25/10/2021
The fact is that information about the daily life of the Polovtsians, a people who did not have their own written language and did not leave, accordingly, written monuments on their own, are so scarce that almost all research constructions on this matter risk remaining nothing more than speculative hypotheses that are not confirmed and not verifiable with any additional data. However, the names and family ties of individual Polovtsians captured in ancient Russian monuments constitute, as often happens, the minimum quanta of relatively reliable (and most importantly, undoubtedly significant for the Middle Ages) information. For the compilers of the most ancient compilations of chronicles, these nomads serve as one of the main personifications of paganism, atheism, with which the chronicler himself and his audience have to constantly face. Meanwhile, as is known from the same sources, a number of Polovtsians in the XII - first decades of the XIII century bore Christian names, moreover, most of these holders of Christian names clearly belonged to the nomadic elite.