M. Yu.VIDEIKO

UKRAINE: FROM TRYPILLIA TO RUS - Кyiv, 2010, 544 p.: pic.

In ancient times our land, its forests, rivers and plains had different names: Cimmeria, Scythia, Sarmatia, Zamorya, Levedia, Dori, Arkheim, Rus, Borisfen, Danprastadir, Ister, Tiras, Hypanis... All these sometimes unintelligible and by now even unknown names were given in ancient times by representatives of peoples who lived on the territory of today's Ukraine. What did these names mean, how did people who invented and uttered those words live? Dozens of thousands of years of the ancient history of the land which is now called Ukraine have been discovered thanks to field archeological investigations for the last one hundred and fifty years. Every year numerous expeditions seek and find traces of the past epochs and events in this land. The mosaic of the ancient history is based on these findings. This book represents its separate pages, episodes which cover the period from the Trypillian archeological culture (5400-2650 B.C.) till the beginning of the history of the Rus at the IX-X centuries A.C.

by Dr. John Chapman

PREFACE

The long development of the Ukrainian nation has received a new impetus in the period since 19911, with political independence and a growing sense of recognising and nurturing its own place in Eastern Europe and the globalised world system. One facet of this growth has been the possibility of distancing new forms of Ukrainian history from the dominant, Marxist-led narratives of the past. This has led to an exciting series of new, popular books in which local factors have been identified as playing important roles in the past in tandem with global factors  – as much in prehistory as in history. However, this widespread freedom of expression has allowed the emergence of a strong ‘fringe’ archaeology, in which elements of the paranormal, the fantastic and even the nationalist have combined to produce travesties of the Ukrainian past. The undoubted right of such authors to produce these unscientific and biased accounts of the past must be balanced by the right of archaeologists and historians to criticise such works and to write their own versions of the past which are, in many senses, truer to the evidence in hand. The question of ‘who owns the past?’ is therefore very much on the agenda in Ukraine at present.

It should not be thought that these ‘standard’ historical texts remain true to the evidence at the cost of being dry-as-dust, stuffy or ‘academic’, in the worst sense of texts written in incomprehensible jargon by one author for a coterie of six readers. Mykhailo Videiko’s latest book is an excellent example of a popular book, which is accessible to all general readers but which does not compromise the high standards of his own scholarship. The book takes the long-term view of the prehistory of the Ukraine, creating a narrative that takes the reader from later prehistory (the early farming communities of the 5^th millennium BC) to the perhaps better-known historical period of the Roman impact on the Ukraine in the AD 4^th century. It does not take the use of a chapter title ‘The Silicon Valley of Old Europe’ to make us realise that this book is the product of high-tech graphics and an imaginative use of Google Earth images. These images are for the most part previously unpublished in the West and never discussed in languages other than Ukrainian or Russian. The broad canvas which Videiko gives himself to paint images of the Ukrainian past leads to a masterful synthesis over a period of 6,000 years. There is a long section on the Tripillyan culture, a suite of communities whose largest settlements were as large as the first cities of the Near East – and a thousand years earlier than Uruk. Successive chapters give us new visions of the Bronze Age, especially the way in which the Trojan War impacted upon the steppe lands North of the Black Sea and the importance of Baltic amber in cultural life. It is when historical evidence becomes available from 500 BC onwards that Videiko weaves an even more intricate tapestry of the past, with local steppe tribes, whether Scythian or Sarmatian, interacting with colonising groups from the Mediterranean civilisations – notably the Greeks and the Macedonians under Alexander the Great but also, later, the Romans.

It may be thought that ‘fringe archaeology’ is inherently more exciting and attractive than ‘mainstream archaeology’ to general readers because of the (literally) amazing stories that they tell. But this volume matches fringe fantasies story for story, image for image and comes off on top. It is a wonderful example of the evidence of the past being marshalled to create vivid and believable stories of the Ukrainian past – a much more satisfying achievement than the creation of fantasized pasts. I encourage you to delve into the pasts encapsulated in these pages; I predict that your love of the past will be strengthened as much as your understanding of the prehistory and history of the Ukraine will be deepened.

John Chapman*,  Durham, 15/V/2010

* Dr. John Chapman, Reader in the Archaeology Department , Durham University, Great Britain