The Antes: A Model of Functional Continuity in the Borderlands and the Chronology of the Formation of the Slavic Koine (Fourth-Sixth Centuries)

In this study, the ethnonym ‘Antes’ is analysed as an onomastic category of the Central and Eastern European borderlands and as a case study for models of the Early Slavic koine (4th–6th centuries). Based on the accounts of Jerome (Chronicon, 334), Ammianus Marcellinus, Jordanes (c. 551), Procopius and Menander Protector, it is shown that the Antes functioned in the 6th century as a community closely linked to the Slavic world, whilst the name itself may retain an older, Sarmatian-Iranian semantic layer associated with the frontier, guarding and border control. A comparison of this material with the Indo-Aryan terms antapāla, pāla/pālaka and argala allows us to situate the Antes within the well-attested conceptual field of ‘border– guard–barrier’ and interpret them as a borderland ethnonym rather than a simple ethnic name. This approach is linked to Florin Curta’s concept of a Slavic lingua franca and models of koineisation, which allows us to view the Early Slavic language as a communicative idiom of the Danube-Pontic zone, rather than merely ‘the language of a single tribe from a single Urheimat’, in the absence of a clear “novelty effect” in the descriptions of these communities by 6th-century authors. In the discussion section, a hypothesis of functional continuity is formulated between the Limigantes (Sarmatae servi) known from sources for the year 334 and the Antes of the 6th century, along with an interpretation of lexical and dietary traces (strava, medos, millet) in the Huns’ vicinity (c. 448) as signs of a maturing Slavic borderland koine, supported by the latest biomolecular research on the diet of the early Slavs. A Bayesian heuristic approach and the principle of parsimony suggest that the model of an earlier presence of a Slavic-speaking population in the borderland formations (4th–5th centuries) better integrates the available historical, philological, lexical and archaeobotanical sources than the traditional picture of the ‘sudden’ appearance of the Slavs only around the year 500.