ABSTRACT

To Fredegar and his Austrasian audience, the Slavs were the people on the eastern periphery of the Frankish kingdom, whose sudden eruption into history was linked exclusively to the victory against King Dagobert and his allies. Only the Tale of Bygone Years, also known as the Russian Primary Chronicle, has a story about the origin of all Slavs. A work compiled by several authors, the last of which finished writing in ca. 1113, the Tale places the Slavs within the story of Babel. While endorsing a culture-historical approach to the archaeological record, most Czech, Slovene, Slovak, and Polish scholars writing about the early Slavs do not follow its logic. For example, the Prague culture is attributed to the Slavs because its territory supposedly coincides with the location of the Slavs as given in the written sources. The Slavic language originated in a Urheimat , wherever that may have been located, and then spread quickly in multiple directions through migration.