Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/419

Rh They were not wild barbarians like the Huns and the Avars.” Their case escaped me when I was collecting instances of such legalized regicide for The Golden Bough. My attention was first drawn to it in 1912 by Miss Barbara Freire-Marreco, who was so kind as to send me a long extract on the subject from the mediaeval Arab historian and geographer Abulfeda. Subsequently the Khazar practice of killing their sacred kings was described by Mr. Géza Roheim in an article contributed to Man. But as his account seems to be based on the works of modern Hungarian historians, and the Khazar custom is probably still but little known, it may be worth while to put together those passages of mediaeval authors which describe in some detail the Khazar kings and their limited tenure of the crown. All the authors in question appear to be Arabs, or at least to have written in Arabic, but their works are accessible to the unlearned in translations, from which I borrow the following extracts. Some of the most important passages were long ago collected and edited in Arabic, with Latin translations, by C. M. Fraehn in the Memoirs of the Academy of St. Petersburg.

The earliest writer to give an account of the Khazar kings from personal observation was Ahmed ibn Foszlan, Fuḍhlan, or Faḍlan, as his name is variously spelled, who travelled through Khazaria in the year 921 or 922 A.D., at a time when the kingdom was still at the height of its power and glory. He was sent from Baghdad by the Caliph Moktadir on an embassy to the king of the Bulgarians whose dominions then lay on the Volga in central Russia, and on his return to Baghdad he described in a book all that he had observed worthy of note on his journey. His work appears to be lost, but the portion of it which 2 B