Several Khazaro-Alanic and Arabo-Turkic Inscriptions of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe Deciphered

In this video we will be discussing several inscriptions of the Pontic-Caspian steppe that scholars haven't attempted, have failed to decipher, or have failed to decipher correctly. As in the case of the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklós, I will be showing you my own decipherments of these inscriptions which, as before, are far more coherent than any and all existing interpretations known to me. Keywords: Khazar inscriptions, Alanic inscriptions, Turkic inscriptions, Hebrew inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions, runic inscriptions, writing systems, Alanic language

Narrated Text (minorly different from the real speech in the video, the textual version being primary; every new timestamp is a new slide on the screen; some of the slides, modified or not, appear inside the Narrated Text; for the components taken from other works inside all the slides and images, please refer to the Links section):

(00:00:00) Hello everyone. In this video (which is the Video No.7), we will be deciphering mediaeval inscriptions, as we did the last time. But before we start the main topic, I need to refer again to a careless mistake I made in my previous video. Though the interpretation "The fermented woshudu for him to warm up" Gábor Hosszú presents in his book "Heritage of Scribes. The Relation of Rovas Scripts to Eurasian Writing Systems" is incorrect, my criticism involved the wrong understanding and explanation of the meaning and function of the phrasal verb "to warm up". I erroneously thought that this verb was transitive and related to the noun "woshudu" as the direct object. But for the verb to be transitive, the author would have to write "for him to warm it up". "for him" in the original sentence is an inseparable part of the infinitive clause - "it's him who warms up, not the woshudu drink that is warmed up". And if I had carefully read what Gábor Hosszú writes, I would have noticed that the verb used in the interpretation he provides corresponds to the Hungarian form "izzadhatni", a form of the verb "izzad", which means "to sweat". (Much as I want to be mistake-free, I'm still not meticulous enough.) My criticism of the interpretation in question is only wrong in the part about "warming up liquids" and everything derived from that premise. But as I've already said, the fact that the phrase "The fermented woshudu for him to warm up" is simply an incorrect reading of the inscription remains unchanged. (You can find my interpretation in the previous video.)

(00:01:52) We will start our topic from the inscription discovered in Crimea (Ukraine), in the city of Sudak. Its more precise location is a three-tiered slab grave within the archaeological site designated as Cemetery Sudak-IV or Necropolis Sudak-IV. The inscription is incised on the grave's side slab adjacent to the right hands of the deceased in the first and third tiers, the first tier being the top (Fig. 1) and the third the bottom (Fig. 3). The figures on this slide are from the work titled "Medieval necropolises of the Sudak valley" (in the orig. Russian, "Средневековые некрополи Судакской долины") published in Kyiv in 2007. The author of the work is regarded as a Soviet, Ukrainian, and Russian historian and is known by the name pronounced either Vadym Vladyslavovych Maiko in Ukrainian or Vadim Vladislavovich Maiko in Russian (Вадим Владиславович Майко). As of now, he is a Russian historian. I'm not currently debating whether this individual is in violation of international law or not, but I must raise this point. The inscription on the side slab is indeed written in Hebrew letters and, regardless of its height above the grave floor, is roughly level with the chests of the deceased in the first and third tiers. The question is in what direction we must read it. Though the language is not Hebrew, it seems that the correct way of reading this inscription in its horizontal orientation chosen by Vadim Maiko is also right-to-left. (00:03:36) In another work by him, to which he gave the English title "Postscripts on the fields of Crimean Bibles. Falsified source and archaeological realities", which means "Marginalia in the Crimean Bibles. A falsified source and archaeological realities" (in the orig. Russian, "Приписки на полях Крымских Библий. Фальсифицированный источник и археологические реалии"), published in Kharkiv in 2014 in the journal "The Khazar Almanac", he interpets the signs of the inscription as "ושבוית", a reading with which we may disagree. What he reads as "וי" between the "ש" and the "ת" closely resembles the letter "ג"; and in the position where Maiko sees "ש", I identify a ligature of "ש" and "ו" with the "ו" to be read first, i.e. bottom-to-top. The resulting sequence of signs, "וושבגת", can be read Ukrainian-wise as the phrase "у всебагать" or "у всебагаття". As far as I know, neither "всебагать" nor "всебагаття" is found in any Ukrainian dictionary or known in Ukrainian literature, but both are quite easy to understand for native Ukrainian speakers. Each of these words is a noun that can be derived from the adjective "всебагатий". This adjective, by contrast, does appear in some Ukrainian sources and can be translated as "all-rich", "all-bountiful". For instance, it's mentioned in the article "Stylistic Functions of Word-Formation Means in the Literary Speech of Ivan Ohiienko" (in the orig. Ukrainian, "Стилістичні функції словотвірних засобів у художньому мовленні Івана Огієнка") authored by Наталія Богданівна Ладиняк (Nataliia Bohdanivna Ladyniak) and Інга Анатоліївна Федькова (Inha Anatoliivna Fed'kova) published in the Ukrainian journal "Philological Sciences" (in the orig. Ukrainian, "Філологічні науки"). "всебагать" or "всебагаття", as a noun, most likely means a place where someone is or becomes "all-rich" after the death, and the preposition "у" speaks of this place as the destination for the deceased. "у всебагать" or "у всебагаття" means "to the all-bountiful place", "to the all-bountiful life", "to paradise". It's not clear from the inscription what kind of paradise is mentioned: the one held by a certain monotheistic religion or the one imagined by pagans. Though, according to Maiko, the grave cannot date back to earlier than the second half of the 10th century, I cannot confidently say that this point (if true) or the mere use of Hebrew letters should necessarily hint at Judaism or Christianity. But I consider the possibility that for a period of time, the word "всебагать" / "всебагаття" was functioning within a pagan environment where Slavic speakers associated it with the noun "багаття" ("bonfire"), regardless of whether this connection is real or is a folk etymology. (00:06:50) The term "всебагать" / "всебагаття" could have been synonymous with the term for the place in Slavic mythology today known as Вирій (Vyriy) where "birds fly for the winter" and where live the souls of the dead - because both the terms connect the warmth or the heat with the afterlife. If we rotate the entire inscription by 180 degrees, most of the letters will be rotated at the correct angles. Does this have any significance? I might speculate that the engraver positioned themself on the opposite side of the slab and was incising the inscription from left to right. But I don't know whether it's even feasible. What I also don't understand is why in both the works by Vadim Maiko mentioned, he describes the slab with the inscription as made of slate ("сланец", "сланцевая плита"), while in the work from 2015 titled "Archaeological monuments of Sudak region of Crimea Republic", meaning "Archaeological sites of the Sudak region of the Republic of Crimea" (in the orig. Russian, "Археологические памятники Судакского региона Республики Крым") authored by him and the Ukrainian historian Олександр Віталійович Джанов (Oleksandr Vitaliiovych Dzhanov), the slab is reported to be made of sandstone ("песчаник", "песчаниковая плита"). "Crimea Republic" or "the Republic of Crimea" is a designation imposed by the Russian Federation as the occupying power. According to the information I've managed to find, unlike Maiko, Oleksandr Dzhanov is not affiliated with any institutions of the Russian Federation, neither in the Russian Federation itself nor in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, and my previous comments regarding Vadim Maiko do not apply to him. To the best of my knowledge, there is no publication after 2015-2016 in which they are co-authors.

(00:08:51) The second inscription I believe I've also deciphered - fully or quite successfully - was discovered in the Russian Federation not much far from the river Manych at the archaeological site designated as "Zhitkov-II, Mound 4, Burial 1". Where it approximately is is shown on the slide. The image is taken from the 1988 article "Towards [Toward] the identification of Central Asian elements in the culture of early medieval nomads of Eastern Europe" (in the orig. Russian, "К выявлению центральноазиатских элементов в культуре раннесредневековых кочевников Восточной Европы") authored by А. И. Семёнов / A. I. Semenov (most likely, he is the Soviet and Russian archaeologist Александр Ильич Семёнов / Aleksandr Il'ich Semyonov). The location of the Mound 4 is denoted on the map as No.23, approximately the south of the Russian Federation Rostov Oblast'. (00:09:48) In the burial were found two coins: a dirham from Nahr Tira dated to the year 98 of the Hijrah (the year 716-717 CE) and an early solidus of Leo III the Isaurian dated to 717-720 CE. It doesn't mean that the inscription was necessarily incised in one of these ranges - this could have happened after 720 or even before 716. But the coins provide us with the initial points in time for our search. Before I show you the inscription, I will say a couple of words about Leo III the Isaurian. (00:10:31) In the times of the second reign of Justinian II (705-711), he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Alania. The Byzantine Empire wanted to secure the Alans as an ally against the Umayyad Caliphate. Describing this mission in his "Chronographia", Theophanes the Confessor mentions an Alanian ruler called either Ἰταξῆς or Ἰταζῆς. Having analysed various manuscript copies of this work, the German Byzantinist Carl Gotthard de Boor selects the form with "ξ" for the reading text of his critical edition, which I also think is the correct one. (00:11:13) This form is used in such early codices as "Parisinus Regius 1710" and "Vaticanus Graecus 155". But let's assume for a while that this name must contain "ζ". The Soviet and Russian historian Игорь Сергеевич Чичуров (Igor' Sergeevich Chichurov) in his translation of Theophanes's work mentions two opinions on this name. The opinion of the Soviet and South Ossetian historian Юрий Сергеевич Гаглойти (Iurii Sergeevich Gagloiti), as presented, suggests that Ἰταζῆς or Itaz corresponds to the Ossetian root "idaez" meaning "widowhood". The Ossetian adjective "идæдз" does mean "widowed", and some might say "Why not?". If the name of the Massagetan queen Tomyris was Germanic and meant "empty" because she was a widow, why cannot the Alanian ruler be called in the same manner? The difference is that in the first case the name is not translated as "widowed" directly, but rather poetically. And there was a context allowing for this point. And why should "τ" become /d/? The Slavic term "vityaz'" ("knight", "hero") is much closer to the form "Ἰταζῆς" and is more natural than the widowed "Идæдз". Also, recall that in the previous video I've said that the term "vityaz'" is more likely to originate from the lexeme "victor" borrowed from a Romance (or Italic) language rather than from the Proto-Germanic "*wīkingaz" which may have never existed. The other opinion mentioned by Игорь Чичуров is attributed by him to the German historian and orientalist Josef Marquart. This opinion proposes to use the form with "ξ" and interpret the name as the Persian "pitiakhsh" ("vice king", "governor"). This interpretation does not even correspond to the Greek spelling. (00:13:08) This work by Theophanes the Confessor has also a Latin translation made by Anastasius Bibliothecarius. The extant manuscript copies of this translation found in the codices "Palatinus Latinus 826" and "Casinensis 6" and different printed editions spell this name with the Latin "x". Where they disagree is the beginning of the name. Depending on the source, the spelling varies between "Hoctaxi", "Hiotaxi", and "Hictaxi". (00:13:40) Given the fact that the Greek spelling starts with a Greek "ϊ" with a diaeresis and the preceding Greek article is "τῷ", I think that the original text of Anastasius spelt the name as "Hoitaxi". Either this was the way how "ϊ" with diaeresis was transliterated into Latin - say, by interpreting the letter as "οι" - or, more likely, Anastasius mistakenly combined the article's diphthong and the name itself into one word, so that "..ῷ ϊταξῇ" became "Hoitaxi", and "σὺν τῷ ϊταξῇ" became "cum Hoitaxi". And then, one copyist, whose manuscript was incorporated into Codex Palatinus Latinus 826, distorted "Hoitaxi" into "Hoctaxi", while the other respelt "Hoitaxi" or "Hoctaxi" as "Hiotaxi". (The manuscript in "Palatinus Latinus 826" is considered to be much older than in "Casinensis 6".) (00:14:45) If all of a sudden Theophanes wrote "ζ" in the name of the Alanian ruler and Anastasius "cum Hictaxi" in his text, I would suggest that the original name was Vityaz' and would explain the presence of "c" in "Hictaxi" by correlating the difference in spelling with the derivation of the term "vityaz'" from "victor", but in the reverse manner. However, this does not seem to be the case. (00:15:11) Conversely, I think this name is either West Oghuz Turkic close to Turkish or Azerbaijani or West Kipchak Turkic close to Crimean Tatar, Kumyk, or Karachay-Balkar. Apparently it means "knifesmith", "bladesmith", "swordsman", or "knivesman". Into the Azerbaijani language, "knife" is translated as "bıçaq" or "çaqqı". "çaqqı" can also mean "pocketknife". The original name likely starts with "bıç" / "biç", "vıç" / "viç", or "ıç" / "iç", and ends with the suffix "-çı" / "-çi" creating nouns denoting a profession, occupation, or inclination. We know that when it comes to foreign appellations, the Greek "τ" can represent the phoneme /ʧ/, and the Greek "ξ" the sequence /kʧ/, /xʧ/. Unfortunately, Theophanes the Confessor doesn't seem to provide any context that would connect the name to the knife, sabre, or sword. The only justification for this interpretation is the spelling itself and the interpretation's non-illogicality and non-impossibility. (00:16:21) Now, if the very first phoneme of the name was a consonant, this consonant was more likely to be voiced. That's why Crimean Tatar should probably be excluded from the list. As regards the rest, the original name would correspond to the Azerbaijani "bıçaqçı", Turkish "bıçakçı", Kumyk "biçaqçı", and Karachay-Balkar "бычакъчы". If I had to keep only one representative from each branch, I would narrow down the list to Azerbaijani and Balkar. Among the Turkic languages, there don't seem to be those where the same lexeme for "knife" could start with /v/. Apparently, if the Greek spelling starts with a vowel, since we are allowed to place a consonant /v/ before it, a consonant /b/ is probably placeable too. Our case appears to suggest this.

The Alanian ruler Ἰταξῆς is in no way related to the inscription we will now be dealing with. What might(!) be related to it is the possible importance of this link between the Alans and Leo III the Isaurian. In some parts of this video, we will(!) be discussing the Alanic language. But now, we return to the inscription discovered in Zhitkov-II, Mound 4, Burial 1. (00:17:39) It's incised on a lath or stiffener of a bow which Александр Семёнов characterises as Central Asian and Khazar. A reliable drawing of the inscription can be found not only in the article by the same author but also in the book by Gábor Hosszú (who references the former). (00:17:59) Gábor Hosszú labels it as Common Turkic and Khazar (perhaps because of Александр Семёнов's description of the bow) and provides the following interpretation, "We send Apsar Jap [the] bow. Shoot a mansion, wealth, oh to us!" Obviously this is wrong. Impossible, I would say. People don't speak like that, much less write like this. Gábor Hosszú thinks that the inscription is written in Turkic runes. But if we look closely, most of the signs, though not all of them, are Hebrew letters. (00:18:36) And the first seven signs from the right read unambiguously. The one resembling a trident is also a ligature of "ש" and "ו", even though it's written slightly differently than in the inscription from Sudak-IV. And similarly to that Crimean inscription, this "ו" also reads before the "ש", bottom to top. As for the seventh sign (which looks like a Hebrew final "ם"), it's a quite well-known Hebrew ligature of "נ" and "ו". Once these key ideas are established, it becomes clear that the fourth sign is the Latin "N". Why so? (00:19:14) Because the entire inscribed text starts with the word "Костяндину", "To Constantine": Hebrew "כ", Hebrew "ו", Hebrew "ש", Hebrew "ת", Latin "N", Hebrew "ד", Hebrew "י", Hebrew "נ", and Hebrew "ו". The way the name is written hints that the language of the inscription, as in the previous case, is Ukrainian too. Because the phrase "to Constantine", once translated, is closer to the standard modern Ukrainian "Костянтину" than to the standard modern Belarusian "Канстанціну" or standard modern Russian "Константину". If this trident is a ligature of "ש" and "ו" and not of "ש" and "נ", the Ukrainian language remains the only possible choice. The most interesting phenomenon about this name, though, is the consonant /d/ instead of /t/. (00:20:09) The spelling with "ד" is real - cases of the same orthographic preference can be found in the Khazar Correspondence. In the Long Recension of the Khagan Joseph's reply letter that was provided in the Hebrew newspaper "HaMelitz" / "ha-Melits" ("המליץ") by the Russian Empire scholar Abraham Eliyahu Harkavy, this name is spelt as "K-u-s-t-n-d-i-n-a" ("קוסטנדינא"), whereas, depending on the source and the instance within it, the words "Constantine" and "Constantinople" were spelt both with a "ס" and with a "ש".

In the beginning, to decipher the inscription, as a normal person, first I tried to find a coherent Hebrew(!) interpretation. But I failed and concluded that the inscription is probably written in a different language. Either because I don't know Hebrew enough and am not a normal person, or because it's indeed not Hebrew and, again, I'm not a normal person. To finally find a good interpretation, I started from the same simple idea: what if the inscription contains a word for "bow". But instead of looking for this(!) word, I mistakenly started looking for a word for "quiver". (00:21:23) Into the modern Ukrainian language, "quiver" is translated as "сагайдак", though the last word is sometimes used to denote the bow as well. The interesting thing about this word is that it matches the last four signs of the inscription. The first two of them are "ש" and "ג". The last one is a pictogram resembling a roof of a house. In the Ukrainian language, the roof is called "дах". But what about the third sign? It resembles an eye, doesn't it? (00:21:54) The letter in the Hebrew alphabet that represents the eye is "ע". And because of its name, apparently, in this place in the inscription, this sign is pronounced either as /j/ or /aj/. The fact that this word is spelt with "ש" instead of "ס" and the phrase "to Constantine" with "שת" instead of "סט" may indicate that the word for "quiver" or "bow" in this inscription should be read not as "сагайдак" but "сягайдак" or "сягайдах" (00:22:27) - because the previous three signs before the last four are a Hebrew "ט", a Hebrew "ס", and a Latin "N". "ש" and "ת" represent the consonants /s/ and /t/ with palatalisation, whereas "ס" and "ט" without. It doesn't mean that we have to change the interpretation of the previous inscription where "ש" is probably not palatalised. Whether and how to distinguish consonants by the palatalisation feature or by some other criterion is only the author's choice. We saw the same thing when we were dealing with the runic inscriptions of the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklós. (00:23:07) The five signs before those three can be read quite easily: Hebrew "ע", Hebrew "כ", Hebrew "ע", Hebrew "ז", Latin "N", which constitute the word "оказан". This word is definitely related to the Ukrainian verb "оказати". In the 20th century, the verb "оказати" was traslated as "to show", "to exhibit", "to manifest". In the same way is translated the Polish verb "okazać". In Russian, the verb "оказать" can also be translated as "to give", "to provide", while in Old Polish, the verb "okazać" can also mean "to grant". Also, pay attention to the fact that the Silesian counterpart of the Polish "okazać" is "ôkŏzać". Silesian dialects are primarily spoken in southern Poland and neighbouring regions across its southern border. I think that the word "оказан" in the inscription can be legitimately interpreted as "is provided", but the way the author spelt it may also suggest that he possibly regarded the verb "оказати" as connected to vision. (00:24:16) The Hebrew letter "ע", when used as a vowel, may represent not only the phoneme /o/ but also /a/. But the sound /o/ can be considered as the default one because, comparing different alphabetic systems, the counterparts of the Hebrew "ע" are the Greek "Ο", the Cyrillic "О", and the Latin "O", all of which have the same shape as the Phoenician "𐤏". And all of them denote or resemble the eye. The first three signs of the word "оказан" can also be read as "око", which in the Ukrainian language (and not only) means "eye". To "show", to "exhibit", to "manifest" something to someone, this someone must be able to see it. Moreover, the author may have repeated the letter "ע" two times to denote two eyes. The first "ע" seems to be a natural choice because, with the first letter being "ו", the word would be read as "вказан" or "указан". But the meanings of the verbs "вказати" and "указати" are completely unsuitable for the inscription. It's possible that these five signs were pronounced not as "оказан" but something like "окозан" (recall the Silesian form). But since the inscription is most likely written in an older version of the Ukrainian language, we deliberately favour the form "оказан". The word probably means "is provided" because, if the bow is a gift, it was not just demonstrated; it was also given. You can think of this as the English verb "to present" which embodies both the concepts, "to show" and "to give". (00:26:01) "сагайдак" is another case (not less prominent than the case of "оказан") where the author probably tried to reflect the connection of the word with some others. The form "сягайдах" or "сягайдак" can also be read as a phrase, "сягай дах!" or "сягай дак!", "reach the roof!". There are several ways to imagine this. It can be understood as "kill the sniper!" - "take out the enemy archer holding the height!". Or, conversely, "you archer, take the high ground to kill the enemy!". Or this one, "shoot the arrow at such an angle that the arrow reaches the height needed to hit a distant target!". However, it's also possible that for the author it was just a pun which they decided to include in the inscription. What is also unclear is whether the "roof" pictogram should be read as "дах" or "дак". (00:26:53) The modern Ukrainian noun "дах" is usually believed to have been borrowed via Polish from German not earlier than the 14th-16th century CE. But it's unlikely that the inscription was engraved that recently. If the pictogram must be read as "дах", we have to consider a scenario where the language this lexeme was borrowed from into Ukrainian by the time of the inscription was possibly Yiddish. (00:27:20) If the pictogram is pronounced as "дак", it would likely mean that the Ukrainian language borrowed this term at least twice, with the first borrowing having occurred around or before the date on which the inscription was made. In this case, if it's not Yiddish, the source language is hardly establishable. The only possible candidate in close proximity is Cimmerian (if it still existed). But whether this term in Cimmerian had the same form as the Dutch lexeme "dak" is unknown. It seems that the form "дах" is more reliable. Moreover, the interpretation "сягайдах" of the last word represents both "сягайдах" and "сягайдак" at the same time: it's easier to reconstruct "сягайдак" from "сягайдах" than vice versa because the term "сагайдак" is well-known, "сягайдах" is a discovered one, and "сягайдак" lies between them.

(00:28:16) We have just deciphered the following three parts of the inscription: "Костяндину" ("To Constantine"), "оказан" ("is provided"), and "сягайдах" ("bow" or "quiver"). You may doubt whether grouping these signs in this way is correct, assuming that these drawings are reliable. But we can see in the drawings that in the entire inscription the spaces between some of the signs are larger than between the others. And the next word I want to discuss is the one between "оказан" and "сягайдах". The first thought that can cross the mind of a decipherer of this inscription is that these three signs are possibly an adjective modifying the noun "сягайдах". (00:28:59) In the beginning, I tried inserting the adjective "тесаний", "hewn". If the bow was made only of wood, this interpretation would make some sense. But the inscription is engraved on the bow's lath or stiffener, which may mean that it belonged to the class of composite bows (which are not self-bows nor compound bows). Composite bows are not made only of wood. If this bow was indeed composite, then I don't quite understand why the author would write the adjective "тесаний" or a related term. To highlight the huge efforts? This is not completely impossible, but I would consider the following alternative. (00:29:39) I suppose that this word is not an adjective but an appositive that is derived by the author or just derives from the noun "тис", "yew" ("yew tree"). ... You don't understand, do you? Let me explain. With these three signs, the author could have written the word "тисень". Though the noun-forming suffix "-ень" does exist and even can modify nouns (as in the case "краса" to "красень": "beauty" to "handsome man"), the word "тисень" is absent from the Ukrainian lexicon. This transformation from "тис" to "тисень" the author possibly applied can be compared to the literary device called "antimeria"; but only if "тисень" describes the following noun directly - the situation where "тисень" means "made of yew" or "containing yew" is a case in point. To me, it doesn't seem possible to translate the phrase "тисень сягайдах" into English as meaning "the yew-made bow or quiver" while retaining the antimeria. (00:30:40) Instead, I would translate it as the evaluative binominal noun phrase "the yew of a bow". Regardless of whether the word in question is related to yew or hewing, it suggests that the last one in the inscription is unlikely to denote a quiver - because both the options imply a material like wood or stone. The problem is that yew is not considered a good wood for composite bows and, reportedly, was not preferred. But this may make sense if this bow was not supposed to be used for shooting but was instead a presentation one or funerary - "the perfect composite bow which ordinary people are unable to construct". (00:31:20) "тисень" could also mean that it's not the bow that is made of yew but its arrows that are tipped with yew poison. In this case, this is not just an antimeria but also a metonymy. To reflect both these literary devices in English, we cannot use the previous structure anymore - we have to replace "the yew of a bow" with "the yewing bow" - "the lethiferous composite bow". But there is also one more explanation. (00:31:47) Both the terms "тисень" and "сягайдах" can mean the same, "bow". Because into Ancient Greek, the word "bow" is translated as "τόξον" which, in turn, is a possible cognate of the Latin "taxus" which means "yew". For this scenario, the best translation I can come up with is "the yew-bow", and for the sake of simplicity we will be sticking to it. We will also be sticking to the interpretation "тисень", but the alternatives are the adjective "тесаний" ("hewn") and the noun "тесань" (which conveys the same meaning).

(00:32:20) In the remaining piece consisting of five signs, we can identify two instances of the letter "ג". Whether after the first of them there is a space separating it from the next four signs is unclear, but this does not pose any problem because this whole section reads the same either way (in my view). The second and the fourth signs of these five resemble "כ" and "ד". But I think that, in fact, they are "ב" and "ר", which, as we know, are not much different from "כ" and "ד". The third sign is either "ה" or "ח" (which are also similar to each other). And I think it's actually "ה" because, deciphering the inscription, I came to the conclusion that this sign most likely represents a vowel /e/. The only reasonable interpretation I've managed to find for this piece is "в оберіг". "в" is the preposition "in" as in the phrase "in support of" or "in defence of", "оберіг" is a noun that can be translated as "amulet" or "talisman". If the bow was funerary, we could translate "в оберіг" into the English phrase "as an amulet". But I deliberately mentioned these two structures "in support of" and "in defence of" because the Ukrainian verb "оберігати" (which is related to the noun "оберіг") means "to guard", "to defend", "to protect". And in a more literal and general sense, "в оберіг" means "in defence of you" - "for your protection", "to protect you". It can be replaced with the phrase "as an amulet", but not necessarily. I possibly know why the author of the inscription has started this piece with the letter "ג" instead of "ו". They possibly thought that with the first letter being "ו", the piece could be erroneously read as "оберіг" instead of the phrase "в оберіг", whereas "гоберіг" with the "ג" at the beginning would be naturally caught as "в оберіг": "в оберіг" - "гоберіг", "гоберіг" - "в оберіг".

So what is said in this inscription? (00:34:26) "Костяндину в оберіг оказан тисень(-)сягайдах!" - "To Constantine, for [his] protection, the yew-bow is provided!" Who is this Constantine? And who is the author? It could have been written by the Khazars, but also by the Alans. The fact that Ἰταξῆς is apparently a Turkic appellation doesn't mean that the Alans were predominantly Turkic. The earliest mention of the Alans in the historical and literary record dates back to the 1st century CE: "Thyestes" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, "Pharsalia" by Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, "The Judean War" by Flavius Josephus, "Natural History" by Pliny the Elder. If those Alans were Turkic, we currently have no data confirming this. Instead, the data we have at the moment give us a reason to think that they could have been Slavic (because of the Scythians), Germanic (because of the Cimmerians), Northwest Caucasian (because of the Argippaeans), or Hungarian (because of the Sauromatae). Let's assume for a while that the Alans of the time of the inscription were predominantly Slavic (even if this is not true) - because it was them, not the Khazars, who were visited by Leo III the Isaurian, whose solidus, according to Александр Семёнов, was found in the burial along with the lath or stiffener of a bow on which the inscription was carved, wasn't it? The fact that the bow is addressed to some Constantine suggests that the recipient was either a Byzantine native (including the emperor) or a Khazar or an Alan baptised under this name. Baptism typically involves receiving the name of a saint. However, if an individual being baptised was not born in the Byzantine Empire, the baptismal sponsor (that is, the godfather) could give the individual their own name (making the individual their namesake). In this way, the sponsor signified the dependence of the baptised individual on themselves. If the sponsor was the emperor, this dependence could be political. If the Constantine in the inscription was not a Byzantine native, we have almost no data to reveal his identity or the story behind the bow. The earliest known person in the historical record bearing this name that can be regarded as a Khazar or an Alan is the magistros Constantine the Alan from the 11th century CE. The situation becomes even more obscure if the bow was addressed to a Byzantine native who was never a member of any Byzantine emperor's family. The only thing we can do now is to assess the possibility that the Constantine in question was actually one who was or later became a Byzantine ruler. And it seems that the most plausible candidate is Constantine V, the son of Leo III the Isaurian; while Constantine VI is an unlikely one. The inscription may have commemorated the period of relatively good relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Khazars. (00:37:49) Scholars believe that Constantine V, before the beginning of his reign, when he was around fourteen, married the Khazar princess Tzitzak (Τζιτζάκ). This name is nowhere mentioned in the historical record directly, it's a reconstruction. However, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in his "De Cerimoniis" indeed mentions a type of clothing called "tzitzakion" ("τζιτζάκιον") while scholia to his text refer to "tzitzakia" ("τζιτζάκια") as Khazar garments which were introduced by an "augousta from Khazaria" (in the translation by Ann Moffatt and Maxeme Tall); which means that her name prior to her baptism was not necessarily Tzitzak. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus's account clearly indicates that the "tzitzakion" was not underwear. Whenever a Byzantine emperor wore a "tzitzakion" along with a "divetesion" ("διβητήσιον"), the "divetesion" was always worn underneath the "tzitzakion", though the "tzitzakion" was not the outermost garment either. The question is whether the Khazar princess was herself dressed in a "tzitzakion" or "tzitzak" when she supposedly introduced it to the Byzantines. Why this question? Because thinking in this direction may lead us to the answer. (00:39:07) If this term comes from the language of the Khazars, I would derive it from the Ukrainian noun "цицька", "mamilla". "Цицяк" was either a nickname for the Khazar princess which meant "busty woman" (which could have been how her father referred to her, for instance), or it was already a term for some garment covering the chest without the lower parts of the body. "Цицяк" was not a name given to the princess at birth. I highly doubt that it was any of her appellations. Generally, Marcel Erdal is correct that the point suggested by the Hungarian professor Gyula Moravcsik about "Tzitzak" being her original personal name, with which the American professor Peter Benjamin Golden agreed (or still agrees), is far-fetched. And it seems to me that in this trio only one person tried to think. Marcel Erdal at least made a noticeable effort to step beyond the limits of the Turkic world. While the other two reinforce the occurrence I honestly dislike, "one says, another one repeats". It's unlikely that the Khazar princess bore the Turkic name "Çıçak" (much less "Çiçek") meaning "flower" also for the reason that the term for the garment is spelt with "τζ". "τζ" is read /ʧ/ neither here nor in the Buyla inscription (notwithstanding that it's not Greek), and my previous point that the first part of the original name of the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv is connected to the Ukrainian term "дзерно" ("grain") is also likely to be valid - because, according to the printed edition we dealt with, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus spelt it with "τζ" as well (though, ideally, we should rely on manuscripts and their critical analysis). (The name of the city of Chernihiv was possibly distorted into its present-day form via text, not speech. A likely example of this type of distortion can be traced in the name of the Crimean and Ukrainian city of Yalta. We will be discussing from what probable original Ukrainian term it developed in another video.) At the same time, the name "Bıçaqçı" / "Бычакъчы" is spelt by Theophanes the Confessor with a single "τ" only, not "τζ" (unless "Ἰταξῆς" has a better interpretation that I currently don't see). If the princess's name had been "Çıçak", the garment would more probably have been called "τιτάκιον". (The phenomena I've just recited do not apply to the Hebrew alphabet in the exact same way.) (00:41:48) If the bow was a gift addressed to Constantine V, then how did it appear in the burial? The simplest explanation is that it was never intended for him to receive during his lifetime, or was(!) intended but was not delivered. If it was a wedding(!) gift rejected by him or his representatives, then the inscription is more likely to be written by the Khazars than the Alans. But if it was supposed to be delivered to Constantine as the child of his father Leo III the Isaurian, then the Alans are more likely to be the sender. If it was funerary, either option is possible. Constantine V was not buried in the North Caucasus, Ciscaucasia, or the nearby territories of the East European Plain bounded to the north by the Don and Volga rivers (all of which I referred to as the "North Caucasus" in my previous videos). But he still could have been the intended recipient of the bow - whether in earthly life or the afterlife - if, for example, this burial is a cenotaph: at least, the same work by Александр Семёнов makes no mention of human remains at this site. The inscription is not written solely in Hebrew letters, but also in the repeated instances of the Latin character and in the pictogram. This might indicate that it was incised either before the official conversion of the Khazars to Judaism or during the early period following its adoption. That's why I think that the Constantine in the inscription is unlikely to be the magistros Constantine the Alan - it's too late. Most likely, before us is a sample of the Ukrainian language of the 8th century CE. The century can be debated, but the language is virtually certain. This was the last Slavic inscription in this video.

(00:43:39) The next inscription is incised on a clay flask that, according to the Soviet and Russian historian and archaeologist Игорь Леонидович Кызласов (Igor' Leonidovich Kyzlasov), was accidentally discovered during the construction of the Salsk-Tsaritsyn railway in 1896 (Tsaritsyn being one of the former names of present-day Volgograd). In his book "Runic scripts of the Eurasian steppes" (in the orig. Russian, "Рунические письменности евразийских степей"), Игорь Кызласов writes that the find is dated to the 8th-10th century CE. His work contains drawings of different inscriptions, even of the previous one we just discussed. But what must be noted is that the drawings he made himself differ from those provided by other authors. Unlike the previous inscription, the discrepancy for this one is minor. For this inscription, Gábor Hosszú selects the drawing by the Hungarian historian, archaeologist, and linguist Gábor Vékony, which is closer to the photo than the drawing by Игорь Кызласов. (00:44:43) But no matter which drawing any author used, none of them suggested a coherent interpretation. "Oh. Let us drink. We drink from [this] bosha." "Brave was - Kaisykh-kan (pupil of) Kaisykh." "Engraved inscription - inscription of hope. This (belongs to) home (= lodge)." Are you serious? This inscription is actually one of the simplest. (00:45:09) It's mainly written in Old Turkic script, and contains two repeated blocks. In each of them, only the second sign from the right is unfamiliar to us. But looking at the whole inscription, this sign becomes comparable to the one with the phonetic value /m/. Each of these blocks is the negative subject impersonal imperfective or non-past (adjectival) participle of the verb meaning "to drink". In Turkish, this form is pronounced "içmeyen"; in Azerbaijani, "içməyən". (00:45:40) Whereas the very first sign in the entire inscription is the word for "water". Among the five modern Turkic languages we already mentioned in this video, not counting dialectal forms, Azerbaijani and Turkish are the only ones where this word contains just one consonant. And that's one of the reasons why I believe that the language of the inscription is closest to one of these two (if not exactly one of them). The first two words are read Turkish-wise as "su içmeyen" and Azerbaijani-wise as "su içməyən" ("not drinking water"). (00:46:17) The third word corresponds to the Azerbaijani word for "blood" ("qan") or the Turkish and Azerbaijani word for "sun" ("gün") - because the first sign, just as in the previous inscription, denotes the eye; the difference is that it should be replaced with the Latin letter "g" or "q" because the Turkish and Azerbaijani word for "eye" is "göz". I conjecture that the correct option is not related to blood but to sun. The only remaining sign to clarify is the second from the left. (00:46:48) It resembles the Turkic rune whose phonetic values include /ot/ and /ut/. But in this inscription, it may represent not the phoneme /t/ but /d/. In modern Turkish, the last part of the inscription would be read as "kişi hiçtir" which means "a man is a worthless person" or "the man is a worthless person". But the Azerbaijani word-for-word and morpheme-for-morpheme counterpart of the same phrase would be pronounced as "kişi heçdir" (even if the Azerbaijani people do not speak like that today). Why I think that this sign may represent the phoneme /d/ is because the same sign is present in another inscription, which I will show you a bit later in this video. And establishing the exact phoneme may hint at whether the language before us is closer to Turkish or Azerbaijani. (00:47:41) But, at the moment, we have to read the entire line in both the ways. Turkish-wise, the line reads, "Su içmeyen, gün içmeyen kişi hiçtir!" Azerbaijani-wise, it reads, "Su içməyən, gün içməyən kişi heçdir!" - "The man not drinking water, not absorbing sun is nothing!" I cannot say what the exact meaning is, but the phrase resembles the Latin proverb "mens sana in corpore sano" - "a sound mind in a sound body" - but expressed in a slightly different way, "There is no body without water, there is no mind without sun, and you are nothing if either is missing."

(00:48:25) The same "eye" sign can also be encountered in one more inscription found in the Mayatskoye gorodishche (Mayatskoye hillfort) in the Russian Federation Voronezh Oblast'. The Russian Empire, Soviet, and Ukrainian archaeologist known in the Russian language as Николай Емельянович Макаренко and in the Ukrainian language as Микола Омелянович Макаренко (Mykola Omelianovych Makarenko) believed that the hillfort and a cemetery located at the same site were coeval. In the journal "Bulletin [or News] of the Imperial Archaeological Commission" (in the orig. Russian, "Известия Императорской Археологической комиссии"), he reported that the objects in the cemetery were dated to the 8th-9th century CE. But he didn't know when the inscription was made. (I don't know either.) When providing a drawing of this inscription, Gábor Hosszú refers to Gábor Vékony. But this time, this was the wrong decision. (00:49:24) The less controversial drawing is actually provided by Игорь Кызласов. Not just because the photo in the report by Микола Макаренко suggests that if there are indeed signs after the sixth one from the right, there are at least two of them (not one), but also because the first six signs perfectly read "minik ayğır", "minek ayğır", "binek aygır", or "binek ayğır" - "riding stallion", "riding horse". (00:49:51) - No, not "Uma and Angush - our names"; no, not "Kan of Alans"; no, not "Shugaymek"; and, of course, not "I will write [something]". - (00:50:03) Into Turkish, "riding horse" can also be translated as "binek atı". But I think that the language of the inscription, comparing to the same five, is closer to Azerbaijani ("minik ayğır"), Crimean Tatar ("minek ayğır"), or Kumyk ("миник айгъыр"). As for Karachay-Balkar, I didn't find a similar form for the first word. The dictionaries I checked suggest that, instead of "minik" or "minek", its speakers say "миннген". At the same time, the word "stallion" is translated into Karachay-Balkar as "аджир". I think that the phonetic value of the first sign is /m/, not /b/ - hence "minik" or "minek". Though we cannot say confidently whether the fifth sign should be read as /g/, /ɣ/, or /ʤ/, the point that it's indeed the "eye"(!) sign is rather confirmed now. Moreover, that someone could have written this phrase, "minik/minek ayğır", is not unexpected. In the same report, Микола Макаренко writes that, besides inscriptions, on the walls of the hillfort, several images of a horse were also encountered. The inscription in question can simply be a caption.

Now it's time for me to argue my case for why the last word in the previous inscription may also be read as "heçdir", not necessarily "hiçtir", and why the first word in this inscription is more likely to be "minik/minek" rather than "binek". (00:51:32) The inscription containing both these signs is incised on a clay flask reportedly discovered near the Krivyanskaya stanitsa (Krivyanskaya village) in the Russian Federation Rostov Oblast' and dated to the 9th-10th century CE by the Soviet archaeologist and historian Михаил Илларионович Артамонов (Mikhail Illarionovich Artamonov). Gábor Hosszú provides the drawing of the inscription as it's depicted by the Soviet linguist Георгий Фёдорович Турчанинов (Georgii Fedorovich/Fyodorovich Turchaninov) in his article from 1964 published in the journal "Soviet Archaeology" ("Советская археология") (the same person who suggested the Ossetic interpretation of the previous inscription). The only thing wrong in this drawing is the low dot next to the sign resembling a hash or a stile. In his article, when enumerating separators in the inscribed text, Георгий Турчанинов doesn't mention this dot, while in another work by him from 1971 mentioned by Gábor Hosszú, the drawing itself(!) is provided without it. Plus, there are other differences between the two drawings in how the same separators are depicted. (00:52:42) A copy of the second drawing along with the interpretation by Георгий Турчанинов from his 1971 work can also be found in the work by the Bulgarian author Живко Гочев Войников (Zhivko Gochev Voynikov) titled "The Alano-Proto-Bulgarian script" (in the orig. Bulgarian, "Алано-древнобългарското писмо"). Игорь Кызласов does not depict any separators in his drawing, but for the rest, it matches the 1971 drawing by Георгий Турчанинов. (00:53:12) The inscription has several new signs not familiar to us, and now I will tell you how I currently interpret them. The one resembling the Latin letter "X" but with two additional elements near the intersection is probably read as /t/ - because without these two elements, we get the Turkic rune with the phonetic value /d/ (which is also present in the inscription). The letter resembling the Greek letter "φ" is probably read as /f/. The sign resembling a hash or a stile most likely corresponds to the Latin letter "h" in Turkic spelling (if the language of the inscription is Turkic). And the third sign from the right resembles the sign with the phonetic value /i/ used in the runic inscriptions of the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklós. When I tried to decipher the inscription, I started from Karachay-Balkar and Kabardian, but these attempts were not successful. The Circassian interpretation by Георгий Турчанинов the approximate Russian-to-English translation of which reads "The jug, to whom it having belonged, Leyuk: was a warrior of the Kuuyev clan of a famous tribe." is not an example of a successful attempt. (00:54:25) But I must admit that this reading, without verifying the grammar, sounds much better than the following two: "Vessel of the house (lodge), this is sanctuary-home (lodge). Living in this house, the last you will taste is araka [or vodka]. Drink!" and "[This] voshu drink is yours. [This] drink should keep alive [the] one who drinks [it]. For you, Uachag wrote this.". If you think that I mention interpretations by other authors and researchers to show how far human knowledge (including scientific) has progressed thus far and whether it's too far from normality or not, you've wrongly understood my intention. ... I just want you to share my pain. ... (00:55:11) The inscription is indeed written in a Turkic language in my view. But it looks as though some of the words and morphemes are borrowings from Persian and Arabic. For instance, the fourth block from the left is the Turkic word for "wine" that was borrowed from the Persian "باده" /baː.ˈda/. It corresponds to the Azerbaijani "badə" and the Turkish "bade". Another example is the third block from the left which is most likely read as "natahır" or "natahir". The prefix "na-" that exists in Turkish and Azerbaijani among others and was borrowed into them from Persian means the same as the English prefix "non-" while "tahır" / "tahir" is the loanword borrowed from the Arabic "طَاهِر" ("ṭāhir") meaning "pure" or "clean". The sign corresponding to the phoneme /t/ in this block appears in the inscription two times. However, there is a reason to doubt that its second instance is also pronounced voicelessly. (00:56:10) Turkish-wise, the inscription reads "Keşişimiz nakış mizah diyen, bade natahır Şaha Gaffar Taç". Azerbaijani-wise, "Keşişimiz naxış mizah deyən, badə natahır Şaha Qafar Tac". "keşişimiz" means "our priest". "nakış" / "naxış" is translated as "(painted) decoration", "embroidery", "ornament", or, figuratively, "trick", "deception". But in this inscription, this word most likely means "imagery" ("decorating"). The two dots inside the second sign of the second block from the right might be a modifier signifying that the correct pronunciation is the Azerbaijani one, "naxış". "mizah" means "humour". (00:57:00) And "diyen" / "deyən" is the positive subject impersonal imperfective or non-past (adjectival) participle produced from the verb "demek" / "demək" meaning "to call", "to name". The reason why "diyen" / "deyən" is spelt with the sign resembling a horseshoe, which is more likely to be pronounced as /t/ than /d/ in the other part of the inscription, is probably connected to the fact that the root of the verb "demek" / "demək" is considered to originate from the reconstructed Proto-Turkic root "*tē-". However, it doesn't mean that the word in the inscription should be read as "tiyen" / "teyən" instead of "diyen" / "deyən". Right now, this is not establishable. (00:57:42) The entire translation reads, "Our priest calling imagery humour [and] wine impure to Shah Gaffar Taj." "Gaffar" in the inscription can be a name, a title, or an epithet of the shah. The word originates from the Arabic "غَفَّار" /ɣaf.faːr/ meaning "inclined to forgive", "forgiving". Besides, "ٱلْغَفَّارُ" (Al-Ghaffār) is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. The last word in the inscription is also a loanword. It was borrowed from either Arabic or Persian and corresponds to the Turkish "taç" and Azerbaijani "tac". The word itself means "crown", but in this expression, "Şaha Gaffar / Ğaffar Tac", it can also be understood as "His Crown" (akin to "His Majesty", "His Highness", "His Excellency", and so on) - "to His Crown Shah Gaffar [or Ghaffar]", "to His Crown the All-Forgiving Shah". The text of the inscription is a message through which a priest is assuring a shah that he and his community are committed to Islam. That's why he calls wine impure - because Muslims believed it was forbidden in earthly life. But at the same time, he tried to convey that images of living beings made by people should not be regarded as contradicting Islamic holy texts (at least, as a general rule). That's why he calls imagery humour - "the images we have and create are not serious and thus pose no threat to Islamic law or the Islamic order" - the priest and the community didn't want the shah to initiate their effacement or, if he had already started, to continue doing so. Also, pay attention to the fact that we don't know whether this community was already under his rule or not. (00:59:35) Because of the suffix "-imiz" in the inscription instead of "-ibiz", its language is unlikely to have anything to do with Karachay-Balkar or Kumyk. Whereas the participle "diyen" / "deyən" excludes not only those two but also Crimean Tatar: in all the three languages, as far as I understand, the same participle is spelt "degen" / "деген". Presuming that the second sign of the second block from the right does have the modifier, I think that this inscription is written in some ancestor of the Azerbaijani language or its close "non-Turkish" sister. The same point probably applies to all the three Turkic inscriptions we so far have analysed. But to be more confident, we need to decipher more of them. (01:00:20) One additional remark I want to share with you concerns the term "shah". Some people believe that the Russian noun "шашка" ("checker", "draughtsman") derives from this word. But I suppose that, in fact, it originates from its counterpart in a Finno-Ugric language related (via borrowing or not) to the Hungarian(!) noun "sáska" ("grasshopper").

(01:00:43) The next and the last inscription in this video is not written in any Turkic language. It was discovered in a dwelling of the Tsimlyanskoye gorodishche (Tsimlyanskoye hillfort) in the Russian Federation Rostov Oblast' on a fragment of a bovine tubular bone. The inscription is presented in the article "A runic inscription from the Right-Bank Tsimlyanskoye gorodishche" (in the orig. Russian, "Руническая надпись с Правобережного Цимлянского городища") authored by the Soviet historian Василий Сергеевич Флёров (Vasilii Sergeevich Flerov/Flyorov) and the Belarusian-born Soviet and Russian historian Сергей Григорьевич Кляшторный (Sergei Grigor'evich Kliashtornyi). Not assessing the reliability of their view, the article dates the inscription to the 9th century CE. The inscription consists of six signs (not four) with the last being the one resembling a colon and being the leftmost at the proper orientation (which is already shown). Most likely, this sign has no phonetic value and just denotes the end of the preceding phrase. Of the remaining five, the second sign from the right resembles a separator we saw in the inscriptions of the Nagyszentmiklós treasure. And the remaining four approximately match those four identified by the authors. (01:01:58) And they have actually correctly transliterated the first two. They indeed correspond to the Latin letters "l" and "g" in that order. The last two can also be replaced with their matching Turkic runes. The rune closest to the fourth sign is one with the phonetic value /b/, whereas, to be more confident about the assumed link between the third sign and its matching rune, we can pay attention to the Hebrew alphabet - the third sign corresponds not only to the Turkic rune with the phonetic value /s/ or /ʃ/ but also to the Hebrew letter "ס". These four signs can be transliterated either as "l", "g", "s", "b", or as "l", "q", "s", "b". In the entire inscription, the second sign of all the six is probably indeed a separator. But let's assume it's not. The only values I can assign to it are /i/ and /e/ - because it resembles the Hebrew "י" ("yod"). (01:02:55) In such a case, the inscription could be read as the Hungarian adjective "legszebb" - "the most beautiful". But then, the following questions come. "The most beautiful cow"? "ox"? Someone who killed their cow or ox for sale was missing it? ... But if we think again about this major hint that the second sign is quite likely to be a separator with the preceding sign representing the isolated consonant /l/, it can quite instantly dawn on us that the first word in the inscription is almost certainly the Arabic definite article "اَلْ" ("al"). (01:03:28) Whereas the entire expression most fitting to have been carved on this bone is the Arabic phrase "اَلْقَصَّاب", "(The) Butcher". In this hillfort, archaeologists excavated hundreds(!) of animal bones. If this "butcher" was the owner of the dwelling in which the bone with the inscription was found, then perhaps the engraved text was his signature (at the very least, the one identifying him as a supplier, for example). But if the dwelling belonged to the bone's recipient, then the inscription is either the supplier's signature as before or a note of the supplier's name made by the recipient to distinguish one group of bones from others. The last idea should probably be rejected because, had it been a note, the author writing such an inscription would rather not have spent their energy carving separators or punctuation marks. That's why the interpretation "legszebb" ("the most beautiful") is also unlikely - for the same reason. Assuming it's a signature written in Arabic words, the inscription alone therefore does not allow us to establish who owned this dwelling: this person who signed himself "(The) Butcher", or someone else. We need some other data to reach any conclusions on this matter.

Impressed? The second inscription in this video with the name "Constantine" was most likely written by an author from the Khazar or Alanic community. That's why I think it makes sense to discuss what we actually know about the Alanic language. I've already conveyed my point that the name, nickname, title, or epithet "Ἰταξῆς" of the Alanian ruler mentioned by Theophanes the Confessor corresponds to the Azerbaijani "bıçaqçı" and the Karachay-Balkar "бычакъчы". It's possible that, at some point, Turkic speakers indeed emerged in their society, at least among their elite. But who were the non-Turkic speakers, then? Did they exist? (01:05:29) A source that may suggest a possible answer to this question is "Book of Precious Necklaces" by Ibn Rustah. This time, we will be relying on the Arabic text in the critical edition by Michael Jan de Goeje and the Russian translations of Ibn Rustah's work by the Russian historian in the Republic of Tatarstan Нурия Габдулахатовна Гараева (Nuriia Gabdulakhatovna Garaeva) and the Russian Empire historian Николай Александрович Караулов (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Karaulov). Ibn Rustah writes that the king of the Alans was called "بغاير" ("b-gh-a-i-r"). Given that he portrays the king of the Alans as a Christian while the Alanian people as pagans, I think that the following interpretation of the term "بغاير" ("b-gh-a-i-r") is quite plausible. (01:06:11) I think that it's the Ukrainian word "боговір", "one who believes in God", deriving from the terms "Бог" for "God" and "вірувати" / "вірити" for "to believe (in)". As we remember, the Arabic letter "ا" can represent the vowel /o/ at least in foreign words. (In Ukrainian dictionaries, we can also find the adjective "боговірний" meaning "pious".) It's rather unlikely that the Alanian ruler was referred to by this title or epithet by those professing monotheistic religions or by any Slavic speakers not being part of the elites of the countries neighbouring Alania. Those who called the Alanian ruler "بغاير" ("b-gh-a-i-r") were most probably the Ukrainian-speaking locals. The only problem is that, in the historical record in regard to the Alans, "боговір" might be the only word that can be quite easily identified as Ukrainian or at least Slavic (though this is not thoroughly verified yet). (01:07:08) To take an example, Ibn Rustah's account conveys that the tribe associated with nobility and kingship was called "دحساس" ("d-ḥ-s-a-s"). The word (or its last part) that could have been spelt in this way is the Greek "δοξος" related to the Modern Greek noun "δόξα" ("glory", "fame", "pride") and the Ancient Greek adjective "εὔδοξος" ("of good repute", "honoured", "famous", "glorious"). Ibn Rustah is not the only author to mention a seemingly Greek term regarding the Alans. (01:07:39) Another such example is the name of their capital which, in his work titled "Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems", al-Mas'udi spells as "مَعَص" ("ma'as") or "مَغَص" ("maghas"). According to his account, this word means "(religious) devotion" (in the French translation by Charles Barbier de Meynard and Abel Pavet de Courteille), "godliness" (in the Russian translation by Nikolai Karaulov), and "observation of religion" (in the English translation by Aloys Sprenger; by "observation of religion", he means "observance of religion"). In such different ways different authors translate the Arabic word "دِيَاْنَة" ("diyāna") ("religion", "confession", "denomination"). (01:08:22) Regardless of the exact meaning, a word that fits any of these interpretations is the Greek "μιγάς", "monk who lives in a monastery". (The name of the German and Bavarian city of Munich also derives from a word for "monk", by the way.) A less likely scenario is that "مَعَص" ("ma'as") / "مَغَص" ("maghas") is related to the Ancient Greek "μάγος", "Zoroastrian priest". But even in this case the word in question would most probably be Greek too, not Iranic. Nevertheless, both the terms denote a person. If "مَعَص" ("ma'as") / "مَغَص" ("maghas") is indeed a name of the city, (01:09:00) it's more likely to correspond to the Ancient Greek or Greek adjective "μέγας" - "big", "large", "great", "very important" - which could have been confused by some people with the word "μιγάς" for "monk". Alania's capital was the largest and the most important city compared to the rest - that's why it was simply called "μέγας". This interpretation does not contradict the Arabic spelling with all the diacritics if the first "fatḥah" above the letter "م" ("mīm") can indeed represent the vowel /e/. If, in the original text, the diacritic added to this letter was actually a "kasrah", the Arabic spelling would match both "μιγάς" and "μέγας". If no diacritics were used, we don't care. (01:09:44) Describing the Alans, al-Mas'udi also writes that their kings were called by their general name of "كركنداج" ("k-r-k-n-d-a-j") or "كدكنداج" ("k-d-k-n-d-a-j"). If this term consists of two parts with the second part corresponding to the Persian "تاج" ("tāj") or the Arabic "تَاج" ("tāj") meaning "crown", the first part still does not appear to be Iranic. But it may also be connected to religion. (01:10:07) "كركن" ("k-r-k-n") resembles a Germanic adjective deriving from the Germanic noun for "church" that corresponds to the English "kirk", the Scots "kirk", and the Dutch "kerk". The phrase "church crown" can be understood as "ecclesiastical ruler". But if the first part is Germanic, is the second part indeed Arabic or Iranic? And why "dāj" instead of "tāj"? When the Arabic letter "ج" ("jīm") is used in the spelling of a foreign word, the original sound it transcribes can be read as /g/. (01:10:39) It means that the actual sequence before us is not necessarily "k-r-k-n-d-a-j" but possibly "k-r-k-n-d-a-g", and "k-r-k-n-d-a-g" quite clearly resembles the Dutch "kerkendag" and, to a lesser extent, the German "Kirchentag". These words are translated as "church day", "church meeting", "church council", "church congress". Therefore, there is high likelihood that "k-r-k-n-d-a-j" in the Arabic text may not be a title. If it's fully Germanic, the most likely translations would include "church council" and "church light" where the last, if accurate, could have been a title for a single individual while the first would suggest that what the account by al-Mas'udi means by "general name" is in fact "group name", though it's not necessarily the name of their kings. (01:11:27) Regardless of the second part - whether it's about a "crown" or not - the mention by Ibn Rustah and al-Mas'udi of Slavic, Germanic, and Greek terms in regard to the Alans allows us to state that their locals resided next to the Sea of Azov (exactly what Flavius Josephus writes in his "Judean War") - because in the same area, then or before, dwelt the Greeks, the Scythians, and the Cimmerians - hence the Ukrainian "боговір" and the Germanic word for "church". But what our findings do not allow us to do is to place the Alans near the Darial Gorge. Not to mention that according to Theophanes the Confessor the Alans neighboured the Abasgians (roughly speaking, present-day Abkhazia) - it's too far from the Darial Gorge. But there is indeed a source that may lead a reader to conclude that the Alans spoke Iranic - "Theogony" by John Tzetzes (Ἰωάννης Τζέτζης).

(01:12:23) The passages from "Theogony" by John Tzetzes containing the multilingual lines written in Greek letters are primarily known thanks to two manuscripts reported and researched respectively by the two Byzantinists: the Hungarian scholar Gyula Moravcsik and the Austrian scholar Herbert Hunger. Now I will be showing you the nightmares that can be encountered in modern scientific papers. Before you is a text from the article "John Tzetzes and the blemish examiners: a Byzantine teacher on schedography, everyday language and writerly disposition" by the Greek-born Byzantinist Παναγιώτης Α. Αγαπητός (Panagiotis A. Agapitos) published in the Italian-based journal "Medioevo greco" in 2017. Before examining the lines that the account by John Tzetzes portrays as Alanic, we will analyse several others first. And the first one on this list is written in the so-called "Scythian" language, "σαλαμαλὲκ ἀλτὴ [...] σαλαμαλὲκ ἀλτοῦγεπ". "σαλαμαλὲκ" indeed corresponds to several forms of the Arabic greeting "ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ" ("as-salamu aleykum") ("Peace be upon you" or simply "Hello"). But all the remaining words are also Arabic. "ἀλτοῦγεπ" is the Arabic "الطَّيِّب" ("al-ṭayyib"; instead of "aṭ-ṭayyib"). "طَيِّب" ("ṭayyib") is an Arabic masculine adjective meaning "good", "nice", "charming", "pleasant", "agreeable", "enjoyable". Potentially, the word "ṭayyib" could have been pronounced by some people as "ṭıyyib" because of the occurrence in Arabic known as "imālah". This would explain why the Greek word is spelt with an "ου": this diphthong can represent the vowel /ɪ/ and the back yer - this is what I didn't immediately realise when I was trying to decipher some of the toponyms in the text of "De administrando imperio" by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The second part, "σαλαμαλὲκ ἀλτοῦγεπ", probably addresses a man, whereas the first part, "σαλαμαλὲκ ἀλτὴ", seems to address a woman. (01:14:26) Most likely, "ἀλτὴ" represents the Arabic feminine pronoun "أَنْتِ" ("ʔanti"), "you". The whole line can be translated as "Good day to you [...] Good day, good man" or, more literally, "Peace be upon you to you [...] Peace be upon you, good man" - (01:14:44) which means that the Greek interpretation of this line provided by John Tzetzes is apparently incorrect. The word "κόμανον" above the word "Σκύθην" as well as "τούρκοις" above "Πέρσαις" can also be ignored. In the Greek text of "Theogony", these glosses appear in the work by Herbert Hunger from 1953 but not in the works by Gyula Moravcsik published in 1930 and 1967: because the manuscript on which Gyula Moravcsik based his analysis does not contain them. (01:15:17) These glosses are also absent from the printed text of "Theogony" provided by the German philologist August Immanuel Bekker in his article from 1840 - the text which, according to Gyula Moravcsik, is based on a third(!) manuscript (a third copy). What is interesting is that in Immanuel Bekker's work the Scythian line reads only "σαλὰ μαλὲκ ἀλτὴ σαλὰ μαλὲκ". That's why I doubt that these two glosses were ever written by John Tzetzes. Nevertheless, the absence or presence of the word "κόμανον" does not prevent us from explaining why John Tzetzes attributed the Arabic line to the Scythians - because his account, by the Scythians, means some people who lived in former Khazaria, whereas some historical sources of that period related that Muslims were Khazaria's biggest class. In particular, such authors were al-Mas'udi and Ibn Hawqal. Whether these quote unquote "Scythian Muslims" in the text of John Tzetzes were the Cumans or not does not actually matter - in "Theogony", there is no Turkic line for their language ... unfortunately. I don't know what is even worse: various approaches to interpret a Turkic inscription in an irrelevant Turkic language, or only a few attempts to read an Arabic phrase in Turkic.

(01:16:41) The next line to examine is the one that John Tzetzes claims he used or would use in addressing the Rus' people. "No, Professor Doctor, they are not Russians." Παναγιώτης Α. Αγαπητός presents this line as follows: "σδρᾶ<στε>, βράτε, σέστριτζα [...] δόβρα δένη". The termination "στε" is enclosed in the angle brackets because this fragment is an artificial insertion: it's not present in either of the manuscripts. But why does this insertion appear in the work by Παναγιώτης Α. Αγαπητός? Because he simply copied and pasted the Greek text and the conclusions of Herbert Hunger - Παναγιώτης Α. Αγαπητός did not verify his claims. But why did Herbert Hunger change the line? The reason is fairly idiotic: no Slavic language other than Russian existed in his mental world - he stupidly believed (or intentionally tried to convince the reader) that Russian was spoken in Rus' and simply added this termination to make the line sound more Russian. Let's analyse the first part, "σδρᾶ, βράτε, σέστριτζα", more carefully. The only difference between the two manuscripts is the spelling of the word "βράτε": in the manuscript used by Gyula Moravcsik, it's spelt with a "π", "πράτε". No matter which letter the first one was, the word is clearly the vocative case of a Slavic noun for "brother" (the case that does not exist in modern Russian). "σέστριτζα" is indeed a diminutive form of a Slavic noun meaning "sister", but in this line it's rather used for politeness. Unlike "πράτε" / "βράτε", the word is spelt as if it were in the nominative case. In modern Ukrainian, the whole part would be spoken as "Здоров, брате, сестриця" (if only the first noun were in the vocative). (01:18:34) The word "здоров" means "hello", but it derives from the noun "здоров'я", "health". The difference with the line in "Theogony" is that the first word comes not from the Ukrainian-wise "здоров'я", (01:18:46) but from the noun for "health" corresponding to the Carpatho-Rusyn "здравля". Instead of "Здоров, брате, сестриця", John Tzetzes conveys the phrase "Здрав, брате, сестриця" - "Hello, brother, sister" or "Good health to you, brother, sister". And the sign resembling a circumflex above the letter "α" in the word "σδρᾶ" upholds this interpretation: in the Greek language, the circumflex appeared only over long vowels and diphthongs, whereas the Ukrainian letter sequence "ав" sounds like a diphthong. The modern Carpatho-Rusyn language is mainly spoken in western Ukraine and neighbouring regions west of Ukraine. (01:19:29) The second part, "δόβρα δένη", indeed resembles the Ukrainian greeting "добридень" or "добрий день" - "good day", "good afternoon" - which John Tzetzes might have inaccurately transcribed. However, the quite literal reading of this piece as "добра день" makes sense too. "добра день" or "день добра" can be translated as "day of good" or "day of well". It's not necessarily a greeting - in the entire line, the definite greeting is the word "здрав". What is more or less certain is that the phrase "добра день", to a Ukrainian speaker, would first of all imply a wish: "I wish you a day of good". "Здрав, брате, сестриця [...] Добра( )день" - "Hello, brother, sister [...] Have a good day" - "Hello" and "Bye". Nevertheless, the expression quite close to the Greek "δόβρα δένη", the evidence of which appears to be convincing, is the Belarusian greeting "добрадзень". What Ukrainian and Carpatho-Rusyn dialectologists should do is to verify whether the expression "добра( )день" existed or still exists in these languages too. And afterwards, maybe we will be more confident about whether the second part is a greeting or not. The language reflected by John Tzetzes in this line indeed could have been spoken in the 12th century CE or before by the Russes. But even if we assume for a while that this language was spoken not by them but someone else, it's still not Russian. The point that the Russes spoke Russian is not corroborated by evidence. (01:21:04) According to "Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems" by al-Mas'udi, among the Russes there was a group called "لوذعانة" ("l-u-ð-ʾ-a-n-a") which was the most numerous and traded with Spain, Rome, Constantinople, and the Khazars. There is no way to prove that this word is Russian, but there is a way to justify its geographical connection to Ukraine. (01:21:26) The word that al-Mas'udi has recorded as "لوذعانة" ("l-u-ð-ʾ-a-n-a") means "inhabitants of meadows". In the Ukrainian language, this noun is pronounced as "лужани", and in western Ukraine in Chernivtsi Oblast' there is a rural settlement with the same name. (01:21:42) It's called Лужани (Luzhany) and is also known as Лукани (Lukany). These names come, respectively, from the nouns "луг" and "лу́ка" / "лука́" all of which, in the Ukrainian language, mean "meadow". The drivel Herbert Hunger wrote in his 1953 publication reappears sixty-four years later in a scientific paper by another author. And looking at this mess, I'm thinking, "To create my own content, I don't need to put in a lot of effort, actually. I just need to find a guy who was considered to be intelligent back in the day, whose ideas people will like, and present those ideas as the unshakeable truth - be it a particular wisdom from a source whose century is safe to mention, or the Bible as a last resort." You think it's a joke, but what I've just described is sometimes referred to by people as mainstream knowledge.

(01:22:38) Now we can finally discuss the so-called "Alanic lines". Why "the lines" and not "the line" is because there are two of them. - "Daniel! Please, stop! It's unbearable!" - "I hear you, I feel you, and I share your pain in return. Now, again, is your turn." To finish something, we need to start something, right? I will not be arguing about whether these lines are written in some Iranic language - because it seems to be true. The question that should(!) be answered is why. John Tzetzes indeed might have recorded a language spoken somewhere near the Darial Gorge - for instance, on the territory of present-day North Ossetia and South Ossetia. But even if so, it doesn't mean that this language was spoken by the Alans. The Alans could have been attributed this language if they used to pass along this gorge. Arabic sources of the 10th century CE place the Alans next to the Sarir or Serir people. But this people was, roughly speaking, Circassians - the kingdom of As-Sarir or As-Serir was never located in present-day Dagestan and therefore the accounts by Ibn-Rustah, al-Mas'udi, and Theophanes the Confessor in this regard are in agreement. Even if we assume that Alania extended from the Sea of Azov to the very Darial Gorge, there is no evidence suggesting that this vast territory was predominantly Iranic-speaking - even involving the so-called Zelenchuk inscription: I doubt it was written by an Alanic author. It's quite possible that John Tzetzes confused the Alans (deliberately or not) with some people with a similar name - for instance, with the Caucasian Albanians. And there is a justification behind this point. (01:24:25) What Arabic authors of the 9th-10th centuries CE, the list of which includes Ibn Rustah and Ibn Khordadbeh, call "Bab-al-Lan" ("the Alanian Gate", "the Gate of the Alans") is referred to by Movses Khorenatsi as "the Albanian Gate", "Աղուան դուռն" ("Aluan Durrn"). In the 1736 John Whiston edition of Movses Khorenatsi's "History of Armenia", the name of this gate is translated from Classical Armenian into Latin as "Portae Albanae". What is interesting is that the account by Movses Khorenatsi suggests that this "Albania" was located somewhere near the Darial Gorge. Pay attention to the text: describing the confines of the part of Sarmatia east of the river Don, Movses Khorenatsi writes that this part of Sarmatia extends through some place in the Caucasus Mountains near Iberia and "Albania" and then, from that point, to the Caspian Sea. If Iberia is, roughly speaking, present-day Georgia (or Sakartvelo) which is mainly situated south of the Caucasus Mountains, this "Albania" is unlikely to be south of them too. Movses Khorenatsi portrays this area not from the south to the east, but from the west to the east. - Iberia and "Albania" together being in the west are separated by the Caucasus Mountains. Therefore, this "Albania" has nothing to do with Azerbaijan. (01:25:55) Moreover, the mention of Iberia and "Albania" in this pair correlates with the mention of the "Albanian Gate" along with the "Tsakanian Gate". According to the Abkhazian scholar Гурам Джотович Гумба (Guram Dzhotovich Gumba), "the Tsakanian Gate" is the same as "the Tsilkanian Gate", where "Tsilkani" is a Georgian village not far from the Darial Gorge. And that would make perfect sense: the Khazars should not have passed through Derbent and the territory of Azerbaijan to invade Armenia - the Darial Gorge was a much simpler, much closer option. ... Unfortunately, this disagrees with the account by Movses Kaghankatvatsi (or Kalankatuatsi). The "Albania" mentioned in his "History of the Country of Aluank" also suffered from Khazar invasions, but this "Albania" was located south of the Caucasus Mountains and east of Armenia and Iberia. In several attacks by the Khazars mentioned by this source, the Khazars passed through Derbent (more accurately, the Chor Gate, or the Chola Gate) regardless of whether their target was Caucasian Albania (that is, Azerbaijan) or Armenia. However, several critical editions of the same source indeed contain a passage about one attack on Armenia that could(!) have occurred through the Darial Gorge. But Movses Kalankatuatsi ascribes it not to the Khazars, but the Alans. He did distinguish the terms "Alan" and "Albanian" - moreover, he was aware of the existence of the Alanian Gate, which is erroneously referred to as the Albanian Gate by Movses Khorenatsi, or the copyist, or the editor of his work. (01:27:34) That some ancient author could have confused the Alans with the Albanians is generally possible. The account by Cassius Dio mentions the participation of the Alans in a war that "caused dire injury to the Albanian territory and Media, and [...] involved Armenia and Cappadocia" (according to the English translation by Earnest Cary). Cassius Dio connects the Alans to the Massagetae at least for the reason that, while the Massagetae can be regarded as those who dwelt near the Caspian Sea, the Alans were simply those who passed through their territory. If the Alans and the Massagetae were equated in this way, less effort was required to equate the Alans with the Albanians. This possible chain or list of confusions is better reflected in the account by Ammianus Marcellinus. The English translation by John Carew Rolfe reading "who, passing through the Albani and the Massagetae, whom we now call the Alani" speaks volumes. (The Latin text he translated follows an equally ambiguous syntactical structure.) However, I don't think that this quote unquote "possible confusion" has anything to do with why John Tzetzes attributed the Iranic lines to the Alans. The Alans he speaks of are simply some people who, back then, lived quite close to the Alanian Gate. It doesn't mean that these people were the Alans, and we can doubt this. There is no clarity about where their eastern and southern borders lied and whether and how the borders' locations changed through the centuries. What we know quite definitely is that the Alans themselves dwelt next to the Sea of Azov. The fact that the historical record seems to attest the use of Slavic, Germanic, and/or Greek terms in their speech makes a strong case against their relation to the Ossetians or any other Iranic people. (01:29:25) In his "Geography", Claudius Ptolemy calls the Alans the "Scythian Alauni". He refers to them so because he probably tried to separate them (clearly for the reader) from the Alauni without this adjective: Ptolemy places those Alauni somewhere in the lands of Noricum (a Roman province at the time). If "Alauni" is a correct form of the Alans' appellation, I have the following versions in my mind of what it means. The first two suggest that their name describes a type of the terrain in which they lived. In the first case, the name is related to the Ukrainian nouns "галява" and "галявина" meaning "clearing" or "glade"; in the second, to the English noun "lawn" meaning the same. The Ukrainian-wise version suggests that their name could have been "Галявни". Another possible word that can be hidden behind the name is the English-wise adjective "alone", which can be understood as "having become independent" (for instance, from the Scythians). (01:30:27) But what if their name is an exonym? That's my fourth interpretation. It suggests connecting "Alauni" with the Old Armenian noun "աղաւնի" ("alawni"; "dove", "pigeon"). Relative to the Armenians, the Alans dwelt on the opposite side of the Caucasus Mountains, and the farthest space the Armenians were able to see or imagine was the snows on the mountain peaks. This version has a weak point though. Why would the Alans have been associated with white(!) doves? In the vast majority of cases, back then, such a colour would have indicated a domesticated species; and at least one such species must have been familiar to the Armenians. If the form "Alauni" must be disregarded, then there are only two interpretations I can provide now. The first connects the name of the Alans to the Ukrainian lexeme "лан" ("field", "lea"); the second, to the English lexeme "land".

In this video, I've said that if the name of the Alanian ruler Ἰταξῆς is Turkic, I would view it as Azerbaijani-wise or Karachay-Balkar-wise. (Of course, it doesn't mean that the Alans of Ammianus Marcellinus's time were Turkic.) (01:31:37) This is a good way to return to the discussion of the toponym "Tizul" in the Schechter Letter - as I promised. In the past, I connected it to the Ukrainian interjection "тізю" and interpreted the toponym as "calf". But now I think that this interpretation is likely wrong or incomplete. Etymologically, the appellations "Tizul" and "Tuzla", in my view, are related. Geographically - Tizul could have been located somewhere inside Crimea while present-day Tuzla is an islet next to it. Surprisingly, the form "Tuzla" actually hints at the word underlying the name "Tizul". (01:32:15) It's a Turkic adjective matching the Karachay-Balkar "тюзлю" that derives from the noun "тюз" meaning "truth". As far as I understand, one of the translations of the Karachay-Balkar adjective "тюзлю" is "righteous". But in the context of Tizul's name, the translation of this adjective as "true" makes sense as well. (01:32:36) The valley of Tizul could have been called "righteous" or "veritable" because, as can be inferred from the Schechter Letter, in a cave in this valley there were "Books of the Law of Moses" that provided the evidence of which faith was true. The spelling of the name as "Tizul" instead of "Tuzul" can be explained by mishearing "тюзлю" as "тизлю". But why are the last two letters swapped? (01:33:02) They could have been swapped for the same reason the last two letters could have been swapped in the name of the river Atil or Etil - it's a phenomenon about the Turkic suffixes "-lı", "-li", "-lu", "-lü" that we possibly must admit. The river Atil, Etil, or Itil could have been called "Atlı". Translated from Azerbaijani into English, this name would mean "horse-drawn". And the river Don or the Kerch Strait (not the river Volga) could have been called so - because the western part of the Caucasus Mountains were known as the Hippian Mountains: the Ancient Greek "ἵππος" means "horse". For the river Volga to be this river, it should have been called "Etli", "Itlı", or "İtli": because "et" / "it" means "dog", and one of the former appellations of the Caspian Sea was the Gorgan Sea (that is, "the Wolf Sea" or "the Canine Sea"). In the Video No.4, I've showed you that the historical record does not unambiguously portray the river Atil as a single river. Some sources lead to the conclusion that what some authors meant by the river Atil most probably encompassed all the major Scythian rivers the ancients believed to flow out of the Riphean Mountains plus the river Volga. Why is the Volga included? There are no mountains that can be unambiguously identified as the Ripheans. Their location depended on what the ancients knew about the inhabited world. In the beginning, their knowledge was limited roughly by the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov - back then, any mountains farther north of the Donets' Ridge, much less the Urals, were unlikely to be called Riphean. But as previously unknown regions were explored, the coordinates of the Riphean Mountains also changed, and thus the source of the Scythian rivers. Once the Urals or something more abstract beyond the Donets' Ridge started to be associated with those "exact same" mountains in the extreme north, the family of the major Scythian rivers adopted a new member - the Volga. The concept of the Riphean Mountains remained static for centuries. What was dynamic was their projection on earth. In the same way, I think, should be perceived the location of the Varangian Sea. The Baltic Sea is indeed sometimes referred to as the Varangian Sea in the historical record, but not always and not everywhere. (01:35:34) The sea that can be regarded as the Varangian Sea in its primordial(!) sense is described in "Opus Astronomicum" by al-Battani. Referring to al-Jayhani and others, al-Battani writes that the Varangian Sea was a gulf of what the Greeks called the Ocean. In his account, the Ocean includes the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Baltic Sea. It's well known that different authors of classical antiquity thought that the Caspian Sea was an ocean gulf. But al-Battani speaks of a different sea, which at the same time has nothing to do with the Baltic region. Indeed, according to al-Battani, the Varangian Sea was situated "in the north of the Slavs" or "north of the Slavs" (depending on whether the translation is by Carlo Alfonso Nallino or Дмитрий Евгеньевич Мишин / Dmitrii Evgenevich Mishin). But he also adds that this sea or gulf extends to the lands of the Muslim Bulgars - those Bulgars who lived next to the Caucasus Mountains and whose name was inherited by the present-day Karachay-Balkars or borrowed by their direct ancestors. But why did I say it's not the Caspian Sea? The dimensions of this gulf provided by al-Battani match the size of the Sea of Azov. The Sea of Azov does not stretch precisely from east to west, but its length along its longest axis is indeed about 300 Roman miles - that is, 444-450 kilometres - while 100 Roman miles, or 148-150 kilometres, along the shortest and perpendicular axis is indeed its approximate width. (01:37:17) Moreover, al-Battani explicitly writes in another passage what I've just said - that the Maeotian Lake (that is, the Sea of Azov) is the Varangian Sea. (By the way, in another video, we will be identifying the length of the parasang measure used in the Khazar Correspondence.) In his "Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology", al-Biruni repeats al-Battani's words about the Varangian Sea being a gulf next to the Muslim Bulgars. And in another work by him, "Canon Masudicus", al-Biruni, just like al-Battani, writes that the Ocean flows behind some passable or impassable mountains and uninhabited lands. What al-Biruni clarifies is that these mountains were embraced by a severe frost and that the intense cold was the reason why these lands were uninhabited. These mountains - be they the Urals or some mountains near the Black Sea or the Sea of Azov - are the Ripheans whose projections define the projections of the Varangian Sea - the Baltic Sea is just one of them. The difference with the Riphean Mountains is that the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea are physically connected, by the same waterway. For the ancients to confuse these seas, taking the Varangian Sea for the Ocean was sufficient. Oddly, the fact that the Sea of Azov was the primordial Varangian Sea correlates with its Finnic name recorded by Pliny the Elder - "temerinda", "*äitei *meriden", which is translated as "mother of (the) seas" (and can be understood as "source of (the) seas"). Such a name can indicate that, as early as Pliny the Elder's time or before, Finnic speakers already believed that the Maeotian Lake and their own waters were connected by a sea route, which could have been imagined by them as a river with its source in the Maeotian Lake and its mouth in the Baltic Sea. The primordial Varangian Sea is the Sea of Azov, the primordial Riphean Mountains are next to it - the river Atil is the entity that strives to connect their projections: the account by al-Istakhri suggests it runs by circle, after all. The river Atil should also be regarded as a set of its projections. (01:39:35) One such is mentioned in the Schechter Letter. In this source, the river Atil is the river Don, the Kerch Strait, or both. But why is it "right of [the Black Sea or the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov]"? In Hebrew texts, "right" can indeed mean "south", which is how Solomon Schechter rendered this phrase. But the author of this document possibly did not use the Hebrew or Arabic tradition of referring to the cardinal directions - he could have used the Ancient Greek one (unless a copyist has modified the text). In the Ancient Greek language, the word "δεξιός" that can be translated as "right" is also translated as "northern" / "northward" / "northerly", whereas "εὐώνυμος" connects the left direction with the south. The Khazars could have inherited this tradition from the Scythians, but if the author applied it in such a document, this may have been done by mistake. However, at the moment, we cannot say for sure whether the Khazars ever actually viewed the cardinal directions from the Ancient Greek perspective. That's why it's safer to translate the phrase in question as "right of [...]". (01:40:45) As for the toponym "Tizul", its Turkic equivalent "Тюзлю" / "Tüzlü" points to the Kipchak languages, not Oghuz - because of the voiceless consonant /t/. Though the valley's name can be easily viewed through the lens of the Karachay-Balkar language, whether it was given by the Balkars, the Crimean Tatars, or someone else is not precisely known; nor precisely what the valley was called by the neighbouring Slavs.

That's all I wanted to cover in this video. If you think it's good, don't forget to like it. And, as usual, if you feel that liking my videos is not enough, also subscribe to this YouTube channel and to my other platforms listed in the channel's Links section under the Description. My real name is Daniel Haidachuk, and on this channel I act the role of Daniel Poirot. Thank you for your visit and attention.

Links:

Gábor Hosszú. Heritage of Scribes. The Relation of Rovas Scripts to Eurasian Writing Systems (2013) - pp. 120-121, 153-154, 173, 182

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- Wikipedia: Iriy (en), Phoenician_alphabet (en), Tzitzak (en)

- Wiktionary: izzad (en), bıçaq (en), çaqqı (en), -çi (en), bıçaqçı (en), Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/bïčak (en), okazać (en), Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/þaką (en), τόξον (en), taxus (en), içmek (en), içmək (en), Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/sub (en), gün (en), qan (en), göz (en), kişi (en), hiç (en), -dir (en), باده (en), طاهر (en), na- (en), keşiş (en), nakış (en), naxış (en), mizah (en), demək (en), Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/tē- (en), غفار (en), taç (en), tac (en), шашка (en), sáska (en), legszebb (en), szép (en), قصاب (en), δόξα (en), εὔδοξος (en), μιγάς (el), μάγος (en), μέγας (en), kirk (en), kerk (en), طيب (en), أنت (en), աղաւնի (en), δεξιός (en), εὐώνυμος (en), Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/türᶻ (en)

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By Daniel Haidachuk, who, in this blog and on the relevant social media and networks, acts the role of Daniel Poirot