Minorsky (v.)_The Khazars and the Turks in the Ākām Al-Marjān (BSOAS 9:1, 1937, 141-150)

The Khazars and the Turks in the Ākām al-MarjānAuthor(s): V. MinorskySource: Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1937),pp. 141-150Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the School of Oriental and African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/608182 .

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The Khazars and the Turks in the Akam al-Marjan By V. MINORSKY

N 1929 Professor Angela Codazzi published a careful edition, with an Italian translation, of a geographical compendium by Ishaq

ibn al-Husayn entitled Kitab akam al-marjan fT dhikr al-mad&'in al-mashhiira fT kull makdn.1 According to Professor Nallino's

suggestion the author may be identical with one of the sources mentioned by Idrisi (" Ishaq ibn al-HIusayn al-munajjim ") and by Ibn-Khaldin (" Ishaq ibn al-Hasan (?) al-Khazinl"). As regards the date of the text, the editor takes as its terminus a quo 262/875 and as its terminus ad quem 454/1062. Most probably he belongs to the eleventh century. Several indications suggest that the author was a native of the westernmost part of the Islamic world (Spain ?). He seems to have used (directly or indirectly ?) Khuwarizmi's rifacimento of Ptolemy and Ya'q-ibi's Kitab al-buldan. Some single points of likeness have been discovered by the editor in I. Khurdadhbih (a legend on Alexandria and another on the Seven Sleepers) 2 and in Ibn-Rusta (San'a, Saba', Misr, and the Khazar lands). Very judiciously Professor Codazzi (p. 461, note 5) points out some confusion in our author, who, under al-Khazar, quotes a feature 3 which in Ibn-Rusta

belongs to the Burdas (Burtas), and we shall see that such cases are much more numerous in our text!

On the whole, the compendium, though not very original, gives some curious facts regarding the towns of the Islamic countries. It shows a marked predilection for historical data relating to their

conquest, local risings, etc. Quite isolated are the two last paragraphs, on the Khazars and the Turks, where the description becomes very vague and some puzzling and misunderstood forms of names occur. These two passages will form the subject of the present article with a view to explaining the facts quoted, and ascertaining the sources from which they were borrowed by the author.

1 Rendiconti della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, Novembre-Dicembre, 1929, pp. 373-463.

2 Under several towns our author quotes the amount of taxes paid by them. I. Kh., 35, quotes the taxes only for Khorasan [and 'Iraq]. Our author seems to have rounded off I. Kh.'s sums, e.g. Bokhair, 1,189,200 dirhams > 1,000,000; Nishipiir 4,108,900 > 5,000,000; Gurgin 10,176,800 > 10,000,000. But some of the sums are apparently false : for the insignificant Sarakhs 1,000,000 (instead of I. Kh.'s 307,440) and for the enormous Khorsdin 10,000,000 (instead of 44,846,000).

3 Freedom of the women.



142 V. MINORSKY-

The quotations below reproduce the text as it stands in the unique MS. belonging to the Ambrosiana of Milan. Asterisks mark some of Professor Codazzi's emendations of obvious character. My own corrections will be found in my translation.

S (sic. V.M.)

LIV. . *)

THE LANDS OF THE KHAZAR AND *SARIGHSHIN. Ibn-Rusta

1. " These are vast and ex- p. 147,. " You travel from al- tensive lands on the confines of Khazar [i.e. from the capital of *al-SarIr. the Khazar] to (the Sarir) 12

days." 2. " Their supreme king pro- p. 13912. [The Khazars]:

fesses Judaism. "their supreme chief professes the religion of the Jews."



KHAZARS AND THE TURKS IN THE AKAM AL-MARJAN 143

3. " They (i.e. the Khazars) fight the Turks and (in their turn) are attacked by the (people) of *al-SarIr.

4. " Their king has a great army.

5. " In their country there are (numerous) fields, gardens, and fruits [v. i. 9].

6. " To it belong many towns,

among which is * ~

Balanjar, which is in subjection to the Khazar king. And from it come out 10,000 fighters.

7. " Their appearance and bodies (manizir wa-ajsam) are like those of the Turks.

8. "With them, when a woman reaches (maturity) she chooses whomsoever she wants of men; (then) she ceases to be in subjection to her father and mother.

9. " (This country) is situated in the plains and most of its trees are khalanj (the wood of which) is

exported to Khorasan, and this is their greatest wealth. They possess fields [v. s. 5].

10. "Most of them profess (yantahiliina) . . . (?).

Ibn-Rusta

p. 1405. "Every year the Khazars lead an army against the Pechenegs."

p. 1431. " It is said that the Khazars had previously built fortifications to protect them- selves against the Majghari and other neighbouring nations."

p. 1415. "[The Burdas] possess fields."

p. 14016. " [The Burdas] are in subjection to the Khazar king and from them come out 10,000 horse."

p. 14020. [The Burdas]: " their religion resembles that of the Ghuzz and they have fine

appearance and bodies (la-hum ru'5' wa-manzar wa-ajsdm)."

p. 1411. " When a girl of theirs reaches (maturity) she ceases to be in subjection to her father and chooses for herself whomsoever she wants of men .. ."

p. 1415. They live in the plains. Most of their trees are khalanj. They possess fields. Most of their goods are honey, martens (dalaq), and furs.

p. 14116. [The Bulkar] " Most of them profess (yantahililna) the religion of Islam."



144 V. MINORSKY-

11. ' And among their towns is

*al-Bay.da-*Hab-baligh, which

is great and beautiful and lies on a great river flowing from the *Khazar lake (?) to the Khorasan lake.

12. "Their graves are like those of the Muslims.

13. " Most of them burn their dead as atonement for them."

[Cf. under Turk, point 6.]

Ibn-Rusta

p.. 13914. [The Khazar]: their capital is *Sarighshin and

by it (biha) is another town called or

p. 1421. [The Bulkar] : " their

graves are like those of the Muslims."

p. 1414. [The Burdas]: " They are of two classes : the ones burn their dead and the others bury them."

The foregoing analysis has clearly shown that the paragraph on the Khazars is a patchwork of data found in Ibn- Rusta's chapters on al-Khazar (1394-14013), Burdas (14014-1417), and Bulkar (1417-1424). The extraordinary confusion of the characteristics of the three nations 1 may be due to the fact that, in the

compiler's source, the headings of the chapters were omitted, as is

often the case when spaces are left in blank for subsequent rubrications. Another source of confusion must be connected with the desire to fit in Ibn-Khurdadhbih's short passage (p. 124) on the Khazar towns:

L.J...

? ('.

) .-•~'-i1 -.•j.

The second name

~-LL in Arabic script looks very much like

,•L•.

and the

epitomator substituted the latter (found in Ibn-Rusta) for the former

(found in Ibn-Khurdadhbih). But Ibn-Rusta nowhere says that the

Bulkar (Kama Bulghars) were subjects of the Khazar king, and this

item undoubtedly refers to Balanjar, which lay to the north-east of the

Caucasus range and belonged to the Khazar.

WjL..J1 mentioned in the heading of the paragraph is

doubtless the name of the Khazar capital, or rather of the part of it situated on the western bank of the Volga, which appears in I. Rusta as

•jp,- , in the Hud&d al-'Alam as aLb,

in Bakri as .

I think that the unusual name of the second town mentioned in our text is nothing but a combination of two names found respectively in

1 Burdds (or Bur.tas)

stands probably for the ancestors of the present-day Mordva, and Bulkdr for the Kama Bulghars.




I. Khurdadhbih and I. Rusta. In order to make the comparison clear we shall place these names under the form found in the Akam :-

V Lh.2

Of these, al-Baydi " the White one " is the name given by I. Kh. to the western part of the capital, which I. Rusta calls by its native

name of ... •*'

" The Yellow [town ?] ". On the other hand,

.

or L~- quoted by I. Rusta is evidently the name of

the eastern part of the capital which I. Kh. spells .

or . The " Khazar lake ", out of which the river is said to flow, may

reflect some confusion of the meanings of Arabic bahr and Persian

daryai, which both stand for "a sea, and a large river ". The original may have referred to the fact that the canal on which the capital stood was a part of the Khazar river (bahr). Buhayra may then be a secondary Verschlimmbesserung for bahr.

The name - must certainly be restored as

..1

" The Throne ", i.e. " the possessions of the Master of the Throne ", a well- known designation of a kingdom in the northern Daghestan, of which the nucleus must have been the present-day Avar territory (on the

Qoy-su). The S~hib al-Sarir was quite rightly the immediate southern

neighbour of the Khazar king. The mention of wars between them is

probably a mere amplification of the epitomator's. We shall leave aside for the moment the extraordinarily close

analogies of our Khazar paragraph with I. Rusta's text and shall consider the question of borrowings more completely after we have examined the second paragraph describing the " Turks ".

VOL. IX. PART 1. 10



146 v. MINORSKY-

~ ~"AN 4 >FT jE TURKS.

"A OF THE TURKS.

1. " These are extensive and vast lands which, in the north, adjoin the *Northern Sea, and, in the east, the lands of the

Toghuzghuz. 2. " The Turks are courageous

and valiant and have a (fine) aspect and (fine) bodies.

3. " They are the most skil- ful of people in the. preparation of felts, for the latter serve them as garments.

4. " They have milk (in plenty) and game is plentiful.

5. " Their country is very cold and snowy. They possess under-

ground dwellings (asrdb fi'l ard) which they enter to escape the

rigours of the cold.

[Cf. under Khazar, point 7.]

Gardizi, 84 : " In summer the

Kimik drink mare's milk . . . they hunt sable-martens and

grey squirrels ..." Gardizi, 84. " In the land [of

the Kimik] falls much snow.

They have underground tanks

(chiy-ha < chih-ha) made of timber for the winter. When the snowfall is heavy they drink that water stored in the month of Tir, for their horses cannot go through the snow to the watering place."




6. "They are idol worship. pers, may God Almighty humiliate them. They burn their dead.

They pray twice in the daytime and fast (only) one day.

7. " Their river flows into the sea of Tabaristan and in it are found fish which stick to the feet

(of the bathers ?). The river

dries up in summer and the

(Turks) drink only from lakes

(or marshes).

8. " In their country there is a mighty mountain with a tree

(•; .?-

) on it. On the tree (?) are the marks of two hands, two

feet, and a knee, as if (some one had been) worshipping there. And

everyone of them who notices those traces worships them.

9. " And in (their country ?) there are herds of untamed horses which have become wild in the desert."

Gardizi, 87: "the Khirkhiz

[neighbours of the Kimak] burn their dead, like the Indians; and they say that Fire is the

purest thing and whatever falls into it becomes pure." [Cf. under Khazar, point 13.]

Gardizi, 83. [On the way to the Kimiks, beyond the mountain

Kinda'uir, is the river Asus (?)] : its water is black, it flows from the east, until it joins the sea [dar, read: dary&] of Tabaristan. After this, the river Artush (Irtish) is reached where the land of the Kimik begins.

Birfini, c'-Athar al-biqiya, p. 2645: " And similar to this lake

( -.)

[of Tils] is a spring of fresh water in the land of the Kimak in a mountain called M. nkfir, as large as a large shield. The level of the water in it is up to the brim, and sometimes an

army drinks from it and it does not dwindle a finger's breadth. Near this spring, there is a trace of a man's foot, of his palms with their five fingers and of'his knees, as if he had been worshipping; and also traces of the steps of a child and of the hooves of a

donkey. And whenever the Ghuzz Turks see (that place) they worship it."

Gardizi, 83. " On both banks of the Irtish pasture wild horses. Their race is from the king's horses which have become wild," etc.



148 V. MINORSKY-

Though the description of the " Turks " is very general and no tribes are distinguished among them, it is curious that the territory of the Toghuzghuz, the most celebrated of the Turkish tribes,' is said to lie to the east of, and consequently separate from, the " Turk " land. The analysis of the text shows that what the author really means

by Turk is the particular tribe of Kimak (*Kimak),2 which lived near the Irtish, but, " when there was peace between them and the Ghuz," visited the latter's territory in winter, cf. Huditd al-'Alam, ? 18. These

periodical movements are a source of great confusion in our sources in which two different territories are usually telescoped into one " Kimak land ". Therefore one might improve our Bahr al-shami

(CL[-) into Bahr al-Shash ('L.4). The latter term would be

quite possible for the Aral sea into which disembogues " the Shash river " (Jaxartes), and the Ghuz territories are usually associated with the Aral sea. On the other hand, Professor Codazzi's correction

Bahr al-shamali (3Lc ) "Northern sea" has the advantage of

suiting the Huded al-'Alam, according to which the Kimiik territories extended in the north up to the Northern Uninhabited Lands.

The river mentioned in the text belongs to the region between the Irtish and the Caspian Sea, of which Muslim authors (Mas'iidI, Mur7j, i, 213; Hudjid al-'Alam, ? 6, 41; Gardizi, 83) give very entangled descriptions. Our sources do not know the lower course of the Irtish : the Hudid al-'Alam takes the latter for an affluent of the Volga; moreover, the authors mentioned have a vague idea of the exist- ence of some other river flowing to the Caspian, to the west of the Irtish. The Ural (Yayiq) river and the Emba, disemboguing into the

Caspian, the rivers of the steppes to the north-east of the Aral sea

(such as the Irghiz and Turghai), and even some left affluents of the Irtish may be partly responsible for the confused descriptions of the course of this second river. The new detail added by the Akam, namely that the river dries up in the summer, points to the steppe region.

The two last paragraphs, which stand isolated in the text of the

Akdm, refer to the north-eastern territories lying pretty close to each

other, and it would be strange if their description were due to two

1 By Toghuzghuz Muslim writers mean both the tribes which originally belonged to the ancient Turkish (in Chinese Tu-ch'iteh) Empire, and the later Uyghur possessions in the eastern T'ien-shan.

2 According to Idrisi (Jaubert), ii, 221, the Kimdkiya border on the Toghuzghuz in the south, but the bearings in Muslim authors constantly vary up to 900.




different sources. After all, one might suppose that Ibn-Khurdadhbih's original work contained a more complete account of the Kimik land than the bare mention of a road to this tribe (BGA., vi, 28 = Qudama, 209). But then the bulk of our data on the Khazar-Burtas (Burdas)- Bulghar (Bulkar) cannot be explained from I. Khurdadhbih. More

probably, therefore, the description of the Kimik territory was only one of the items in Jayhani's description of the Turkish lands (as reflected in the Hudiid al-'Alam, ?? 12-22). The Khazar-Burdas- Bulkar chapters undoubtedly existed in Jayhani.

The latter's Kitab al-nmamn7lik wal-masalik has not come down to

us, but, by quotations and analogous passages in I. Rusta, I. Faqih, I. Hauqal, the HudTid al-'Alam, Muqaddasi, 'Aufi, etc., we know how

great was the authority and influence of the Samanid vazir who

systematically utilized his exceptional opportunities for collecting relevant information. However, the size of Jayhani's work (seven volumes !) rendered it difficult to make and distribute copies, and there are no indications that it was directly accessible in the extreme west of the Muslim world where our epitomator lived.

We have, then, to suppose that Jayhani's data were used by our author through the work of some other author. The obvious person to come to mind is al-Bakri (d. 487/1094), whose countryman our

Isha1q b. Husayn presumably was, and whose work enjoyed great esteem among his contemporaries. Indeed, the Gayangos MS.' of Bakri's al-Mamalik wal-masdlik contains chapters on the Khazar-

Furdas (Burtas, Burdas)-Bulkar, but in an abridged form omitting several items which appear in our compendium.

Consequently the latter must be independent of Bakri, and, as the two possible transmitters of Jayhani's data, we might in principle consider I. Rusta or Ibn al-Faqih.2 Both authors' works, as reproduced in de Goeje's edition, are incomplete. Even the copy of Ibn al-Faqih discovered in Mashhad by A. Z. Validi contains neither the chapters on the Khazar-Burdas-Bulkar nor the items on the Kimdik quoted in our analysis. In I. Rusta's text, as printed by de Goeje in BGA., vii,

1 All traces of it seem to have been lost, but the relevant passages from it bearing on Eastern Europe were published by Defremery in Journ. As., 1849, t. 13, pp. 460-477, and re-edited with commentary by Baron Rosen and Kunik, Izvestiya al-Bakri, etc., SPb., i, 1878, ii, 1903. [I hear from M. W. MarQais that a very complete MS. of al-Bakri has been discovered in Morocco and that M. Colin has undertaken its

publication.] 2 Al Bakri quotes as his source (in Jayhdni matters) a certain Ahmad. Baron Rosen,

op. cit., 17, thought that the person meant was Abmad b. Muhammad al-Hamadhini (= Ibn al-Faqih), but, as a matter of fact, Ibn-Rusta's name also was

Ar4mad b. 'Omar.



150 KHAZARS AND THE TURKS IN THE AKAM AL-MARJAN

the chapters on the Turks are lacking, but, at least, his Khazar- Burdas-Bulkar passages account for our text almost verbatim. Still

disbelieving the possibility that two different sources were used by Ishaq b. al-Husayn, I feel inclined to admit that at the bottom of the two passages in the Akam there must be a more complete manuscript of Ibn-Rusta.

As regards the parallel texts quoted in the paragraph on the Turks, we must add that Gardizi, in his extremely valuable chapter on the

Turks,' expressly mentions Jayhani among his sources. Birfini does not unfortunately indicate the origin of the story about the spring in the Kimik land, but almost immediately after, and in the same

paragraph, he quotes Jayhani's testimony on a spring between Bukhara and Qaryat al-haditha, and, further, on the columns of the

Qayrawan mosque. If only the items on the Kimdk in Birfini (300/1000) and Gardizi (c. 442/1050) were borrowed from Jayhani, the earlier Ibn- Rusta and Ibn al-Faqih 2 (both writing in the earlier part of the tenth

century) could not have failed to know them through the same author, whom they certainly did utilize.

Our examination of the two last paragraphs of the Akdm

al-marjan may appear to be merely destructive. Yet the Textkritik of our composite geographical texts is one of the very urgent problems, and by disentangling the data of a fresh source and defining the measure of its trustworthiness some useful purpose is served. It is

necessary, too, to obviate any eventual speculation with misspellings which might be taken for novelties. Indirectly dur analysis gives a new weight to the important unknown source (Jayhani ?) which is at the bottom of so many older geographical works.3

1 Edited by Barthold, in Mlemoires de l'Ac. de St.-Petersbourg, viiie s'rie, I, No. 4, 1897.

2 According to the Fihrist, 154, Ibn al-Faqih " plundered (salaklha) Jayhdni's book ".

3 See V. Barthold's and my own Prefaces to the Hudf~d al-'Alam, Gibb Memorial, new series, vol. 17, 1937.



Minorsky (v.)_The Khazars and the Turks in the Ākām Al-Marjān (BSOAS 9:1, 1937, 141-150)

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