Burtas

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Burtas (Russian: Буртасы, Chuvash: Пăртассем, Tatar Cyrillic: Бортаслар, Latin: Bortaslar) were a tribe of uncertain ethnolinguistic affiliation inhabiting the steppe region north of the Caspian Sea in medieval times (modern Penza Oblast, Ulyanovsk Oblast and Saratov Oblast of the Russian Federation). They were subject to the Khazars.

The ethnic identiry of the Burtas is disputed, with several different theories ranging from them being a Uralic tribal confederacy (probably later assimilated to Turkic language), and therefore perhaps the ancestors of the modern Moksha people, or that they were an Aryan tribe, possibly the ancestors of the modern Mishars, and/or Volga Tatars and Chuvash.

Recently, some scholars have suggesting that the Burtas were actually Alans or another Iranian ethnolinguistic group. The Alanic (Sarmatian) origin is also derived from their name Burt-as / Beehive-asses (Burt is Turkic for beehive) and Asses is Alanic selfname, as Ossetians (Caucasian Alans) and Jasses (Jasz, Hungarian Alans) all used the same name.

Literature

Kevin Alan Brook. The Jews of Khazaria. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2010.ISBN 978-0-7425-4981-4

(Tatar) "Бортаслар". Tatar Encyclopaedia. Kazan: The Republic of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences. Institution of the Tatar Encyclopaedia. 2002.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.