THE POLISH LAND 37
place, the supposition of a continuous North Carpathian Culture of Slavonic
character, lasting throughout the Bronze Age in its successive Komarov,
Bilogrudivka, and Chernoles variants, presents far fewer conflicts of evidence. It
allows for the persistence of a similarly stable Baltic Culture to the north, and
of the widespread Central European Culture with Unetice, Urnfield, and
Lusatian variants to the west. It agrees with linguistic evidence, which demands
firstly that the Slavs did not disperse until relatively recently; and secondly that
they should have passed the formative years in contact not only with Germans
and Baits but also with Illyrians, Thracians, and Iranians. (See Diagram C.) It
also encourages the identification of these early Slavs with the 'Scythian farm-
ers' of the fifth century BC whom Herodotus put at three days' march from the
Dnieper. Here the Slavs would have developed their characteristic social insti-
tution, the zadruga or 'joint family', where all the relatives of the chieftain lived
together under fierce patriarchal discipline. Here, subjected first to the Scythians
and then from the second century BC to the Sarmatians, they learned their com-
mon religious vocabulary, most of which from Bog (God) to raj (Paradise) is
Sarmato-Iranian by derivation. Here they would have worshipped their numer-
ous deities such as Triglav, the Three-headed One, Svarog the Sun-maker, and
Perun, the God of the Thunderclap. Here in the first century of our era, they
would have witnessed the slow migration of the Germanic Goths and Gepids
whose route from the Baltic Coast to the Black Sea is clearly marked by a trail
of characteristic settlement and funeral sites. Here, they would have experi-
enced the successive arrivals of the Huns and the Avars. Their own main expan-
sion, which probably began on the coat-tails of the nomads, grew into a flood
with the collapse of Avar supremacy in the seventh century. 'The barriers were
down, and the Slavs poured out.' One branch headed north and east into Baltic
and Finnish territory to found the East Slav communities - the ancestors of the
Great Russians and the Ruthenes. A second branch moved south into the
Balkans - the future Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgars. The third group
turned westward into Germanic, Celtic, and Baltic territory, into lands which
ancient authors had known as Bohemia, northern Pannonia, and eastern
Germania. These were the forebears of the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Sorbs, the
Polabians, the Pomeranians, and the Poles. According to this schedule, the
'Protopoles' would have been one of the last of the Slavs to drift away from the
North Carpathian homeland, and would have settled in the valleys of the Odra
and Vistula in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries. By the end of the
prehistoric period, the new wave of Slavonic colonization had obliterated most
of the underlying layers of previous settlement.^2
The main implication of this hypothesis for Polish history is that the Poles
would have been but the latest of many Indo-European groups who have settled
on the territory of present-day Poland. Such a conclusion may be unpalatable to
many Polish readers; but it is hard to refute. The first Indo-Europeans are gen-
erally thought to have penetrated into the North European Plain in the second
half of the Fourth Millennium BC, bringing with them the unmistakable trait of