sidered to be closer than that which unites two brothers or the uncle and his nephew. In a society organised on the principle of agnation, the son of a sister has no reason to interfere in the pursuit of the murderer of his uncle. The brother belongs altogether to another clan, and the duty of vengeance falls exclusively on the persons of that clan. But such is by no means the point of view of the old Russian law, recognising, as it does, the right of the sister’s son to avenge the death of his uncle.
“In case a man shall be killed by a man,” decrees the first article of the Pravda of Yaroslav (the lex barborum of the Russians), “vengeance may be taken by a son in case his father has been killed; by the father when the son falls a victim; by the brother’s son, and by the son of a sister.” These last words are omitted in the later versions of the Pravda, a fact which shows the increase of agnatic organisation, but they are found in the version generally recognised as the most ancient.
This close tie between brother and sister, between the uncle and the sister’s children, still exists among the Southern Slavs. Professor Bogisic, and after him Mr. Krauss, have illustrated this fact by the epic songs of the Servian people. They speak of the custom generally in use among the Southern Slavs of securing from a person truthfulness in his statements by the invocation of the name of the sister. They mention, too, that peculiar relation of artificial brotherhood and sisterhood, into which young men and young women belonging to different kindreds frequently enter, in order to secure to the weaker sex protection and help.
I hardly need insist on the importance which all these facts have with regard to the theory of an early matriarchate among the Slavs, the more so because this has already been done in England by Mr. McLennan, in his well-known study on the Patriarchal theory, and in Germany by Bachofen in one of his Antiquarian Letters.[1] But I
- ↑ Antiquarische Briefe, 1880, p. 167; McLennan, The Patriarchal Theory, ch. vi, p. 71.
