Hello
Old names described Polish people:
- East Slav
Lach,
- South Slav
Ljach,
- Hungarian Lengyel
- Byzantine
Lechoi,
- Polish
Lędzianie, Lendzianie, Lędzice
They all stem from the word
lęda (uncultivated field)
But according the encyclopedia,
Lengyel culture didn't cover exclusively Polish areas. It was located in the area of southern Moravia, western Slovakia, western Hungary, parts of southern Poland, and in adjacent sections of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/European_Late_Neolithic.gif
If you didn't mind I would tell about
the legendary cradle of Poland.
So, according to the legend three brothers Lech, Czech and Rus were penetrating the wilderness to find a place to settle. Suddenly they saw a hill with an old oak and an eagle on top.
Lech said: this white eagle I will adopt as an emblem of my people, and around this oak I will build my stronghold, and because of the eagle
nest I will call it
Gniezdno. (Polish: nest = gniazdo = gniezdno). Gniezdno ( modern Gniezno) became one of the main towns of the early Piast dynasty, founders of Polish state while the white eagle became Polish emblem. The old name for Poland was
Lechistan and Poles called
Lechici.
The other brothers went further on to find a place for their people. Czech went to the South and
Rus went to the East.
Medieval Polish chroniclers would derive Rus' from the Latin rus, ruris ("country"). The early Rus may well have seemed to visitors from Byzantium to be "rustic" and "rural" — both, terms derived from the Latin rus. And the name of the semilegendary founder of the early Rus state, Ruric does suspiciously resemble the genitive case of rus — ruris. Maybe the word "Rus'" was adopted by the Slavs from the Norse root , in compounds (roths-), either directly or via the Finnish Ruotsi. This root is the same as the English row and may have referred to the fact that the Varangians mainly rowed down the East European waterways; the Swedish region, Roslagen, which means "naval districts".