The Khazars and the Turks in the Ākām al-Marjān

KHAZARS AND THE TURKS IN THE AKAM AL-MARJAN 145
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 " The
Throne ", i.e. " the possessions of the Master of the Throne ..1 ", a wellknown
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
This content downloaded from 71.172.230.205 on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:35:23 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions