KHAZARS

--Theophanes wrote the following about the origin of the Khazars: "The Khazar people appeared from the remotest reaches of Bersillia, the first Sarmatia, and ruled the entire area extending from the Black Sea . . . . "

In the 5th century, according to Priscus, the Khazars belonged to the Hun Empire and were known by the name of Akatzir. St Cyril claimed that the Khazars were a people who worshiped God in their own Khazar language, rather than in Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. Greek sources refer to the Khazars as Caearoi, but also as Cotxiroi. The Khazar state extended considerably to the west of the boundary formed by the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Volga. In June the shadow of the Khazar mountains falls twelve days into Samatia, and in December it falls a month's walk to the north. As early as bout 700 A.D., Khazar officials resided on the Bosporus and in Phanagoria. Christian (Russian) sources, such as Nestor's Chronicle, assert that in the 9th century tribes south of the central Dnieper paid a tribute to the Khazars in the form of one white squirrel pelt or one sword per head. In the tenth century this tribute was paid in the form of money.

Greek sources on the Khazar question are supported by an important document that the Daubmannus edition refers to has "The Great Parchment". According to this source, a Khazar legation was sent to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus, and one of the envoys had the Khazar's history and topography tattooed on his body--in the Khazar language but using Hebrew letters. At the time the envoy had been tattooed, the Khazars were already using Greek, Jewish, or Arabic letters interchangeably as an alphabet for their own language, but when a Khazar converted he would only use one of the three alphabets, that of the faith he had adopted. Khazars who converted to the Greek faith, to Islam, or who accepted Judaism began to distort their Khazar language, in the desire to make it look less and less like the language of the Khazars who had retained their original faith. Some sources, however, do not recognize the incident of the tattooed envoy mentioned by Daubmannus. They speak instead of a richly decorated dish of salt, sent to the Byzantine emperor as a gift from which he could read the Khazars' history, and they believe that the entire story of the "The Great Parchment" was really only the result of a misread historical source. This rational qualification presents a problem, however. If one accepts the dish-of-salt version, it is impossible to understand the remainder of the story about the "Great Parchment" which proceeds as follows.

In "The Great Parchment" years were calculated according to the large Khazar years, which took into account only wartime periods, consequently, they had to be converted into smaller Greek years. The beginning of the parchment was lost, because part of the envoy's body on which the first and second great Khazar years had been written had been chopped off at some point as an act of punishment. The preserved part of the Khazar tale begins, therefore, with the third large year, in the 7th century (according to modern calculations of time), when the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius marched on Persia with the aid of the Khazars, who participated in the siege of Tiflis under the leadership of their King Ziebel and retreated in 627 A.D., leaving the Greek troops to face the enemy alone. They believed that all things followed one code when on the rise and another when on the fall, that departures and returns did not come under the same law, and that some agreements did not apply before and after a victory. After an earthquake even plants grew in a new and different way. The fourth large Khazar year described the Khazar victories over the Bulgarian alliance, when part of the Onogur Hun tribe fell subject to the Khazars and the rest retreated, under Asparuh, westward to the Danube River, to the tribes that whip the wind, grow grass on their heads instead of hair, and have icy thoughts.

The fifth and sixth large years (written on the envoy's chest) contained the history of the Khazar Empire's war during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II. After his dethronement, Justinian, expelled and crippled, was imprisoned in Kherson, whence he escaped and fled stark naked to the Khazars, sleeping under heavy rocks along the way to keep from freezing. He was well received at the court of the Khazar kaghan and married the kaghan's sister, who adopted the Greek faith and took the name Theodora (from the name of Justinian I's empress), but, in the Khazar tradition, she continued to believe that God had appeared to the Virgin Mary in her sleep and had impregnated her with the dreamed word. This is how Justinian II saved himself among the Khazars the first time. The second time, he was to meet his end with the Khazars; one can flee to them but not from them. When the legation from Emperor Tiberius arrived at the Khazar court, demanding that Justinian be handed over to the Greeks, he fled once more and headed for the capital. When he again became emperor, Justinian II forgot the Khazar's hospitality, and in 711 A.D. sent a punitive expedition to Kherson, to which he had once been banished and which was now under Khazar rule. This time, the move toward the Khazar Empire was to cost him his head. The Khazars were supporting rebel imperial troops (the Crimea was already theirs by this time), and Justinian II and his small son, Tiberius, child of the Khazar princess and the last descendant of Heraclius' dynasty in Byzantium, were killed in the rebellion. In short, the Khazars sheltered the pursued and destroyed the pursuer, who were one and the same person.

In the seventh and final large Khazar year given in "The Great Parchment", inscribed on the stomach of the Khazar envoy, there was another tribe of the same name, and this Khazar twin lived far away from the real Khazar tribe; people often confused them for the real Khazars, and travelers from the two peoples would occasionally meet. These other Khazars tried to take advantage of the similarity in names, and on the envoy's thighs there was a warning that similarly tattooed envoys bearing not the Khazar history but that of the other tribe of the same name had been known to appear at the courts of caliphs and emperors. These other Khazars even knew how to speak Khazar, but the knowledge never lasted more than three or four years, the lifetime of a strand of hair. Sometimes their knowledge came to a halt in mid-sentence and they would be unable to utter another word. The envoy used his powers of persuasion and his tattooed message to show he was the representative of the real Khazar kaghan and the real Khazars. He also mentioned at one point the Greeks had linked up with the Khazars' doubles; that was during the period covered by the seventh large Khazar year. in 733 A.D. (by modern calculations), and in the said large Khazar year, Emperor Leo III is Isaurian, and iconoclast, married his some Constantine to Irene, the daughter Of the Khazar kaghan. This marriage produced the Greek Emperor Leo IV (reigned 775-780 A.D.). It was at this time that Emperor Leo III was asked to send to the Khazar court a legation to interpret the Christian faith. The request was to be renewed some one hundred years later, during the reign of the Greek Emperor Theophilus (reigned 829-842 A.D.), when the Russian Normans and Magyars menaced the Crimea, the Greek Empire, and the Khazar state. At the request of the Khazar kaghan, Greek engineers built the Sarkel fortress; inside the envoy's left ear one could clearly see a fortress being erected at the mouth of the Don. On of his thumbs showed the Khazar attack on Kiev in 862 A.D., but because his thumb carried a festering wound received in the very same siege, the picture was smeared and remained an eternal mystery. That siege had not yet taken place when the envoy was dispatched to Constantinople; it was a two full decades away.

The note on "The Great Parchment" breaks off at this point, and it can be safely said that the individual who created this "excerpt" from the Khazar original only included material concerning Greek-Khazar relations, omitting everything else that had certainly been tattooed on the skin of the Khazar diplomat, thereby leaving the "walking letter" to continue his mission in some other land. This seems to be supported by information that the Khazar envoy ended his life at the court of some caliph by turning his soul inside out and slipping it on like an inverted glove. His torn skin, tanned and bound like a big atlas, held a place of honor in the caliph's palace in Samarra. According to a group of sources, the envoy had many a nasty moment. First, while in Constantinople, he had to let his hand be cut off, because an influential man at the Greek court had paid in solid gold for the second large Khazar year, written on the envoy's left palm. A third group of sources claim that two or three occasions the envoy was forced to return to the Khazar capital, where he had to undergo corrections of the historical and other facts he bore, or where he was replaced by another envoy, whose skin had been imprinted with the corrected and revised version of history. He lived--The Khazar Dictionary tells us--like a living encyclopedia of the Khazars, on money earned by standing quietly through the long nights. He would keep vigil, his gaze fixed on the Bosporus' silver treetops, which resembled puffs of smoke. While he stood, Greek and other scribes would copy the Khazar history from his back and thighs into their books. It is said that, in keeping with Khazar tradition, he carried a glass sword, and that he claimed the letters of the Khazar alphabet derived their names from foods, the numbers from the seven types of salt the Khazars differentiated. One of his sayings has been preserved. It reads: "If the Khazars did better in Itil [the Khazar capital] they would do better in Constantinople too. "Generally speaking, he said many things that were contrary to what was written on his skin.

He or one of his successors explained the Khazar polemic conducted at the court of the Khazar kaghan in the following manner. An angel once came to the kaghan in a dream and told him, "The Lord is not pleased by your deeds, but is by your intentions." He immediately summoned one of the most prominent Khazar priests from the sect of dream hunters and asked what the dream meant. The hunter laughed and told the kaghan; "God knows nothing of you; he sees not your intentions, or your thoughts, or your deeds. The fact that an angel appeared and rambled on in your dream only means that it had nowhere else to spend the night and that is was probably raining outside. If it did not stay long, that is probably because your dream had a bad stench. Wash your dreams next time. . . ." Upon hearing these words, the kaghan became enraged and summoned foreigners to interpret his dream. "Yes, human dreams have a dreadful odor," was the Khazar envoy's comment on the story. He passed away, because his skin inscribed with the Khazar history began to itch terribly. The itch was unbearable, and it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history.