Khazars

The Khazars are variably believed to have contributed to the ethnogenesis of numerous peoples, including the Hazaras, Hungarians, Kazakhs, the Don and Zaporozhian Cossacks, Kumyks, Krymchaks, Crimean Karaites, Csángós, Mountain Jews, and Subbotniks. The late 19th century saw the emergence of the Khazar myth, the theory that the core of today's Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora that migrated westward into France and Germany. Linguistic and genetic studies have not supported the theory, and despite occasional support, most scholars view it with considerable skepticism. The theory is sometimes associated with antisemitism.

In Oghuz Turkic languages, the Caspian Sea is still named the "Khazar Sea".

Gyula Németh, following Zoltán Gombocz, derived Khazar from a hypothetical *Qasar reflecting a Turkic root qaz- ("to ramble, to roam") being an hypothetical retracted variant of Common Turkic kez-; however, András Róna-Tas objected that *qaz- is a ghost word. In the fragmentary Tes and Terkhin inscriptions of the Uyğur empire (744–840) the form Qasar is attested, although uncertainty remains whether this represents a personal or tribal name, gradually other hypotheses emerged. Louis Bazin derived it from Turkic qas- ("tyrannise, oppress, terrorise") on the basis of its phonetic similarity to the Uyğur tribal name, Qasar. Róna-Tas connects qasar with Kesar, the Pahlavi transcription of the Roman title Caesar.

D. M. Dunlop tried to link the Chinese term for "Khazars" to one of the tribal names of the Uyğur, or Toquz Oğuz, namely the Qasar (Ch. 葛薩 Gésà). The objections are that Uyğur 葛薩 Gésà/Qasar was not a tribal name but rather the surname of the chief of the 思结 Sijie tribe (Sogdian: Sikari) of the Toquz Oğuz (Ch. 九姓 jĭu xìng), and that in Middle Chinese the ethnonym "Khazars" was always prefaced with Tūjué, then still reserved for Göktürks and their splinter groups, (Tūjué Kěsà bù:突厥可薩部; Tūjué Hésà:突厥曷薩) and "Khazar's" first syllable is transcribed with different characters (可 and 曷) than 葛, which is used to render the syllable Qa- in the Uyğur word Qasar. While it is far from given that the Khazars are not signifying a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual cluster of peoples and clans, some more nomadic, some less, it doesn't exclude that some clans, or splintergroups, or even rulers has identified with the name(s) of the Khazars, in the variety of ways it has been expressed.

After their conversion it is reported that they adopted the Hebrew script, and it is likely that, although speaking a Turkic language, the Khazar chancellery under Judaism probably corresponded in Hebrew.

Determining the origins and nature of the Khazars is closely bound with theories of their languages, but analysis of their languages' origins is difficult, since no indigenous records in the Khazar language survive, and the state was polyglot and polyethnic. Whereas the royal or ruling elite probably spoke an eastern variety of the Common Turkic, the subject tribes appear to have spoken varieties of Oghuric languages, a language variously identified with the Bulgar, Chuvash, and the Hunnic language.

The latter is based upon the assertion of the Persian historian Istakhri that the Khazar language was different from any other known tongue, although his account also likened it to Bulğaric. Alano-As was also widely spoken. Eastern Common Turkic, the language of the royal house and its core tribes, in all likelihood remained the language of the ruling elite in the same way that Mongol continued to be used by the rulers of the Golden Horde, alongside of the Kipchak languages spoken by the bulk of the Turkic tribesmen that constituted the military force of this part of the Činggisid empire. Similarity, Oğuric, like Qipčaq Turkic in the Jočid realm, functioned as one of the languages of government. One method for tracing their origins consists in the analysis of the possible etymologies behind the ethnonym "Khazar".

For most of its history, Khazaria served as a buffer state between the Byzantine Empire, the nomads of the northern steppes, and the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, having previously been Byzantium's proxy against the rival Sasanian Empire. Around 900, the Byzantines began encouraging the Alans to attack Khazaria; this move aimed to weaken Khazar control over Crimea and the Caucasus and facilitate imperial diplomacy and proselytising towards the powerful Kievan Rus' in the north. By 969, Sviatoslav I of Kiev, the ruler of Kievan Rus', along with his allies, conquered the Khazar capital of Atil, ushering the decline and disintegration of Khazaria by the mid 11th century.

Joseph, one of the Khazar rulers, wrote in his Reply to Hasdai ibn Shaprut, that the Khazars were descendants of "Kozar", one of the ten sons of Togarmah (the others being Uygur, Tiros, Avar, Oguz, Bisal, Tarna, Sanar, Bulgar, and Savir).

The tribes that were to comprise the Khazar empire were not an ethnic union, but a congeries of steppe nomads and peoples who came to be subordinated, and subscribed to a core Turkic leadership. Many Turkic groups, such as Oghuric speakers, including the Saragurs, Oğurs, Onogurs, and Bulgars, who earlier formed part of the Tiele (Tiělè) confederation, are attested quite early, having been driven west by the Sabirs, who in turn fled the Pannonian Avars, and began to flow into the Volga–Caspian–Pontic zone from as early as the 4th century and are recorded by Priscus to reside in the western Eurasian Steppe as early as 463. They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia in the aftermath of the fall of the Hunnic-Xiōngnú nomadic polities. A variegated tribal federation led by these Turks, probably comprising a complex assortment of Iranian peoples, proto-Mongols, Uralic speakers, and Paleosiberian peoples vanquished the Rouran Khaganate of the hegemonic Pannonian Avars in 552 who swept westwards, taking in their train other steppe nomads and peoples from Sogdia.

The ruling family of this confederation may have hailed from the Ashina tribe of the Western Turkic Khaganate, although Constantin Zuckerman regards Ashina and their pivotal role in the formation of the Khazars with scepticism. Golden notes that Chinese and Arabic reports are almost identical, making the connection a strong one, and conjectures that their leader may have been Irbis Seguy, who lost power or was killed around 651. Moving west, the confederation reached the land of the Akatziri, who had been important allies of Byzantium in fighting off Attila's army.

An embryonic state of Khazaria began to form sometime after 630, when it emerged from the breakdown of the larger First Turkic Khaganate of the Göktürks. Göktürk armies had penetrated the Volga by 549, ejecting the Avars, who were then forced to flee to the sanctuary of the Pannonian Basin. The Ashina clan appeared on the scene by 552, when they overthrew the Rourans and established the First Turkic Khaganate, whose self designation was Tür(ü)k. By 568, these Göktürks were probing for an alliance with Byzantium to attack the Sasanian Empire. An internecine war broke out between the senior eastern Göktürks and the junior Western Turkic Khaganate some decades later, when on the death of Taspar Qaghan, a succession dispute led to a dynastic crisis between Taspar's chosen heir, the Apa Qaghan, and the ruler appointed by the tribal high council, Āshǐnà Shètú, the Ishbara Qaghan.

By the first decades of the 7th century, the Ashina Tong Yabghu Qaghan managed to stabilise the Western division. Upon his death, after providing crucial military assistance to Byzantium in routing the Sasanian army in the Persian heartland, the Western Turkic Qağanate dissolved under pressure from the encroaching Tang dynasty armies and split into two competing federations, each consisting of five tribes, collectively known as the "Ten Arrows" (On Oq). Both briefly challenged Tang hegemony in eastern Turkestan. To the West, two new nomadic states arose in the meantime: Old Great Bulgaria under Kubrat, the Duōlù clan leader, and the Nǔshībì subconfederation, also comprising five tribes. The Duōlù challenged the Avars in the Kuban River-Sea of Azov area while the Khazar Khaghanate consolidated further westwards, led apparently by an Ashina dynasty. With a resounding victory over the tribes in 657, engineered by General Su Dingfang, Chinese overlordship was imposed to their East after a final mop-up operation in 659, but the two confederations of Bulğars and Khazars fought for supremacy on the western steppeland, and with the ascendency of the latter, the former either succumbed to Khazar rule or, as under Asparukh of Bulgaria, Kubrat's son, shifted even further west across the Danube to lay the foundations of the First Bulgarian Empire in the Balkans (c. 679).

The Khazar Khaghanate thus took shape from the ruins of this nomadic empire, which broke up under pressure from the armies of the Tang dynasty to the east sometime between 630 and 650. After their conquest of the lower Volga region to the East and an area westwards between the Danube and the Dniepr, and their subjugation of the Onoghur-Bulghar union, sometime around 670, a properly constituted Khazar Khaghanate emerges, becoming the westernmost successor state of the formidable Göktürk Khaghanate after its disintegration. According to Omeljan Pritsak, the language of the Onoghur-Bulghar federation was to become the lingua franca of Khazaria as it developed into what Lev Gumilev called a "steppe Atlantis" (stepnaja Atlantida/ Степная Атлантида). Historians have often referred to this period of Khazar domination as the Pax Khazarica because the state became an international trading hub that permitted Western Eurasian merchants safe passage across it to conduct business without interference. The high status soon to be accorded this empire to the north is attested by the Fars-Nama (c. 1100), which relates that the Sasanian emperor, Khosrau I, placed three thrones by his own, one for the King of China, a second for the King of Byzantium, and a third for the King of the Khazars. Although anachronistic in retrodating the Khazars to this period, the legend, by placing the Khazar khagan on a throne of equal status to the rulers of the other two superpowers, attests to the reputation the Khazars had long enjoyed.

Khazaria developed a diarchy (dual leadership) typical among Turkic nomads, consisting of a khagan-bek and a khagan. The emergence of this system may be deeply entwined with the conversion to Judaism. According to Arabic sources, the khagan-bek was called an ʾīšā and the greater a khagan (Arabic: خاقان, romanised: ḫāqān); the former managed and commanded the military, while the greater king's role was primarily sacral, less concerned with daily affairs.

The greater king was recruited from the Khazar house of notables (ahl bayt maʿrūfīn) and, in an initiation ritual, was nearly strangled until he declared the number of years he wished to reign, on the expiration of which he would be ritually killed by the nobles. Similarly, Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote that there was a maximum limit on the number of years of a king's reign. If a khagan had reigned for at least forty years, his courtiers and subjects felt his ability to reason would become impaired by old age. They would then execute him. The deputy ruler would enter the presence of the reclusive greater king only with great ceremony, approaching him barefoot to prostrate himself in the dust and then light a piece of wood as a purifying fire, while waiting humbly and calmly to be summoned.

Particularly elaborate rituals accompanied a royal burial. At one period, travellers had to dismount, bow before the ruler's tomb, and then walk away on foot. Subsequently, the charismatic sovereign's burial place was hidden from view, with a palatial structure ("Paradise") constructed and then hidden under rerouted riverwater to avoid disturbance by evil spirits and later generations. Such a qoruq 'taboo' royal burial ground is typical of inner Asian peoples.

Both the ʾīšā and the ḫāqān converted to Rabbinic Judaism sometime in the 8th century, while the rest, according to the Persian traveller Ahmad ibn Rustah, probably continued to follow traditional religion.

The ruling stratum, like that of the later Činggisids within the Golden Horde, was a relatively small group that differed ethnically and linguistically from its subject peoples, meaning the Alano-As and Oğuric Turkic tribes, who were numerically superior within Khazaria. The Khazar Qağans, while taking wives and concubines from the subject populations, were protected by a Khwarazmian guard corps, or comitatus 'warband' called the Arsiyah. But unlike many other local polities, they hired mercenary soldiers (the junūd murtazīqa in al-Masudi).

At the peak of their empire, the Khazars ran a centralised fiscal administration, with a standing army of some 7–12,000 men, which could, at need, be multiplied two or three times that number by inducting reserves from noble retinues. Other figures for the permanent standing army indicate that it numbered as many as one hundred thousand. They controlled and exacted tribute from 25 to 30 different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, and the Ukrainian steppes. Khazar armies were led by the khagan-bek and commanded by subordinate officers known as tarkhans. When the bek sent out a body of troops, they would not retreat under any circumstances. If they were defeated, survivors were executed.

Settlements were governed by administrative officials known as tuduns. In some cases, such as the Byzantine settlements in southern Crimea, a tudun would be appointed for a town nominally within another polity's sphere of influence. Other officials in the Khazar government included dignitaries referred to by ibn Fadlan as jāwashīghar and kündür, but their responsibilities are unknown.

It has been estimated that 25 to 28 distinct ethnic groups made up the population of the Khazar Qağanate, aside from the ethnic elite. The ruling elite seems to have been constituted out of nine tribes/clans, themselves ethnically heterogeneous, spread over perhaps nine provinces or principalities, each of which would have been allocated to a clan. In terms of caste or class, some evidence suggests that there was a distinction, whether racial or social is unclear, between "White Khazars" (ak-Khazars) and "Black Khazars" (qara-Khazars). The 10th-century Muslim geographer al-Iṣṭakhrī claimed that the White Khazars were strikingly handsome with reddish hair, white skin, and blue eyes, while the Black Khazars were swarthy, verging on deep black as if they were "some kind of Indian". Many Turkic nations had a similar (political, not racial) division between a "white" ruling warrior caste and a "black" class of commoners; the consensus among mainstream scholars is that Istakhri was confused by the names given to the two groups. However, Khazars are generally described by early Arab sources as having a white complexion, blue eyes, and reddish hair. The ethnonym in the Tang Chinese annals, Ashina, often accorded a key role in the Khazar leadership, may reflect an Eastern Iranian or Tokharian word (Khotanese Saka âşşeina-āššsena "blue"): Middle Persian axšaêna ("dark-coloured"): Tokharian A âśna ("blue", "dark"). The distinction appears to have survived the collapse of the Khazarian empire. Later Russian chronicles, commenting on the role of the Khazars in the magyarisation of Hungary, refer to them as "White Oghurs" and Magyars as "Black Oghurs".

Direct sources for the Khazar religion are not many, but in all likelihood they originally engaged in a traditional Turkic form of religious practices known as Tengrism, which focused on the sky god Tengri. Something of its nature may be deduced from what we know of the rites and beliefs of contiguous tribes, such as the North Caucasian Huns. Horse sacrifices were made to this supreme deity. Rites involved offerings to fire, water, and the moon, to remarkable creatures, and to "gods of the road" (cf. Old Türk yol tengri, perhaps a god of fortune). Sun amulets were widespread as cultic ornaments. A tree cult was also maintained. Whatever was struck by lightning, man or object, was considered a sacrifice to the high god of heaven. The afterlife, to judge from excavations of aristocratic tumuli, was much a continuation of life on earth, warriors being interred with their weapons, horses, and sometimes with human sacrifices: the funeral of one tudrun in 711-12 saw 300 soldiers killed to accompany him to the otherworld. Ancestor worship was observed. The key religious figure appears to have been a shaman-like qam, and it was these (qozmím) that were, according to the Khazar Hebrew conversion stories, driven out.

Many sources suggest, and a notable number of scholars have argued, that the charismatic Ashina clan played a germinal role in the early Khazar state, although Zuckerman dismisses the widespread notion of their pivotal role as a "phantom". The Ashina were closely associated with the Tengri cult, whose practices involved rites performed to assure a tribe of heaven's protective providence. The khagan was deemed to rule by virtue of qut, "the heavenly mandate/good fortune to rule."

Khazaria long served as a buffer state between the Byzantine Empire and both the nomads of the northern steppes and the Umayyad Empire, after serving as Byzantium's proxy against the Sasanian Persian Empire. The alliance was dropped around 900. Byzantium began to encourage the Alans to attack Khazaria and weaken its hold on Crimea and the Caucasus, while seeking to obtain an entente with the rising Rus' power to the north, which it aspired to convert to Christianity.

On Khazaria's southern flank, both Islam and Byzantine Christianity were proselytising great powers. Byzantine success in the north was sporadic, although Armenian and Albanian missions from Derbend built churches extensively in maritime Daghestan, then a Khazar district. Buddhism also had exercised an attraction on leaders of both the Eastern (552–742) and Western Qağanates (552–659), the latter being the progenitor of the Khazar state. In 682, according to the Armenian chronicle of Movsês Dasxuranc'i, the king of Caucasian Albania, Varaz Trdat, dispatched a bishop, Israyêl, to convert Caucasian "Huns" who were subject to the Khazars, and managed to convince Alp Ilut'uêr, a son-in-law of the Khazar khagan, and his army, to abandon their shamanising cults and join the Christian fold.

The Arab Georgian martyr St Abo, who converted to Christianity within the Khazar kingdom around 779–80, describes local Khazars as irreligious. Some reports register a Christian majority at Samandar, or Muslim majorities.

Conversion to Judaism is mentioned in the Khazar Correspondence and medieval external sources, such as Masudi's "Meadows of Gold". The authenticity of the former was long doubted and challenged, but the documents are now widely accepted by specialists as either authentic or as reflecting internal Khazar traditions. Archaeological evidence for conversion, on the other hand, remains elusive, and may reflect either the incompleteness of excavations, or that the stratum of actual adherents was thin. Conversion of steppe or peripheral tribes to a universal religion is a fairly well attested phenomenon, and the Khazar conversion to Judaism, although unusual, would not have been without precedent.

Jews from both the Islamic world and Byzantium are known to have migrated to Khazaria during periods of persecution under Heraclius, Justinian II, Leo III, and Romanus Lakapēnos. For Simon Schama, Jewish communities from the Balkans and the Bosphoran Crimea, especially from Panticapaeum, began migrating to the more hospitable climate of pagan Khazaria in the wake of these persecutions, and were joined there by Jews from Armenia. The Geniza fragments, he argues, make it clear the Judaising reforms sent roots down into the whole of the population. The pattern is one of an elite conversion preceding large-scale adoption of the new religion by the general population, which often resisted the imposition. One important condition for mass conversion was a settled urban state, where churches, synagogues or mosques provided a focus for religion, as opposed to the free nomadic lifestyle of life on the open steppes. A tradition of the Iranian Judeo-Tats claims that their ancestors were responsible for the Khazar conversion. A legend traceable to the 16th-century Italian rabbi Judah Moscato attributed it to Yitzhak ha-Sangari.

Both the date of the conversion, and the extent of its influence beyond the elite, often minimised in some scholarship, are a matter of dispute, but at some point between 740 and 920 CE, the Khazar royalty and nobility appear to have converted to Judaism, in part, it is argued, perhaps to deflect competing pressures from Arabs and Byzantines to accept either Islam or Christianity.

The conversion of the Khazars to Judaism is an emotionally charged topic in Israel, and two scholars, Moshe Gil (2011) and Shaul Stampfer, (2013) have challenged the authenticity of the medieval Hebrew documents and argue that the conversion of the Khazar elite to Judaism never happened. Alex M. Feldman is critical of Stampfer and Gil's dismissal of "overwhelming textual and archaeological evidence" of Khazarian Judaism, though agrees it is unlikely that Ashkenazim are descended from Khazarian Jews, he posits "a middle ground which can simultaneously accept Khazarian Judaism and doubt the Khazar-Ashkenazi descent theory advanced in dubious genetic studies."

The earliest surviving Arabic text that refers to Khazar Jewishness appears to be that which was written by Ibn Rustah, a Persian scholar who wrote an encyclopedic work on geography in the early tenth century. It is believed that ibn Rustah derived much of his information from the works of his contemporary Abu al-Jayhani based in Central Asia.

Christian of Stavelot in his Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam (c. 860–870s) refers to Gazari, presumably Khazars, as living in the lands of Gog and Magog, who were circumcised and omnem Judaismum observat—observing all the laws of Judaism. New numismatic evidence of coins dated 837/8 bearing the inscriptions arḍ al-ḫazar "Land of the Khazars", or Mûsâ rasûl Allâh "Moses is the messenger of God", in imitation of the Islamic coin phrase "Muhammad is the messenger of God") suggest to many the conversion took place in that decade. Olsson argues that the 837/8 evidence marks only the beginning of a long and difficult official Judaisation that concluded some decades later. A 9th-century Jewish traveller, Eldad ha-Dani, is said to have informed Spanish Jews in 883 that there was a Jewish polity in the East, and that fragments of the legendary Ten Lost Tribes, part of the line of Simeon and half-line of Manasseh, dwelt in "the land of the Khazars", receiving tribute from some 25 to 28 kingdoms. Another view holds that by the 10th century, while the royal clan officially claimed Judaism, a non-normative variety of Islamisation took place among the majority of Khazars.

By the 10th century, the letter of King Joseph asserts that, after the royal conversion, "Israel returned (yashuvu yisra'el) with the people of Qazaria (to Judaism) in complete repentance (bi-teshuvah shelemah)." Persian historian Ibn al-Faqîh wrote that "all the Khazars are Jews, but they have been Judaized recently". Ibn Fadlân, based on his Caliphal mission (921–922) to the Volga Bulgars, also reported that "the core element of the state, the Khazars, were Judaized", something underwritten by the Qaraite scholar Ya'kub Qirqisânî around 937. The conversion appears to have occurred against a background of frictions arising from both an intensification of Byzantine missionary activity from the Crimea to the Caucasus, and Arab attempts to wrest control over the latter in the 8th century CE, and a revolt, put down, by the Khavars around the mid-9th century is often invoked as in part influenced by their refusal to accept Judaism. Modern scholars generally see the conversion as a slow process through three stages, which accords with Richard Eaton's model of syncretic inclusion, gradual identification and, finally, displacement of the older tradition.

Sometime between 954 and 961, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, from al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), wrote a letter of inquiry addressed to the ruler of Khazaria, and received a reply from Joseph of Khazaria. The exchanges of this Khazar Correspondence, together with the Schechter Letter discovered in the Cairo Geniza and the famous Platonizing dialogue by Judah Halevi, Sefer ha-Kuzari ("Book (of) The Khazari"), which plausibly drew on such sources, provide us with the only direct evidence of the indigenous traditions concerning the conversion. King Bulan is said to have driven out the sorcerers, and to have received angelic visitations exhorting him to find the true religion, upon which, accompanied by his vizier, he travelled to desert mountains of Warsān on a seashore, where he came across a cave rising from the plain of Tiyul in which Jews used to celebrate the Sabbath. Here he was circumcised. Bulan is then said to have convened a royal debate between exponents of the three Abrahamic religions. He decided to convert when he was convinced of Judaism's superiority. Many scholars situate this c. 740, a date supported by Halevi's own account. The details are both Judaic and Turkic: a Turkic ethnogonic myth speaks of an ancestral cave in which the Ashina were conceived from the mating of their human ancestor and a wolf ancestress. These accounts suggest that there was a rationalising syncretism of native pagan traditions with Jewish law, by melding through the motif of the cave, a site of ancestral ritual and repository of forgotten sacred texts, Turkic myths of origin and Jewish notions of redemption of Israel's fallen people. It is generally agreed they adopted Rabbinical rather than Qaraite Judaism.

Ibn Fadlan reports that the settlement of disputes in Khazaria was adjudicated by judges hailing each from his community, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Pagan. Some evidence suggests that the Khazar king saw himself as a defender of Jews even beyond the kingdom's frontiers, retaliating against Muslim or Christian interests in Khazaria in the wake of Islamic and Byzantine persecutions of Jews abroad. Ibn Fadlan recounts specifically an incident in which the king of Khazaria destroyed the minaret of a mosque in Atil as revenge for the destruction of a synagogue in Dâr al-Bâbûnaj, and allegedly said he would have done worse were it not for a fear that the Muslims might retaliate in turn against Jews. Hasdai ibn Shaprut sought information on Khazaria in the hope he might discover "a place on this earth where harassed Israel can rule itself" and wrote that, were it to prove true that Khazaria had such a king, he would not hesitate to forsake his high office and his family in order to emigrate there.

Albert Harkavy noted in 1877 that an Arabic commentary on Isaiah 48:14

ascribed to Saadia Gaon or to the Karaite scholar Benjamin Nahâwandî, interpreted "The Lord hath loved him" as a reference "to the Khazars, who will go and destroy Babel" (i.e., Babylonia), a name used to designate the country of the Arabs.

Nine skeletons dating to the 7th–9th centuries excavated from elite military burial mounds of the Khazar Khaganate (in the modern Rostov region) were analysed in two genetic studies (from 2019 and 2021). According to the 2019 study, the results "confirm the Turkic roots of the Khazars, but also highlight their ethnic diversity and some integration of conquered populations". The samples did not show a genetic connection to Ashkenazi Jews, and the results do not support the hypothesis of Ashkenazi Jews being descendants of the Khazars. In the 2021 study the results showed both European and East Asian paternal haplogroups in the samples: three individuals carried R1a Y-haplogroup, two had C2b, and the rest carried haplogroups G2a, N1a, Q, and R1b, respectively. According to the authors, "The Y-chromosome data are consistent with the results of the craniological study and genome-wide analysis of the same individuals in the sense that they show mixed genetic origins for the early medieval Khazar nobility". Their facial features were of mix of East Asian and European, with East Asian type dominating (70%) in the early Khazars.