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Iranian ancestors of Croats and Serbs
Who exactly were the Serbs and Croats?
Scholars have long been aware that the name
'Croat' (Hrvat in Serbo-Croat) is not a
Slav word. It is thought to be the same as
an Iranian name, Choroatos, found in inscriptions
on tombstones near the Greek town of Tanais
on the lower Don, in southern Russia. The whole
region north of the Black sea was inhabited
in the early centuries AD by a mixture of tribes
which included Slavs and Sarmatians.
Another theory proposes that the root of the
name Serb, serv, became charv in Iranian,
and that together with the suffix -at
this gave rise to Choroatos and Hrvat.
What is clear is that the Serbs and
the Croats had a similar and connected
history from the earliest times: Ptolemy, writing
in the second century AD, also located the Serboi
among the Sarmatian tribes north of the
Caucasus. Most scholars believe either that both
Serbs and Croats were Slavic tribes with Iranian
ruling castes, or that they were originally
Iranian tribes which had acquired Slavic
subjects.
- Bosnia: a short history
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Originally Posted by Far_away
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