THE EUROPEAN STEPPES IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Volume 4
The fourth volume of "The Steppes", despite of a wide choice of themes connected with the ethnocultural periods of the Middle Ages nomads including Huns, Avars, Alans, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Oguzes, Polovtsys, Mongols, etc., again as 4 years ago (Vol.2) is devoted to the Khazarian time. There is nothing surprising in this as the given problematic, certainly, goes through the period of the unprecedented upsurge today that is proved to be true, in particular, by the appearance of new editions solely Khazarian by theme. So "The Khazarian almanac" project organized in Kharkov is being successfully developed under the aegis of which three volumes were already published (2002, 2004, and 2005) and the fourth and the fifth are planned for publishing. The collection of materials of the Second International Colloquium on the Khazars which took place in 2002 was issued recently. The collected papers are being prepared in Rostov-on-Don. Furthermore the conferences and seminars have taken place in Moscow, Jerusalem, Kharkov. This all cannot but please because researches on Khazar subject will not be dissolved in a huge amount of archaeological editions now. Such an appreciable improvement of a state of affairs in the Khazar study should promote the further escalating of knowledge about the Khazarian kaganat and the Saltovo-Mayaki culture which, in our opinion, cannot be territorially equated.
The collected papers have gathered a many-sided material which can be conditionally divided at least into 4 blocks: publications of new sources, a problem of distribution of Judaism and Islam, a social and political structure of Khazaria, and numismatic finds. However, it is quite difficult to represent them sequentially since the materials often intersect each other in the same work.
A.V.Yevglevsky
