Little is known of the origin of the Slavs.

Philologists and archaeologists theorize that the Slavs settled very early in the Carpathian Mountains or in the area of present-day Belarus.

By 600, they had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches.

The East Slavs had settled along the Dnepr River in what is now Ukraine; then they spread northward to the northern Volga River valley, east of modern-day Moscow, and westward to the basins of the northern Dnestr and the western Bug rivers, in present-day Moldova and southern Ukraine.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, many East Slavic tribes pay tribute to the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people who had adopted Judaism about 740 and live in the southern Volga and Caucasus regions.