Dnieper Balts

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Baltic archaeological cultures in the Iron Age from 600 BC to 200 BC with Dnieper-Dvina culture in brown

The Dnieper Balts were a subgroup of the Balts that lived in the Dnieper river basin for millennia until the Late Middle Ages, when they were partly destroyed and partly assimilated by the Slavs by the 13th century.Template:Sfn To the north and northeast of the Dnieper Balts were the Volga Finns, and to the southeast and south were the ancient Iranians, the Scythians.Template:Sfn

The Dnieper Balts have been studied by many researchers, such as the Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga, the German linguist Max Vasmer, and the Russian linguists Vladimir Toporov and Oleg Trubachyov.Template:Sfn

History

In the early 20th century, the Lithuanian linguist Kazimieras Būga showed that essentially all names in the upper Nemunas and upper Dnieper basins were Baltic.Template:Sfn In 1962, the Russian linguists Vladimir Toporov and Oleg Trubachyov, in their work, the "Linguistic analysis of the hydronyms of the Upper Dnieper region" (Template:Langx), demonstrated that more than a thousand names in the Dnieper basin were of Baltic origin, due to their morphology and etymology.Template:Sfn

The former ethnic Balticness of the Dnieper basin is evidenced by numerous archaeological finds, as well as hydronyms.Template:Sfn For example, the hydronyms Yauza, Template:Interlanguage link and Moskva, are of Baltic origin according to Toporov.Template:Sfn In the late Bronze Age, the Balts lived in territories from what is now the western border of Poland to the Ural Mountains.Template:Sfn However, some propose a smaller territory of Baltic inhabitation from the Vistula in the west to at least as far as Moscow in the east and as far south as Kyiv.Template:Sfn

Ancient history

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Baltic archeological cultures (in purple) at the end of 3rd century to beginning of 4th century between Slavic (in brown) and Finno-Ugric archeological cultures (in green)

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Baltic archeological cultures (in purple) at the end of 5th century to 7th century between Slavic archeological cultures (in light brown)

Various archeological monuments and the prevalence of Baltic hydronyms indicate that by the end of the Neolithic period (Template:Circa), there were several closely related, at least hypothetically Baltic, cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, which were the Pamariai, (Late) Narva, and (Late) Nemunas cultures.Template:Sfn The earliest of them is the Pamariai culture, which covered only a narrow part of the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea.Template:Sfn

During the Bronze (Template:Circa) and Iron (Template:Circa) Ages, in the lands to the east and south of modern-day Lithuania and Latvia, there were Baltic (Late) Narva and the Brushed Pottery cultures (the areas of these two cultures included the east of present-day Lithuania and Latvia), the Template:Interlanguage link, Milograd, Template:Interlanguage link and the later Dyakovo cultures.Template:Sfn

In the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, the aforementioned Baltic cultures of the Dnieper, Daugava and Oka basins transformed into the Kolochin, Template:Interlanguage link and Moshchiny cultures, which existed until the 8th–10th centuries.Template:Sfn This transformation was due to the strong influence of the culture of the Western Balts (of the Zarubintsy culture), which moved from the territory of what is now Poland deep into the Dnieper basin as early as the 2nd and 1st centuries BC.Template:Sfn

Moshchiny culture is considered to be the ancestor of the Eastern Galindians, who lived in the lands near Moscow and within the Protva river basin.Template:Sfn

Slavic invasion

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Eastern Europe at the end of 9th century to beginning of 10th century with the last remaining Dnieper Baltic inhabited area around the modern-day Moscow cut off from the rest of the Baltic people by Krivichs

In the middle of the 1st millennium, Slavs began to invade the Baltic territory of the Dnieper Balts along the Dnieper and its tributaries.Template:Sfn In the 7th century, the Slavs, that previously only lived in Right-bank Ukraine, started invading the Baltic lands in the eastern Dnieper basin.Template:Sfn Since the 7th and 8th centuries, the linguistic and cultural Slavicisation of Dnieper Balts was accelerated by the conversion of the multilingual tribes living in Ruthenia to Eastern Orthodoxy.Template:Sfn By the early 9th century, only small numbers of Slavs had gone into Upper Dnieper and the majority were still Balts, with the Slavs mostly settling near Gnezdovo.

Some researchers believe that after the Christianization of Kievan Rus' in 988, part of the Dnieper Balts retreated westwards, eventually merging into Lithuanians and Latgalians.Template:Sfn In the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of the Dnieper Balts were separated from the other Balts living in the west by Slavic migrants moving north on the Dnieper banks.Template:Sfn In the 11th and 12th centuries, out of the Dnieper Balts, only the Eastern Galindians remained undestroyed by the eastern Slavs.Template:Sfn

The Lithuanian professor Zigmas Zinkevičius writes that:

It is thought that the Dnieper Balts, just as the other Balts living to the east from present-day Lithuania and Latvia, had an important influence on the Slavs who moved to these lands and the formation of East Slavic as a separate linguistic group.Template:Sfn

Religion

According to some researchers, the pagan religion of the Dnieper Balts included the veneration of pillars with bear heads.

See also

• Eastern Galindians
• Neuri