Vistula Veneti
Ancient Roman geographers first mentioned Venedi in the 1st century AD, differentiating a group of peoples whose manner and language differed from those of the neighbouring Germanic and Sarmatian tribes.
[4] Thereafter, the 2nd century Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy in his section on Sarmatia, places the Greater Ouenedai along the entire Venedic Bay, which is equivalent to the southern shores of the Baltic.
Nevertheless, they are on the whole to be classed as Germans; for they have settled homes, carry shields, and are fond of travelling—and travelling fast on foot—differing in all these respects from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback.
[10] Though Jordanes is the only author to explicitly associate the Veneti with the Sclaveni and Antes, the Tabula Peutingeriana, originating from the 3rd to the 4th century AD, separately mentions the Venedi on the northern bank of the Danube somewhat upstream of its mouth and the Venadi Sarmatae along the Baltic coast.
These herders lived in small settlements or in little lake dwellings built on artificial islands made of several layers of wooden logs attached by stakes.
During the Middle Ages the region east of the mouth of the Vistula river was inhabited by people speaking Old Prussian, a now-extinct Baltic language in an area described by Tacitus in AD 98 as "Suebian Sea, which washes the country of the Aestii, who have the same customs and fashions as the Suebi".
The earliest origins of Slavs seem to lie in the area between the Middle Dnieper and the Bug rivers, where the most archaic Slavic hydronyms have been established.
[13] The vocabulary of Proto-Slavic had a heterogenous character and there is evidence that in the early stages of its evolution it adopted some loanwords from centum-type Indo-European languages.
[14][15] The aforementioned area of proto-Slavic hydronyms roughly corresponds with the Zarubintsy archeological culture which has been interpreted as the most likely locus of the ethnogenesis of Slavs.
According to Polish archaeologist Michał Parczewski, Slavs began to settle in southeastern Poland no earlier than the late 5th century AD, the Prague culture being their recognizable expression.
[21] According to Gołąb, Schenker's conclusion is supported by the fact that to the east of the Venedae, Ptolemy mentions two further tribes called Stavanoi (Σταυανοί) and Souobenoi (Σουοβενοι), both of which have been interpreted as possibly the oldest historical attestations of at least some Slavs.
Zbigniew Gołąb considers that the hydronyms of the Vistula and Odra river basins had a North-West Indo-European character with close affinities to the Italo-Celtic branch, but different from the Germanic branch, and show similarities with those attested in the area of the Adriatic Veneti (in Northeastern Italy) as well as those attested in the Western Balkans that are attributed to Illyrians, which points to a possible connection between these ancient Indo-European peoples.
