--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
>
> The ones that are mentioned in a list of peoples "beyond" the northernmost important city of Roman Dacia, Porolissum. Again one must be careful here. The TP gives the impression that this list (= PITI. GAETAE. DAGAE. VENEDI) follows the flow of the Danube eastward, and hence the VENEDI would be located near its Black Sea outlet. This BTW is what led the interesting Belorusan historian/archaeologist V. Nosewich to identify these VENEDI with the "Etulia culture" of that spot (2nd through 4th centuries: a mixture of LaTene, Late Scythian, and Late Zarubinian elements) Cf. his recent article at http://vln.by/node/178 (with great maps!).
>
> But there is another possibility, viz., that the list represents peoples to the north of Porolissum. The TP is quite schematic. If the extant version is indeed datable to the early 330's in this form, then it might have been drawn in the wake of Constantine's temporary reconquest of Roman Dacia from the Goths in 332 (Didn't last long, but at least to 337 and some few years beyond). Which justified the retention of the old Dacian road system on the map, with one route leading to Tivisco, another to Sarmizegetuza, and a third to Napoca (today's Cluj in Transylvania) and Porolissum. Then came the list, which has been plausibly reconstructed as (GE)PITI (=Gepids), Goths, Dacians, and Venedi, members of the defeated 332 Gothic alliance. The rest of the TP information is typically hazy but quite understandable for the 330's. Contact with the northern Black Sea coast had been effectively lost for generations. Tyras and Olbia had been destroyed (they're not
on the map). The Bosporan Kingdom particulars are thoroughly scrambled. In fact all this portion of the TP shows the north Black Sea coast to have become a sort of "terra incognita" again. We have Germanic names for the Dnister ("Agaling") and the Dnipro ("Nusacus"). This is the heyday of the Chernyakhiv culture. And even the Vistula seems to have become a "Sellania" which flows from the Baltic into the Dnipro/Nusacus (!!). And the Don is "Tanasis Galatiae"...
>
> So I would think that these VENEDI are to be located not so much at the mouth of the Danube, but somewhere in the north, near the Goth-dominated territory, more or less in the area of the Kyivan culture, which is basically the same as the location hinted at by Tacitus, and by Jordanes for the time of Hermanaric. These VENEDI would be Slavs.
Nope. Those Venedi would *later* be Slavs.
****GK: Why later? This is a pretty straightforward notion, following the most recent archaeological/historical approach, viz., that the best bet for finding Slavs before their documented emergence in the late 5th/early 6th cs. is to "trace back" the roots of the material cultures which can be associated with the populations occupying the "Slav" areas attested in ca. 500/600 CE. There were three basic "Slavic" cultures then: Prague/Korchak, Penki(o)vka, Kolochinsk. The earlier attempts to link these with Chernyakhiv and Przeworsk have now been abandoned. Their roots stem from the more northern "Kyivan culture" of ca. 200-400 CE. The KC would be that of Jordanes' Venedi of ca. 370 CE and that of the TP's Venedi of ca. 332 CE. The roots of this "Kyivan culture" are pretty complex, but traceable. One of the major components is the Late Zarubinian culture. BTW the Belorusan author I mentioned,
Nosewich, opines in his 2010 article that the core language of emerging Slavdom would have been the BaltoSlavic dialect of the Grini version of Late Zarubinia (a continuation of what I labeled Zarubinia 3 [Upper Dnipro] which spread very actively amongst neighbouring groups in the period 50-200 CE) though he adds that as it assimilated other Baltic, Germanic, and Pomeranian elements it "experienced a substantially serious transformation". It's an interesting idea worth further study. One of the areas I'd be curious about is whether some of the words in Slavic borrowed from Old Germanic (like "king", "helmet", "sword" etc. might have been a Bastarnian (Zarubinian) rather than a Gothic contribution, though the prior theory is obviously still defensible. And we know from the analyses of Struminski that as late as the 6th c. many Slav (both "Sklav" and "Antic") chieftains still bore Germanic sounding names (borrowed from ancient
aristocrats?)*****