Steppe merchants made the Caspian the “Khazar Sea”
Khazars forged a late-sixth-century commercial empire across southern Russia, Ukraine, and western Kazakhstan—the strongest polity to follow the Western Turkic breakup. Semi-nomadic, multilingual, and archive-poor in their own tongue, they force historians to eavesdrop through neighbours.
The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people whose state emerged in the late sixth century as the strongest successor to the fractured Western Turkic Khaganate. From roughly 650 to 965 they held the steppe from the Volga and Don to eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus, astride the trade route linking Eastern Europe with West Asia. That position made Khazaria one of the great trading powers of the early Middle Ages, guarding the western end of the Silk Road and sitting at a crossroads between China, West Asia and Kievan Rus'. Oghuz Turkic languages still call the Caspian the Khazar Sea.
They remain hard to pin down because nothing written in Khazar survives. The state was a confederation of Turkic speakers and many other groups; the ruling elite probably spoke an eastern Common Turkic dialect, while subject tribes used Oghuric speech related to Bulgar and Chuvash. Their original faith was likely Tengrism, but the population included pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims. There is evidence that the ruling class adopted Rabbinic Judaism in the eighth century, after which the chancellery probably wrote in Hebrew script, though how far the conversion reached beyond the elite is unknown.
The name is a puzzle. Gyula Németh proposed a Turkic root meaning to roam, which András Róna-Tas dismissed as a ghost word; he instead linked Qasar to Kesar, the Pahlavi form of Caesar. Louis Bazin suggested a verb meaning to oppress. D. M. Dunlop tied the Chinese name to a Uyghur clan called Qasar, but critics note that Chinese sources always prefixed the Khazars with Tūjué, the Göktürk label, and wrote the first syllable with different characters.
Many peoples have been linked to Khazar ancestry, from Hungarians and Kazakhs to Cossacks, Kumyks and Crimean Karaites. A late nineteenth-century theory claimed that Ashkenazi Jews descend mainly from a Khazar diaspora that moved west. Linguistic and genetic research has not supported it, most scholars are deeply sceptical, and the idea is sometimes tied to antisemitism.
Source: Khazars
