Localization of the Nevrian and Scythian Plowmen Tribes in the Context of Ethnogenesis of Eastern Slavs

Abstract

Archaeological researches of settlements and hillforts of the VII-III centuries B.C. in the Middle and Upper Dnieper region on the territory of Ukraine and Belarus in the 20th and 21st centuries contributed to the possibility of further ethnological research of the Slavs. B. Rybakov in the 1980s developed a system of the Eastern Slavs ethnogenesis research from the Bronze Age to Ruthenia using the methods of historical geography, based on the research of Ukrainian (S. Berezanska, V. Illinska, O. Terenozhkina, etc.) and Belarusian (O. Melnykivska, L. Pobolia) archaeologists. He compared the maps of the homeland of the Proto-Slavic tribes from different periods and found the sameness of their main contours for two millennia. This fact became the basis of our further research.During the Scythian period, a civilizational breakdown took place in Rome and Athens – a change from the natural tribal system to the imperial-oligarchic one. In Eastern Europe during these ages and before the emergence of Kyivan Rus, Slavic tribes continued to live in a tribal system. In this work, we aim to prove the tribal structure of the Slavs by locating the nests of the ancestral settlements of the Slavic tribes of the Herodotus’ Neurs and Scythian farmers in the basins of the Dnieper, Prypiat, and Desna rivers on the modern maps at a scale of 1:250,000. Analogous mapping of the nests of Scythian farmers’ tribal settlements of the Left Bank of Ukraine was published in the previous issue of the Ukrainoznavstvo journal. These and further similar studies will reveal the characteristic features of the ethnogenesis of Ukrainian Slavs from the annalistic tribes of Kyivan Rus to the Iron, Bronze, and Copper Ages.