We also find a good deal of interesting information about these 'Rûs,' as they are called, in various Arab historians. We hear how they sailed their vessels down the chief waterways and had such a firm hold on the Black Sea that by the year 900 it was already known as the Russian Sea. Often they dragged their vessels overland from one stream to another, and thus they made their way from the upper waters of the Don down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. But not only do we have a description of their journeyings we also learn a good deal of their customs and habits, and, though at times the information given is open to suspicion, archaeological research tends to confirm the statements of these historians and to show that the civilisation of the 'Rûs' closely resembled that of the Scandinavian peoples generally in the Viking age. The identification of the ancient 'Rus' with the Swedes was long and hotly contested by Slavonic patriots but there is now a general consensus of opinion that the evidence for it is too strong to be overthrown. Not only have we the evidence given above but also the very names 'Rus' and 'Varangian' can be satisfactorily explained only on this theory. The name 'Rus' is the Slavonic, 'Rhôs' the Greek, and 'Rûs' the Arabic form of the Finnish name for Sweden, viz. Ruotsi. This name was originally derived from _Roþr_ or _Roþin_, the name of certain districts of Upland and Östergötland, whose inhabitants were known as _Rods-karlar_ or _Rods-mæn_. The Finns had early come into relation with the Swedes and they used the name of those people with whom they were in earliest and most intimate contact for the whole Swedish nationality. When these Swedes settled in Russia the Finns applied the same term to the new colonists and the term came to be adopted later into the various Slavonic dialects. We are most familiar with the term 'Varangian' or 'Variag,' to use the Slavonic form, as applied to the famous guard of the Byzantine emperors, which seems to have been formed in the latter half of the 10th century and was largely composed of Norwegian, Icelandic and Swedish recruits. In Russian and Arabic historians on the other hand the term is used rather in an ethnographic or geographic sense. We have seen that it was thus used by Nestor, and similarly we find the Baltic commonly spoken of as the 'Varangian' Sea both in Russian and in Arabic records. All the evidence tends to show that this was the earlier sense of the term and we find it gradually displacing the term 'Rhôs' even in Byzantine historians. The word itself is of Scandinavian origin and means 'those who are bound together by a pledge.' The theory which best explains its various uses is that put forward by Dr Vilhelm Thomsen, viz. that it originated among the Northmen who settled in Russia, i.e. among the ancient Russ, and that under that term they denoted those peoples west of the Baltic who were related to them by nationality.