Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/71

 K H A K H A 59 KHATMANDU, the capital of the kingdom of Nepal, ludia, situated on the bank of the Vishnumati river at its junction with the Baghmati, 27 36 N. lat., 85 24 E. - long. The town, which is said to have been founded by Raj A Gunakamadeva about 723, now contains a population estimated at about 50,000, occupying 5000 houses made of brick, and usually from two to four stories high. Many of the houses have large projecting wooden windows or balconies, richly carved. The maharajd s palace, a huge, rambling, ungainly building, stands in the centre of the city, which also contains numerous handsome temples. The streets are extremely narrow, and the whole town very dirty. A British resident, with a small staff and j escort, is stationed about a mile to the north of the city. KHAZARS. This vanished people, who appear also as | Chozars, as A/car^tpot or Xaapot in Byzantine writers, as ; Khazirs in Armenian and Khwalisses in Russian chronicles, | Ugri Bielii in Nestor, and Kosa (?) in Chinese, occupied a prominent place amongst the secondary powers of the Byzantine state-system. In the epic of Firdousi &quot; Khazar &quot; is the representative name for all the northern foes of Persia, and legendary invasions long before the Christian era are vaguely attributed to them. But the Khazars are an historic figure upon the borderland of Europe and Asia &amp;gt; for at least nine hundred years (190-1100 A.D.). The ! three hundred and fifty years 600-950 A.D. mark the epoch of their grsatness, but their rise can be traced for four centuries before, and their decline for one hundred and fifty years to follow. Their home was in the spurs of the Caucasus and along the shores of the Caspian the &quot;sea of the Khazars&quot;; and their cities, all of them popu lous and civilized commercial centres, were Itil, the capital, upon the delta of the Volga, the &quot;river of the Khazars,&quot; Semender (Tarkhu), the older capital, KhamliJje or Khal- endsch, Bdendschcr, the outpost towards Armenia, and S lrb- l on the Don. They were the Venetians of the Caspian and the Euxine, the organizers of the transit between the two basins, the universal carriers between Eist and West ; and Itil was the meeting-place of the commerce of Persia, of Byzantium, of Armenia, of Russia, and of the Bulgarians of the middle Volga. The tide of their dominion ebbed and flowed repeatedly during their history, but the normal Khazaria may be taken as the territory included between the Caucasus, the Volga, and the Don, with the outlying province of the Crimea or &quot;Little Khazaria.&quot; The southern boundary never greatly altered ; it did at times reach the Cyrus and the Araxes, but on that side the Khazars were confronted by the great powers of Byzantium and Persia, and were for the most part restrained within the passes of the Caucasus by the fortifications of Dariel. Amongst the nomadic Ugrians and agricultural Slavs of the north their frontier fluctuated widely, and in its zenith Khazaria extended from the Dnieper to Bolgari upon the middle Volga, and along the eastern shore of the Caspian to Asterabad. Ethnology. Few points have been more disputed than the origin i &amp;gt;f this interesting people ; and there is still no consent amongst liuthorities upon the subject. They are assigned to the Turkish stock by Lit ham and Howorth, to the Ugrian by Klaproth and Vivien St Martin, and have even been claimed as Jews on account of their use of the Hebrew character and the profession of the Hebrew faith amongst them. But their geographical position, their history, and the contemporary witness we have as to their physical character, their language?, and their own national tradition, may be accepted as conclusive proof that the Khazars were an indigenous people of the Caucasus, aud near akin to the Armenians and the Georgians. Their king Joseph, in answer to the inquiry of the Rabbi Cliasdai Ibn-Shafrut of Cordova (circ. 9f&amp;gt;8) stated that his people sprang from Thogarmah, grandson of Japhet, and the supposed ancestor of the other peoples of the Caucasus. The Arab geographers who knew the Khazars best connect them either with the Georgians (Ibn el Athir) or with the Armenians (Dimishqy, cd. Mehren, p. 263) ; whilst Ahmed ibn Fadlan, who passed through Khazaria on a mission from the caliph Moktadir (921 A.D.), positively asserts that the Khazar tongue differed not only from the Turkish, but from that of the bordering nations, which were Ugrian. Nevertheless there are many points connected with the Khazars which indicate a close connexion with Ugrian or Turkish peoples. The official titles recorded by Ibn Facllan are those in use amongst the Tartar nations of that age, whether Huns, Bulgarians, Turks, or Mongols. The names of their cities can be explained only by refer ence to Turkish or Ugrian dialects (Klaproth, Mem. inir les Khazars ; Howorth, Khazars). Some too amongst the mediaeval authori ties (Ibn Haukal and Is*akhry) note a resemblance between the speech in use amongst the Khazars and the Bulgarians ; and the modern Magyar a Ugrian dialect can be traced back to a tribe which in the 9th century formed part of the Khazar kingdom. These characteristics, however, are accounted for by the fact that the Khazars were at one time subject to the Huns (448 A. p. et scq.), at another to the Turks (circ. 580), which would sufficiently explain the signs of Tartar influence in their polity, and also by the testimony of all observers, Greeks, Arabs, and Russians, that there was a double strain within the Khazar nation. There were K/tazars and Kara (black) Khazars. The &quot; Khazars &quot; were fair-skinned, black-haired, and of a remarkable beauty and stature ; their women indeed were .sought as wives equally at Byzantium and Baghdad; while the &quot;Kara Khazars&quot; were ugly, short, and were reported by the Arabs almost as dark as Indians. The latter were indubitably the Ugrian nomads of the steppe, akin to the Tartar invaders of Europe, Huns, Bul garians, and Hungarians, who filled the armies and convoyed the caravans of the ruling caste. But the Khazars proper were a civic commercial people, the founders of cities, remarkable for somewhat elaborate political institutions, for persistence, and for good faith all qualities foreign to the Hunnic character. They are identified with good reason (by Zeuss, V. St Martin, Howorth, Latham) with the AKarfrpoi (perhaps Ak-Khazari, &quot;AVhite Khazars&quot;) who appear upon the lower Volga in the Byzantine annals, and thence they have been deduced, though with less convincing proof, either from the Ayd.6vp&amp;lt;roi or the Kariapot of Herodotus, iv. 104 (Latham, V. St Martin). There was throughout historic times a close connexion which eventually amounted to political identity between the Khazars and the Barsileens (the Passils of Moses of Chorene) who occupied the delta of the Volga ; and the Barsileens can be traced through the pages of Ptolemy (Gcog., v. 9), of Pliny (iv. 26), of Strabo (vii. p. 306), and of Poinponius Mela (ii. c. 1, p. 119) to the so-called Royal Scyths, 2;cuPai jSocriX^es, who wer3 known to the Greek colonies upon the Euxine, and whose political superiority and commercial enterprise led to this rendering of their name. Such points, h wever, need not here be further pur sued than to establish the presence of this white race (&quot; La Race Blonde &quot; of Klaproth) around the Caspian and the Euxine through out historic times. They appear in European history as &quot;White Huns (Ephthalites), White Ugrians (Sar-ogours), White Bulgarians. They were the carriers between Europe and the farthest East. Owing to climatic causes (see ASIA) the tract they occupied was slowly drying up. They were the outposts of civilization towards the encroaching desert, and the Tartar nomadism that advanced with it. They held in precarious subjection the hordes whom the conditions of the climate and the soil made it impossible to supplant. They bore the brunt of each of the great waves of Tartar conquests, and were even tually overwhelmed. History. From out of the mass of this white race of the steppe i the Khazars can be first historically distinguished at the end of the 2d century of our era. They burst into Armenia with the Barsileens, 198 A.D. They were repulsed and attacked in turn, but thenceforth Khazar wars occupy a prominent place in the j the only motives of these early expeditions ; but in the long struggle between the Roman and Persian empires, of which Armenia was not seldom the battlefield, and eventually the prize, the attitude of this powerful people of the Caucasus assumed political importance. Armenia inclined to the civilization and ere long to the Christianity of Rome, whilst her Arsacid princes maintained an inveterate feud with the Sassanids of Persia. It became therefore the policy of the Persian kings to call in the Khnzars to neutralize or to chastize the efforts of the Armenians in every collision with the empire (200-350). During the 4th century, however, the growing power of Persia culminated in the annexation of eastern Armenia. The Khazars, endangered by so powerful a neighbour, passed from under Persian influence into that remote alliance with Byzantium which thenceforth characterized their policy, and they aided Julian in his invasion of Persia (363). Simultaneously with the approach of Persia to the Caucasus the terrible empire of the Huns sprang up among the Ugrians of the northern steppes. The Khazars straitened on eveiy side remained passive till the danger culminated in the accession of Attila (434). The emperor Theodosius, with reason terrified for civilization, sent envoys to bribe the Khazars ( A/car^poj) to divert the Huns from the empire by an attack upon their
 * Armenian annals for eight hundred years. The pressure of the
 * nomads of the steppe, the quest of plunder or revenge, these seem