500 to 862

Balts and Slavs

Before any state, the forests and marshes of today's Belarus were home to Baltic-speaking peoples. From around the sixth to the eighth centuries Slavic tribes moved in: the Krivichi in the north, the Dregovichi among the Pripyat marshes and the Radimichi in the east. Polotsk, on the Western Dvina, is first mentioned in a chronicle under the year 862.