The Ulichi and the Tivertsi: Historiography Evaluations Cover Image
  • Price 4.90 €

Уличи и тиверцы в оценках историографии
The Ulichi and the Tivertsi: Historiography Evaluations

Author(s): Roman A. Rabinovich
Subject(s): History, Archaeology, Middle Ages, 6th to 12th Centuries
Published by: Издательский дом Stratum, Университет «Высшая антропологическая школа»

Summary/Abstract: The article reviews historiography concerning the study of the past of two early medieval peoples in the Eastenr Europe – the Ulichi and the Tivertsi. The historians’ interest towards the Ulichi and the Tivertsi was long ago stirred by their peculiar geographic location close to the Danube, which is known as a historical cradle of the Slavic peoples, and by reflection of their history in the early Russian chronicles.The most debatable issues are: the ethnic origin of the Tivertsi and the Ulichi; localization of the Tivertsi and the Ulichi (along with a number of related questions: the location of the first settlement of the Ulichi and the location of the Peresechen, known from the chronicles as the town of the Ulichi, which the Kiev governor Sveneld could not seize for a long time); the time when the Kiev knyazes conquered the Tivertsi and the Ulichi, etc.The author examines historiographic records about the Ulichi and the Tivertsi starting from the mid 18th century to the present day. As it turns out to be, the quality of the historiographic records of the 19th-early 20th cc. is much different compared to the modern ones. This stage in studies of the Ulichi and the Tivertsi strikes one by a variety, vividness of many ideas, numerous bright surmises and hypotheses, which unfortunately have been absolutely “forgotten” by the modern historiography.The special brightness of this pre-revolutionary period in historiography becomes even more evident when compared to the second half of the 20th c.The key difference is the extent of use of different types of evidence. Emergence of an absolutely new type of evidence – archaeological ones – has drawn professional archaeologists to the research and has reduced the role of the analysis of written records. It has also revealed the drawbacks of mixed argumentation, violation of the principle of separation, according to which every discipline must arrive at its own conclusions following strictly and owing to analysis of its own records, done by use of its own methods and approaches to the research, without attracting arguments from other disciplines as an evidence (because these disciplines also require evidence).The analysis of a two-hundred-years historiography concerning the Ulichi and the Tivertsi proves the necessity of an obligatory periodical return to and re-introduction into the scientific discourse of forgotten, but most useful for the modern research achievements of the past historiography.

  • Issue Year: 2004
  • Issue No: 5
  • Page Range: 440-484
  • Page Count: 45
  • Language: Russian