Vatseba R. The early dryht-type states in Slavic Polabya (the late 8th – first third of the 10th century): political system and its transformations.

The study deals with political system of the Slavic Polabya political units and touches upon the issue of causes & nature of its transformations between the end of the 8th and first decades of the 10th century AD. The main essence of those changes was the emergence of early state, considered within the framework of the early dryht-type state formation & hierarchization model. The work is based on a comparison of the information of written sources with contemporary works on archaeological material; also, it is sporadically accompanied by the use of developments in historical geography and linguistics. The study considers the political units of the White Serbs, the Veleti and the Obotrites. For each of the groups, the research work was aimed at finding out the issues of political unity and presence of central government; at localizing the principalities of the then Slavic rulers mentioned in the Frankish narratives; at describing their internal political situation, mechanisms of power and principles of relations with local leaders and society; at reconstructing the nature of power institutions at the lower levels of the territorial-political structure and determining the degree of its general hierarchisation; and at tracking the changes of the political system within the specified period.