On the path through the Shadow Empire: The Khazar nomads at the North-Western frontier of Iran and the Islamic Caliphate

The nomadic Khazars inhabited the North-Western frontier of Iran and the Islamic Caliphate and were at the vanguard of the large Turk/Khazar Empire that dominated the Western Eurasian Steppe and its trade routes from the 6 th to the 10th centuries AD. The Turk/Khazar polity was formed as a "shadow empire" which was politically and economically linked to Sasanian Iran and later, the Islamic Caliphate. The Khazar nomads, who were strategically located in the wider North-Western Caspian Region, witnessed a number of dramatic cultural and political transformations, such as incorporation into the Turk/Khazar imperial polity, Islamization, and the economic explosion of market exchange during the 9th-10 th centuries AD. These cultural and political developments are evident from scarce historical sources, but archaeologically they have been demonstrated to some degree only in the context of settled peoples, who were the tributaries of the Turk/Khazar Empire.;This study uses interdisciplinary sources, including historical, anthropological, and archaeological data, to redefine the cultural category of the Khazars and highlight the important role these nomads of the North-Western Caspian region played in the aforementioned transformations during the second half of the first millennium AD. This dissertation also deals with modern politicized interpretations of Khazar material culture and the crisis of the archaeological representation of the Khazar nomads in the framework of the positivist Eurocentric paradigm. Instead, this study begins with a cosmological approach and reinterprets available historical data by filtering them through relevant anthropological models according to a cultural "hierarchy of difference." The main focus falls on an emic perspective, the politics of representation, and the value of materiality in the world of the nomadic Khazars. Thus a new approach to this nomadic material culture is developed, which allows for a comparative evaluation of the cultural and political continuity and change among the Khazar nomads and their settled neighbors. In addition, original archaeological data were collected during seasonal surface surveys (2002-2004) in the core territory of the nomadic Khazars (in the Republic of Kalmykia, Russia) that demonstrate strong links between the nomadic sites, the frontier population of Iran and the Islamic Caliphate.