Arkeolojik bulgular ışığında Hazar–Macar ilişkileri

This chapter approaches Khazar–Hungarian relations from an archaeological perspective, focusing on three problems: the Khazar fortress of Šarkel and the Hungarians, parallels between the archaeological material of the Hungarians and of the Khazar Khaganate in the 9th and 10th centuries, and the Qabars and their archaeological traces. Reviewing De Administrando Imperio and Ibn Rusta, the author finds problematic the early 20th-century hypothesis that Šarkel, built around 840 with Byzantine help, was directed against the Hungarians: Ibn Rusta's sentence on Khazar entrenchment was probably inserted in the early 10th century, and the DAI presents the Hungarians as vassals of the Khaganate. Šarkel is unique among the Khaganate's north-western fortresses, which do not form a limes, and has precise Byzantine parallels, but archaeology cannot show why it was built. Saltovo-type finds are rare in the Carpathian Basin; the closest parallels to Hungarian material lie in the Middle Volga region, and the Subotsi-horizon material of Etelköz, though connected with the Saltovo culture, is not identical with Khazar-type material. No archaeological traces of the Qabars have been identified; the homogeneity of 10th-century material in the Carpathian Basin suggests that they changed their material culture within three to four generations and perhaps joined the Hungarians in the first half of the 9th century. The chapter concludes that the written sources reflect contacts between Hungarian and Khazar elites, whereas the absence of archaeological evidence for intensive coexistence contradicts the linguistic model based on the many Old Turkic loanwords in Hungarian.