Baliqchi

According to Theophanes the Confessor, baliqchi (Old Turkic most probably: balıkçı) was a military title used by the Khazar Khaganate. If the term Balgitzin can be associated with balık[çı], then it means "[an executer of a labour/issue] pertaining to a walled town/stronghold", because besides the meanings "fish" and "mud", balık in Old Turkic means "walled town, stronghold; town".[1] The term has evolved from ba- "bind, tie, connect; close, block; etc." with a word-building -l suffix, which cognates with wal- "wall". It is synonymous with tam "dam, wall". Balıkçı could be a title or a common name for a townwall guardian.

For other uses, see Baliqchi (disambiguation).

An earlier figure in Khazar history, Balgitzin, was governor of Phanagoria during Justinian II's sojourn there in 705 CE. Whether Balgitzin is a personal name or a variant of the title Baliqchi is unclear.

The Schechter Letter describes the Khazar general Pesakh as "BWLŠṢY" (Hebrew: בולשצי‎), which has been interpreted as both the Hebrew rendition of baliqchi, or as Boluščï, a Turkic personal name, which would imply that "Pesakh" was not the general's name at birth.

References
  1. Clauson, Sir Gerard (1972). An etymological dictionary of pre-thirteens-century Turkish. Oxford University Press. pp. 335f.
  • Kevin Alan Brook. The Jews of Khazaria. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006.
  • Douglas M. Dunlop. The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954.
  • Peter B. Golden. Khazar Studies: An Historio-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars. Budapest: Akademia Kiado, 1980.
  • Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.