History of Estonia

Pre-history

Human settlement in what is now Estonia became possible when the ice from the last glacial era melted away 11,000–13,000 years ago. The oldest known human settlement in Estonia is located by the Pärnu River, near the village of Pulli. It has been dated to the beginning of the 9th millennium BC. Previously known hunting and fishing communities from around 6500 BC once lived near the town of Kunda. Bone and stone artefacts similar to those found at Kunda have been discovered elsewhere in Estonia, as well as in Latvia, northern Lithuania and southern Finland. The Kunda culture group belongs to the middle stone age, or Mesolithic period (in Estonia from the beginning of the 9th millennium to the 5th millennium BC).

Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language and belongs to the Uralic language family. The modern language that is most closely related to Estonian is Finnish. Both Finnish and Estonian are Finnic languages, which comprises one branch of the larger Finno-Ugric language family.

The origins of the Estonian and Finnish peoples and their languages are a matter of some controversy. In the 19th century the Finnish researcher Castrén prevailed with the theory that "their original home" was in west-central Siberia. Later, a theory of an ancient homeland of all Finno-Ugric peoples situated in the Volga and Kama rivers region within the European part of Russia appeared more credible. Until the 1970s most linguists believed Estonians to have arrived in Estonia as late as the first few centuries AD. In the 1980s these ideas drastically changed. The old theory was challenged by another postulating a wide-ranged "homeland" between the Volga river and Scandinavia. In light of new archaeological findings, it was concluded that the ancestors of Estonians and Finns arrived at their present territory many thousands of years ago, perhaps in many successive waves of immigration.[citation needed] During that period of massed migrations, the possible linguistic and cultural ancestors of the hunting-gathering Sami were pushed into the more remote northern regions.

Estonians are claimed by some to be one of the longest settled European peoples, whose ancestors may have corresponded to the Comb Ceramic Culture people, who lived on the southeastern shores of the Baltic Sea over 5,000 years ago. Like other early agricultural societies, the ancient people of Estonia are believed to have been organized into economically self-sufficient, male-dominated clans with few differences in wealth or social power. By the early Middle Ages most Estonians were small landholders, with farmsteads primarily organised by village. The government remained decentralized, with local political and administrative subdivisions emerging only around the first century AD. By then, Estonia had a population of over 150,000 people.

The name "Estonia" (in modern Estonian: Eesti) could be derived from the word "Aestii," the name given by the ancient Germanic people to the peoples living northeast of the Vistula River. The Roman historian Tacitus in 98 A.D. was the first to mention the "Aestii" people, and early Scandinavians called the land south of the Gulf of Finland Eistland, and the people eistr.

The Middle Ages

Estonia remained one of the last corners of medieval Europe to be Christianized. In 1193 Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against pagans in Northern Europe. Crusaders from northern Germany established the stronghold of Riga in modern Latvia. With the help of the newly converted local tribes of Livs and Letts, the crusaders initiated raids into part of what is present-day Estonia. Estonian tribes fiercely resisted the attacks from Riga and occasionally themselves sacked territories controlled by the crusaders. In 1217 the German crusading order of the Sword Brethren and their recently converted allies won a major battle in which the Estonian commander Lembitu was killed.