Romania · Where the sources disagree
The Antes end twice, a century apart
In 602 an Avar general was sent to destroy them, and the name never appears again. But the villages carry on for another hundred years. Which ending belongs on a map?
The short answer
602 ends a political confederation; the settlements run on into the 700s. They are two different things, and the map dates the settlements.
In the year 602 the Avars — a steppe empire ruling from the Hungarian plain — sent a general named Apsich, in the words of the Byzantine writer Theophylact Simocatta, "to destroy the nation of the Antes". It was a reprisal: the Romans had attacked the Avars' Slavic allies, and the Antes were Rome's allies in turn.
After that the Antes are never mentioned again. The name survives exactly once more, as a decorative title in the emperor's list of honours in 612, and then it is gone from history entirely.
Which sounds like a clean ending. It is not, and the reason why is a problem that runs through the archaeology of this entire period.
The problem in one sentence
The people stop being written about in 602. The villages carry on for another hundred years.
The pottery and settlement type usually identified with the Antes — called the Penkovka culture, after a site in Ukraine — does not stop in 602. In the country between the Prut and the lower Danube it runs on into the 700s.
So there are two possible end dates, a century apart, and this map uses the later one. That is a choice, and it is the thing being argued about.
What we actually know about them
Less than you would guess from how confidently they get drawn on maps. Four writers mention them, across about eighty years, and they do not agree.
Jordanes, around 551, puts them between the Dniester and the Dnieper — which is central Ukraine — and says Venethi, Antes and Sclaveni are three names for one people. He also tells a story about their king Boz being crucified by a Goth.
Procopius, writing at the same time, puts them just north of the Danube, which is Wallachia — several hundred kilometres away. He records their first contact with the empire in 518, and in 539 or 540 he has the Antes and the Sclaveni fighting each other, which is awkward for Jordanes's claim that they were the same people.
Menander has them at war with the Avars in the 560s. Theophylact has the campaign of 602.
That is the complete political record: four authors, eighty years, and no agreement on where they lived.
The case for treating the villages as the real evidence
The link between the Antes and Penkovka pottery was made by serious people — Marija Gimbutas in 1971, Mark Shchukin in 1986, Volodymyr Baran in 1988, Valentin Sedov in 1996, Michel Kazanski since. The distribution roughly fits what the sources describe, the dates fit, and nobody has a better candidate.
If that link holds, the material is the better evidence. Byzantine writers noticed the Antes when they raided the empire or were destroyed by it. The settlements record them getting on with their lives. Smashing a confederation in 602 tells you nothing about whether the farmers who made it up went anywhere — and the archaeology says that, at least at first, they did not.
The case against the whole framing
Florin Curta's objection is not about the dates. It is about the link itself.
His argument, in plain terms: the ethnic labels in these sources are outsiders' categories. Procopius knew what a raiding party looked like from the safe bank of the Danube. He was not conducting a census, he had no access to how these people described themselves, and Greek and Roman writers had a long habit of sorting barbarians into tidy named nations because that is how their own literature worked. Building a national map on those labels is building on somebody's rough field notes.
And a pottery style is weaker still. Handmade wares like these are simple and widely shared. A distribution map of them shows you where a way of making pots was current — not where a people lived, and certainly not where a state ruled. Bartłomiej Szymon Szmoniewski describes the Antes as a complex political reality rather than an ethnic group: something that could contain people of several origins, and could dissolve without anybody moving house.
On that reading the two dates are not in conflict at all. They are dates for two different things. 602 ends a political arrangement. The eighth-century villages belong to a population that was never the same thing as the arrangement.
A third possibility
Georgios Kardaras has suggested that Apsich's campaign is not the cause at all.
The Antes disappear from the record, on his account, not because the Avars wiped them out but because the frontier they had been guarding — as Byzantine allies, which is the only reason the empire knew their name — collapsed. Once there is no imperial administration on the Danube, there is nobody left writing down who lives on the other side. The disappearance is a change in the sources, not in the population.
That fits the timing neatly. The Danube frontier fails around 614 or 615, and the Antes vanish from the record in the same window. It also explains why the villages carry on undisturbed: nothing happened to them, we just stopped watching.
What would settle it
- Radiocarbon dates from a settlement sequence between the Prut and the Danube, rather than dating by pottery style. That would show directly whether the eighth-century material is continuous with the sixth-century material or a later arrival on top of it. Kazanski's chronology has the Penkovka material and the related metalwork hoards disappearing in the first half of the 600s, with the bulk of the population possibly moving north and small groups surviving on the Southern Bug and in Moldova — that is a testable claim.
- The naming question cannot be settled by finding more pots. It could in principle be settled by a source in which these people name themselves. For a non-literate population living between the Avars and the Danube, that source is very unlikely to exist.
The useful conclusion: "the Antes" is a Byzantine diplomatic category with a firm end date, and whatever population sat behind it had a longer and different history that the category was never measuring.
Sources
- Theophylact Simocatta, on Apsich's campaign of 602.
- Jordanes, Getica (c. 551); Procopius, Wars; Menander Protector on the 560s.
- Antes (people) — the sources, the Penkovka identification and the debate over it.
- Florin Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700 (Cambridge, 2001).
- Michel Kazanski on Penkovka chronology; Marija Gimbutas (1971), Mark Shchukin (1986), Volodymyr Baran (1988) and Valentin Sedov (1996) for the identification.
- Georgios Kardaras, for the collapse of the frontier as the reason the name disappears.