3. discovering Khazaria, the Volga Delta

From CHAPTER SIX, in the book.

For me, really fascinating. The first part is a diary of explorations. And the second part is a chronical of interpretations. How does the Archeologist / Historian interpret his results? How does he exclude what doesn’t make sense?

Stepan Razin's hillock

Our Astrakhan archaeological expedition of the State Hermitage arrived at Stepan Razin hill on July, 18, 1961, timely on the one hand, but a little bit late on the other. We were about 80 years late.

A small brickyard was built under the eastern slope of the hill, and bones from the burials went into the kiln along with the clay. The local population repeatedly tried to look for treasures on the hill and destroyed many burials. They tried to take the bones to recycling, but they quickly refused to accept them because they were completely degreased. A large part of the burial ground was destroyed by the time we arrived, which hampered the initial search.

Stepan Razin hillock rises above the surrounding delta plain, reaching an absolute mark of minus 4.6 m. The foot of the hill is at a mark of minus 20 m, and, therefore, at the time of the highest rise of the Caspian Sea in the XIV century the sea waves only washed around the hill, which became an island for some time. At that time the depths around our hillock reached 4-5 meters, and therefore there is no trace of Tartars or Nogais, who divided the power over the banks of the Lower Volga among themselves. When the sea level lowered, Russian fishing settlements sprang up in the delta, and more recently, the Kazakhs of the Bukeyev horde settled here, having switched to sedentary life.

In our approach to the search and archaeological reconnaissance, the character of the landscape deserved maximum attention. In the XX century the meadows surrounding the hillock are mostly swamped and covered with reeds or chakan. The banks of the Podrazinskaya River are densely overgrown with willows and tallow. The number of mosquitoes living there defies description.  But let's imagine an era when the sea level was four meters lower. Back then, the rivers flowed downhill without swamping the surrounding lowlands, where luxuriant meadows with rich forage grass stretched out.

The Khazars who dwelt here must have lived freely, and therefore we assumed that the numerous populations left such a number of graves that it was enough for science. [128-129] Full of hope, we began to excavate by pits and trenches, But, for a long time we dug in empty clay. It took a week before we determined that the gentle slopes of the hill were nothing more than landslides, and if there were burials in them, they had sunk into the soft loam.

Graves are often marked by uneven soil, but there was no humus layer at the top of the hill, and the wind flattened the surface so that the graves had no external signs. There were many bumps of 0.5 m or less high, but they were formed by perennial plants, the roots of which strengthen the soil and resist scattering. Other surfaces of the hill were covered with baked crust of the same sandy loam. This crust protected the hillock from destruction, but everything under it was inaccessible to both the common eye and the leveler. [129-130]

And yet the discoveries went on! On the same day the burials of three very different rites were discovered. On the eastern edge were discovered corpses, on the western edge a seated burial, and on the southern edge a skeleton lying on its back with a pot in its headboard. Soon the number of burials found multiplied, and one underdenture and one with a horse were added to them. In addition, we came across burials of 19th century Kazakhs, unnoticed because the above-ground parts of the graves were destroyed during the construction of the triangulation point. The first of them perplexed us, but then we figured it out and again covered the excavated skeletons with earth. As for the ancient burials, they gave reason for many reflections and conclusions1. But before we talk about the results of the excavations, let us tell about other hillocks in the delta, which we investigated in 1962, so that the picture would be more complete.

1 For a detailed description of the finds of burials in the Volga delta see: 35, 36,94. Only summary descriptions of burial rites and their interpretation in historical aspect will be given below.

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Kazenny hillock.

From the top of Stepan Razin hill there was a magnificent view. To the south stretched a smooth plain, smoothly sinking under the Caspian Sea; to the east stood a wall of reeds, swaying in the evenings in the light wind; to the west, beyond the river Podrazinskaya, was a veritable jungle - a refuge for herons and wild boars; to the north stood another hillock, the hillocks of Bera, and they have attracted my attention.  It would be strange if only one knoll served as a cemetery. Are there no burials on the other knolls? - I thought, and, taking Gela as my companion, set out on the master's boat up the river.

We set out on our first trip without realizing the difficulty of the journey. It simply did not occur to us how strong the current could be in the quiet channels of the delta! We rode like the ancient Khazars, wielding a steering oar and a pole. This method of travel is without fail. We really reached our destination, the Kazenny hill, but only for 8 hours of continuous travel. All this time we could not go anywhere on coast to have a rest, because on coast there were dense walls of reeds, through which could break only a wild [130-131] boar. The river wriggled in a green corridor, and it was obvious that this quiet place had always been a natural fortress, more reliable than the Caucasus Mountains.  Any cavalry attempting to penetrate into Khazaria would not have been able to quickly force the wide streams surrounded by thickets. It would have lost its main advantage - maneuverability, while the locals, able to ride on boats and navigate the maze of channels, were always almost elusive, and they could strike any unexpected blow to the enemies tired of futile movements.

But could it have been different in winter? Hardly! The ice on the swift rivers is thin and only in very cold winters could sustain a horse and a clipper. And in Khazar time, winters were soft and snowy. Then, to fall through the ice in winter, even in a shallow place, meant to be immediately put out of action, because in the wind the rider would immediately freeze. He should have made a fire and dried himself off before continuing his movement, and in the meantime the pursued enemy would always have managed to break away and hide. In the Middle Ages no nation had an army capable of conquering Khazaria, and during the boat movement it became clear why Svyatoslav, who stood at the head of the victorious squadron, limited himself to the defeat of the easily accessible Itil and left the heart of the defeated, but unconquered country without attention. He saved his army and he was right. Strong in their country, the Khazars could not compete with the Russian soldiers on the hard land of the steppes. It was enough to crush the Muslim mercenaries of the Khazar king, and the danger from the east for Russia had disappeared, and the fact that the free Khazars remained in the reeds, did not matter for the principality of Kiev. Let them sit there!

But here passed the last bend, and to the right of our boat opened a meadow, in the middle of which on a bright blue background of the sky rose two oblong mounds of Baer. Between them nestled the Kazakh village, which seemed empty because the inhabitants had hidden away in their homes from the heat.

But we felt neither heat nor fatigue at that moment. We ran up the hill, outrunning each other, and began our search. With a trained eye we quickly discerned tiny fragments of pottery among the thorny bushes and burnt grass. Soon on the crest of the hill we found a burial according to the Khazar rite. Unfortunately, it was in very poor condition, as the Kazakhs drove herds of sheep over the hill. However, that was not important in this case. The second Khazar [131-132] cemetery was found, and it is curious that it was located, like the first, where people live in the XX century. Obviously, modern and ancient settlements were located on the same convenient, dry places.

We could not stay long on the Kazen knoll that day. After the first ascent fatigue from the road began to show, and the risk of heat shock was too real. Having cleaned and sketched the burial, or rather its pathetic remains, we ran down and threw ourselves into the cool water.

It was evening, the heat began to slowly die down, and we hurried back to get home before sunset, because otherwise we would have been in even more danger. The mosquitoes hiding in the thickets during the day can bite a traveler half to death floating down the river at night. But we did not expect the trip to last long, so we brought neither dimethyl phthalate nor mosquito nets, just as Svyatoslav's warriors had done in their time. It was easier to move along the stream, and the route ended safely. However, to continue in this direction, I immediately arranged with our host for an outboard motor, so that Gelya, whom I had assigned to scout the surrounding hillocks, would spend his energy only on scouting, and not on the exercise of steering the boat with a pole.

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Journey to the west of the delta

The luck of the first route gave reason to try to survey the whole delta and make a map of the distribution of the Khazar burial grounds. Of course, the reconnaissance had to be conducted at a high level, i.e. to ensure the speed of movement, to get an experienced guide so as not to get lost in the channels and to have a place to rest overnight. The latter was especially important, for when scouting the main thing is increased attention to various trifles. A tired observer would miss details of the landscape and the results of the work would come to naught.

In short, we needed our old acquaintance Mikhail Alexandrovich Shuvarin with a motorboat and one smart, diligent assistant. The latter was expressed by E. P. Sidorenko, a young historian who worked at Leningrad University. He was young, healthy, trained and not afraid of difficulties. I took him on a reconnaissance mission in 1962.

Three routes were planned: to the western delta, to the eastern delta, and to the southern part of the central delta. Considering that [132-133] each route would require a full-time effort, the work was planned with breaks, which could be spent in a quieter environment at the excavation of Stepan Razin hill, especially since this site should not be overlooked either. The work plan was, perhaps, excessively tense, but it promised success and therefore was accepted for execution.

On July 23, 1962, when the main unit was conducting a follow-up investigation of Stepan Razin's hillock, I took a motorboat to the route along the western part of the Volga Delta. Our task was to find out where other Khazar monuments were located and what peoples, other than the Khazars, had left traces of their stay in the Volga delta? The domes of the Astrakhan Kremlin flashed in the distance and disappeared behind us. The swift current of the Great Volga caught up with us and carried us along. A wide alluvial plain spread out around us, smooth as the surface of a calm sea. It made no sense to go ashore, because if people lived here in ancient times, the Caspian transgression had buried their remains under the bottom sediments. That's why when we reached Ikryanoye village we turned to Khurdun channel, flowing westward out of the Great Volga and flowing into it 30 km down again.

The landscape changed dramatically. The Khurdun wriggled between oblong berms covered with scorched grass. But the most careful examination showed that the area was uninhabited in the Middle Ages. On one hillock we found two tiny fragments of Gooz pottery, on others many fragments of human bones. Yes, there had been fighting here, but not living or burying the dearly departed. The farther we went to the west, the more the Khurdun began to resemble not a delta flow, but an ordinary steppe river. The landscape around us adjoined the "area of sub-steppe ilmens" and, as a matter of fact, was its continuation. At last our Khurdun stretched into a wide, shallow lake densely overgrown with algae. It became difficult and pointless to go further, and we returned back to the bank of the largest, navigable channel of the Volga – Bakhtemir.

Reflections of willows leaning over the shore swayed gently in the streams of the powerful river, pierced by the rays of the rising sun. The willows stood like a line of soldiers guarding the shore from erosion, and behind them stretched a plain overgrown with reeds twice as tall as a man. Above the flat smoothness of the rippling reeds could be seen the circular abbreviations of the Baer knolls. At this place the absolute mark of the valley was minus [132-133] 25,6m, and the hillock, which stood opposite us, was minus 9,9m. At the time of the Caspian Sea level rise, this knoll was an island.

While we were admiring the landscape, the caring M.A. Shuvarin managed to ask a passerby, and he told us that this hillock is called "Devil's Mound", because there are pieces of bricks and bones lying on it. The report was worth checking out, and we, having drunk tea to endure the day in the sun, headed west along paths leading through the reeds to the mound, which was about 5km from the shore of Bakhtemir.

"Devil's Mound."

The hillock we approached was really unusual. It was seen from the side. Ordinary hillocks have perfectly smooth sides, more or less melted, but this hillock was dug by water, leaving his body dry channels deep up to 2m. It was clear where the streams could come from: they were the remnants of rainwater streams, but there were none on the other hillocks. And it couldn't be because rain water is absorbed by soft sandy sand which Baer knolls are made of, and it doesn't form streams. If a stream appeared, then, that means, the water was accumulated somewhere above and then flowed down.

As we climbed up and looked around, everything became clear. On the broad top of the knoll, traces of earth floors of densely packed clay were clearly visible. Stream channels started directly from them. Houses had once stood here. Back then, water dripped from the roofs onto the soft loam surface of the knoll and did not produce destruction.

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When the buildings died, puddles formed where people had trampled the ground, and the creeks flowed out of the puddles and deformed the slopes of the hill. Noticing this, I concluded that in the future it would be easy to distinguish from afar the hillocks on which there had been settlements in ancient times from the uninhabited hillocks. This method promised to become extremely useful when observing from a boat. The side of a knoll could be seen as a signpost inviting an archaeologist either to start searching or not to waste energy and sail on. In fact, this observation was later confirmed and saved us a lot of time and effort.

There was no shortage of finds on this knoll. The quadrangular floor patches were littered with shards, small pieces of rusted iron, charcoal, and bones of dead people. The pottery precisely dates the settlement - XIV century. On it [133-134] blue watering with a dark blue pattern, exactly as on ruins of the great city of Saraj. Having dug around, we found two coins: silver - dirgem of khan Dzhanibek (1340-1357), and copper with an erased inscription, which then in the Hermitage identified as a pula of the sixties of the XIV century.

There could be no doubt that it was a Tatar fortress. So, it was skillfully fortified! The sides of the knoll on the west and north were sheared off, forming a cliff 11m high. The walls on the edges of the cliff were built of Tatar bricks (22x30x4), pink, cracked and perfectly burnt.      The bricks were made by hand, and fragments of their surfaces show the traces of the fingers of the workers who smoothed the clay before firing. Now the walls no longer exist. They were dismantled by the local population to build, and only fragments have survived, as well as a whole brick, which was accidentally forgotten, and which we picked up to take to the Hermitage. But back in the seventeenth century this fortress was noticeable and even marked in the "Book of the Great Scheme" in the explanatory note to the map of the Russian lands made under Boris Godunov [48, p. 145. Cf.: 33, p. 93]. It is sad when cities are destroyed, but there are always historical reasons for this. And when the monuments of the past are destroyed, it is even more offensive. After all, they do not disturb anyone! [135-136]

After digging several pits, we were convinced that the cultural layer on the settlement reaches only 4 cm. This means that the life of the settlement was short. Khazar remains were not present, so the fortress was built by Golden Horde Tatars themselves on an empty place, and here the question arises: why? After all, as already mentioned, hill "Devil's Fortress" in the XIV century was an island, and the depths around it reached 6 meters. To get here was possible only by boat, and in windy weather - not without risk. So, who wanted or perhaps needed to live there? This mystery is unsolvable without geography.

In the first millennium, most of the Volga flowed through the Akhtuba, while the western part of the present-day delta was dry steppe. When the water in the Volga rose in the 13th century, it began to intensively undermine the right bank and finally dug its present-day channel. At the same time the Akhtuba was covered with sand, the eastern channels shallowed and ceased to be waterways important for trade [33]. Ships from Russian land have moved to Persia on the western channel - Bakhtemir, and to meet them ships of the Persian merchants have sailed.

Trade enriched the khans of the Golden Horde, but not the nomads of the neighboring steppe, which adjoined the Volga from the west. To guard the trade route, to give merchants a safe haven, to monitor order on the wide river and to maintain the authority of the Golden Horde Khan on its banks, a fortress was built on the island. As long as the waves of the sea washed over the hill, the fortress was impregnable.

How does worldly glory pass

The throne of the Khan Dzhanibek stood in the Golden Horde, and it was quiet in the Volga delta. The throne swayed under the hand of Mamay, faltered under the heel of Tokhtamysh and fell at the feet of Timur. In April 1395 in a bloody siege on the banks of the Terek, Tamerlane's veterans overthrew the militia assembled by Tokhtamysh and invaded the Southern Russian steppes, where they met no more resistance. Tokhtamysh fled to Bolgar, leaving his country to be plundered by the victor. Vasily Dmitrievich of Moscow, having gathered an army, blocked the crossing of the Oka and defended the Russian land. Dagestani princes Kuli and Taus took refuge in the mountain castles, but the castles were taken and the princes were killed. In the winter of 1395, Timur approached the Volga and besieged the city of Haji-Tarkhan (now the district of Astrakhan on the right bank of the Volga). The city surrendered, but it was not saved; it was given [136-137] to pillage and burned. The same fate befell the capital of Golden Horde - Berke-khan Saray. Traces of the fire were uncovered by excavations [21, p.372].

The winter of 1395 was exceptionally severe. Many cattle in the steppes froze and meat prices went up. And if so, it means that the sea "around the fortress of the Devil's Town" froze, and Timur's soldiers, returning home through the Derbent Passage, i.e. along the Caspian Sea coast, could not pass the lower Volga. What happened next is easy to imagine, and even if something incidental turns out to be inaccurate, the whole picture is restored as an inexorable pattern. December is ending. The dry snow creaks under the hooves of the horses, and the steppe wind blows across the faces of the warriors. They are victorious and go home, but they are tired, hungry, frozen, and there is a long road across the desert ahead. They have to buy food for 250 kebek dinars for a ram from the merchants of the Markitans. T Chu there is not enough booty to feed you here! [ibid], there is a settlement ahead, houses, food, women.

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There is a small fortress in the middle of the ice field. It's so easy to take... and we must take it, because the enemy is lodged there. Of course, this (the enemy is not dangerous, and if you pass by, you can never remember it in your life. But the fortress has the booty, the ability to feed the soldiers, to get forage for the horses, and to take this fortress is easy. So could, so should have thought the commander of the Chagatai detachment in 1395. If he still thought about his wives in the gardens of Bukhara, or remembered a sura from the Koran, these thoughts could not but prompted him his tavachi, centurions, and even an orderly, who before exchanged a word with the ordinary horsemen. The Timur army had a brutal discipline, which meant that the warriors listened to the emir, and the emir listened to the warriors.

One might think that the attack was short and the fire completed the rest. All the wreckage of iron guns or weapons was melted in the great fire. There was not a single burial, but the wreckage of human bones was everywhere.    The ruins of the walls and houses lay on the hill for a long time, but there were no inhabitants among them. The city turned into a fortress in a few hours…

By the time we finished describing it, the heat had already gone down. Before leaving the place, I wanted to walk around the knoll at the bottom to see it from below. On the west side, not far from the artificial trim, I noticed a tamarisk bush. It was strange that this bush of coastal deserts and [137-138] bank ramparts was here, surrounded by willows, reeds, and green meadows. Looking closer, I realized: the tamarisk was growing on the collapse of the cultural layer. Apparently, when the sea was gone, tamarisk bushes grew on the sands washed away by the waves, but it was long ago, and other plants had time to displace them. This shrub had survived because it had grown not on natural soil, but on historical soil; it was as much a remnant of the past as the brick fragments or shards of broken crockery that lay around it. The shards showed what man could do; the tamarisk showed how cruelly nature treats its creatures: it was alone here, and its kin were crushed by reeds and willows.

And then, bidding farewell to the "Devil's Mound", I recited a poem by Omar Khayyam in my own, rather approximate, rather semantic translation:

"I saw a bird that sat on the ruins of Tus, and laid before her the skull of Kai-Caws.

And said: "Woe, woe! The skull, see thyself...

Where are the banners? Where are the kettledrums? Where is the harem? Where is the temple?" The glory of this world passes this way.

We were quickly going down the Bakhtemir River. All around there was a smooth surface of the seabed, exposed in the last hundred years. There were some hillocks, but they were empty. Apparently, before the rise of the Caspian Sea, people preferred to live by the water, and during the rise there was nothing to do on these islands at all.

When the river widened so much that it began to gradually turn into a bay, we turned north along another channel, the Staraya Volga. The terrain was the same, but how the landscape had changed. Huge reeds were growing right out of the water; in the channels branching off to the east, lotuses were rising above the surface of the still water; the air had become thick with the scents of plants and the fumes of water. It was a very different country.

The journey had already shown us quite a bit. We had established that there were no Khazar monuments either in the streams bordering the steppe or in the swampy lower reaches. Now we sought to find that land, which was so native to the Khazars that they buried their loved ones in it. [138-139]

By analogy with the finds made earlier, we could imagine its external appearance. There must have been low hillocks close together, quiet rivers with clear water, without an abundance of algae, and meadows in between, not swamps. And when, after six days of wandering around the delta, I saw terrain similar to what I had clearly imagined, we made a stop and went to explore the Tuta hillock, which rose between the Tabola and Kamyzyak channels. And there we again came across the burials, no different in character from the Khazar graves on Stepan Razin's hill. This meant that we found the western border of Khazaria.

The preservation of the graves of Tuta hill was extremely poor, not like the ones in the eastern delta. The skeletons lay right on the surface, because the place is windy, and the sandy dust, which was used to cover them, did not lie dormant. The bones were cemented into the hardened surface of the knoll, and we wiped our palms to blisters, digging up the earth around the skeletons and vessels.

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But this was not important; it seemed much more significant to us that the original point was confirmed: the settlement of the people and the landscape corresponded exactly to each other. According to this feature, we could outline the boundaries of the area where the Khazars lived, and then draw conclusions about how the physical and geographical conditions changed over two thousand years. For the sake of such a perspective, one could regret neither wiped hands nor mosquito-eaten faces, nor fatigue that had swollen the entire body with a leaden weight. [139-140]

From the Tuta hill we turned north, toward Astrakhan. The area had become civilized, the fields were cultivated, streams were lined with willow alleys, and buses rattled along asphalt roads. But the hillocks still attracted our attention, and finally, on the bank of the river Tsarev, on the hill Mullin, where the Tatar cemetery was located, we collected another handful of broken crockery, but not Khazar, but Goz. So, the Khazars lived not in the vicinity of Astrakhan, but south of it. That is why attempts to find Itil in the place of Hadzhi-Tarkhan failed completely. There are no Khazar settlements and cemeteries where the dry steppe is.

Journey along the central delta

From Tutinsky hill to the wide river Buzan the landscape did not change, and findings were found almost on every hill. The Barany hill on the Bolda channel was especially wonderful. It lies a kilometer from the river bank, and there we gathered a collection of vessels and shards richer than even on the hill Stepan Razin.    But our attempts to go through the delta channels to the sea and examine again those islands, on which I visited with A.A. Aleksin in 1960, ended in failure. Most of the channels at the mouth were shallowing, and the exit to the sea was closed by a dense jungle of bushes and reeds. It was a dead end. When we did make our way to the open space through the bank, a passage for ships, where the fairway was deepened, it turned out that all the islands in three years were covered with such dense vegetation that it was impossible to go ashore. The trees stood a dense hedge, through which you would have to cut a clearing with an axe. Of course, it was impossible to find anything in such thick vegetation, so we turned back to Stepan Razin's hillock.

Works on the hillock were coming to an end. We were able to find that the cemetery was used only by the southern part of the hill. We checked this observation more than once, and it proved to be true everywhere. Here is another mystery of the Khazar ideology: why did they neglect the northern slopes? The solution to this riddle was not given to us.

A reconnaissance detachment had great success. Gelya found three Khazar burials on the Small Kazen hill not badly preserved, on many other surrounding hillocks - the remains of ruined tombs and collected a large collection of pottery. Now it became clear that this country [140-141] was very densely populated in Khazar time. After all, most of the above-ground burials perished from the ruthlessness of time. According to the instructions that I gave for local conditions, the places of finds were tied with a level to the topographic signs. The observation made back in 1960 was confirmed: there was not a single find below an absolute mark of minus 18 meters. It means that in the XIII century the sea ruled these places.

On returning from the western route, I joined Gela, and together we stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon - the Khazar dwellings. Perhaps we had seen them before, but we noticed and realized our discovery only after visiting the "Devil's Fort. On one of the mounds (Shike), we stumbled on the stains from the floors of the dwelling, in which the small fragments of iron tools and pottery were. The latter gave us a dating - it was Khazar. Apparently, on some hillocks during the transgression of the Caspian Sea the Khazars huddled, not wanting to leave their native land. The water was arriving slowly, and apparently some old men hoped that they would live out their age and feed themselves on the high ground, so they built huts on the hillocks. Later, during our wanderings around the delta, we repeatedly encountered similar oval-shaped patches, but the edges of the patches were always so blurred and deformed that it is difficult to get an idea of the Khazar architecture. What is clear is that these were dwellings similar to those in which the Kazakhs now live.

Journey to the east of the delta

On August 16, 1962, Gelya and I, together with Mikhail Alexandrovich Shuvarin, who was always there with us, set out to the east. Through the channels, which had become a familiar landscape for us, we made our way out to Buzan and Sumnitsa. These broad rivers clearly delimit the hilly area of the central delta, i.e., Khazaria, and the alluvial plain that stretches to the east. We went down the Sumnitsa River to the channels of its lower reaches, where the current is simply furious, despite the gentle topography. To get at least a few hours' rest from the buzzing of mosquitoes and gadflies and the heavy fumes of the reed jungle fringing the narrow channels, we went out to Igolkin Bank, where a dredger had dug a channel to deepen the fairway.

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The water in the channel was rushing like crazy, but there was a knee-deep sea (literally), and Gela and I came out on round [141-142] islands formed by the dredger's outcropping. Suddenly... a bone, very ancient and broken by man, then a shard pelleted by water! We rushed to search and gathered a whole collection of fragments of large vessels made of black, poorly deteriorated clay with dents from the fingers of ancient craftsmen. In addition to these, we also found shards of gray clay, thin-walled vessels of smaller sizes. Both of them were familiar to us, as similar vessels we have already encountered in the Khazar burials. What did this find mean?

Dredger has passed the cultural layer of the Khazar settlement and threw the 6th century crocks from the seabed. The absolute mark of the channel bottom is minus 29.6m. Since wind surges in this part of the Caspian Sea reach 2m high, then at the time of the existence of the settlement, the sea level should have been at least 3m lower, i.e. the sea was at minus 32.5m. The same figure we obtained during the study of the Derbent wall, which means that all our calculations have been confirmed.

So, finally we got to the most ancient land of the Khazars. We stood knee-deep in water, and between our feet and the layers containing the Khazar monuments, there was another meter and a half of bottom sediment. Yes, Khazaria is in the full sense the Russian Atlantis, and the region of the Baer knolls is only its northern outskirts. The hypothesis became a reality. The facts, which confirmed the thought, lay in the palms of my hands.  However, it was too early to return home. We had to outline Khazaria from the northeast, just as we had outlined it from the west.

We ascended the wide Kigacha River, flowing in low steppe banks, where we found only Tatar ceramics of the 14th century. There was dry grass on the slopes, light, prickly air, so unlike the thick atmosphere of the delta, and at the river bend we saw an outpost of the desert - huge barchans (sand dunes). There was no trace of Khazar pottery, but again we began to see fragments of Gozo shards. The border of Khazaria had closed. We entered the Akhtuba and went up it, as far as its fairway (channel) allowed. There are places where the sand is washed up to such an extent that this mighty river can be easily waded across. On the left bank of the Akhtuba, the number of Gooz shards is very large in some places. Apparently, the nomads drove their herds here for wintering, so that they could go back to Ryn-seski in spring. There are no Khazar shards here.

Now, having outlined the border of Khazaria, we can and should answer the question: were Khazars nomads? The territory, on [142-143] which there are Khazar monuments, is the least suitable for nomadic cattle-breeding. In summer, the lush meadows provide an opportunity to feed large herds, and in winter there are shelters in riverside forests and opportunities for supplementary feeding if hay is stocked. It is possible that the Khazars drove cattle to nearby pastures in the spring, but even this assumption is only a hypothesis, which is impossible to prove or substantiate.

Nomadic life is always alien to fishermen and gardeners, and the inhabitants of the Volga delta were just that. Most likely, the traditions of nomadic life were preserved by the descendants of Turkuts who settled in Khazaria, and this has given many researchers reason to consider the Khazars a nomadic people.

However, sedentarism did not prevent either to make the distant campaigns, or conquer other people's lands, or live off the defeated neighbors. The Khazars did all this successfully and not in spite of the fact that they had "villages and fields," as the poet said, but because of it. And in those distant times they needed money and more money for war, and intensive farming brings more surplus product than extensive nomadic cattle-breeding. The itineraries, which we were already doing in 1963, allowed us to clarify a lot of details, but did not yield anything of principle. Historical geography, having had its say, gave way to archaeology, the science of monuments: burials and the things found in them. The former tell of death, the latter of former life. Both are equally important to the researcher.

CHAPTER SEVEN, GRAVES AND REFLECTIONS On Life and on Death

People of different nations differ from one another not so much in their way of life as  in their attitude toward death. At first glance this is a paradox. It is commonly believed that death equals everything and everyone. But is it so? Let's think and understand.

In life man of past epochs wanted to have food and woman, shelter over his head and children, [143-144] a peculiar sense of immortality in his posterity. To realize these modest aspirations, he needed implements and weapons, preferably the best of those in his time at the then level of technology existed.

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If he did not invent them himself, he reproduced everything he saw from his neighbors, and if even this proved difficult, he traded or borrowed the thing he needed. This explains the fact that the ranges of distribution of certain types of tools (knives, pottery, etc.) are always wider than the ranges of the tribes. Archaeological culture and ethnic unity rarely coincide.

But the rite of the burial of the dead almost always has peculiarities that distinguish it from all other rites. The funeral of a close, dear person is an affair so intimate that imitation of foreigners seemed inappropriate to the primitive mind. Although theoretically the number of ways to bury the dead is very small (well, one can bury a corpse, put it on the ground or on a tree, burn it, throw it in water; probably nothing else can be thought of), but the details in each case vary so much that it is mostly possible to determine who is buried in this or that grave. Changing burial rites happens only when religion changes, but it is a rare phenomenon associated with a radical breakdown of ethnic existence and consciousness. A tribe that changed the faith of its fathers is essentially a different tribe.

The burial ground on Stepan Razin hillock turned out to be an archaeological museum. There were remains of ancient Sarmatian burials and Sarmatian ceramics. Sarmatian graves were disturbed by graves of Khazar time, and here revealed an unexpected diversity. Usually, different types of burials in one cemetery show a change of epochs and peoples, but here the five types belong to the same time. They coexisted! The graves of the Turkic khan's warriors and graves of the Khazar women and children are located in a close cemetery alternately, in the same layer, but with clear intervals of not less than 1.5 m between the graves. Apparently, when they were buried here, the graves had external features, which have been erased by time, rain and winds.

The burials of the Turkuts themselves were the first to come across, then their allies, the Teli, by the forces of which the Turkuts "were heroic in the deserts of the North" [14, vol. [14, vol. I, p. 301]. Then the old caveman opened and near the end of excavations in 1961 we found barsil. Nowhere else was such a variety found, but Khazar burials were scattered throughout the delta. Therefore, we give a description of the Khazar graves at the end of the chapter. As [144-145] can be seen, the steppe nomads and Khazars died and lived in closeness and harmony, together went to defeat the Persians and together repulsed the onslaught of the Arabs. Khazars, Barsils, Turkuts and Telesians were united not by the commonality of life, morals, culture or language, but by the commonality of historical destiny. They were different, but they were friends. And from this point of view, it is understandable why being deprived of the throne and persecuted in their homeland, the western branch of Ashin dynasty found refuge in Khazaria and ruled there until the early IX century, when power from the Turkic khans passed into the hands of the Jewish kings. Here is the first thing the tombs told us about their former life, being plotted. Let us see what they can add, taken individually.

✓Türküts: The dead were burnt and the ashes were covered with earth [ibid, pp. 228-230]. In Altai, where the ground is very hard, they covered the ashes of the dead with stones from the neighboring ancient graves. Thanks to this it was possible to establish that the platforms where they piled the ashes were quadrangular [24]. The same platforms have been met by us on Stepan Razin's hillock, with the only difference that ashes have been covered with sand which has caked to a crust covering the rests of burnt bones and fragments of iron knifes [35].

Incineration is a custom of warlike peoples. The descendants of the conquerors of India, the Aryans, the Hindus burned the dead and threw the ashes into the water. But as it is not easy to burn a human body, over time they began to throw half-burnt corpses into the river for [145-146] crocodiles to eat. ✓The Normans put the deceased on a boat, set it on fire, and pushed it away from the shore. A torch floated into the sea, then plunged into the abyss. The Romans also burned corpses, and with their customary precision they gave an explanation of the origin of the custom: "The burning of the corpses was not an ancient Roman custom; the dead were buried in the ground, and the burning was discovered when during wars in far-away lands they learned that corpses are pulled out of the ground" (PI. VII, 187) [quoted from: 73, p. 214].

One must suppose that Turkites, warriors like the ancient Hindus, Romans and Normans, were also afraid that an enemy would desecrate or offend the ashes of their bogatyr, who in their lifetime inspired terror in them. The fate of the corpse at that time was of interest not only to family and friends, but also to enemies.    All steppe and Siberian peoples believed in an afterlife. The body seemed to them a kind of clothing which could be changed on occasion, but was pitiful because it was beautiful, comfortable, and familiar. That is why in the Turkic gravestones the word, "separated" from the herds, wives, friends is often mentioned. Sometimes it is replaced by the word "not enjoyed" by the same. But still, the deceased continued to speak on his own behalf. In other words, a monument for Turkuts was the opposite in meaning and sense to a tombstone of our time; after all, with us family and friends address the deceased, while with those it was the opposite.

The belief in posthumous existence was so strong and distinct that in 649 Ashina Shono (Wolf), one of the most prominent cavalry generals of the Tang Empire, at the funeral of Emperor Li Shimin, who was his personal friend, wanted to stab himself so as not to be parted from his beloved leader. The Chinese nobles, skeptics and cynics, did not allow the suicide [93, p. 178].

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This attitude toward death entailed the cruel custom of human sacrifice. At Istemi-khan's funeral in 576 four prisoners of war were killed to accompany the khan in his posthumous existence (Menander in his Byzantine Historians [16, pp. 421-422]). This evidence cannot be archaeologically verified, because fire does not leave behind anything, but a similar custom was used by the Telesian tribes, close in language and life to the Türkuts, and their burials were also found in our burial site.

The Telesians, not less brave and indomitable than Turkuits, were not warlike, but free-loving. Their ideal was not victory over the enemy, though they had won many, but grazing [146- 147] in the wilds of the steppes, songs and tales by the hearth in the yurt, and therefore they showed great interest in any alien culture, except the Chinese. ✓Their burial rites were different, also unlike any other. "The dead are carried to a dug-up grave, they put a corpse in the middle, with a drawn bow, girded with a sword, with a spear under its arm, as if alive; but the grave is not filled in". [14, vol. I, p.21b]. Similar graves till now in Central Asia are not found, and it is not strange, because the corpse was dispersed by birds and wolves. But on Stepan Razin's hillock a grave hole in light loamy sand swam quickly, and we managed to find four Teletskiy burials.

It is very difficult not to recognize the corpse. The vertical position, given to the corpse, was not preserved for a long time. The body rotted away and the bones fell to the bottom of the shallow grave pit. The most annoying thing for the archaeologist is that the skull, which was most exposed to rain and wind, was the first to be spoiled by this rite. The pelvic bones, from which it can be established that the men were buried, were preserved.

We had barely solved the mystery of the tangled bones at the western end of the knoll, when we were struck by a valuable, but unpleasant find. Next to the remains of a calf lay the skeleton of a woman whose cervical vertebrae had been displaced. The poor woman's neck had been snapped. The same maiden was found on the eastern half of the cemetery. Both had no belongings - perhaps they had been sent naked to accompany the lord. But there were no horse bones. Apparently, a horse was more valuable than a prisoner on a quest. For the Telesians were not at home, but at war.

Still more interesting was the third grave, in a grave 0,75 m deep, where the bones of a mature man were mixed with the bones of a horse. There was no female skeleton nearby, although this could not be ruled out. It is possible that it was discarded by the modern, enterprising natives. The greatest difficulty in this burial was the fact that, along with the telekova rite, traces of fire were visible: a lot of ash and bones slightly burned. Apparently, this warrior was especially beloved by his commanders, and they honored him with a purification by fire, which was denied to common militiamen from the allied tribes.

The Western Turkuts knew how to appreciate the valor and loyalty of their foreign-tribal comrades-in-arms. That is why their dynasty lasted so long on the throne, first in Semirechye and then on the Volga. Indeed, the system of uniting the horde, i.e. an army composed of bogatyrs, and the tribal unions, where [147-148] there were no less brave warriors who needed only organization, was beneficial for both sides. This system, called "el" [29], allowed the nomads to repel the attacks of civilized neighbors from the south and east for, as we know, civilization is not always associated with peace and justice. And nomads had the right to live in their native steppe without submitting to invaders.

✓The Badjanak was almost at home, and therefore it was not difficult to determine that the skeleton of an old man with a horse we found could not be anyone else [65, p. 153-156]. However, to say "with a horse" is an exaggeration. Most part of the old horse, fifteen years old, was apparently eaten at the funeral, and in the grave was placed only the head with a bridle and four legs. This, too, was an "escort," but it seems more acceptable than killing captive girls”. It is better to put things in the grave, as, for example, this Pecheneg put a saddle with round stirrups.      It was immediately clear that he wore soft shoes like ichig, because when a rider has hard-soled boots, he prefers stirrups with a straight base. Both the saddle and stirrup suggest by their shape that this Pechenegs came to the Volga from the East, from the Ryn-sands, long before their descendants made their way to the shores of the Dnieper and killed Prince Svyatoslav there in 972. Since then, we keep bad attitude to Pechenegs, although a thousand years can revise the problem. True, the Pechenegs are not praised, besides the Russians, by the Greek chroniclers, and the Arab and Persian geographers are very skeptical about them, because all these peoples suffered a lot from the Pechenegs. But are they already so right? I was involuntarily reminded of a poem by Saadi, which I immediately translated.

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I once read in a book that someone in a dream saw Satan.

He was slimmer than a cypress tree,

And the light came from his handsome palms. Said the man, "O father of vanity!

Thou art more beautiful than the angels,

And in the baths, they paint themselves stealthily, they paint thee nastily and vilely."

Then the divot, with a sigh and a sob, answered, "You see, I am not so bad.

There's nothing ugly about me,

But the hands of my enemy are in my hands." [148-149]

To think how much historical junk, we carry in our minds without even realizing it. We think in habitual categories of sympathies and antipathies, completely forgetting how and why they arose, not even thinking about how fair they are. For example, to say: Pechenegs were defeated by Yaroslav the Wise, and they did much less harm to Russia than Polovtsy or Nogai Tatars. And they were hardly more savage than other nomadic tribes of the steppe or hunters of the upper Volga - Ugry and Finns!

The flowering of the Pechenegs culture falls in the period of the first centuries of our era, when they inhabited the Eastern and Central Kazakhstan. At that time, their power, Kangyu, was respected and feared by their neighbors. Drought in the 3rd century undermined their power. Only in the VIII century they gained freedom and fought off the Turgesh and Uighurs, but were driven out into the barren Aral Sea steppes. Life there was not good for them. The neighboring tribes grabbed Pechenezh's children and sold them into slavery. Then, the Polovtsy and Oguzes pressed the remnants of the Pechenegs people and drove them to the west. The Badjanaks held out until the last opportunity, when Alexei Komnin at Leburne in 1091 dealt them a cruel defeat that undermined the strength of the people. Nevertheless, they tried once more to find a place under the sun for their children and herds, but were defeated again by John Comnenus in 1,122. After that the survivors of the massacre settled in the lower Danube and merged with the Bulgarians. Their descendants are considered to be a tribe of Gagauzians, who had forgotten the Türkic language only in the early 20th century.

Involuntarily one thinks that it is fairer to sympathize with the Pechenegs, rather than hate them. And how many more questions in the history of the Middle Ages are there which we must revise and rethink, because the new accumulated material does not fit any more into the old, pre-revolutionary concepts.

The Barsils, one of the pre-Bulgarian tribes, lived in the neighborhood of the Khazars [7, p.312]. In V century they were at enmity, then, by X century they merged with Khazars and were dissolved in them. However, in the 7th century, when the Khazar preponderance has already clearly emerged, Barsils still retained ethnic traits that distinguished them from the Khazars, in particular the burial ritual: ✓Barsils buried their dead in graves with a lining [35, p. 130].

On the eastern half of the hillock, we came across a chink made in the side of a high mound and filled with small loose earth, which is formed only by slow crumbling [149-151] of the walls and the roof of the grave hole. When the earth was cleaned out, the skeleton of a warrior appeared before us, in the head of which lay the rump of a ram - a usual sacrifice, food for the one who went to the netherworld. There was no horse with the deceased, but there was an iron bridle, a saddle-cushion covered with bone plates, a round stirrup, like a Pachenian, and an iron knife with a wooden handle on the belt. The whole inventory showed that this man died in the 7th-8th c., but, unlike all the other burials, he was buried with his head to the east, not to the west or north. In short, this was a man of very different ideas about the world and about death, although, unfortunately, nothing more can be said about his culture.

But the most interesting thing was that on the right side of the skeleton lay a saber in a wooden scabbard. Its blade was bent, though very slightly, but the hilt of the saber was also bent1, and nothing more important can be imagined: the saber testified about the military reform of the 6th century.

Sabre: In prehistoric times, when individual small tribes challenged each other for possession of hunting grounds, there was a need for weapons. Initially, the technique of killing their own kind was based on three principles: ✓throwing weapons - a stone, which we will not touch in this section; ✓stabbing - a spear and ✓striking - a mace. Over time they improved:  a lightweight spear became a dart and arrow, a weighted one became a spade; a mace with the addition of a machined stone on the end became an axe, and after the invention of fusible metals, a long sword. The distance is enormous, but the principles were unchanged. All the ancient world fought with such weapons. Of course, some refinements were introduced when iron hardening was mastered. It was possible to make a sword with a sharp end and use it simultaneously as a stabbing and cutting weapon. Such was the glaudius of Roman legionnaires. You could put an axe on a pike - you got a halberd, which the Chinese infantrymen masterfully wielded. The sword, at first glance, is a better weapon than the spear, but it has a fundamental disadvantage. A short sword is difficult to reach a dodging opponent, and a long, double-edged sword is heavy and tires the swordsman's hand during prolonged combat, while [151-152] with a spear you can act for a long time. Ancient warriors reached such heights in this art that at at full gallop they caught with the end of the spear a “ring” which the instructor held in his fingers. Of course, this required long training and constant practice.

1 On the dating of this type of saber, see: 52, p. 75; 58, pp. 160-167; 90.

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But I already hear an objection: "And where is the principle of cutting, i.e. the knife, without which no man nowadays can live an hour? How did ancient people do without it?" Yes, they were cutting even then, but the technique of stone did not allow to bring the cutting objects to the degree of perfection that is necessary during battle. A stone knife could cut the throat of a bound enemy or, like the Aztec priests, remove a captive's heart from his chest, but no more. Bronze daggers were used as a short-range stabbing weapon but could not compete with spears and swords.

But in the 6th century or so the Altai blacksmiths, who obtained excellent iron by crunching, invented to bend a sword slightly and bend its hilt backwards. Then this blade, when pulled back, began not only to chop, but also to cut. The effectiveness of the weapon increased many times over. The saber (that's what it is called) didn't break heads and crush bones; it sliced them, and no great weight of the blade was required, but only the ability to pull the weapon on itself at impact. In those days iron armor was a rarity and most used caftans with plates and plaques sewn on them. It was easy to find a place to strike between the plates and the horsemen armed with sabers proved to be a decisive force in the hand-to-hand fight. Not without reason, "The Tale of Bygone Years" gives the example that the Polans paid tribute to the Khazars with swords, and the Khazars were armed with sabers. The chronicler hindsight predicts that a double-edged sword would eventually defeat a single-edged saber; but of course, as we have seen, there were many good reasons of another nature for the defeat of the Khazars by the Russians.

In order to assess the significance of the new weapon, let us turn to a text written in the 10th century, but describing the 6th century battle on the basis of sources that did not come down to us. It is the work of Abulkasim Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, where the poetic form did not interfere with the descriptions of battle scenes. Of course, this work has, and cannot fail to have, many moments introduced by the personal qualities of the author (lyricism), or the requirements of the taste of the era (didacticism), or his political attitudes (patriotism), but we will choose a passage where these features will not be felt, and the comparative value of the types of [152-153] weapons is obvious.  A few explanations must precede our further exposition.

In 590 the Persian commander Bahram Chubin, who not long before that won a victory over Turks at Herat [28], fell into disgrace. Fearing "execution, he revolted and, seizing power, was crowned Shah of Iran”. The rightful heir to the throne, prince Khosroi, fled to Byzantium and there received military aid, with which he moved to claim the throne of his ancestors. The decisive battle of the Byzantine interventionists, supported by Armenians and Persian royalist emigrants, against the professional army of Bahram and Turks who joined him took place in August 591 near Balyarat, one of the rivers flowing into Lake Urmia. [25, с. 240]. For us only the first episode of this fight is interesting, a duel of a warrior Goth-Khazar (equal in fighting ability to a thousand ordinary soldiers) and Bakhram, who learned from the Turkuts a new weapon, a saber.

As soon as the sun lifted its forehead over the mountain, over the crowds rose the noise of battle. Like the rotation of the sky - the movement of regiments, And the sun was eclipsed by the brilliancy of blades. What follows is a long description of the dispositions of both armies with the names of the commanders of the units and much attention is given to the feelings of the young prince Khosroi, who is forced to exterminate his Persian army with the help of his sworn enemies, the Greek mercenary armies. Then begins the description of the first attack by the Byzantines.

And when the drums beat round and round

And the war-loving moved suddenly,

You'll say: The land has risen in a ridge,

"The earth rose up in a ridge.

Here the land of Khosroi was seen,he duck1

The ranks of the advancing warriors,

And his heart was filled with thoughts1,

And the world became more plentiful to him1.

And the Goth2 suddenly burst forth from the warlike throngs. [153-154]

All in black iron, like a pillar,

And shouted to Khosroi, "Examine your enemies!

1 These favorite images of the Persian poets are rendered literally.

2 Goths in VI century served in the Byzantine armies very often, and even formed a special detachment of the guard.

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Where is the slave before whom the kings fled?

To point him out to me, that is your business.

And the work for a man's heart is a spear!"

Remembering the battles of the past, the shah stood silent, with longing in his eyes,

And then he said, "Well, go forth; He will see you in the field and find you. Try not to flee from him then, That you may chew your lips for shame "1. 1 Then the Goth returned from Khosroi, seizing his spear, and glad to fight.

Like an elephant intoxicated, he went on, furious, or as if he were a comrade to the wind. Yelian Sina2 shouted to Bahram: "Look! There the divine before the Rumians stood in front. Like an elephant he has an iron pike in his hands,

And the harness is hidden far away in the thorns "3.

3 The blade in Bajram's hand soared, and whistling like a fresh leaf's breeze, the

Shah4 sprang to his feet when he saw it,

He stared at the Goth with tearful eyes. And as soon as the Roumian rushed to fight, Khosroi clutched the dry earth with his heels.

The pike did not harm Bahram,

With his shield, he could deflect it without difficulty,

He struck back, his blade with a combat blade,

And the Goth fell in two before him.

Notes from the poem of battle:

1 These favorite images of the Persian poets are rendered literally.

2 One of Bahram's most loyal associates, on this day commanding the vanguard of Persian troops.

3 So he would not take the defeated enemy prisoner, but kill him. Figuratively, a challenge to mortal combat.

4 This is how the author respectfully calls Khosroi, who on that day was only a pretender to the throne.

Goth died for lack of knowledge in the novelties of military technology. He expected to meet the enemy with a sword, not a saber. Then the armor would have protected him, he would have received a slight wound and the possibility of a second blow, which on approach would have been Bahram's last. [154-155]

Of course, the close formation of the spearmen was still invulnerable to riders with sabers, but they did not take the fight, but shot the crowded enemy with bows; and when the spearmen scattered so as not to present too easy a target for the enemy's arrows, the sabers forced them into duels and had every chance of victory.

The Battle of Balyarat ended with the victory of the Byzantines, only because they pinned the Persians on cliffs, deprived them of freedom of maneuver and crushed the numerical superiority - 60 thousand against 40 thousand. But in the steppes horsemen armed with sabers and bows, had no equal until the invention of firearms. Despite the fact that European knights during the Crusades suffered a lot from the Turkish and Arab swords, they were not able to reconstruct their usual military training and continued to fight with swords, which over time turned into cuirassier swords.

The art of wielding a saber required quite different training and other psychophysical qualities of the fighter and even the horse. Heavy European horses, on which knights hurled themselves in devastating but usually unsuccessful attacks, were no match for the sabre-rider whose main qualities were agility and quickness. Only Napoleon tried to retrain his cavalrymen, taking the tactics of the Egyptian Mamelukes as an example, but the reform was belated and did not save the French cavalry from the Russian Hussar sabers and Cossack swords, only slightly improved in comparison with the one that lay in the underbelly of the barshal's grave. It is difficult to describe our joy at finding a progenitor of Russian arms, which now occupies an honorable place in the collections of the Hermitage.

The Sarmatians inhabited the Volga steppes in the first centuries of our era, and only the Huns pushed them to the west in the fourth century. Could the Khazars have encountered them? - is a question that can be answered in two ways. No, because the Khazars are descendants of Hun warriors and Sarmatian women, and yes, because such a large people as the Khazars could not appear in one generation and had to coexist with "pure Sarmatians" for some time. Both answers cannot be considered sufficient, and only archaeology is able to establish whether the Sarmatians lived in the Volga delta in the very places where we found the Khazars, or whether both peoples coexisted in the III-IV centuries and divided among themselves the Caspian lands, with the Sarmatians taking the steppe, and the Khazars the delta. [155-156]

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Recall that in the first and second centuries. The Volga was still low in water, but at the time when the Huns were pushing the Sarmatians to the west (III-IV BB.), it flooded with a wide stream, and the steppes were turned into deserts. Before that time, the Volga flowed in several channels among the plains and hillocks, as the Khurdun and Kigach flow now. If so, the Sarmatians had no reason to choose between the two landscapes, for in their time there was only one.  Consequently, we had to look for Sarmatian graves in the same place where we found Khazar graves, only considering them more ancient. And our search was successful. The first find was made on the hill Stepan Razin. ✓The throat of a grey clay Sarmatian vessel was found half a metre away from the Turkut burial site at a depth of 0.75 meter. Then, on the Bilinga hillock we were lucky to come across ✓the burial of a rich Sarmatian woman. Her wide clothes were decorated with beads and studded with figured bronze fibulae, clasps designed on the principle of a French pin. On her chest was a bronze mirror. Of course, the clothes had decayed, but the beads and fibulae showed how wide and probably comfortable they were.

The Sarmatians inhabited the delta in the first centuries of our era. So we found the ancestors of the Khazars.

Khazaria and geographical determinism.

Following the course of our thought, prompted by observations during travels in the deserts and wilds, the reader might think that the role of the geographical factor that we shaded, is close to the concept of geographical determinism, most clearly formulated by Montesquieu in "The Spirit of Laws". [98, р. 290-293]. But it is enough to cite examples of Montesquieu's interpretation of the meaning of natural phenomena of human society to see how different his and our approaches to the topic and our conclusions are.

Montesquieu argues that a hot climate relaxes the soul and body, while a cold climate makes a person strong and vigorous. Southerners feel pain intensely, while Northerners have little sensitivity. In the eastern countries a hot climate makes people physically and mentally lazy, so that manners, customs and laws do not change. The peoples of the hot countries lack courage and are almost always enslaved by the northern, courageous peoples. "The barrenness of the soil makes the people skillful, sober, [156-157] hardened in labor, courageous, capable of war, as they have to procure for themselves what the land denies them; the fertility of the country, together with the prosperity, gives the inhabitants a pampering and love of preserving life." [98, p. 234]. In the plains, where it is difficult to defend freedom, despotic rule is established, and the highlanders can defend themselves because it is difficult to conduct conquests on rugged terrain.

To these and similar statements the theory of geographical determinism, subordinated to the rationalistic idea of universal regularity, which includes the phenomena of social life [18, p. 99].

Much more important is the fundamental side of the case. All supporters of the concept of geographical determinism assume the direct influence of nature on people's psyche and social development. From our point of view, there is no such influence. Social development is a form of spontaneous spiral movement, and thus it cannot be connected in any way with exogenous phenomena, including changes of climate and landscape. People's psyche is also a phenomenon of a special order, dependent on physiology, which at the time of the birth of geographical determinism was an undeveloped science and its importance was not taken into account. In our opinion, the role of nature affects the ethnographic features and ranges of peoples, but not directly; but through the economy, i.e. the basis of economic life. Nature has no definite influence on people's lives. Landscape did not determine the occupation of any people. Where habitual occupations were impossible, representatives of that people preferred not to settle. That is why forest dwellers seldom developed semi-deserts and preferred river valleys, and steppe dwellers, even having mastered forest areas, chose open places for residence. The Samoyed Ugric and Yakut Turks inhabited the tundra and meadows of the Lena valley, leaving the taiga to the forest-dwelling Khanty and Evenks. There are few exceptions to this rule, and they can always be explained by the events of political history. The difference between our approach and geographic determinism is obvious. Both methods exclude one another.

It is not difficult to see that the material we have collected allows us to reject all the assertions listed by Montesquieu, who based his considerations on insufficient information. The history of North Asia and Eastern Europe remained beyond his attention, because in the middle [157-158] of the eighteenth century it was still unknown to Europeans. Summers in the Mongol and Kazakh steppes are hotter than in Western Europe and Western Asia, but this is the home of the bogatyrs. The mental laziness and immutability of customs in the East is a myth! We have seen how strenuous the economic and political life in the early Middle Ages, while, on the contrary, the West was almost in a state of stagnation.

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To talk about the lack of courage of the southern peoples is ridiculous, because the Arab conquests of the 7th-8th centuries were made by the southerners, and there are many similar examples to be found. There is no system in the geographical concept of conquests: one side or the other wins.    The harshness of nature is by no means conducive to human hardiness. Where natural conditions are really harsh, for example, in the Sahara, the Siberian Taiga, Greenland, the inhabitants are exhausted in the daily struggle to maintain existence and no development is observed in them.

Plains are also not conducive to the formation of despotism, so, for example, the Oguzes, Pechenegs, and Polovtsians lived in free tribal unions, and in mountainous Georgia or Asia Minor, monarchical rule was established from antiquity. Finally, defense in the steppe, using the strategic maneuver in space, is much easier than defense of mountain fortresses, from which there is no exit. Montesquieu's judgments correspond to the level of science of his time and cannot be taken seriously in the twentieth century, nor can those of his followers. Ignoring the basis of human society - the mode of production of material goods - inevitably led them to a dead end.

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The Khazars left the greatest number of burials. Five of them were found on Stepan Razin's hillock, three on Kazenny hillock, three on Baran hillock, which we did not have time to excavate1, and on several other hillocks were found strongly ruined and not very expressive, but certainly Khazar skeletons. This made it possible to establish the characteristic features of the Khazar burial rite.

The corpse was laid on the ground, often with its head to the west, but sometimes to the north. Two vessels were placed in the headstone, one of grey clay, obviously with porridge, and the other of red clay, with wine or some other beverage. Meat was also sacrificed in the headstone, usually mutton (once a whole [158- 159] skeleton of a lamb was found), sometimes a bird, and once we were shocked, because on the place where the sacrifice was supposed to be, was the skeleton of an infant. There are very few belongings with the skeletons. Sometimes there are iron knives and belt buckles, corroded and decayed to such an extent that it is difficult to transfer them from the ground to the absorbent cotton; there is a ring-ring in the left ear, and once there was an iron plaque, or rather traces of it, sewn on the clothes. These are poor burials of poor people, who worked hard to get their livelihood and did not allow themselves the luxury of burying needed or valuable things in the sand. Not the Khazar nobility, but the defenseless people lived in these mosque-like places.

Our attention was drawn to the fact that the Khazar vessels from the burials are very similar to the poor Sarmatian ones. Of course, there is a difference, they cannot be confused, but something in the shape, kneaded dough and even firing kindred them to each other.

Well, this is no coincidence and no surprise. The Khazars are descendants of the Sarmatians to some extent, however small; they lived, if not in the same, then in similar conditions, and they had [159-160] the same clay, which determined the similarity of the dough. Therefore, their vessels were similar. But the Sarmatians had a great taste and great wealth, looted from the Scythians, defeated by them in the II century BC. The Sarmatians had an easy period of initial accumulation, and they could afford to reinvigorate in the arts. The Khazars for a long time struggled for the right to exist, and when they won, they fell under the rule of foreign ruling elite. The conditions for a rapid growth of their material culture did not arise. However, if we were able to find the remains of the Khazar capitals, if not Itil, then at least Semender, located somewhere on the Terek River [7, p. 399], we would probably find their art and traces of luxury. The same places where we worked were for Khazaria a province, a village, but for us the Khazar village was no less interesting than the capital, and the poverty of the material did not confuse us, but rather awoke in our heads and hearts the thoughts and feelings necessary to continue the search.

It was quite strange to note that almost all of the Khazar skeletons bore traces of severe damage of great age. In most cases the skulls had been crushed by blows of a chisel or club to the forehead or temple, and the legs below the knees had been chopped off. The fingers of the right hand are often stumped. Very often there are ashes and embers from the fire among the bones, but these are not traces of corpses, because the bones were not exposed to the action of a weak fire, which apparently scorched only the skin and muscles.

Our finds are an illustration for the report of the Armenian author Moses of Kalankatu, who tells about the corpses "cut with sword and knifes", "brutal and violent massacre" and "crazy crying" over the dead [60, p. 193, 199-200]! And yet the disfigured corpses were buried carefully, with observance of the ritual. Obviously, we encountered an ancient belief - fear of the dead, certainty that the deceased could bring harm. All ancient peoples feared evil spirits, but not all associated them with corpses. For example, the ancient Greek empusa, which frightened children, was drawn as a werewolf, Turkic Albasts and Dzheztyrnaks - night spirits, etc.

1 The expedition stopped the moment the successes ceased to raise doubts in anyone. A pity.

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The belief that the corpse itself (and not the spirit of the deceased) is dangerous for living people and especially relatives, obviously originated with ancient Ugrian peoples and was brought to Europe by Hungarians. It is not by chance, that legends and stories about Ghouls, which [160-161] on the Balkans were also called Ghouls, and in Hungary as vampires, are widespread only in the countries bordering with the Hungarian kingdom: Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria and still in Right-bank Ukraine, where since XI century settled neighbors of ancient Hungarians - Turks-guzes. According to the unanimous testimony of the eastern authors "the Khazar faith resembles the faith of the Turks and Oguzes" [40, 146-147]. [40, p. 146-147] and it hardly differed much from the religion of the ancient Hungarians. Superstitions spread quickly and are easily adopted even by enemies, and the Hungarians and Khazars were sometimes allies. If we accept this hypothesis, the mutilation of corpses is easy to explain: in order to deprive the mystical enemy of the ability to move, they scorched him with fire and cut off his limbs. From the point of view of primitive consciousness, this was enough.

Let us look at the ethnographic parallels. Where funerals became a matter of religion, i.e. in Christian and Muslim countries, the burial rites were strictly defined and the relatives of the deceased had to obey them. But after the funeral, one of the fellow villagers would say that the deceased had chased him at night or something like that. Then the corpse was dug out, the dead man's chest was pierced with an aspen stake, and sometimes simply burned. Before the 17th century, these superstitions were very common, but no one fought them then. Maybe the Khazars had not that, but a similar concept, but either way it is important that their concept of death was very different from the Turkic, Teleses and Pechenegs, which again points to a certain independence of their culture.

Date of the burial ground

Now we can concern ourselves with the date, which can be refined on the basis of the whole complex of finds. The lower date can be accepted as 6th c., because it was then that sabre [52, p. 75; 58, p. 160ff] and round iron stirrups [47, p. 518; 23, p. 234] appeared in the Volga region. The latter were replaced by stirrups with flat footstools by the 9th c. [80, p. 137, 148-150], but round stirrups could coexist with them for some time, and it would be unwise to base the upper date only on the form of stirrups. The indisputable upper date is the XIII century, because Tatar pottery is very different from that typical of our finds. Remains 700 years of Khazar period in which were made [161-162] burial of the dead on Stepan Razin hill. The formal method of archaeology cannot specify anything else.

But besides archaeology we have history and geography, why not use them? Note that the Türkic people and their Telesians allies are present in the burial site. Hence, it is most likely that they were buried at a time when Khazaria was a part of the Kaganate, i.e. before 650 AD. The presence of the burial of a Barsil shows that the times when the Khazars and Barsil were at enmity, i.e. the beginning of the VI century, had passed. It is also easy to explain the appearance of Pecheneg in the Khazar cemetery, if we consider that he was a warrior of Turkic khan. After the fall of the Kaganate, the Pechenegs fought more with the Khazars than being friends.

So, only the middle of the 7th century. - epoch of Turkic-Khazar advance to Transcaucasia - has all those features, at which could arise a joint burial of representatives of the four peoples described by us. This opinion should be considered tentative and approximate for now; it is not excluded that it will be refined, but, as Cicero said: "In the absence of certainty the rule of the wise must be the greatest probability".

It is known that Jews lived in Khazaria, but they were few [40, p. 164-165]. In five years of detailed searches, we have not found a single trace of their culture. This means that we were looking in the wrong place. If Itil had not been washed away by the waters of the raging Volga, if Sarkel had not been just a fortress with a garrison of Turkic mercenaries, if Tmutarakan had not been under the influence of Byzantine culture and economy, then surely the magnificent monuments of medieval Judaism, which Leon Feuchtvanger described so colorfully in his famous "Spanish Ballad," would not be the only several Jewish gravestones discovered near Taman.

Consequently, it was necessary to shift the focus of our research to another place, and that could only be the city of Semender, the first capital of the Khazaria. According to the descriptions of the ancient authors, Semender was as rich and crowded as Itil, but it fell under the sword of Svyatoslav Igorevich. A lot of different opinions were expressed about the location of this town, and our task was extremely difficult, on the one hand, and extremely interesting, on the other.

The search for Semender became our task in the spring of 1963, when the expedition left Leningrad for Khazaria again. This time we included the Terek River besides the Volga in our research program. [162- 163]

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