ATEH

(9th century)--the Khazar princess whose role in the polemic concerning the Khazars conversion was decisive. Her name is taken to be the term for the Khazars' four states of consciousness. At night she wore a single letter on each eyelid, inscribed as are those put on the eyelids of a horse before a race. The letters came from the proscribed Khazar alphabet, in which each letter kills as soon as it is read. They were written by blind men, and the ladies-in-waiting shut their eyes when they attended to the princess in the morning, before her bath. Thus, she was protected from her enemies while she slept. This, for the Khazars, was the time when a person is most vulnerable. Ateh was a beautiful and pious woman, and the letters suited her perfectly. Seven kinds of salt stood on her table at all times, and she would always dip her fingers in a different salt before taking a piece of fish. This is the way she prayed. They said she had seven faces, like her seven salts. According to one legend, every morning she would pick up a mirror and sit down to draw; a male or female slave, always someone different, would come to pose. And every morning, she would create a new, hitherto unseen image of her own face. According to other stories, Ateh was no beauty at all, but she would train her face in the mirror and compose her features into a lovely expression and a pretty shape. These beauty exercises required tremendous physical effort, and as soon as the princess was alone and could relax, her beauty would dissolve like her salt. In any event, in the 9th century, a Byzantine emperor used the term "Khazar face" to describe the famous philosopher and Patriarch Photius, which could have meant that the Patriarch was related to the Khazars or that he was a hypocrite.

According to Daubmannus, neither was the case. The term "Khazar face" referred to the characteristic of all Khazars, including Princess Ateh, of starting each day as someone else, with a completely new and unfamiliar face, so that even the closest of kin were at pains to recognize one another. Travelers recorded just the opposite, that all Khazar faces were identical, that they never changed, and that this created problems and created confusion. Whatever the case may be, the result is the same, and a Khazar face epitomizes as face that is hard to recall. This may also explain the legend that Princess Ateh showed a different face to each of the participants in the Khazar polemic at the kaghan's court, or even that there were three Princess Atehs--one for the Moslem, another fro the Christian, and a third for the Hebrew scholar and dream interpreter. The fact is, however, that her presence at the Khazar palace was not recorded in the Christian source of the time, written in Greek and translated into Old Slavonic (The Life of Constantine of Thessalonica, St. Cyril), but, according to The Khazar Dictionary, something like a cult of Princess Ateh once existed among the Greek and Slavic monastic circles. This cult originated in the belief that Ateh had defeated the Hebrew theologian in the Khazar polemic and had adopted Christianity along with the kaghan, about whom it is uncertain whether he was her father, her husband, or her brother. Two of Princess Ateh's prayers were preserved in their Greek translation, and although they were never canonized, Daubmannus cites them as her "Our Father" and "Hail Mary!" The first of thee two prayers reads:

On our ship, my Father, the crew swarms like ants: I cleaned it this morning with my hair, and they crawl up the clean mast and strip the green sails like sweet vine leaves into their anthills: the helmsman tries to tear loose the helm and haul it off his back like spoils of war to feed and live on for an entire week; the weakest among them pull at the salty rope and disappear with it in the bowls of our floating home. Only thou, my Father, hast no right to their kind of hunger. While they devour speed, to thee, my only Father, belongs the quickest part. Thy food be the shattered wind.

Princess Ateh's second prayer seems to explain the story of her Khazar face:

I have memorized my mother's life and, like in a play, I act it out in front of the mirror every morning for an hour. This has gone on day after day for years now. I don my mother's robes, holding her fan, my hair done like hers, plaited into the shape of a woolen cap. I enact her in front of others as well, even in the bed of my beloved. In moments of passion, I cease to exist, I am not me but her. For I enact her so well that my own passion vanishes and only hers remains. In other words, she has already stolen my every touch of love. Yet I do not begrudge her, because I know that she too was once robbed in the same way by her own mother. If someone were to ask me why I act so much, I would say: I am trying to give birth to myself anew, but in a better way. . . .
It is known that Princess Ateh never managed to die. Nevertheless, a record of her death exists and is inscribed on a knife embellished with tiny holes. This isolated and not particularly plausible story is cited by Daubmannus, not, however, as a story about how Princess Ateh actually dies, but about how it could have happened had she been able to die at all. Just as wine does not turn the hair gray, so this story cannot cause anyone harm.