger than their tribal
> names, save the fact
> that they had little idea of common history and
> solidarity.

*****GK: This is an important point. In fact one might
argue even more radically. viz., that tribal names
such as mentioned above (and many other similar ones
in sources of later centuries) represent a
consolidation of earlier small units ("rods"= the term
stands both for something like "clan" and for "a
combination of 'clans'"). These small units left a
vast number of toponyms a la "-ICHI" scattered all
over. I'm not sure about the situation south of the
Danube in this regard, but on the territories of
Ukraine and Belarus, for instance, the productivity of
this suffix was enormous.(NB not to be confused with
the rather later "-OVYCHI")******

> The case with the Bulgars was similar, yet
> different, to that of the
> Slavs. The Bulgars appear on several occasions in
> history before
> they established their states in the Balkans and the
> Volga-Kama
> estuary. The first people called "Bulgars" appear
> in the later 4th
> century as a most probably non-Turkic tribe and we
> see them acting
> within Attila's steppe empire.
>
> With the end of the Hunnic empire in the 470's, the
> Bulgars
> disappear from sources

****GK: Could you develop the above? The information
about "Bulgars" in the 4th century is news to me.*****



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