A Resource for Turkic and Jewish History in Russia and Ukraine

Last Updated: August 1, 2020

Read about The Jews of Khazaria - the best general-interest book about the Khazars in English

Order the improved 3rd edition (February 2018) in hardcover format:

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KINDLE EDITION (3rd edition)

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A new candidate for Atil's location has emerged! It's Semibugry, a large Khazar-era city that was discovered in 2019 by researchers from Astrakhan, including Damir Solovyov. They will be continuing to dig in the summer of 2020. I added what we know so far about Semibugry's remains to my Atil page.

The Genetics of the Medieval Khazars is our new page summarizing the results obtained so far from scientific teams around the world that have worked with genuine Khazar DNA and Saltovian DNA. The latest study was led by Tatiana Tatarinova of the University of La Verne and included Y-DNA, mtDNA, and autosomal DNA. Tatarinova's team concluded that the Khazars' DNA doesn't match the Ashkenazic Jews' DNA. They also confirmed that the Khazars included members with a combination of Caucasoid and Mongoloid origins. Both of these findings match statements in the 3rd edition of The Jews of Khazaria, which was written two years earlier. All but one of the bonafide Khazars studied show significant Mongoloid ancestry from the original Turkic homeland in southern Siberia and Central Asia.

"O nakhodke sosuda s graffiti v Mariupole" by Eduard Ye. Kravchenko and V. K. Kul'baka was published in Russian (with an English summary) in the journal Arkheologicheskii al'manakh No. 21 (2010) on pages 386-395. This article describes Khazar-era artifacts found in the city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine. They include two Arabic dirhams that were used as pendants, mirror fragments, and a pot (shown on the bottom of page 389) that bears two drawn symbols: a Jewish menorah and a plus sign that's interpreted as a Christian cross. The authors believe the potter was neither a Jew nor a Christian but was a pagan who was familiar with these other religions that were practiced in Khazaria at the time. Was the plus sign really not a tamga? Some other authors disagree with the hypothesis that that plus sign was Christian.

In his article "Iudaizm, khristianstvo, islam v khazarskom kaganate po arkheologicheskim dannym (kratkiy obzor)" ("Judaism, Christianity, Islam on archaeological data in Khazaria") in volume 8 (2018) of the journal Prinosi kum bulgarskata arkheologiya on pages 139-145, Valery S. Flyorov agrees that among artifacts currently unearthed it depicts a unique image of a Jewish Khazarian menorah (with 7 candles above a rhombus) "S bol'shoy doley veroyatnosti" (with a high degree of probability) (page 140). Having said that, Flyorov regards it as Jewishly inappropriate to find a menorah in a kitchen and thus believes that the pot was made by a "neophyte" (page 141). He also points out that the pot was found in a grave together with other artifacts, including a mirror, a copper chain, and two dirham coins originating from 8th-century Baghdad, and burials with objects typify paganism rather than standard Judaism (page 140). The rhombus within the menorah is also unusual and "raises questions" (pages 139). Flyorov disagrees with the idea that the pot's "small clumsily incised oblique cross with equal bars" was inspired by Christianity (page 139).