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For the first time the name "Ros"
was recorded in the 6th century by Arabic scholars, though without clear
evidence that they were referring to Slavic tribes. All they wrote was that the
"Rossi" were strongly built and tall, but so were the Varangians.
Byzantine sources of the 6th and 7th centuries and Jordanis, a Goth historian
who also lived in the 6th century, call eastern Slavs, Antes, who populated the
territory between the Danube and Dnieper and were mainly involved in
agriculture, hunting and fishing. According to Jordanis, besides Antes (Anti)
there were two other Slavic groups, the Wends and the Sclavini that were
included in the Gothic Empire. The name "Ros" appeared again in 839
in the Annales Bertinianse (the first known western document to mention it),
when describing the delegation that the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus
(Pheophila) sent to King Ludwig (Louis Blagochestivii). With the mission
arrived a few men who were on their way back to their country. They told the
king that they belonged to the people called "Ros" and that they were
sent to Constantinople by their ruler the Kagan-Chacanus to propose a treaty of
friendship with the Emperor. The problem was that they described themselves as
Swedes and the uncertainty about who they were, and who actually sent them to
Constantinople led to various interpretations of the episode and of their
origin. Thus some historians considered that the Varangian adventurers were
first called "Ros" because of the name's Scandinavian origin,. This
speculation gained recognition in Russia after Vasily N.Tatishchev, the father
of Russian historiography, confirmed its validity in the first half of the 18th
century. Most of the later prominent Russian historians, including Soloviev and
Shakhmatov, sided with Tatishchev. The official Soviet position on the subject
tends to dispute Tatishchev and all those who sided with him, giving their own
interpretation of the obscure and very distant origin of the Slavic tribes,
using mainly Arabic and Byzantine sources as support. The Soviet historians now
suggest the "Ros" populated in the 9th century both sides of the
river Dnieper, having as their center the area around the river Ros-a, a small
tributary of the Dnieper. They assume that the river received the name after
the tribe that lived there, which had not been an unusual case. The Soviet
historians attribute Slavic ancestry to the tribe and describe it as more
developed than the Varangians. According to them the state the"Ros"
established was advanced and more united, and in all probability was the center
of small ancient states the Eastern Slavic tribes organized there before the
appearance of Riurik in Novgorod in the year of 862, as it was recorded by the
author of the Russian Chronicle. The Middle East sources mentioned also another
three Slavic states: Slavia - with Novgorod as the most probable center, Kuiaba
- presumably with Kiev as its capital, and Artania - which remained the most
obscure. Based on more recent investigations, the Soviet historians suggest the
Kuiaba must have had some connections with state of "Ros. "Obviously
their aim was to clarify the notion that Novgorod and Kiev were not the first
Russian organized states and that they existed before, though historically
undocumented.
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