NO. II THE RACES OF RUSSIA — HRDLICKA 7 



tion and dispersion than blood admixture. Yet remnants of the 

 Huns may have remained in what was once Scythia for a long time 

 after their original name disappeared. 



The Scythians, together with the problematical Sauromatae, the 

 Goths, the Huns, and other early groups, became now gradually 

 replaced in southern Russia by a new ethnic unit, the Khazars. The 

 Khazars were, according to many indications, of Caucasus or Asia 

 Minor extraction, and related to the Georgians and Armenians. 

 There were with them, however, also the so-called " Black Khazars," 

 who may have been Huns. Their history in Russia extends over a 

 very considerable period of time — from the end of the second to the 

 eleventh centuries. • Between 600 and 950 their territory spread 

 from the Caspian Sea to the Don and later even into Crimea. They 

 were relatively civilized people, who built towns and engaged exten- 

 sively in sea trade, which earned them the name ot the " Phoeni- 

 cians " or " Venetians " of the Caspian and Black Seas. In the 

 earlier part of the seventh century their power was such that they 

 compelled the agricultural Slavs of the Dnieper and even those of 

 more northern regions to pay tribute. About 740 they accepted 

 Judaism. But during the ninth and tenth centuries they were grad- 

 ually overwhelmed by the Russians, and in the eleventh century 

 they practically disappeared from the stage. Remnants of the Kha- 

 zars probably still exist in the Caucasus. What effect this interesting 

 ethnic unit had on the blood of the Russian population it is hard to 

 estimate, but at most it was not extensive. 



The Khazar occupation of the regions which now form south- 

 eastern Russia was, however, far from uniform and continuously 

 peaceful. The waves of invasion of the Turkish and Tartar tribes 

 from farther east followed one another with greater or shorter 

 intervals and over approximately the same roads, the broad open 

 steppes, traversed before by the Huns. Some of these invasions it 

 is not necessary to enumerate in detail. The more important ones 

 were those of the Bolgars, in 482, 1 of the Avars, in 557, and those of 

 the Polovtsi (Kumans), Ugri (Magyars), Pechenegs, and related 

 tribes, in the ninth and tenth centuries. Whatever the name under 

 which they came, they were, so far as can at present be discerned, 

 all of Tartar or Turkish or Ugro-Finnic extraction, which means 

 mixtures in differing proportions of the white (western Asiatic) and 



1 These were the non-Slavic Bolgars from the Volga, who eventually left 

 their name to the Slavonic state south of the Danube. 



