THE KHAZARS AND THE MAGYARS

András Róna-Tas

Introduction

My paper is based on my book Hungarians and Europe in the Early Mid- dle Ages (Budapest, 1999, CEU Press), which has been published several years ago in Hungary. It deals in 600 pages with the early history of the Hungarians and East Europe until the middle of the 10th century. It focuses on the relationship of the Hungarians with the Turks, above all with the Khazars. In the following I shall concentrate on some of my new results leaving aside references and citations, which can be found in at my book. See also the bibliography the end of this paper.

1. Khazar studies in Hungary

The main periods of Khazar studies in Hungary are the following: a) Kha- zars in the Latin chronicles 12th–17th centuries, b) Khazars in the his- torical works of the 18th-early 19th centuries, c) Khazars in the so-called Ugor—Turkic discussion on the origin of the Hungarians, Vámbéry and Budenz, Hunfalvy, Pauler, Munkácsi, d) From Zoltán Gombocz (1898) to Louis Ligeti and e) present studies. Of great importance is the work of Gombocz (Die bulgarisch-türkischen Lehnwörter in der ungarischen Sprache 1912), less known are the changes in the opinion of Gombocz. It is also unknown that the key figure of Hungarian oriental studies, Louis Ligeti, gave a lecture on the Khazars in 1945 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which he never published. Ligeti’s paper on the Kievan let- ter (1981, published in 1984) raises some problems of the word written in runiform letters in connection with earlier solutions given by Pritsak (1982). His last, great monograph published in 1986 The Turkic connec- tions of the Hungarian language before the Conquest and in the age of the Árpáds remained inaccessible to the greater circle of scholars, not only because it appeared only in Hungarian, but also because of its structure and uneven reasoning. If I should summarise the history of the Khazar 270 andrás róna-tas studies in Hungary in one sentence I would say: it is the history of the suppression of the “Khazar problem”.

2. The name of the Khazars

The name of the Khazars played an important role in the identification of their language. In his work published in 1912, Z. Gombocz analysed the name of the Khazars. He claimed that a) it is a self-designation, b) it has a word medial -z- and c) it is of Turkic origin. From these he came to the conclusion: “Aus der oben gegebenen deutung des namens Kazar kann nur gefolgert werden, dass das chasarische eine z-sprache war, und folgedessen als quelle der alttürkischen lehnwörter der ungarischen sprache nicht in betracht kommt” (1912:199). This claim was accepted by later research and influenced not only research on the Turkic loan- words in Hungarian but also the judgement of the main historical questions of the Khazars. We know from Priskos that around 463 A.D. Oghur tribes appeared in Eastern Europe. After the establishment of the first Turkic Khaghanate in 551 East Turkic tribes also reached Europe. If the Khazars spoke a z-Turkic language, they may have arrived in the West only after the middle of the 6th century, if they spoke anr -Turkic language they pertained to the groups, which arrived in the middle of the 5th century. The discovery of the Terh Inscription by C. Dorjsüren and its pub- lication by S. Kljashtornyj in 1980 (English version in 1982) brought a decisive change in the discussion. The Terh inscription written in the Turkic runiform script and dated from the year 754 A.D., contained the Turkic form of the name as Qasar. In two successive papers published in 1982 and 1983 respectively, I demonstrated that the form with inter- vocalic -s- is the original form, I showed that the verb qaz-, on which the etymology of Gombocz was based, never existed. I pointed out that the form Qasar is extant in other sources as well (the Shine usu and Tez inscriptions, Chinese, Syriac sources etc.). Finally I claimed that the name Qasar through Iranian mediation went back to a title, qasar, which is derived from the name Caesar, as are the titles Kaiser or Tsar. If the claim of Altheim (1959), more recently accepted and argued by Lud- wig (1982) can be corroborated that the Khazars, or at least their leading clans came from Khorasan, the historical background for the transmis- sion of the title is clear. This etymology also excludes the much-debated Uighur origin of the Khazars, and makes probable that the Qasar tribe