introduction 5
Hungary and the core of the Avar khaganate) as being marginal to the
“Great steppe.” The notion that the civilized world ended at the Lower
Danube (including the Danube Delta) was an extremely popular one
throughout the Middle Ages. It can still be found in the thirteenth
century in the work of William Rubruck, according to whom Scythia
stretched from the Danube River all the way to the sunrise. Rubruck’s
concept of Scythia mirrors a geographical stereotype, which originated
in Greek mythography and ethnography, before being borrowed and
much expanded by Roman authors and thus transmitted to the medi-
eval West.
The roots of the traditional notion of otherness (especially during
the early Middle Ages, when the Other was always the foreigner) lie
within a rather general scheme, in which the Other was present as
periphery and limit of the self, in other words, geographically placed
on the fringes of the Self ’s known world. The Other had to be con-
quered by means of disintegration and transformation, and later on,
by incorporation into the Self. The Other was thus perceived only as
a mirror of the Self. Because of that, images or notions of the Other
were not required, or even expected to reflect reality.^7 In fact, quite the
contrary is true: in order to control the Other, (former) nomads often
employed hyperbolic representations of alterity, in which eternal or
absolute features were given pre-eminence, in order to obtain an ideal-
ized mirror-image of the Self. Such representations typically omitted
or concealed defeats and mistakes, in order to project the image of a
heroic Self. They also spoke with excitement about the Self ’s victories,
and belittled the Other’s. However, such strategies of self-representa-
tion are hardly typical to nomadic societies and can be found in any
society preoccupied with establishing by means of collective memory
a sense of group identity. The peoples of Eurasia are thus no ‘exotic’
exception.
There are, of course, worse problems to consider. Given that writing
was introduced to the world of the nomads only in the mid-seventh
century,^8 information about how nomadic societies viewed themselves
is scarce prior to the ninth century. To put it in other words, there are
no written tracts from the world of the nomads, which could inform
(^7) Shukurov 1999, 15.
(^8) See details in, Malov 1959; Kliashtornyi 1964; Stebleva 1965; Stebleva 1976;
Kliashtornyi 1992; Kyzlasov 1994, 208–235.