Vistula Veneti - Relation Between Veneti, Balts and Slavs

Relation Between Veneti, Balts and Slavs

The Veneti were geographically and temporally contiguous to the Germanic and Slavic peoples and were eventually assimilated by both groups, perhaps even more decisively by Slavs, who later settled in the territory which erstwhile belonged to the Veneti. The Germanic peoples subsequently transferred the ethnonym Veneti to their new easterly neighbours, the Slavs. This tradition survived in German language where Slavs living in closest proximity to Germany were originally called Wenden or Winden (see Wends), while the people of the Austrian federal lands Styria and Carinthia referred to their Slavic neighbours as Windische. It should be emphasised, though, that Slavic peoples never used the ethnonym Veneti for themselves but were called thus only by the neighbouring Germanic peoples. Such transfers of ethnonyms from one group to another are not unusual and have occurred frequently in history. Although Tacitus listed the Venethi as a tribe in Germania, in his Getica, Jordanes equated the Venethi with the Sclavenes and Antes. Slavists such as Pavel Josef Šafařík have criticized Tacitus for erroneously identifying the Venethi as Germanic, due to the similar appearance of Slavs and Germans.

Considering Ptolemy's Ouenedai and their location along the Baltic sea, a German linguist, Alexander M. Schenker, underlines that the vocabulary of the Slavic languages shows no evidence that the early Slavs were exposed to the sea. Proto-Slavic had no maritime terminology and even lacked a word for amber which was the most important item of export from the shores of the Baltic to the Mediterranean. In view of this, the very fact that Ptolemy refers to the Baltic as the Venedic Bay appears to rule out a possible identification of the Veneti of his times with the Slavs. Schenker's conclusion is supported by the fact that to the east of the Ouenedai, Ptolemy mentions two further tribes called Stauanoi and Souobenoi, both of which have been interpreted as possibly the oldest historical attestations of Slavs.

Linguists agree that Slavic languages evolved in close proximity with the Baltic languages. The two language families probably evolved from a common ancestor, a phylogenetic Proto-Balto-Slavic language continuum. The earliest origins of Slavs seem to lie in the area between the Middle Dnieper and the Bug rivers, where the most archaic Slavic hydronyms have been established. The vocabulary of Proto-Slavic had a heterogenous character and there is evidence that in the early stages of its evolution it adopted some loanwords from centum-type Indo-European languages. It has been proposed that contacts of Proto-Slavs with the Veneti may have been one of the sources for these borrowings. The aforementioned area of proto-Slavic hydronyms roughly corresponds with the Zarubintsy archeological culture which has been interpreted as the most likely locus of the ethnogenesis of Slavs. According to Polish archaeologist Michał Parczewski, Slavs began to settle in southeastern Poland no earlier than the late 5th century AD, the Prague culture being their recognizable expression.