20 CHAPTER 1
syncretism that it is still difficult to determine the nature of the Bulgar pagan
religion and especially its ideology. As for Khazaria, according to S. Pletneva,
“the religious concepts of the population of the Don Region between the
eighth and the ninth centuries constitute a vast topic, since the fragmentation
and brevity of the written and archaeological sources make it impossible to
examine these notions separately from the religions of the other Irano-lingual
and Turko-lingual nomads”.13
The ruling family’s change of religion is not uncommon for the steppe
empires contemporary to Khazaria. A very similar example is the Khakasian
state (the Kyrgyz Khaganate) where the nobility (or rather, a small part of it),
together with the ruler, converted to Manichaeism (around 765 AD), while the
majority of the population remained pagan.14 In this case, the change of reli-
gion did not lead in the slightest to the disintegration of the ethnic whole, to
civil wars or to the collapse of the state. Therefore, there is something eluding
the study of the Khazar dual kingship issue. Most likely, it is contained in the
Khazar population’s notions of power. Khazaria’s population here is seen as
all the ethnic groups that defined the appearance of the material culture and
which most likely had a direct participation in the establishment and func-
tioning of the state—the Khazars, the Bulgars and the Alans. In other words,
these three ethnic groups’ notions of power should be the leading issue in the
process of defining the nature of the Khazar Khaganate in the tenth century.
The above-said directly lays out the problem of the Turko-Iranian symbio-
sis that occurred in the steppes in the first millennium AD. Though here the
Turko-Iranian symbiosis does not in the least imply the division of the Khazar
population into Turks (which the Bulgars and Khazars are most often seen
as) and Iranians (the Alans). Rather, it refers to a cultural fusion that was not
accomplished through contacts between the various ethnic groups in one
state, but that defined to a smaller or larger extent each one of them. The
Bulgars, Khazars and Alans can be seen as a manifestation of this process. In
other words, it refers to the origin of these three ethnic groups, which suggests
a combination of Iranian and Turkic features, either during their formation
Artamonov 1962, 286. See also Shapira 2007a, 293–294. Recently (in 2000) scientists found
a Zoroastrian funeral complex near Derbent, which is dated between the sixth and the
first half of the seventh centuries (Gadzhiev 2007). Maiko 1996, 131–132 suggests the exis-
tence (from the late seventh century) of a Zoroastrian temple near the Morskoe village in
the Crimea, in a region populated by Bulgars.
13 Pletneva 1967, 171.
14 Kyzlasov 2004, 7; Pletneva 1982, 94. A similar, though not sufficiently clarified, situation
existed also in the Uyghur Khaganate after 763 (see for instance Stepanov 2005a, 76).