Class 4: Before Europe (3)
we're still, these names are speaking through us.
Okay, you get the point.
So language is there between us
and language is helping to make us.
Now this is only possible because
some institutions outside of individuals
are keeping the language going, right?
And we're gonna talk a little about
what those institutions might have been.
But the big institutional change is whether there are,
whether there's a written language or not,
and whether some institution
is propagating the written language.
And so a big moment of historical change
for any language is when literacy comes,
and that's where we're gonna be edging towards.
So the conversion, in around 988, to Christianity
is also the moment when a written language
emerges on these territories.
But, that said, you know,
it's important that there was a Slavic language,
that it was spoken, that it was not so terribly different
from the Slavic languages that are spoken now.
This is a, so this is a continuity.
This is something which was there before Kyivan Rus,
before any idea of Europe.
If there was a time traveler from a thousand years ago
and heard Ukrainian or Russian for that matter being spoken,
they would understand that there was,
that this language had something to do with their language.
Now, by the way, I'm not trying to say
that Slavic was the only kind of language
being spoken then, right?
Other languages are being spoken
on the territory of Ukraine as well,
like Greek, for example.
But it was the main language then,
just as it is the main language now.
And so here we have a very significant continuity.
Okay, what was that language,
and what can that language tell us
about the people we're concerned with?
Slavic language, so how do we call each other?
When I was in Kyiv, I was overhearing, as one does,
it's like an important, you know, scientific method,
you listen in to other people's conversations.
I was listening to a couple of military officers
talking about like one of their colleagues
who's going off for training.
And the first guy said, you know,
he went, he said he went do Germaniyu.
And then he corrected himself, do Nimechchyny, right?
So what was happening there is that
do Germaniyu is not really, that's like,
kind of, so that's not really Ukrainian.
It's kind of Russian.
Do Nimechchyny is Ukrainian, to Germany is what it means.
Nimechchyny, Nimechchyna.
Why is that country called that,
why is Germany called that in Slavic languages?
You've taken classes before.
Have you taken classes before? Okay, why is it called that?
- [Student] Well Nemets means kind of mute in Russian
and they couldn't understand the Germans.
- Very good.
Yeah, so a Nemets, sorry, Nemets,
it's the same in a bunch of Slavic languages,
is somebody who can't hear you, can't understand you, right?
So in a lot of these languages up till now
a Neme or something like that
means mute or maybe deaf,
someone who can't talk or can't who can't hear.
So there's, so that, like that tells you
that there is this ancient barrier
between people who speak Slavic
and people who speak Germanic languages,
and that line is still there, right?
It's not where it always was.
It's probably, I'm sure it's occurred to you,
if it hasn't it's gonna stay with you the rest of your life,
Berlin isn't really a very German name, right?
It's not, it's a Slavic name, right?
A lot of the toponyms in what's now Germany
are actually Slavic names because the line
between the two languages used to be further
to the west than it is now.
So the way people use languages starts to tell us
where they think they are, where they think they start,
where they think they stop.
The word for Slav, which we're just gonna use Ukrainian
'cause this is a class on Ukraine,
but if I say Slav in Ukrainian it's Slovyan,
and the word for word is Slovo, okay?
So as best as we can make out,
the Slavs thought of themselves
as the people who could talk, right?
The people of the word.
As opposed to the Germans who you can't figure out
what they're saying, and you know,
they don't understand you.
So it, so like Slovyanska, or in Polish Slowianska,
these are people, these are the people who have the word.
And this, like this broader name,
it survived into the nations
that named themselves the latest.
So like the Slovenes and the Slovaks, right?
Those were the Slavs who took on national names late.
And so basically they just took the name Slav
as opposed to other people.
Now, that word, Slav, for self,
which means people of the word
might mean something else to other people.
So in, if you are an Arab speaking slave trader
that word means something entirely different.
Al-Saqaliba means slaves, means slaves,
and that Arabic word then becomes the,
goes into the West through German as Sklavin
and becomes the English word slave.
So it's actually not a coincidence
that the English word slave sounds like the word Slav
that we're talking about. It's not a coincidence at all.
It's historically revealing
because the people that we're talking about
were enslaved, right, between the Baltic and the Black Sea,
usually by slavers coming from the north to the south,
and so an Arabic word to describe them
then comes into our language, right?
With a very different meaning.
It's very different to say I'm the people of the word
as opposed to the people who can be enslaved.
And although, like with the punch thing
that you could probably do without the word punch,
but you can't really do without the word slave.
And so here you have an example of how
the language is speaking you
and the language is carrying knowledge
of something that happened,
as it happens in our part of the world,
the language is carrying knowledge of something
that happened in our part of the world
a thousand years ago or more, right?
And now you know what that knowledge is.
The knowledge is that the pagan Slavs
that we're talking about, for a long while,
were enslaved, they were legitimately enslaved.
Why do I say legitimately?
That's not a good word.
It's because the monotheistic religions in general
did not enslave their own people.
So they might enslave other people
who are believers of other monotheistic religions,
but not themselves.
But if you were a pagan, everyone could enslave you, right?
If you were a Christian, Muslims might, and pagans might,
and so on, but if you're a pagan,
then everyone might enslave you, including the other pagans.
And so that's an important point that raises the stakes
of this whole monotheism.
When we get to the conversion it's not just this, like,
it's not just that people are becoming Christian.
I mean in a way like that's the least important thing,
and it takes a while to happen.
You're, but when you join the Christian world
it means that other Christians aren't going to enslave you.
And it means that you're, you know,
you're part of a larger group.
But don't worry, we'll talk more about that later.
Okay, so the Slavs, from their own point of view,
are the people of the word.
From the point of view of people around them,
for a while at least, they are people who can be enslaved.
So this brings us to what I want to talk about next,
which is who they were at the time.
So again, before Europe, before the conversion,
means before literacy,
so we know less about them, right?
So, I mean the history,
this may seem like a bit of a cop out,
but history is based on written records,
and so, you know, we have the history
of ancient Mesopotamia and history of ancient Egypt,
legitimately the history, because they left documents.
We don't have the history of their neighbors necessarily
because their neighbors didn't leave behind documents.
So when we're talking about the history of the Slavs
up to this point where the sources we're using
are Jewish travelers or Arabic travelers, right?
Or maybe Christian missionaries,
and just the most basic principles
of source criticism would tell you that
these monotheistic visitors are gonna have
a certain kind of bias towards the pagans that they see.
But those are the kind of written sources we have
up until the Christian conversions.
But we know some things, but we know less than we might.
We know something about the paganism,
but because these people were not literate
and because they didn't have temples,
and they were an aniconic, that is they didn't have icons.
They only started to have temples and icons,
that is physical instantiations of their divinities,
very late in the day
when they were influenced by the Christians.
But on their own, they didn't.
And so there isn't really a physical trace,
not just not a written trace,
but there isn't really a physical trace
of how they worshiped.
But we know something.
We know that they were, as I've said, that they were pagans.
That means that there were a number of gods
and the gods were not necessarily divinity
separate from the world.
On the contrary, they were connected to the world.
They were connected with things that happened in the world.
This will be familiar from Greek or Scandinavian mythology.
There, actually there's pretty strong similarities
between this and Scandinavian mythology,
so if you think of Thor, not in the most recent movie,
not that Thor, like I thought the most recent one
didn't really work, I don't know about the rest of you.
Like I was in Vienna and I was with a seven year old
and a 10 year old and I took them to see
the most recent Thor movie and like
it turns out that it was like 17 and over.
Seemed weird to me.
And I said like together they're 17,
and they're like, okay. (students laughing)
And they looked away.
And I took them, but it wasn't really,
I don't think that last Thor movie really worked, yeah.
Anyway, but if you think of Thor, the Scandinavian divinity,
you're not far away from Perun
who is a central divinity in the Slavic pantheon,
a god of thunder associated with the thunderbolt
also associated with the oak tree.
Another important god was called Svarog
who was associated with the sun and with the crops,
but the spirits and divinities were everywhere.
So that's the thing about, like, about monotheism,
it's not just that there's one god,
it's that that one God is often located
somewhere else besides Earth,
which is a very strange thought
if you're not used to it, right?
Like there's something, there's something very,
there's something very ascetic and demanding and disciplined
about monotheism,
where you put God somewhere else besides here.
Like there's a way in which it's much more comforting,
actually, to have the gods kind of around all the time.
Right?
Okay, so the gods were everywhere and the notion was that
you are in constant relationships with them,
which explains things that we now treat as superstitions.
The things that we now treat as superstitions,
the little physical actions, are gestures towards the gods.
Sacrifice, human sacrifice,
would be part of these relationships,
sacrificing the right kind of person at the right kind of,
at the right time.
If you spent any time in the Slavic world,
and you think about it,
you'll notice that the sacrifices to,
the spring sacrifices and the summer sacrifices
to water and to flame are both still present in the culture.
They're now ritualized and nobody gets hurt,
but the rituals are still there.
We can talk more about that if you want.
The dead are still with you.
That's another part of this pagan religion.
