Олег Бубенок, кандидат исторических наук, заместитель директора Института востоковедения имени Агафангела Крымского Академии наук Украины.

Oleh Bubenok
Concerning the participation of an Iranian element in the ethnogenesis of the Proto-Bulgars.

The origins of the Proto-Bulgars is still controversial. In the opinion of some researchers, from the very beginning the Proto-Bulgars were a part of the Hunnic confederation and related to Turkic peoples. Others are more inclined to see in the Proto-Bulgars as Ugrians Turkicized by the Huns. However A. Smirnov and V. Syrotenko considered that the Proto-Bulgars originally belonged to Sarmato-Alanic tribes. The basis for this was the information of the 4th century Syrian author Mar-Abbas Katina and the Byzantine Chronograph of 359, where it is mentioned that long before the arrival of the Huns in the 4th century, a tribe called the "Bulgars" lived to the north of the Caucasus. However, the mentioned sources were copied in the Middle Ages and we cannot be sure that the copyist did not interchange the name of some other people with the word "Bulgar." The first reliable information on the Bulgars is in John of Antioch and relates to the end of the 5th century. This and also the information of Jordannes, Procopius, Agafij and other early Medieval authors testifies in favor of the Hunnic origin of the Proto-Bulgars. However, the information of Shimon Kezai (13th century), Michael the Syrian (12th century) and Byzantine historians testifies that the Proto-Bulgars subdued and assimilated aborigines of the steppes of Eastern Europe and the Northern Caucasus. The material culture of the Black Bulgars has much in common with the traditions of the Sarmato-Alans of the pre-Hunnic epoch: burial in holes in the ground with a zaplichka, skeletons with displaced bones, burials of men and women hunched over, ceramics, etc. The burial customs of the Volga Bulgars recorded by Ibn Fadlan, in many of their features are reminiscent of those of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Ossetians. The same can be said about the traditions of the Chuvash - the descendants of the Bulgars on the Middle Volga. There is also much common in the lexicons of the Chuvash and Ossetians, who are descendants of the northern Caucasian Sarmato-Alans. From this we can make the supposition that the Proto-Bulgars while being in the steppes of Eurasia not only assimilated local Iranophone tribes, but inherited traits of their ideology and material culture.