The Slavs, who were they, and where did they come from?

Living as they did in the forested areas north of the Pontic steppes, and so just beyond the known world of the ancient Mediterranean authors, there were a few written references to them in early times, and so historians either have to rely on what scraps of evidence there are or an archaeological or linguistic evidence.

The Indo-European origins of their languages suggest that they were settled in Eastern Europe

since at least the 3rd millennium BC, but that is not known for sure.

The current consensus among historians is that their original

homeland was somewhere north of the Carpathian Mountains around the area of what is today

southeast and Poland, southern Belarus and northwestern Ukraine. This is the story of their early

years. This is a history of Europe, Kibato's, the Siege of Kersen, Part 3 of 5.

Over a long period of many centuries, the Slavs slowly dispersed in different directions. To their west,

they met resistance from other tribes, but to their east, the mixed forest areas were sparsely

inhabited and so still had room for peaceful migration. The people who lived there before

were of two different ethnic groups, the Finno-Ugrians and the

bolts. The Finno-Ugrians, who were characterised by more or less common language of which

Finnish is one descendant and a Hungarian another inhabited at the time the expanses

of land from northern Scandinavia across the Urals. The Bouts meanwhile, another linguistic group, lived in a band of territory, ranging

in the area just east of modern-day Denmark along the southern Baltic coast, and then inland eastwards as far as Moscow and the Volga River Basin.

As the Slavs gradually migrated southeast, they met the

first serious resistance in the steppe regions of Ukraine. There lived various warlike nomadic

peoples who halted their attempts at migration for centuries. But despite the dangers, the South

offered potentially great opportunities for trade

of the ancient Greek and the later Roman cities in the Balkans and along the coast of the Black Sea

and Sea of Azov. The first known Slavic tribe were called the Antae. They originated during the first

...