The Pechenegs In Khazar History 143
of Rum towards Syria”.80 It is clear that the Inner Bulgars have appeared in
place of Burjan. It should also be borne in mind that the Eastern writer distin-
guishes the Danubian Bulgarians, called “great”, from the Volga ones, who are
called “outer”.
Al-Istakhri’s text is identical to that of Al-Balkhi. In the work of Ibn Hawqal
the meaning changes, the accounts regarding the various Bulgar communi-
ties are largely intertwined and the main goal is to inform about the wreckage
caused by the Rus’.81 Another excerpt from Ibn Hawqal, cited from Dimashqi,
also points to such a confusion: “from the Encircling Sea comes a third arm,
situated north of Slavonia, that extends near the Muslim Bulgars and turns
eastward”.82
Around the end of the tenth century, the Arabic writer Abu Nasr Al-Qummi,
who wrote between 984 and 997, adheres to the older tradition: “The seventh
climate begins to the north of the lands of Yajuj and Majuj, traverses towards
the Turks also from the north of the coast of the Sea of Jurjan, crosses the
land of the Burjan and Slavonia and ends at the Western Sea”.83 In Al-Masudi’s
work this account is related in a different way: “The Ifranja, Slavs, Nuqabard,
Ashban, Yajuj and Majuj, Turk, Khazar, Burjan, Alan, Jalaliqa and the others,
who, as stated, live under the Capricorn constellation, i.e. in the north”.84 It
is clear that in these accounts the Burjan and the Inner Bulgars are mutually
interchangeable.85
Of particular interest, with regard to the Burjan’s location, is an account by
Al-Khwarizmi from the 830s. Using the terminology of Ptolemy regarding the
territory of the East European Steppe (European and Asian Sarmatia), he “fills”
it with a different ethnic content. Thus, according to Al-Khwarizmi, European
80 Garkavi 1870, 274.
81 Garkavi 1870, 218.
82 Garkavi 1870, 222.
83 Garkavi 1870, 247.
84 Garkavi 1870, 138; Kalinina 2005a, 103.
85 It is noteworthy that besides the Inner Bulgars, Hudud al-ʿAlam also mentions the V.n.nd.r.
This is especially interesting, since they do not come up in other Eastern sources, with the
exception of Gardizi, who talks about N.n.d.r. In Hudud al-ʿAlam V.n.nd.r. are described
as being weak and poor (Minorsky 1937, 53; see also Bozhilov and Dimitrov 1995, 49–51).
The Khazar ruler Joseph associated the creation of the Khazar Khaganate with the war
against the V.n.nd.r., i.e. the Asparukh’s Bulgars. Is it possible that the account in Hudud
al-ʿAlam refers to the remains of precisely this population, which lived in poverty and iso-
lation from the rest of the Bulgar communities in the khaganate? This would explain the
existence of a separate episcopate for the Onogurs during the eighth and ninth centuries
somewhere in the region north of the Caucasus (see Ivanov 2001, 30).