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SOURCES FOR SLAVIC RELIGION

Our knowledge of Old Slavic mythology and religion is quite limited. Most of the available information was recorded during and after the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity in the ninth to twelft h centuries CE and consists of very brief references of foreign provenience, usually written in Greek, Latin and Arabic.1 Archaeological sources do not enable us to look much deeper into the past as there is still no conclusion to the discussion of precisely how and whence the Slavs originated.

This means that before about the fifth century CE, when the earliest Slavic pottery of the Prague type appears, it is impossible to connect archaeological evidence to a Slavic population with any certainty. Written records concerning Slavic pre-Christian religion (with few exceptions) cover only two regions: some parts of Kievan Rus and some of Polabia (located in what is today north-eastern Germany). The most important sources will be discussed in the following sections.

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Source: Bredholt Christensen Lisbeth, Hammer Olav, Warburton David. The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe. Acumen,2013. — 456 p.. 2013

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