Pre-Christian Slavic writing is a hypothesized writing system that may have been used by the Slavs prior to Christianization and the introduction of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets. No extant evidence of pre-Christian Slavic writing exists, but early Slavic forms of writing or proto-writing may have been mentioned in several early medieval sources.
Evidence from early historiography The 9th-century Bulgarian writer Chernorizets Hrabar, in his work An Account of Letters (, O pismenĭhŭ), briefly mentions that, before becoming Christian, Slavs used a system he had dubbed "strokes and incisions" or "tallies and sketches" in some translations (Old Church Slavonic: , črŭty i rězy). He also provided information critical to Slavonic palaeography with his book.
Another contemporaneous source, Thietmar of Merseburg, describing a Rethra temple remarked that the idols there had their names carved out on them ("singulis nominibus insculptis", Chronicon 6:23). Chapter III of describes Cyril finding two Christian books written with "Rus characters" during his trip to Korsun. This trip precedes Cyril's mission in Moravia described in Chapter IV of Vita Cyrilli.
Evidence from archaeology
Alekanovo inscription
In 1897, Russian archeologist Vasily Gorodtsov unearthed a small clay pot 15 cm high located in a Slavic burial site in the village of Alekanovo, Ryazan Oblast, Russia.Городцов В. А. «Заметка о глиняном сосуде с загадочными знаками» // Археологические известия и заметки, т. V, № 12, М., 1897. The pot had a group of undeciphered characters that were dated by Gorodtsov to 10th–11th century AD, called the Alekanovo inscription. A year later Gorodtsov discovered similar characters on sherds, also in Alekanovo.Городцов В. А. «Заметка о загадочных знаках на обломках глиняной посуды» // Археологические известия и заметки. 11-12. М., 1898. стр. 370. б).
Kerch amphora
In 1949, a Kerch amphora was found in Gnezdovo in Smolensk Oblast, Russia, containing what may be the earliest inscription in Old East Slavic. The amphora was found in the grave of a Scandinavian merchant who traded with the Orient. The excavator read the one-word inscription as Cyrillic "гороухща" (goruhšča), inferring that it designated mustard that was kept there.The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, 2nd ed. Article "Гнездовская надпись". This explanation has not been universally accepted and the inscription seems to be open to different interpretations.Roman Jakobson, Linda R. Waugh, Stephen Rudy. Contributions to Comparative Mythology. Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Page 333. Other scholars have read the apparent "хщ" letter combination as an "N", resulting in a transcription as "гороуна" which could be either Cyrillic or Greek and which might represent an Arabic name Hārūn with possessive suffix (Härün's amphora). The inscription is dated to the early 10th century,The latest coins found in the same burial go back to 295 AH, i.e. to 906–907 CE. which suggests a hitherto unsuspected popularity of the Cyrillic script in pre-Christian Rus'. Different sources prove that the Slavic and Norse population of Rus' had trade connections to the Muslim and Asian worlds.
Prague runic inscription
In 2021 new archaeological evidence of an early instance of writing among a Slavic population was published. In 2017 a cattle bone, dated 585–640 AD, with runes of the Germanic Elder Futhark was discovered in a Prague culture settlement near Břeclav in the Czech Republic.
The inscription contains no recognizable words in either Slavic or any other language but seems to represent an attempt at an abecedary, reading as the latter part of the Elder Futhark:
᛬ ᛬ ᛏᛒᛖᛗ[ᛚᛜ]ᛞᛟ : : tbem[lŋ]do
It may have been incised by people of Germanic origin that remained in the region after the departure of the Lombards, or the runes may have been engraved by a Slav. In either case, the find attests to a direct interaction between the Slavic and Germanic ethnolinguistic groups. If runic knowledge was transferred from Germanic peoples to Slavs, it must have happened in Central Europe as judged by the rune shapes or it may have persisted in the region as a result of population continuity between Lombards and Slavs.
Evidence against In the Vita Cyrilli, Rastislav, the duke of Moravia, sent an embassy to Constantinople asking Emperor Michael III to send learned men to the Slavs of Great Moravia, who being already baptised, wished to have the liturgy in their own language, and not Latin and Greek. The emperor called for Constantine and asked him if he could accomplish this task, even though he was in poor health. Constantine replied that he would gladly travel to Great Moravia and teach them, as long as the Slavs had their own alphabet to write their own language in, to which the Emperor replied that not even his grandfather and father and let alone he could find any evidence of such an alphabet. Constantine was distraught, and was worried that if he invented an alphabet for the Slavs he'd be labelled a heretic.
According to Alexey Karpov, this text is a later insertion in the chronicle, and its authenticity is questioned.
Pseudoscientific ideas The theme of "ancient Slavic writing", including "Slavic runes", is popular in pseudo-history (folk history) and pseudo-linguistic writings. Many inscriptions, both traditionally considered in the series of Slavic pre-Cyrillic writing and other cultures (Etruscan texts or the Phaistos Disc), were repeatedly amateurishly "deciphered" as Russian and Slavic without relying on scientific data. Such readings were offered by Gennady Grinevich, Valery Chudinov, and others.
The Russian Empress Catherine the Great was interested in ancient Slavic history and considered the toponymy of Spain, France, Scotland, India, and America as "Slavic". In her opinion, the early kings of France and Spain were Slavs by origin, and Etruscan and runic monuments were associated with ancient Slavic writing. She then came up with the idea that the Slavs conquered Europe three times from the Don to Sweden and England.
The idea of the connections of the Slavs with the Etruscans was supported by Sebastiano Ciampi, Tadeusz Wolański, and Alexander Chertkov. The Russian teacher Yegor Klassen (1795-1862) saw the Slavs in many regions and eras, starting from antiquity and including the Etruscans, and identified Sanskrit with the Slavic language. He argued that the Veneti were literate and all runic writings were Slavic.
The idea of ancient Slavic writing in its pseudo-historical interpretation is also connected with the Aryan myth. Guido von List, a follower of the German nationalist völkisch movement and the founder of Armanism, argued that the Germanic peoples, or "Aryans", had a written language long before Christianity. In his opinion, the runes contain an encrypted secret meaning that was revealed only to the initiates. The Nazi theorist Herman Wirth, comparing prehistoric drawings and ornaments, saw in them traces of primitive writing. This, in his opinion, proved the existence of an ancient "Atlanto-Nordic culture" created by the "Atlanto-Nordic race" and spreading in waves from the Arctic.
In the 1920s, occult ideas became widespread in Germany. Rudolf Johan Gorsleben, who promoted Aryan mysticism and the idea of the superiority of the Aryans over other races, was an adherent of the magic of runes and considered them "conductors of subtle energies". One of his assistants was the future Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther.
The Aryan myth also spread to Slavic neopaganism (Rodnovery), in many forms of which the Slavs are considered the closest descendants of the Aryans or are identified with them. These "Slavic-Aryans", according to neopagans, were the creators of the oldest or one of the most ancient civilizations, which transferred their knowledge and achievements, including writing, to other peoples. Such writing can be understood as allegedly existing "Slavic runes" or "bukvitsa" (historically, the word "bukvitsa" has a different meaning—a synonym for an initial). The idea is widespread that the Cyrillic alphabet was not created based on the Greek alphabet but came from some primordially Slavic alphabet. The absence of pre-Christian literature is explained by the destruction of all this property by Jews or Christians.
Among the Russian émigrés, the idea spread that the most ancient Aryan people were the Rus. Emigrant Yury Mirolyubov wrote about the existence of the Rus in the Paleolithic when they suffered greatly from the invasion of the Neanderthals. In the 1950s, he published the Book of Veles, allegedly written in the pre-Christian alphabet. Mirolyubov argued that Slavic writing formed the basis of Latin and Greek, as well as Scandinavian runes.
One of the founders of modern Russian neopaganism, Valery Yemelyanov, in his book Dezionization (1979), wrote about the great Russian ancient civilization of the "Aryans-Veneti", which had a rich written language and culture and became the founder of all civilizations.
Popular in Soviet times, the novel Primordial Rus (1961) by Valentin Ivanov, adapted into a film in 1985, mentions "tablets and birth records", that is, an indication of the pre-Christian writing of the Slavs.
In the late 1970s, esoteric teacher A.F. Shubin-Abramov, an "academician" of the self-proclaimed "Russian Academy of Sciences, Arts and Culture" in 1992, wrote about the ancient Slavic alphabet and, in his words, "the bearer of tribal memory" and "keeper of the secret knowledge of the initiates", a representative of a kind of guardians of the "true Russian letter". This "ancient Russian all-linguistic letter" consists of 147 characters and is 7500 years old. According to the author, the letters in the works of the classics and ancient texts are not "flat" but spatially defined. In the past, humanity allegedly knew how to read spatial writing, but then people degraded.
The "all-linguistic letter" contained colossal "Vedic knowledge" and was given to people by the Creator, or "Teachers". Shubin-Abramov and his followers consider each character of this letter as having a vast "ideological meaning" ("multidimensional materializing object"), any Russian word - as an abbreviation, a carrier of complex encrypted information, the "disclosure" of which gives phrases endowed with "the deepest meaning". Shubin-Abramov gave the word "Rus" a comprehensive meaning: "the unifying and substantiating beginning of all types of Matters ascending into the Cosmoses, which become Universes."
In such a perspective, the Earth is considered to be "a speck of All-Linguistic Rus'", its creation, "Kievan Rus" - "the name of the Planet after its original capital". Shubin-Abramov called the "human system of life" "Aryan". He argued that people possessed unthinkable knowledge and abilities when they appeared on Earth, but over time they lost them, including most of their letters.
This degradation - "circumcision" - occurred at the behest of "evil forces" - "occupiers-Hebrews". He believed that to "revive the Fatherland", it was necessary to return to the original alphabet and rebel against the "Hebrews". The neopagan concept of "All-Linguistic Literacy" is popularized in the writings of several authors. Some Russian neopagans use the calendar compiled by Shubin-Abramov, in which many terms are explained based on the principles of All-Linguistic Literacy, and an idea of the teaching itself is given.