KHAZARS

In Arabic "Khazar", in Chinese "K'osa"; the name of people of Turkish origin. The name is derived from the Turkish qazmak (to wander, move) or from quz (the northern, shaded side of a mountain). Also found is the name Aq-Khazar, meaning "white Khazar", obviously to distinguish them from the black Khazars (Qara-Khazar) mentioned by Al-Istakhri. After the year 552 the Khazars were probably part of the campaign launched by the first kaghan or the western Turks against the Persian fortress at Sul or Darband. In the 6th century the area north of the Caucasus was held by the Sabirs (one of the two great Hun tribes). However, in the 10th century the historian Masudi the Scribe says that the Turks called the Khazars "Sabirs". In any event, when Moslem sources mention the Khazars, it is unclear whether they are always referring to the same nation. The entire nation, including its ruler, appears to have had a double. Hence, the names "white" and "black Khazars" can be seen in another light; since Khazars in Arabic means both "white" bird and "black" bird, the white Khazars can be assumed to represent the days and the black Khazars the nights. At the beginning of their remembered history, the Khazars defeated a powerful northern tribe called W-n-nd-r, which is mentioned in Hudu al lam (The Regions of the World). The tribe's name corresponds with what the Greeks called the Bulgars--"On-Ogundur". Thus, the first Khazar clashes in the Trans-Caucasus territory would have been with the Bulgars and the Arabs. According to Islamic sources, the first Arab-Khazar war broke out in the Caucasus in the 642. In 653, in the battle of Balanjar, the commander of the Arab forces was killed and the war came to an end. According to Masudi the Scribe, the capital was moved from Balanjar to Samandar, and finally to Atil or Itil. The second Arab-Khazar war began in or shortly before the year 772, ending in 773 with the defeat of the Khazars. That was during the time of Muhammad Marwan, when the kaghan preached Islam. A map by the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi shows that the Khazar state occupied the lower course of the Volga and Don rivers, including Sarkel and Atil. Al-Istakri talks about the caravan route from Khazaria to Khorezm; also mentioned is the "imperial route" from Khorezm to the Volga.

Islamic sources say the Khazars were excellent tillers of the soil and fishermen. There is a valley in their land where a great deal of water accumulates in the winter, creating a lake. The fish they breed here become so fat that they can be fried in their own oil. When spring comes, the water dries up, and they sow fish-fertilized wheat in the valley; it does so well that in the same year and place they have both a wheat harvest and a fish harvest. They are so resourceful that they have oysters breeding on trees. They take a tree by the sea, bend its branches into the water, and hold them down with a rock; within two years, the branches become so heavy with oysters that by the third year they break loose from the rock and rise out of the water, bearing a splendid yield of tasty shellfish. The river that flows through the Khazar Empire has two names, because in the same riverbed half of its course runs from east to west, and the other half from west to east. The names of this river are the names of the two Khazar calendar years, because the Khazars believe that passing through the four seasons are two years, not one, and that they move in opposite directions (like the Khazar's river). Both years shuffle the days and seasons like cards, mixing winter days with spring, and summer days with autumn. Moreover, one of the two Khazar years flows from the future to the past, the other from the past to the future.

The Khazars carve all the outstanding events in their lives on a stick, and these signs are in the form of animals that represent situations and moods, not events. The owner's grave is built in the shape of the animal that appears most frequently on his stick. Hence, Khazar graves are divided into groups, depending on whether they are shaped like tigers, birds, camels, lynx, fish, eggs, or goats.

The Khazars believe that deep in the inky blackness of the Caspian Sea there is an eyeless fish that, like a clock, marks the only correct time of the universe. In the beginning, according to Khazar legend, all creation, the past and future, all events and things, melted as they swam in the fiery river of time, former and subsequent beings mixing like soap and water. At the time, to the horror of others, every living thing could create any other living thing; it was not until the Khazar god of salt ruled that beings could only give birth to their own image that an end was put to their willfulness. He separated the past from the future, set up his throne in the present; he walks over the future and flies over the past to keep an eye on it. He creates an entire world out of himself, but he swallows and chews up whatever is old, spitting out a rejuvenated world. The fate of all human races, the book of nations, is inscribed in the universe, where every star represents the nest and the already formed life of a language or people. And so the universe is visible and compressed eternity, in which the fates of human races twinkle like stars.

The Khazars can read colors like musical notes, letters, or numbers. When they enter a mosque or a Christian place of worship and see the wall paintings, they immediately spell, read, or sing whatever is depicted in the painting, icon, or other picture, showing that the old painters knew of this secret and unacknowledged skill. Whenever the Jewish influence in the Khazar Empire grows, the Khazars move away from the paintings and forget the skill they have, but it suffered most during the iconoclastic period in Constantinople and was never fully recovered again.

The Khazars image the future in terms of space, never time. Their places of worship are built in a strict, predefined arrangement, which, when connected, forms a picture of Adam Ruhani, the third angel, the symbol of the Khazar princess and her sect of priests. With the Khazars, a character moves from one dream to another, and the Khazars can follow it from village to village. There are priests from the sect of Princess Ateh who follow these figures from one dream to another, writing their biographies like the lives of saints or prophets, with their deeds and detailed descriptions of their deaths. The Khazar kaghan does not like these dream hunters, but he can do nothing to them. Dream hunters always carry the leaf of a secretly grown plant they call ku. When the leaf is placed on a rip in a sail or on a wound, it mends and heals instantaneously, as though by itself.

The Khazar state is organized along very complex lines. Its subjects are divided into those born under the wind (Khazars) and those born above the wind, meaning that they have come from all over, like the Greeks, Jews, Saracens, or Russians. The Khazars are the most numerous in the empire, the others all constituting very small groups. But the empire's administrative organization is designed not to show this. The state is divided into districts. Those populated by Jews, Greeks, or Arabs are named accordingly, whereas the larger part of the Khazar state, inhabited only by Khazars, is divided into several districts, all with different names. This was done so they would have only one of these purely Khazar districts carrying a Khazar name, while the rest acquired their name and standing in the state in other ways. In the north, for instance, an entirely new nation was invented, which gave up the Khazar name, even the Khazar language, and it has a different name for its district. In view of the circumstances and the Khazars' unfavorable position in the empire, many Khazars disclaim their origins and language, their faith and customs, and pretend to be Greeks or Arabs, hoping to fare better that way. There are Greeks and Jews from the Byzantine Empire in the western part of the Khazar state. In one district, the Jews (who were persecuted in the Greek Empire) outnumber everybody else, but only in this district. The same is true of Christians in another district, where the Khazars are called the "non-Christian population". Although the Khazars in the state outnumber the Greek and Jewish settlers one to five, this fact is lost, because the balance of forces and population figures are calculated not on the basis of the overall situation but by district.

These district's representatives to the court are in proportion not to the number of people they stand for but to the number of districts, which means there are always more non-Khazars than Khazars at the court., although not in the state as a whole. Given this situation and this balance of forces, promotions huge on blind obedience to the non-Khazar representatives. Just avoiding the Khazar name is a recommendation in itself, enabling one to take the first step in court. The next step requires fiercely attacking the Khazars and subordinating their interests to those of Greeks, Jews, Turkmen, Arabs, or Goths, as the Slavs are called in these parts. Why this is so is hard to say. A 9th century Arab chronicler writes: "A Khazar contemporary of mine recently made an unusual statement to me: only a part of the future reaches us Khazars, the toughest and most impenetrable part, which is hardest to master, and we brave it sideways, like a strong wind; or the moldering, worn debris and waste of the future that spreads imperceptibly, spreading over our feet like a puddle. Only the most inexorable part of the future ever reaches us, or only that part of the future that is already smoothed and trampled by use. We never know who gets the better, un-chewed part in the general distribution and looting of the future . . . . "

To understand these words, one must remember that the kaghan does not allow the younger generation to come to power until it reaches the age of fifty-five, but this applies only to the Khazars. Others advance more quickly, because the kaghan, himself a Khazar, believes they cannot be dangerous since they are so few in number. According to the latest court decree, ranks in the Khazar administration are reduced, not reassigned, when they are vacated by a man of the Kaghan's age or by a foreigner. In a few years, by the time the next generation of fifty-five-year-old Khazars is eligible, these state titles will already have been given to others, or will have lost their importance and not even be worth the taking.

There is a place in Itil, the Khazar capital, where, when two people (who may be quite unknown to each other) cross paths, they assume each other's name and fate, and each lives out the rest of his or her life in the role of the other, as though they had swapped caps. The most numerous among those waiting in line is to exchange their fate with someone, with anyone else, are always the Khazars.

In the war capital, an area with the largest Khazar population and the most densely populated region in the land, awards and decorations are distributed equally among all inhabitants, with care always taken that an equal number of decorations is given to the Greeks and Goths, and Arabs, and Jews living in the Khazar Empire. The same applies to the Russians and others, and to the Khazars themselves, who share their own decorations and monetary prizes in equal parts with others, even though they themselves are the most numerous. But in the southern provinces, where there are Greeks, or in the western regions, inhabited by Jews, or in the eat, where there are Persians, Saracens, and others, decorations are conferred only upon these people's representatives, not upon the Khazars, because these provinces or districts are considered non-Khazar, although there are just as many Khazars as anybody else there. And so in their own part of the state the Khazars share their bread with everybody, but in the rest of the land nobody gives them even a crumb.

As the most numerous, the Khazars shoulder most of the military duty, but the commanders come from the other nations, in equal proportion. Soldiers are told that only in combat do men live in balance and harmony, and that the rest is not worthy of attention. Thus, the Khazars are responsible for maintaining the state and its unity; they are duty-bound to protect and fight for the empire, while of course, the others--the Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Goths, and Persians living in Khazaria--pull in their own individual direction, towards their parent nations.

Understandably, when war looms, these relations change. Then the Khazars are given greater freedom, and treated more leniently, and their past victories are glorified, for they are good solders. They can thrust a spear or sword with their feet, slay with two hands at once, and are never just right- or left-handed, because both their hands have been trained for was since childhood. As soon as there is war, all the other peoples immediately join up with their parent countries: the Greeks rampage with Byzantine troops and seek enosis, union with the Christian matrix; the Arabs cross over to the side of the Caliph and his fleet; the Persians seek the uncircumcised. After each war, all this is quickly forgotten; the Khazars acknowledge the ranks earned by foreign peoples in enemy armies, but the Khazars themselves revert to dyed bread.

Dyed bread is the sign of the Khazars' position in the Khazar state. The Khazars produce it, because they inhabit the grain-growing regions of the state. The starving populace at the foot of the Caucasus massif eats dyed bread, which is sold for next to nothing. Un-dyded bread, which is also made by the Khazars, is paid for in gold. The Khazars are allowed to buy only the expensive, un-dyed bread. Should any Khazar violate this rule and buy the cheep, dyed bread, which is strictly forbidden to them, it will show in their excrement. Special customs services periodically cheek Khazar latrines and punish violators of this law.