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two tribes called Evremeiset and Savakot, who live among Russians in the city of Leningrad itself.⁷⁰

The early home of the united Finno-Ugrians is supposed by linguists to have been in the region which extends from the headwaters of the Dnieper and the western Dvina to the western slope of the Ural Mountains. The country around the Oka, the bend of the Volga, and the Kama are thought to have been occupied by Finno-Ugrians by the time that some of their southeastern tribes mingled with Caucasic-speaking peoples to produce Indo-European.

In their early home, during the first millennium B.C.,⁷¹ the Finns were in contact, on their southern flank, with the Scythians, who lived west of the

FINN0-U6BIAN SUB-STOCK

Fig. 31. Linguistic Relationships of Finno-Ugrian Speaking Peoples.

After Kajava, Y., EA, #8, #9, 1922, pp. 353-358.

Don, and with the Sarmatians, who occupied the plains to the east of it. Baltic peoples seem to have touched them on the west, for Baltic words are in use among Mordvins, who have never been near the sea. In the time of the earliest Greek accounts, Finns seem to have occupied all of the country which stretched from the Polessje district of White Russia to the central and lower reaches of the Volga. Herodotus located a people called Budinoi in the eastern part of this region, presumably in the Volga coun­try; west of them he placed the Androphagoi, then the Melancheles (Black Mantles), and in the very west, the Neuroi. The name Androphagoi or Cannibals, has the same meaning as the Iranian word Mord-Chvar, whence are derived Mordva and our own term, Mordvin. The black mantle to which Herodotus referred is still a part of the national costume of the Volga Finns.

During the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era, the ancestors of the Baltic Finns migrated westward from their original home

67. The Ijores number roughly 11,000, the Vodes about 700. Exact figures for the Evremeiset and Savakot have not been obtained.

68. The chief source for the following historical r6sum£ is Bunak, V., ZFMA, vol. 30, 1932, pp. 441-503.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

to the eastern shore of the Baltic, south of the Gulf of Finland, where they occupied the country north of the Diina and the northern half, at least, of Kurland, thus taking over most of what is now Latvia, as well as Esthonia. After the beginning of the Christian era, some of them crossed the Gulf of Finland and settled near Abo and in the Kokemaki and Kyro valleys of the present Finland. This country was already inhabited by an Iron Age population, of Scandinavian cultural affinity, which the Finns completely absorbed. The invaders gradually spread eastward until, about 700 a.d., they reached the present Carelia. Thence they went to southern Savo, which seems to have been permanently occupied by 1000 a.d. From there on the occupation of Finland spread gradually northward until eventually the Finns spilled over into Sweden, as related in an earlier section. The Finnish penetration of parts of Sweden was only one-half of a reciprocal action, however, for even earlier, in the thirteenth century, the Swedes, coming by sea, made crusades against the Finns, and many Swedes re­mained on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Bothnia and the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland. It was at this period that the migration began which gave Finland her present Swedish coastal population. Meanwhile the ancestors of the Baltic-speaking Letts had moved northward into Kurland and Livonia, partly forcing the more southerly Baltic Finns out of what is now Latvia, and partly absorbing them.

Between Leningrad and the Finnish homeland may be seen the rem­nants of the early migrant groups, who, when the Slavs first appeared, between the sixth and eighth centuries a.d., formed a continuous belt of Finnish-speaking peoples. Nearest the Gulf are the Vodcs and Ijores, and the Leningrad tribes; on the shores of Lake Onega and the headwaters of the Oyat River live the Vepses, who formerly possessed a large territory and were a powerful people well into Slavic times. To the south and east of the Vepses lived the Merians, now linguis­tically extinct, who covered the territory between the Oka and the upper Volga. Farther south and east lived the now equally extinct Muroma, and then various tribes of Cheremisses, and finally the Mordvins. The connecting links between the Vepses and the Chere­misses have disappeared, and the groups that have survived have suffered great losses of territory.

The position of the Carelians in this picture is not quite clear; it is known, however, that they had settled the shores of the White Sea as early as 900 A.D., and were later largely dislodged by Russians. They are lin­guistically a branch of the Baltic Finns most closely related to the Estho- nians, but it is not known whether they ever were actually in Esthonia, or if so, whether they moved northward across the Gulf of Finland with the Finns, or around its eastern end. In any case, the Carelians now living in

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Ingria and the Volga country seem to represent a secondary infiltration from the present Carelia rather than an early survival.

Although the departure of the ancestors of the Baltic Finns from their Volga homelands took place so early that the movements of the central Asiatic nomads did not affect them directly, these incursions were re­sponsible for other Finno-Ugrian migrations. In the first century a.d., the Huns entered the Volga country and remained along its lower and middle course until after having routed the Ostrogoths, when they went on to the present Hungary. In the fifth century, after their misadventure in France, the Huns returned to the Don Basin and joined their relatives the Bolgars, who had come from the region of the Ural and Kuban Rivers in southeastern Russia, and had settled between Finns and Ugrians on the lower Volga and Kama. There they founded a powerful empire, which was to last from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. Some of these Bolgars migrated to the lower Danube country and defeated the southern Slavs, settling in what is now Bulgaria. These Bulgarians later lost their Uralic speech, and adopted a Slavic language.

The Bolgars of the Volga ruled or at least influenced a number of Finno- Ugrian peoples; the Mordvins, Cheremisses, Votiaks, Syryenians, and Magyars. The modern Chuvash of eastern Russia are the linguistic de­scendants of the Bolgars, but are thought to be largely Finnish in blood. It was at the time of the Bolgar empire or later that the Syryenians moved northward, as did the Votiaks, who remained somewhat nearer the center of dispersion. Only the Cheremisses and Mordvins still remain in the original Finno-Ugrian home territory.

Under Turkish leaders a large body of Ugri left this region and migrated to the southern steppes, whence in the ninth century they moved to Hungary, and mixed with the remnants of the Huns and Avars who dwelt there. These Ugri became the Magyars, the modern Hungarians, whose language is still basically Ugrian, modi§ed by much Turkish influence.

The closest linguistic relatives of the Magyars are the Voguls and Ostiaks, members of primitive hunting and fishing tribes of the Obi country in Siberia. By the end of the first millennium a.d., they had moved to the northeastern section of European Russia, where they are said to have lived with the Samoyeds. The northward movement of Russian colonists forced them over into Siberia, and by 1364 they were already entirely located on the Asiatic side. Today they are still primitive hunters and fishermen, and shamanists in religion. It is believed, however, on philo­logical grounds, as well as on historical, that before their migration north­ward and eastward they were farmers and herdsmen.

The Finno-Ugrians today include peoples in every stage of culture from hunting and fishing to that of modern civilized states. They are