Prof. Marko Živković,
The Serbian Dreambook, 147-151.
THE MOST ANCIENT PEOPLE
There is a mantra every schoolboy in Yugoslavia could repeat in his sleep: “Slavs came to the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries.” I was hardly aware that there were alternative theories until 1990, when a man I met at a party told me a story of a Serbian woman who, despite all odds, defended a controversial dissertation at the Sorbonne in the 1960s, and of a powerful conspiracy of silence that prevented the publication of her manuscript. Only later did I learn that the book in question was
Serbs... the Most Ancient People (
Srbi... narod najstariji) by Olga Luković-Pjanović, first published by the
Glas Srba (
Voice of Serbs) from Indianapolis in 1988, and subsequently reissued in Belgrade in 1990, 1993, 1994, and 2003 (Luković-Pjanović 1988). The book became a best seller in the 1990s and was followed by a deluge of magazine articles, serialized digests in the dailies and weeklies, as well as entire books devoted to the thesis that Serbs are the most ancient of peoples.
If the Mexican charlatan was the first to provoke a vague yearning for ancient identity in 1985, the publication of
Serbs . . . the Most Ancient People, in 1990, was a fulfillment of that yearning. The theories about ancient Serbian origins offered in this hefty two-volume work were not new. Olga Luković-Pjanović was actually revamping the work of a group of nineteenth-century Romantic Slavophiles. A Montenegrin writer, Draško Šćekić, offers a compendium of practically all these theories in his book,
Sorabi (
Sorabs), published by a private Belgrade publisher in 1994. I will try to summarize the main tenets of this odd mixture, although a summary may impose a misleading semblance of order and logic on the kind of free-associating that characterizes the whole genre.
According to most of these theories, the ancient homeland of Serbs or “Sorabs” (one of their faux-archaic names) was in India. From India they migrated around 4500
BC to Mesopotamia, where they took part in the building of the Tower of Babel. Some stayed but the majority migrated further to Africa, where they ruled Egypt for some time. Two more waves of migration from India dispersed ancient Serbs throughout Asia from China to the Urals, and from the Caspian Sea to Siberia or Sirbiria or Sirbidia, that is to say, Serbia. Migrations to Europe followed, centuries before Christ, and the historical map Šćekić provides shows how these migrations covered a great deal of Central, East, and Southeast Europe with Serb states. The evidence for such claims is sought in writings of Herodotus, Strabo, Tacitus, Pliny, and Ptolemy, who supposedly documented the existence of ancient Serbs and their states all over the world of classical antiquity. However, the theories that see Serbs everywhere most often neglect to mention that these classical historians and geographers were talking about Sarmatians and Scythians, Venets and Getae, Thracians and Dacians, Etruscans and Trojans, Illyrians and Pelazgians, but not Serbs. When this potentially damaging discrepancy is noted, the following explanation is offered. For one, says Šćekić, the foreigners couldn’t pronounce the word Srb so, often for nefarious purposes, they distorted it beyond recognition. “Fortunately,” he writes,
these [false] attributions usually cannot mislead the erudite and objective searchers after the autochthonous Slavic origins. Even if doubt does appear, they can rely on the deeply rooted Serbian memory of their own most ancient existence and name. This precious evidence is preserved by the Serbian language—the primordial words, names, myths, wise sayings, traditions, legends and poetry. (Šćekić 1994:75)
“Finguistic” evidence is central to this genre, and it is mostly toponyms combined with fantastic etymologies that provide the main “proofs” of Serbian ancient origin. The Serbian language as it is spoken today, this literature claims, is the closest to the proto-Indo-European among existing European languages. Serbs lived in India since times immemorial, as attested by various place names, and they were most likely the precursors of Vedic poets, as attested by the mention of names like “Srbinda” in the most ancient Rg-Vedas. Srbinda, of course, corresponds to the modern Serbian
srbenda.6“srbinda is not the only ancient Serbian word in the vedas ,” writes Šćekić, referring to unnamed Slavic Sanskritologists of repute. “Our native tongue has preserved more than three thousand words from the times of the most ancient Vedic hymns, and these words have changed neither their form nor their meaning to this very day” (1994:103). My mother’s acquaintance in the farmer’s market used this theory to bypass the uncomfortable Turkish Taint and claim a more ancient and more noble lineage.
For all their nebulous quality, there is a systematicity to these theories if we analyze them as a series of moves to “out-ancient” all the competitors. If Illyrians are actually Serbs, then Albanian claims to be descendants of Illyrians, and thus to predate Serbs in the territories they now inhabit, is invalidated. If the Pelazgians were actually a Serbian tribe, then Serbs can out-ancient the Greeks who claim to be the direct descendants of ancient Hellenes; similarly with Etruscans and Venets with respect to Rome and Venice, and Dacians with respect to Romania. It is interesting also that this literature makes a strong move to establish Serbian preeminence with respect to Slavs by arguing that all the Slavs were originally Serbs. One can easily see the politics of this move which reverses the intra-Slavic hierarchy, especially the older brother claim of Russians. If all the Slavs were originally Serbs, than Russians, too, are our “younger brothers.”
This whole literature rests on a fundamental conspiracy theory. The enemy is the Nordic or Berlin-Viennese School of History—a powerful cabal bent on suppressing the findings of what is often called the Serbian Autochthonistic School. While the Autochthonistic School claims that the Serbs are the autochthonous inhabitants of the Balkans, the Danubian Basin, and even wider areas in Europe and Asia since times immemorial, the Nordic School pushes the theory that we all learned in school as the Holy Writ, namely, that Serbs came to the Balkans only in the seventh century.
To claim pre-Vedic India as the homeland and the status of protoAryans is, of course, quite sufficient to out-ancient all these powerful historic deniers of Serbian antiquity. There is, however, another theory that puts the origins of Serbs even further back into prehistory.
In the late sixties (1965-68) archaeological excavations on the banks of the Danube near the Djerdap straits led by Dragoslav Srejović exposed the culture that came to be known as Lepenski Vir which dated back to about 6000
BC (Srejović 1972). Remains of buildings, tombs evincing strange burial rituals, sophisticated stone, bone and horn weapons, and various jewelry were found, making it one of the most important Mesolithic finds in Europe. Most striking were the monumental sandstone figurines (probably of deities and demons), with their characteristic down-turned mouths and fish-like eyes. The oldest Lepenski Vir sites belonged to hunter-fisher-gatherers. Later dwellings built over the same site and elsewhere in Eastern Serbia (middle Danubian region) belonged to early Neolithic agriculturalists and pastoralists (5000-4500
BC) of what is called the Starčevo culture. For Srejović, these archaeological discoveries suggested the possibility that the impetus for the great cultural takeoff did not have to come to Europe from the Near East, but that one of its possible originating points was the autochthonous culture of Lepenski Vir. The leap that Srejović never made, however, was, predictably, easily made by searchers after Serbian immemorial antiquity. Lepenski Vir culture was patriarchal; it venerated fire, the hearth, and the dead. The pagan Serbian religion, as reconstructed by the noted historian of religion Veselin Čajkanović, was also centered around an ancestor cult. This was enough for Šćekić and others like him to conclude that “the cradle of the Slavs is in the Danubian Basin,” and that “the Serbs, since their embryonic stage inhabited they same ground they inhabit now.” Lepenski Vir reveals the truth, he says, “the truth about ourselves, that has been attacked by Germans, the Vatican and the Turks for centuries” (112). Šćekić does notice, uncharacteristically for this genre, that there is a logical inconsistency between the Mesolithic Danubian and pre-Vedic Indian origin of the Serbs. He resolves it in a footnote. The discovery of Lepenski Vir, he says, “suggested another theory according to which the Sorabs, or the ancient Serbs, originated not in India but in the Danubian region, from which they then migrated to India, taking their culture with them and bringing it to fruition with Vedic religious hymns and the Laws of Manu” (112)7.
6. Srbenda is augmentative of Srbin (a Serb), and in the usage established, according to Skerlić (1925:169-170) in the mid-nineteenth century, it denotes someone who is thoroughly and uncompromisingly devoted to everything Serbian, an “autochthonous, raw Serb without a trace of anything foreign” (Skerlic 1925:167). To this day, “Srbenda” carries the connotations of rusticity, simplicity, and traditional patriarchal values—the opposite of high culture polish and cosmopolitan sophistication. This equation of a mythological being from the Vedas with the romanticized rusticity of the Serbian variant of the Noble Savage is especially piquant.
7. Here the key evidence is found not in etymology and toponymy but mostly in the supposed scripts discovered in Lepenski Vir and the later Starčevo culture sites, especially that of Vinča near Belgrade. In Vinča marks were found on the pottery that could be interpreted as some sort of script. Official archaeology (Srejović) claimed that these marks were no more than personal seals of potters, but some, like Radivoje Pesic, claimed it was a full blown alphabetical script. Another researcher of ancient scripts, Svetislav Bilbija, claims to have deciphered Etruscan script on the basis of the Cyrillic script. The chain is now complete. From its origins in Lepenski Vir and Vinča (perhaps by detour through India), this script begets both that of Etruscans (who were actually “Rascians,” that is, Serbs) and that of mysterious Pelasgians. It is thus the basis of the ancient Greek scripts, from which modern Latin and Greek develop. Therefore, when Serbs got their Cyrillic script, which was adapted from Greek in the ninth century, they were just reclaiming by detour what they themselves had originated!
Marko Živković, klinički psiholog i kulturološki antropolog
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