Re: Bident stuff

From: george knysh
Message: 64991
Date: 2009-09-06

--- On Sun, 9/6/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:





Google cache image of the inaccessible
http://www.mnuai ro/docs/apulum/ articole/ 1.fetisov. pdf
pp. 299-314

Al. Fetisov, Irina Galkova

The `Rurikid Sign' from the B3 Church at Basarabi-Murfatlar

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1. The oldest coin bearing a bident belongs to a hoard dated from the late 9th or early 10th century, found in Gotland (the most recent coin from this set was minted in 880-885). The bident image is linear. The coin is preserved in Stockholm (fig. 5.1)24.

2. A coin with an outlined bident (fig. 5.2), from Pogorel'shchinsky hoard, early 10th century (Minsk region, Byelorussia) . On the other side there is a banner.

****GK: These would presumably be the only secure Rus' (Pyc") (and not Alano-Khazar)instances of bidents before the time of Sventoslav/Svyatoslav.*****

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The difference between inheritance traditions before and after Svyatoslav (preserving the sign intact vs. altering it by every new heir) can be possibly explained by the crucial changes in the nature of princely authority in the last quarter of the 10th century.

****GK: Actually things are both simpler and more complex. First of all, the Rurikid mythology, which established a princely "continuity": Rurik->Oleg->Igor->Svyatoslav (with Olga as regent until 964) was only created in the second half of the 11th century (Oddly enough the name of the alleged founder, Rurik, never did become a popular princely name in the Kyivan realm).
The dynastic history of the early princes of Kyiv remains obscure. We know that the area was under Khazar administration from ca. 750 until ca. 859, when it was captured by Scandinavians with the help of rebellious local Slavs. These Scandinavians were led by a charismatic figure, their "helgi" (the name eventually Slavonized as "Oleg"). Between 859 and 941 there were at least three such "helgis", almost certainly unrelated. There was a historical later 9th c. Rurik (a Dane I think) whose power occasionally extended eastward as far as the territory of Old Ladoga near Novgorod. He became the "Rurik" of the Old Ukrainian chronicle. But he died long before the birth of the historical "Igor" (slavonized form of Ingvar), and was certainly not his father. It would seem that this "Igor" was left in charge of Kyiv during the last "helgi"'s unsuccessful expedition against Khazaria ca. 943 (Pritsak/Golden published the relevant Khazarian text in 1982 ["Khazarian
Hebrew documents of the 10th c."] and then took over. He was considered the real founder of the first firm continuing dynasty of "Rus'" princes in Kyiv by the early 11th c. historiographers of the court of Yaroslav the Wise.

Where the early pre-Svyatoslav "Rus'" bidents listed above on coins come from is unclear. We know that Svyatoslav made an important dynastic marriage in 955, and that his wife was a princess of the local Slav nobility of Kyiv (we don't know her name, but her family, as "Poli/Polan", was of slavonized Scytho-Sarmatian-Alanic descent: as the Kyivan chronicle stated "they were Polan, but they spoke Slavonic". These Polani (the worshippers of Khors and Simargl) were also merchants, and could have marked the Arabic dirhems in question. Otherwise we could associate these bidented coins with the second "helgi" (Oleg) the one who made a treaty with Byzantium in 911.

BTW note the interesting gakk (as n. 123 of the 150-250 CE period in Yatsenko) of the Middle Dnipro region. It seems to be a Bosporan type bident (cf. n. 67) with a symbol added (in the form of a cross(!) making it a trident. The bident component also resembles the 4/3 Western Mongolian gakk...*****