Information on the thesis

The innovative approach to study and analyze of the Arabic sources of the
IX–XII th centuries based on the broad understanding of the subject of folklore is
developed in this research. By expanding the meaning of folklore to all phenomena of
material and spiritual culture that includes language, word, poetry, music, dance,
gestures, myths, rites, crafts, architecture, and other varieties of artistic creativity, the
Arabic sources are involved in the interpretation of certain phenomena that
subsequently had a place in the centuries-old Ukrainian history that was deliberately
denied and which was suppressed in Soviet times.
The Arabic sources of the IX–XII th centuries contain a lot of valuable
information about geography, history and material culture of the Eastern Slavs and
Rus. Relatively, Arab travelers gave little attention to spiritual culture of the ancient
Slavs, and mostly described the material culture. The information of Arab writers about
various areas of spiritual culture of these peoples is extremely rare and mentioned
randomly. The exception is the description of the burial rites of the pagan Slavs. Those
rites were exotic for Muslim and appeared quite often on the pages of geographical and
historical works of the Arab. The information about the material and spiritual culture
of the Slavs is scattered in various works of the Arab authors from the period of the
IX–XII th centuries: Ibn Rustah, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Ibrahim ibn Ya’qub, Ibn
Ḫurdāḏbeh, Ibn al-Faqih, al-Mas’udi, Abū Hamid al-Andalusī and others. Often this
information is confirmed by the medieval western Byzantine or Ruthenian writings,
and its traces can be found in the archaeological sources or in present people’s beliefs.
Particulary, this concerns the information about the religious beliefs of the ancient
Slavs, in the broadest sense of this word. Taking into account the chronological
division of the Arabic sources from the history of the Slavs, we analyzed the geographic
descriptive works written in the IX–XII th centuries. In contrast to the sources of the
earlier and later periods, they contain mostly original information, which is based on
the information of the Arab merchants and travelers about the Eastern Slavs and Rus.
Only a small number of information about material and spiritual culture of the
Slavs in various Arab writings between IX–XII the centuries is original. Some Arab
authors from the XIII th century provide the information about Eastern Slavs and Rus.
However, their works mostly retell the previous sources. The fragments about Rus and
Slavs, that are available to us, are researched from the point of view of how information
provided by them is reflected in our folklore, whether there are analogues or, at the
same time, examples of the existence of this or that phenomenon in our fields, or
whether the information provided by the Arab travelers about Eastern Slavs and Rus
are not alien to our folklore tradition.
Keywords: folklore, Arab sources, material and spiritual culture, Slavs,
religious beliefs, customs.