Pre-Christian Slavic writing

There is some evidence that the early Slavs may have used a writing system or a form of proto-writing prior to the introduction of Christianity and of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets in the mid 9th century. But there is no extant evidence of pre-Christian Slavic writing, and the hypothesis rests on indirect evidence.

Evidence from early historiography

The 9th century Bulgarian writer, Chernorizets Hrabar in his work An Account Of Letters (Bulgarian: О писменех, O pismeneh) briefly mentioned that, before the introduction of Christianity, Slavs used a system he had dubbed "strokes and incisions" or "tallies and sketches" in some translations (Old Church Slavonic: чръты и рѣзы). He also provided information critical to Slavonic palaeography with his book.

In the old days, the Slavs did not have their own letters, but read and divined by means of strokes and incisions, being pagan. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable.

—^[1]

Another contemporary^{[dubious – discuss]} source, Thietmar of Merseburg, describing a temple on the island of Rügen, a Slavic pagan stronghold, remarked that the idols there had their names carved out on them ("singulis nominibus insculptis" Chronicon 6:23 ).^[2] This is not directly connected to the question of possible 8th-century Slavic writing, as Thietmar wrote in the 11th century, and the Conversion of Pomerania took place only in the 12th century.

Evidence from etymology

The Slavic word for "to write", pьsati derives^{[dubious – discuss]} from a Common Balto-Slavic word for "to paint, smear", found in Lithuanian piẽšti "paint, write", paĩšas "smudge", puišinas "sooty, dirty", from the same root as Old Slavic pьstrъ (also pěgъ) "coloured" (Greek πικρός), ultimately from a PIE root *peik- "speckled, coloured" (Latin pingō "paint", Tocharian pik-, pink- "paint, write"). This indicates that the Slavs named the new art of writing in ink, as "smearing, painting", unlike English which, with Old English *(w)rītan English write, transferred the term for "incising (runes)" to manuscript writing. The other Germanic languages use terms derived from Latin scribere. A Slavic term for "to incise" survives in OCS žrěbъ "lot" originally the incision on a wooden chip used for divination (Russian жребий "number, tally mark", from the same root as Greek γράφω).

See also

• Proto-writing
• Christianization of the Slavs

References

1. ^ Old Church Slavonic text of An Account of Letters (a Russian site)
2. ^ Thietmarus Merseburgensis