Khazaria remains a popular subject in scientific and pseudo-scientific circles. The offered excerpt from Khazars by Oleg Ivik and Vladimir Klyuchnikova is distinguished by its firsthand factual material of an  archaeologist, which adds weight to the invaluable work of the writer O.Ivik, obscuring the largely populist content and ideological blunders. For centuries, the Russian historiography ignored “prehistory”, starting its history with a chapter “Genesis” of the Slavic chronicles. The Hun, Bulgar, Avar, and even the Khazar periods were completely ignored. Changes started in the 1960s, began percolating from the 1990s, and today with the work of Oleg Ivik and Vladimir Klyuchnikov we can trace the history of Russia, i.e. its people and culture, from the Hun period. The Khazars in this history have a special place, as an immediate precursor of the future Russia, whose successor it was. Apparently for that reason, and because most of the news about Khazars came from the Islamic writers, and because the story of the Khazar's predecessor and successor the Bulgar was an unpalatable subject to the Russian historiography, in the Russian historiography the Khazariya blocked and overshadowed all the peoples of the Eastern Europe. The distortion of this approach is obvious, the Khazars were a tiny tribe against a backdrop of diverse and numerous tribes inhabiting the Eastern Europe. At their height, they hardly numbered more than 5% of the Caucasus population, or more than 1% of the population within her territories. But in the carnival mirror of historiography, the Khazars rose to the position of hegemony, they are credited with one and a half century war with the Arab conquerors, to them is attributed archaeology of the Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, to them is attributed the history of the Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, and to them is ascribed, aside for the historical Jewish state, creation of a single other Jewish state at all times and in the whole world.

This line of special place hold the authors Oleg Ivik and Vladimir Klyuchnikov, but it is easy to overcome the curved presentation, it is enough to move slightly away and see the carnival mirror on a background of the surrounding world. Righting up the perspective not only does not harm the presentation, but even lets you better appreciate the numerous facts and mature reinterpretation of the rotten imperial historiography.

Page numbers are shown at the end of the page in blue. Posting notes and explanations, added to the text of the author and not noted specially, are shown in (blue italics) in parentheses and in blue boxes, or highlighted by blue headers.

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“Kurgans with ditches”

In the Don steppes and even in the neighboring Voronej province and Kalmykia, the Khazars left much more powerful traces of their existence. In the 650-700s appeared kurgans “with square ditches”, which are believed to belong to the Khazar soldiers.

Female burials in such kurgans are a rarity, and that may indicate either Khazars sent to Don only military units, or that unlike the soldiers, women were buried in flat graves, and they are much harder to find. because practically they do not rise above the surface.

Anyway, the Khazar soldiers in the Lower Don are quite numerous, because by now were found about 300 such burials. Unlike the “Sivashians”, at the Don the Khazars erected individual kurgans for their dead. In the center of the kurgan was located a rectangular grave (sometimes two) with a warrior and his horse (or horse effigy, i.e. the head and legs with spread out hide and a harness). The horse was usually placed at the entrance in the so-called “entry pit”, the rider was placed in a niche (“side chamber”), parallel to the horse.

Warrior was accompanied by military weapons, food, and mandatory zone a belt with numerous silver or bronze buckles and plates. The belts' alloy buckle and plates were often ornamented in the form of a lotus or vine shoots. The traditions of Central Asian and Byzantine art may have influenced the formation of this style. The material of the cast belt decoration, the character and splendor of the ornament probably could testify not only about the wealth of the warrior, but also of his status.
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Of the armaments, in the burials with “ditches” most often are found remains of a so-called Hun-type bow, more precisely, of its Bulgarian-Khazar or Saltov versions. The wooden core of the bow was augmented with several bone plates (usually of deer antler), they gave greater stiffness, and made bow more rebounding. The wood of the core almost always decayed in the burials, but the surviving bone plates allow to see the main structural features. Often the iron arrowheads are found in the burials, long-range three-bladed light or heavier “armor-piercing”, “bullet-type”, as they are called by the archeologists, these could pierce a shield, armor, or chainmail.

Besides bows, into the graves almost always deposited a knife or even a few of them, and sometimes battle daggers. Other weaponry is rare. Occasionally are found remnants of long blade weapons (sword, broadsword, saber). That was a time when a more light and comfortable to handle saber was replacing heavy swords and broadswords. Sometimes graves contained iron or bone bludgeons.

Judging by the bows almost always placed in the grave, at that time they were the main weapon of the nomadic Khazars. Bladed weapons are rare, but this is also explained by the unaffordable luxury of such expensive piece. For the same reason in the Khazar burials are rare chain mail armor and corselets. At the same time, the bow is always somehow individual, “adjusted” for its owner, and at the same time relatively short-lived, unlikely to be passed as inheritance.

Interestingly, even in the rich burials next to the luxury gold and silver imports usually were very rude and simple handmade vessels, probably it was some ritual.²⁶⁰ Most likely, such vessels were made especially for the funerals. Sometimes next to the deceased lay dice cubes, probably among Khazars dice games were popular. Another common find in these kurgans are Byzantine gold solidi. Often they have holes or loops for wearing them.^261
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Around the grave was dug an encircling ditch as more or less right square. Same typr of a trench could also encircle the special ritual place without burial.²⁶² The width of the trench does not exceed one or one and a half meter, and usually it even less. The depth did not exceed the width (naturally these are only the traces of the trench in the continent, that is in the clay under the humus layer). In the ditches sometimes are found bones of sacrificial animals.²⁶³

The authors of this book had a chance to participate in the excavations of four such kurgans containing five graves, one of which was not robbed. This has already been discussed in detail in the preface.

The “kurgans with ditches” remind the Türkic burial and memorial structures of the Central Asian nomads. The similarity is in the  fence-trenches, and in the construction of the grave pit (so-called “pit with niche”, i.e. with a shallow niche), and in the mandatory horse that ias laid together with the deseased.

From the Bulgarian nomadic burials the Khazar kurgans differ by the construction of the grave pit, and by the presence of the trench, and the position of the horse (Bulgars laid it on top of the rider), and  by the construction of the laid in the graves composite bows with bone plates.²⁶⁴ And that is the evidence that Hunno- Bulgars were replaced in Lower Don steppes by nomadic Türks: the Khazars-Türkuts, or rather the soldiers that may belonged to the Türkic elite of the Khazar Kaganate. Their ethnicity is also evidenced by the Türkic runes incised on the coins and bone plates of the bows. This is also evidenced by the gold coins found in the burials, the traces of the Byzantine payments to the Khazars, described by the Byzantine chronicles.

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Khazars constructed their “kurgans with ditches” till the beginning of the 9th c., but then something happened in the Lower Don steppes. Archaeologists agree that in the first third of that century (800-830), “kurgans with ditches” disappear. The cause is unknown, as is not clear at all what happened with this militant group of nomads. Were they destroyed? Migrated to new lands? Went to the next distant raid and did not come back? This is a paradox repeatedly and not without irony noted by the archaeologists: the nomads, in which many recognize the Khazars proper of the Kaganate heyday, at the peak of their power for no apparent reason disappear somewhere without a trace. But after their disappearance from the pages of the archaeological record, the Khazar Kaganate endured for about another two hundred years...

There is a not unfounded version that these people were defeated in the civil war that broke out among the Khazars, and those who survived retreated west.

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