--- Michael Smith <
mytoyneighborhood@...>
wrote:
>
> George, a few questions. Is the overall consensus
> (if there is one) that Neuri were
> Slavic or Baltic speakers?
*****GK: Subject to correction, my impression is that
many would agree that most "Neuri" should be viewed as
ancestors of Balts, some (not many) would argue they
were Slavs. My view is that it is possible to
associate the proto-Slavs with those groups of Neuri
who were part of the Scythian realm, inhabiting the
area south of the Prypjat/Pripet up to the headwaters
of the Southern Boh(g). I call them the "Inner Neuri".
Most of them would be in the forested section, some
mixing with agricultural Scythians in the
forest-steppe area (where Thrakoid hydronyms have
survived, among Baltic and Slavic ones).*****
where would Balts be located at
> this time, and do you know in what regions the
> earliest Baltic toponyms.
*****GK: My view is that these proto-Slavs were still
pretty close to the other Balts in Scythian times, and
that this is the period when Slavic began to
constitute itself as a separate Indo-European
linguistic branch, though others see this differently.
North of the Prypjat' and Seym rivers was solid Baltic
territory, with narry an old Slavic hydronym.******
I thought
> Mallory equated the agricultural Scythians with
> Slavic tribes.
******GK: So did many Soviet scientists. In my opinion
they were wrong. ******
>
> And, you're saying Thrakoid tribes with an Iranian
> ruling class were among the
> Aukhatia population?
******GK: That is what I'm saying. If the "Royal
Scythians" /Paralata/ can be located in the vast areas
east of the Dnipro, there is no reason why the other
groups can't be associated with the Scythian "nomads"
and Scythian "agriculturalists". It was a rather
complex political situation. You might even argue
that, apart from the immediate entourage of the
Paralata sub-king, the upper class of Aukhatia was
also of nomadic descent (and perhaps more, since
Herodotus' "Aratores" were "agriculturalists" much as
the owners of large latifundia were "peasants"). And
then there would be the aristocratic descendants of
the Thrakoid kingdom defeated by the Cimmerians. A
good analogy would be the "Rus" and "Slav"
aristocracies of Kyivan times.*****
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