But as the system invented by Kyrill took deepest root in Bulgaria (whither, in 886, a year after Methody's death, his disciples were banished from Moravia), the language preserved in the ancient transcripts of the holy Scriptures came in time to be called "Ancient Bulgarian." In this connection, it must be noted that this does not indicate the language of the Bulgarians, but merely the language of the Slavonians who lived in Bulgaria.

The Bulgarians themselves did not belong to the Slavonic, nor even to the Indo-European race, but were of Ural-Altaic extraction; that is to say, they belonged to the family now represented in Europe by the Finns, Turks, Hungarians, Tatars, and Samoyeds.

In the seventh century, this people, which had inhabited the country lying between the Volga and the Don, in southeastern Russia, became divided: one section moved northward, and settled on the Kama River, a tributary of the Volga; the other section moved westward, and made their appearance on the Danube, at the close of the seventh century.

There they subdued a considerable portion of the Slavonic inhabitants, being a warlike race; but the Slavonians, who were more advanced in agriculture and more industrious than the Bulgarians, effected a peaceful conquest over the latter in the course of the two succeeding centuries, so that the Bulgarians abandoned their own language and customs, and became completely merged with the Slavonians, to whom they had given their name.
When the Slavonic translations of the Scriptures and the Church Service books were brought to Russia from Bulgaria and Byzantium, the language in which they were written received the name of "Church Slavonic," because it differed materially from the Russian vernacular, and was used exclusively for the church services.

Moreover, as in the early days of Russian literature the majority of writers belonged to the ecclesiastical class, the literary or book language was gradually evolved from a mixture of Church Slavonic and ancient Russian; and in this language all literature was written until the "civil," or secular, alphabet and language were introduced by Peter the Great, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.