34 2 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



the year 1896 a number of Votyaks were tried and convicted for 

 the murder of a passing mendicant, whom they had beheaded to 

 appease the wrath of Kiremet, Spirit of Evil and author of the 

 famine raging at that time in Central Russia. Besides Kiremet, 

 the Votyaks who appear to have migrated from the Urals to 

 their present homes between the Kama and the Viatka rivers 

 about 400 A.D., and are mostly heathens also worship Inmar, 

 God of Heaven, to whom they sacrifice animals as well as human 

 beings whenever it can be safely done. We are assured by Baron 

 de Baye that even the few who are baptized take part secretly 

 in these unhallowed rites 1 . 



To the Ugrian branch, rudest and most savage of all the 

 Finnish peoples, belong these now moribund Volga groups, as 

 well as the fierce Bulgar and Magyar hordes, if not also their 

 precursors, the Jazyges and Rhoxolani, who in the 2nd century A.D. 

 swarmed into Pannonia from the Russian steppe, and in company 

 with the Germanic Quadi and Marcomanni twice (168 and 172) 

 advanced to the walls of Aquileia, and were twice arrested by the 

 legions of Marcus Aurelius and Verus. Of the once numerous 

 Jazyges, whom Pliny calls Sarmates, there were several branches 

 Mceotce, Metanastcz, Basilii ("Royal") who were first reduced 

 by the Goths spreading from the Baltic to the Euxine and Lower 

 Danube, and then overwhelmed with the Dacians, Getae, Bastarnae, 

 and a hundred other ancient peoples in the great deluge of the 

 Hunnish invasion. 



From the same South Russian steppe the plains watered by 

 the Lower Don and Dnieper came the Bulgars, 



The Bulgars 



Origins and first in association with the Huns, from whom they 

 are scarcely distinguished by the early Byzantine 

 writers, and then as a separate people, who, after throwing off the 

 yoke of the Avars (635 A.D.), withdrew before the pressure of the 

 Khazars westwards to the Lower Danube (678). But their records 

 go much farther back than these dates, and while philologists and 

 archaeologists are able to trace their wanderings step by step north 

 to the Middle Volga and the Ural Mountains, authentic Armenian 



1 Notes stir les Votiaks payms des Gonvernements de Kazan et Viatka, Paris. 

 1897. They are still numerous, especially in Yiatka, where they numbered 

 240,000 in 1897. 



