Ilmen Slavs

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The Ilmen Slavs (Ильменские славяне in Russian; also known as словѣне, or Slovene), the northernmost tribe of the Early East Slavs, which inhabited the shores of the Lake Ilmen and the basin of the rivers of Volkhov, Lovat, Msta and the upper stream of the Mologa River in the 8th to 10th centuries.

The Ilmen Slavs seem to have been different from other Slavic tribes colonizing what is now Russia in that they were closely related to the Polabian Slavs in language and traditions (see old Novgorod dialect and Gostomysl for examples). They settled Northern Russia, moving along the major waterways, until they met the southward expansion of the Krivichs in the modern-day Yaroslavl Oblast.

They left a few archaeological monuments of the 6-8 centuries, such as agricultural settlements and tall conelike kurgans with incinerated bodies in the Ladoga region. The most ancient settlement is dated back to the 7th or 8th century. Numerous archaeological finds, such as a metal tip for a wooden plough, indicate that the Ilmen Slavs had a well-developed agriculture.

The principal cities of the Ilmen Slavs were Staraya Russa and Novgorod, which had appeared in the 9-10 centuries. The land of the Ilmen Slavs would later become the center of the Novgorod Republic.