Pre-Christian Slavic Writing - Evidence From Early Historiography

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. —

Another contemporary 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 ). 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.

Ahmad ibn Fadlan describes the manners and customs of the Rus, who arrived on a business trip in Volga Bulgaria. After a ritual ship burial of their dead tribesmen, Rus left an inscription on the tomb:

Then they constructed in the place where had been the ship which they had drawn up out of the river something like a small round hill, in the middle of which they erected a great post of birch wood, on which they wrote the name of the man and the name of the Rus king and they departed. —

However, Ibn Fadlan doesn't leave much clues about the ethnic origin of the people he described. It has been speculated they could have been either Slavic, Germanic or Finnic.