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WHO
WERE THE HISTORICAL KHAZARS? |
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Turcic
legend, (preserved in Chinese chronicles), say the turcs lived
beside a huge marsh. Their enemies killed all except for one boy
whose feet they cut off and then threw him into the marsh. He
was rescued and suckled by a she-wolf with whom he later mated.
Attacked again by enemies, they fled into the mountains and found
refuge in a high cave in East Turkistan, today part of north-
west China. Ten sons were born in the cave, the youngest of whom
was to become a great warrior prince with the dynastic name of
A-Shih-Na. The sons settled on the southern slopes of the Altai
mountains in western Siberia, under the chieftenship of Juan-Juan.
Since earliest times the wolf has been the Khazar totem. [Bozkurt
in modern Turkish. Akdjali in Central Asian Turc]. |
The
Khazars emerged on the world scene as turcic horsemen who followed
the shamanic path of Tengri, the sky god, and a nomadic lifestyle,
suited to the breeding of horses for which they were the envy
of the world, sought after far and wide by the military, and merchants
from many nations. Over the course of centuries they adopted a
more settled way of life, though never dispensing with a nomadic
element connected to the seasons of the sun and moon. Their eventual
settlement, circa fifth century, in the lands between the river
Itil and the river Sabt, (today known respectively as the Volga
and the Don), with the Caucasus range to the south and the Black
Sea coast to the west, gave them the land of Khazaria. The Caspian
was then known as the Khazar Sea.
At
about the time that Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the west,
800AD, the lands east of Byzantium, between the Caucasus and
the upper Sabt, were ruled by a Jewish state, the Khazar Empire,
[see map]. Between the sixth and eleventh centuries, the Khazar
Empire was to play a defining role in the evolution of medieval
and modern Europe. The lands along the lines of the Caucasus
and the Black Sea became a battleground between Byzantium and
Islam. In effect, the Khazar stand prevented the outright Muslim
conquest of eastern Europe:
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