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"KHAZARS
Israelite Tribes in Exile Pre-Publication Offer http://britam.org/books.html Click Here |
article forwarded by Cam Rea
(a) Scholar claims to find medieval
Jewish capital
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080920/ap_on_re_eu/russia_lost_capital
By MANSUR MIROVALEV, Associated Press Writer Sat Sep 20, 2:13 PM ET
MOSCOW - A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of the
Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more
than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.
Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at Astrakhan State University, said his nine-year
excavation near the Caspian Sea has finally unearthed the foundations of a
triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with modest yurt-shaped dwellings,
and he believes these are part of what was once Itil, the Khazar capital.
By law Khazars could use flamed bricks only in the capital, Vasilyev said. The
general location of the city on the Silk Road was confirmed in medieval
chronicles by Arab, Jewish and European authors.
"The discovery of the capital of Eastern Europe's first feudal state is of great
significance," he told The Associated Press. "We should view it as part of
Russian history."
Kevin Brook, the American author of "The Jews of Khazaria," e-mailed Wednesday
that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even though it has yielded
no Jewish artifacts, "Now I'm as confident as the archaeological team is that
they've truly found the long-lost city,
The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern China to
the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they conquered huge swaths of
what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia
as far as the Aral Sea.
Itil, about 800 miles south of Moscow, had a population of up to 60,000 and
occupied 0.8 square miles of marshy plains southwest of the Russian Caspian Sea
port of Astrakhan, Vasilyev said.
It lay at a major junction of the Silk Road, the trade route between Europe and
China, which "helped Khazars amass giant profits," he said.
The Khazar empire was once a regional superpower, and Vasilyev said his team has
found "luxurious collections" of well-preserved ceramics that help identify
cultural ties of the Khazar state with Europe, the Byzantine Empire and even
Northern Africa. They also found armor, wooden kitchenware, glass lamps and
cups, jewelry and vessels for transporting precious balms dating back to the
eighth and ninth centuries, he said.
But a scholar in Israel, while calling the excavations interesting, said the
challenge was to find Khazar inscriptions.
"If they found a few buildings, or remains of buildings, that's interesting but
does not make a big difference," said Dr. Simon Kraiz, an expert on Eastern
European Jewry at Haifa University. "If they found Khazar writings, that would
be very important."
Vasilyev says no Jewish artifacts have been found at the site, and in general,
most of what is known about the Khazars comes from chroniclers from other,
sometimes competing cultures and empires.
"We know a lot about them, and yet we know almost nothing: Jews wrote about
them, and so did Russians, Georgians, and Armenians, to name a few," said Kraiz.
"But from the Khazars themselves we have nearly nothing."
The Khazars' ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime in the
8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of Jewish religious
artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at other Khazar sites prove
that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional beliefs such as shamanism, or newly
introduced religions including Islam.
Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the Middle Eastern Institute in Moscow, said he
believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of political expediency, to remain
independent of neighboring Muslim and Christian states. "They embraced Judaism
because they wanted to remain neutral, like Switzerland these days," he said.
In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the Caucasus
Mountains and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push toward eastern
Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to that of the French knights
who defeated Arab forces at the Battle of Tours in France in 732.
The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding Russian
state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late 10th century. Medieval Russian
epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting the "Jewish Giant."
"In many ways, Russia is a successor of the Khazar state," Vasilyev said.
He said his dig revealed traces of a large fire that was probably caused by the
Russian conquest. He said Itil was rebuilt following the fall of the Khazar
empire, when ethnic Khazars were slowly assimilated by Turkic-speaking tribes,
Tatars and Mongols, who inhabited the city until it was flooded by the rising
Caspian Sea around the 14th century.
The study of the Khazar empire was discouraged in the Soviet Union. The dictator
Josef Stalin, in particular, detested the idea that a Jewish empire had come
before Russia's own. He ordered references to Khazar history removed from
textbooks because they "disproved his theory of Russian statehood," Satanovsky
said.
Only now are Russian scholars free to explore Khazar culture. The Itil
excavations have been sponsored by the Russian-Jewish Congress, a nonprofit
organization that supports cultural projects in Russia.
"Khazar studies are just beginning," Satanovsky said.
See also:
(b) News Photo Results for
Khazar
http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news;_ylt
=A9j8eu4nBNZIFcAAMwbRtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBhNjRqazhx
BHNlYwNzZWFyY2g-?p=
khazar&c=images&x=wrt
(c) Map of Khazaria
Prepared for Brit-Am by Estelle Schutte
Map shows four main centers of Khazar Civilization
Number 4 shows Itil (also known as Saksin, the "Saxon City") the Khazar capital the above article speaks about.
The Map appears in our new work
"KHAZARS. Israelite Tribes in Exile"
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