Attribution and Date of the Debatable Reports about the Community of Rus’ in the 9th Century: Historiographical Result
State Academic University of the Humanities (GAUGN)
Financing: The article was prepared at the State Academic University for the Humanities within the framework of the state assignment of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (topic FZNF-2023-0003 “Traditions and values of society: mechanisms of formation and transformation in the context of global history”, topic number 1022040800353-4-6.1.1; 5.9.1).
For citation: Shchavelev, Аleksei S. Attribution and Date of the Debatable Reports about the Community of Rus’ in the 9th Century: Historiographical Result // Drevneishie gosudarstva Vostochnoi Evropy (The Earliest States of Eastern Europe). 2024: In memoriam Alexandr V. Nazarenko / Editors of the volume Т.V. Guimon, P.V. Lukin, Е.А. Мelnikova, А.V. Podossinov Мoscow: GAUGN-Press, 2024. S. 1–2.
DOI: 10.32608/1560-1382-2024-45-1-2
Abstract: The paper summarizes the results of the studies of those pieces of information on the community (people) Rus’ of the 9th century, that for various reasons cannot be either unambiguously associated with it, or confidently dated to the time earlier than the 10th century. There used to be long discussions of each of these texts, but as a rule, the problematic status of them, disputability of their attribution and dating were ignored while reconstructing the ethnopolitical history of the early period of the Rus’ history. Unfortunately, the researchers’ desire to enrich the history of the 9th-century Rus’, together with infinite immunization of precarious hypotheses have created a cardinal gap between the level of source studies and the new understanding of a number of texts, on the one hand, and their conventional (especially in our domestic historiography) historical interpretations, on the other hand. First of all, one should abandon the arbitrary identification of two high-standing Byzantines living in the early 9th century who bore the name Inger as Scandinavians, because the Germanic names came into the Roman onomasticon much more likely from the descendants of the Goths, Federates of the Roman army, the so-called Gotthograikoi. The probability that the Greek original of the Life of St Stefan of Surozh contained a mention of Rus’ is negligible. The letter of Byzantine emperor Basil I to the Frankish emperor Louis II (871) whose answer is preserved in the Chronicon Salernitanum did not contain, most likely, any ‘latent’ mention of Rus’. At last, the information about Rus’ in the Life of George of Amastris, the Bavarian Geographer and the Chronicle of Pseudo-Simeon should be dated the 10th century, and bear no relation to the 9th century. The dating of the Bavarian geographer to the time ca 900, rather than to the 9th century, is particularly important, as it helps to clarify a number of its ‘dark places’ and to understand its genre as a kind of a personal postscript to a textbook. It is absolutely obvious, that all the texts listed above should be, without doubts, excluded from the history of the 9th-century Rus’ until new source studies specifying their reading, attribution or dating appear. The historiographical inertia of their usage in the studies of the history of the 9th century seriously distorts it and hinders its adequate reconstruction.
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