ATEH

(8th century)--Name of the Khazar princess who lived at the time of the Judaization of the Khazars. Daubmannus gives the Hebrew version of her name and the meaning of each letter in the name of At'h:

The letters can also be used to get some idea of what the Khazar princess was like.

"Aleph"-the first letter of her name, denotes the Supreme Crown, wisdom--i.e., gazing up and gazing down like mother and child. Consequently, Ateh did not need to taste her lover's seed to know whether his offspring would be male or female, because everything above and everything below is part of the secret of wisdom, which is incalculable. "Aleph" is the beginning; it embraces all other letters, and is the beginning manifestation of the seven days of the week.

"Teth" is the ninth letter of the Jewish alphabet and its numerical value is "an ordinary nine". In the book Temunah "teth" designates the Sabbath, which means it is under a sign of the planet Saturn and divine rest; thus, it also means "bride", inasmuch as Saturday is a bride, stemming from the sentence in Ezekiel 14:23: it is connected with broom sweeping, which stands for destruction and the loss of godlessness, and it denotes strength as well. Princess Ateh helped the Hebrew representative in the famous Khazar polemic; she wore, attached to her belt, the skull of her lover Mokaddasa Al-Safer, she fed it with hot, spicy earth and salt water, and she planted cornflowers in its eye sockets so that in the other world he might see blue colors.

"He" is the fourth letter of God's name. It symbolizes the hand, power, a strong swing, cruelty (the left hand), and mercy (the right), the vine that is lifted from the ground and hung to face the sky.

Princess Ateh spoke eloquently during the Khazar polemic. She said: "Thoughts whirled from the sky on me like snow. Afterward, I was barely able to warm up and return to life. . . "

Princess Ateh helped Isaac Sangari, the Hebrew participant in the Khazar polemic, by out-arguing the Arab participant, and so the Khazar Kaghan opted for the Jewish faith. Some believe that Ateh wrote poems and that they were preserved in the "Khazar books" used by Judah Halevi, the Jewish chronicler of the Khazar polemic. According to other sources, Ateh was the first to compile the dictionary or encyclopedia of the Khazars, providing extensive information on their history, religion and dream hunters. Composed as a cycle of poems arranged in alphabetical order, it even described the polemic at the court of the Khazar ruler in poetic form. Asked who would win the polemic, Princess Ateh said, "When two warriors clash, the one that takes longer to nurse his wounds is the victor." The Khazar Dictionary rose like yeast around the princess' collection, which, according to one source, was called On the Passions of Words. If all this is true, then Princess Ateh was the first author of this book, its procreator, but this original Khazar dictionary did not yet include the present three languages; it was still one dictionary and one language. Very little of that original dictionary has reached the present one, no more than a dog's sadness can be conveyed to another by children imitating its whimpering.

When, thanks to Princess Ateh, the kaghan accepted the prayer mantle and the Torah, the other participants in the polemic were incensed. The Islamic demon punished Princess Ateh by condemning her to forget her Khazar language and all her poems. She even forgot the name of her lover; all that her memory retained was the name of a fish-shaped fruit. But before this actually happened, Princess Ateh, sensing the coming danger, ordered a large number of parrots that could imitate human speech. One parrot was brought to the court for every word in The Khazar Dictionary, each was taught an entry from the book and could, at any time of night or day, recite by heart the lines referring to that word. Of course, since the verses were in the Khazar language, this was the language which the parrots recited them. When the Khazar faith was abandoned and the Khazar language suddenly began to die out, Ateh released all the parrots versed in the Khazar dictionary. She told them, "go and teach your poems to other birds, because soon nobody here will know them. . . . " The birds flew away to the Black Sea Forest, where they taught their poems to other parrots, and these taught them to yet others, until there came a moment when the poems and the Khazar language were known only to parrots. In the 17th century a parrot caught on the shores of the Black Sea could recite several poems in an incomprehensible language that its own, a diplomat in Constantinople by the name of Avram Brankovich, claimed to be the Khazar language. He ordered one of the scribes to take down everything the parrot said, hoping to discover the "parrot poems", the poetry of Princess Ateh. It seems that this is how the parrot poems reached the Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary.

It must be said that Princess Ateh was the protectoress of the most powerful set of Khazar priests, the so-called hunters or readers of dreams. Her encyclopaedia was really nothing more than an attempt to compile the records kept over the centuries by dream hunters who wrote down their experiences. Her lover, although young and his eyes still new, was one of the most celebrated members of this sect. One of Princess Ateh's poems was dedicated to the sect of archpriests:

There is also a story that the Jewish representatives at the Khazar court saved Princess Ateh from the fury of the Arab and Greek missionaries by arranging to have her lover, the Khazar archpriest of the dream hunters' sect, punished in her stead. She accepted, and he was banished and imprisoned in a cage that hangs above water. However, even this did not spare the princess from punishment.