Culture in Poland [antikvár]

POLAND'S HISTORY AND CULTUREMORE THAN 1000 YEARS AGOThe medieval chronicler who in 966 A.D. wrote just three words: Mesco dux haptisatur, not only issued a certificate of baptism to the first historical Polish ruler but also a birth certificate to the Polish state. It has become the custom to count Poland's age from that date. But, after all, states do not emerge all of a sudden onto the arena of history, their appearance is usually preceded by many centuries during which authority is gradually constituted within a specific territory inhabited by a specific community.It was no different in Poland. The area lying in the basins of the Odra and the Vistula, which was enclosed by the frontiers of Miesz-ko Ts state (which corresponds roughly to the present territory of Po-iand), had been inhabited by proto-Slav tribes more or less since the middle of the first millennium B.C. From that time dates our first source of information, namely a mention by Herodotus about the Neures who had formed a powerful union on vast though ill-defined territories, rivalling with the nomadic Scythians; most probably, the Neures were proto-Slavs. Pliny and Tacitus knew much more about the Sarmatians and Wends, living on the banks of the Vistula, whose names have become part of Polish mythology. The Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy was the first to use the name "Slavs", albeit in a distorted form.Sometime around the 5th and the 6th centuries A.D., the population of the primitive Slav community, described under various names by ancient writers, began to break into separate peoples from which, after several centuries, sprang the contemporary Slav nations. The development of socio-political relations in the Slav lands in the first millennium A.D. is little known because of the paucity of written sources; but it is known that fairly large tribal communities began to emerge, ruled by princes. Thanks to the work done by archaeologists, the material culture of these Slavonic and proto-Polish peoples and tribes is better