- Ilmen Slavs
The Ilmen Slavs ( _ru. Ильменские славяне; the northernmost
tribe of theEarly East Slavs , which inhabited the shores of theLake Ilmen and the basin of the rivers of Volkhov, Lovat,Msta , and the upper stream of theMologa River in the 8th to 10th centuries.The Ilmen Slavs seem to have been different from other Slavic tribes colonizing what is now
Russia in that they were closely related to thePolabian Slavs in language and traditions (seeold Novgorod dialect andGostomysl for examples). They settled Northern Russia, moving along the major waterways, until they met the southward expansion of theKrivichs in the modern-dayYaroslavl Oblast .They left a few archaeological monuments of the 6th–8th centuries, such as
agricultural settlements and tall conelikekurgan s withincinerate d bodies in the Ladoga region. The mostancient settlement is dated back to the 7th or8th century . Numerous archaeological finds, such as a metal tip for a woodenplough , indicate that the Ilmen Slavs had a well-developed agriculture. They were not a particularly warlike state, but evidence of their unique weaponry, dated back to mid-8th Century, has been found around the city of Novgorod. The weaponry consisted of spears, maces, swords, bows, javelins and even some war hammers. It would seem that they fought rather aggressive warfare designed to push their enemies out of their lands, rather than destroy them utterly.The principal cities of the Ilmen Slavs were
Staraya Russa andNovgorod , which had appeared in the 9th–10th centuries. The land of the Ilmen Slavs would later become the center of theNovgorod Republic .Modern archeology does not consider Slav settlements around lake Ladoga older than 10th century, which makes theories of Ilmen Slavs early precence non tenable. [Wladyslaw Duczko, Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe (The Northern World, V. 12), ISBN-10: 9004138749 ]
References
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