Славяне. Сыны Перуна

Ancient Peoples and Places

by Marija Gimbutas

Всемирно известный археолог и этнограф Мария Гимбутас на основе археологических, исторических и лингвистических материалов, обобщенных в книге, рисует величественную панораму раннего развития славян. Это позволяет реконструировать материальную культуру, религиозные представления и быт древних славян, установить по возможности точную хронологию важнейших фаз развития групп народов, объединенных общностью происхождения и единой языковой группой.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 1971

About the author

Marija (Alseikaite) Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė), was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological interpretation, but earned a mixed reception by other professionals.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gimbutas explains the history of archaeological and sociological learning about Slavic people's through the many centuries. For example she reports the early research by Otto Schrader, who in 1901 claimed to have found the original Proto-Indo-European culture—in Serbia. At that time, the Serbian homeland was divided between the states of Hercegovina and Montenegro. The family structure there, Schrader said, was a clear reflection of the ancient Indo-European society. Central to this was the zagruda, or extended patriarchal family, which was traditionally occupied in stock-breeding. The various local zagrudas were aligned in clans called rodu, which claimed certain pastures, fields and forests as their own. Relations between the male clan members were usually close, and had a military function. The men understood themselves pledged to mutual defense and blood vengeance against external enemies. The women were accountable for sexual loyalty, the betrayal of which could also lead to blood vengeance. These clans were loosely united in tribes, or pleme, which claimed tribal territory, and had tribal heads called zupan or starina. In Schrader’s day, this kind of extended tribal family was already dissolving into urbanized nuclear families. But much of the old order still survives in rural Serbia and the rest of Eastern Europe. At least the code of clan loyalty and blood vengeance seemed alive and well in modern Serbia as Gimbutas compiled this book.

In traditional Eastern European families, a grandfather, his sons, and their families, commonly lived together on the same plot of land. The boys built houses for themselves across the yard after they got married. Such clusters of houses dotted the countryside around Minsk in Belorussia, where Donvar-Zapol’skij described them in 1897. The land, farming tools and animals were all collective family property. The boys worked with their father almost every day, and ate their meals in the central house belonging to their dad. This Belorussian extended family was also called a zagruda. Marija Gimbutas says that in such old-fashioned Slavic families, “The house father is master of the zagruda, responsible for both its economic and moral welfare ... At home he is a judge, ... settling all problems and quarrels. What he says is right.” (pp. 134-135)

Women here were secondary citizens. In early medieval Russia, many men claimed two or three wives. Heads of families could even require sexual service from their son’s wives. If a woman left her husband’s family, she had no recognized right to take any family property with her. A father could discipline his wives or children any way he saw fit, even by killing them. Such strong extended families, with military alliances between clans, tended to evolve in hard environments. In places where a nuclear family might not survive on its own, the extended family tended to grow in importance, till it quite overshadowed the individual.

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