Source: http://www.kroraina.com/hudud/hud_53_c.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 16:31:10+00:00

Document:
Marquart, Streifzüge, passim; Moravcsik, Zur Geschichte der Onoguren, v.s., § 22.
THE SEATS OF THE V.N.ND.R. Our peoples V.n.nd.r (§ 53) and Mirvāt (§ 46) have direct parallels only in Gardīzī's N.nd.r and M.rdāt. In both the Ḥ.-'Ā. and Gardīzī the V.n.nd.r / N.nd.r are the immediate neighbours of the Majgharī though the latter's habitat is conceived differently: our author places them near the Urals, whereas Gardīzī describes the Southern Magyars as living in the region of great rivers in the north-western corner of the Black Sea. Gardīzī's views on the Magyar territory are supported not only by I.R. and Bakrī but by the consensus of Byzantine and Western European sources as well. Therefore in discussing the location of the V.n.nd.r / N.nd.r territory contiguous on that of the Majgharī we have to depend chiefly on Gardīzī and disregard our author's theoretical constructions.  Such is the conclusion arrived at after a long series of attempts to co-ordinate our data with those of Gardīzī until it became evident that our author's starting-point was based on an error.
3. Gardīzī simply describes the facts and our author forces them into a geographical scheme. His error arises the moment that he tries to dispose his materials in map form.
that it stretched in a northern direction. The river from the eastern (or northern) bank of which the Majgharī could see the N.nd.r on the opposite bank is most probably the Danube, or alternatively its northern affluent Sereth mentioned in Const. Porph.'s description of Atelkuzu (v.s., § 22). Consequently the N.nd.r lived west of the last mentioned river, or south of the Danube, with the Transylvanian Carpathians standing "above" them. Gardīzī adds that the N.nd.r lived in the direction (bar janb "on the side") of the Saqlāb. As stated in § 43 the latter term may refer to the western Slavs (or even to the Macedonian Slavs, § 42, 17.).
Our author, in spite of his cartographical error, preserves the original disposition of the peoples with regard to one another, but this goes only as far as the original triad Majgharī - V.n.nd.r - Mirvāt is concerned. In § 46, north [east?] of the Mirvāt are named "some of the Inner Bulghār and [!] the V.n.nd.r mountains". As the Inner Bulghār belong definitely to the Iṣṭ. < Balkhī tradition which does not know the V.n.nd.r, this combination may be disregarded as the author's own guess. See diagram on p. 440.
1. In his translation of § 52 (in annex to Markov's work) Toumansky illustrates V.n.nd.r by found in Ibn al-Athīr, i, 243 ( < Mas'ūdī, Murūj, ii, 58-64). On other similar hints cf. now Kokovtsov, o.c., 92.
2. Cf. Barthold's Preface, p. 43. Marquart, Streifzüge, 172, 517, knew only a stray quotation from the Ḥ.-'Ā through Westberg's Beiträge, p. 215.
Širakac'i, VII. Jahrh.) > W(u)ł(u)ndur Bułkar (Ps. Moses Chorenac'i, letztes Drittel des IX. Jahrh.), Wunundur (Ḥudūd al-'Ālam, Ende des X. Jahrh.), bereits mit prothetischem w vor labialem Vokal, wie im čuwaschischen; Wulundur (al-Mas'ūdī, 943-4 n. Chr.) = magy. Nándor Fejérvár = Belgrad."
The exact references of this cryptic passage are: Nicephori Archiepiscopi Constantinopolitani Opuscula, ed. de Boor, Lipsiae 1880, p. 24; Yāqūt,ī, 404: Japhet's sons: Yūnān, al-Ṣaqlab, (sic),  Burjān, Jurzān, Fārs, Rūm; Géographie de Moïse de Corène [attributed sometimes to A. Shirakats'i], ed. by Soukry, Venice 1881, p. 25, transl. p. 34 (Marquart's translation in Streifzüge, 57); Moses of Khoren, History, book ii, ch. 6. The reference to the Ḥ.-'Ā. evidently hails from Westberg's Beiträge. Mas'ūdī mentions both in the Murūj, ii, 58-64, and in the Tanbīh, 180, 183 (see in detail Streifzüge, 60-74).
1. Not in the general index of Wüstenfeld's edition.
2. Marquart, Chronologie, pp. 89-96, Streifzüge, pp. 126, 505; Bury, A History of the later Roman Empire, 1889, ii, 333; Moravcsik, o.c., pp. 65, 71—2, 89.
3. The name Onoghundur (Onoghur, &c.) may be responsible for the western designation of the Magyars as Hungar-. See Munkácsi and Németh quoted by Moravcsik, o.c., 81, note 3.
began their westward trek which finally brought them into the present-day Hungary, cf. Moravcsik, o.c., 89.
1. The Khazar king's letter (v.i.) refers to the events of A.D. 679, but this detail may point to the literary origin of the passage.
2. Unless the name V.n.nd.r < Onoghundur refers to some special Bulghar territory, such as the original occupied by Asparukh ?
3. Was then the original source on Eastern Europe, or the text in which it was available, in Persian? The absence of underground canals (kārīz) in the M.rdāt country, mentioned in Gardīzī, could hardly strike any one except an Iranian. Cf. also the strange transcription of the name (§51) (§ 52). These facts still await an explanation. Mas'ūdī, Murūj, ii, 59, says that dissensions among the W.l.nd.rī tribes arose in connexion with the presence among them of a Muslim merchant from Ardābīl. Consequently Persian traders penetrated into the southern Russian steppes and could be the source of information for their coreligionists.
5. Were it not for the name *Vunundur one might consider as the Magyars' neighbours the Rumanian Vlachs, see Kunik in Izvestiya al-Bakri, ii, 16, and Niederle, Manuel, Map.
6. The Danube Bulgars were baptized under King Boris in A.D. 864. If indeed our data refer to them ( = Burjān = Inner Bulghār = Bulghari), their weakness in comparison with the Magyars could be explained by the fact that the latter were moving westwards and their forced energy (under the Pecheneg impact) could be mistaken for strength.
1. The form W.l.nd.r peculiar to Mas'ūdī results from the dissimilation n.n>l.n. Cf. the Armenian form Vłəndur.
2. See Marquart, Streifzüge, 60-74, 499-500, 527.
4. Marquart, o.c., 74: "verblasste Erinnerungen".
5. See now V. Zlatarski, Istoriya na Bŭlgarskata dŭržava, Sofia, 1927, i. 25: the frontier left Develt to the Byzantine Empire.
from some colony of Onoghundurs with whom the Greeks were in relations since the times of Kobrat, Streifzüge, 529, or because it was directed against the Vulundur (in Arabic one might say: 'alā thaghr al-Wulundur), and consequently Mas'ūdi's term *Wulunduriya (referring to all the four, or even five different tribes), most probably has to be taken in the sense of "the coalition attacking on the *Vulundur front".  Whatever the explanation of the raid,  the survival of the name *Vulundur in Mas'ūdī is a firmly established fact interesting as a parallel to our *Vunundur.
THE KHAZAR KING'S LETTER. Among the parallels to the name V.n.nd.r it remains for us to consider V.n.nt.r found in the Hebrew letter supposed to have been sent by the Khazar king Joseph in answer to that of Chasdai ben Shafrut, an agent to the Cordovan caliph 'Abd al-Raḥmān (A.D. 912-61). The year 961 is the terminus ante quem of Chasdai's original letter and the king's reply must have followed it within a not too long period. As has been recently discovered (1924), the existence of King Joseph's letter was known already to Yahuda ben Barzillai (lived towards A.D. 1100) who wondered "whether it was genuine or not". The question is complicated by the existence of two versions of the document:  the one (A) in a shorter form was published in Constantinople in 1577 (this text is very close to the Christ Church College MS. 193); the other (B) in a more complete form came to light only towards 1873 among the manuscripts collected by Firkovich. This fact, in view of this collector's suspect practices, was not in favour of a blind acceptance of the contents of this particular version.
1. Unless the coalition was formed on some special territory, v.s., = Bujaq.
3. See Prof. P. K. Kokovtsov, Yevreysko-khazarskaya perepiska v X veke, ed. by the Academy of the U.S.S.R., 1932, which gives the originals of all the documents bearing on the correspondence with the Khazar king with translation and a very valuable commentary. The third document discovered lately in Cambridge does not concern us here.
4. Kokovtsov's transl., pp. 75 and 92.
In a later passage the king gives an account of the Khazar boundaries and, immediately after a very detailed enumeration of the localities belonging to the Crimea [Firkovich's home!], the frontier is said to turn northwards to the country of Batsra ( most probably *Bačna referring to Bajnī or Bajnā whom Mas'ūdī associates with the Pechenegs, v.s., p. 469, n. 3). The (inhabitants) of this country lived near the river V.zg (A. spells Y.zg, very probably *Uzu = Dniepr) and wandered in the steppe down to the limits of the H.gry'īm (A. Hyndy'īm), i.e. evidently Hungarians *H.ng.r. Consequently the lands of a (Turkish) tribe and those of the Magyars stretched to the west of the Khazar and separated the latter from the Danube. The writer clearly refers to the expulsion of the V.n.nt.r beyond the Danube as a remote past (events of A.D. 679), whereas the account of the Khazar frontiers presupposes the arrival of the Pechenegs in the second half of the ninth century. The form W.n.nt.r has a striking resemblance to our V.n.nd.r, and on the other hand considerably differs from the forms attested in Greek and Armenian sources. Numerous names in version B seem to have been borrowed from Muslim geographers  and the question arises whether such is not the case of W.n.nt.r as well. The interpolator could not possibly know the Ḥ.-'Ā. or Gardīzī [which in Europe have come to light at a very recent date] but could he not have seen their common source? The text of the Khazar letter as it stands, if confronted with our two Persian authors, would confirm the interpretation of our Rūtā/Dūbā as Danube  and, on the other hand, suggest the identity of our V.n.nd.r with the Danubian Bulgars. However, the origin of the Hebrew interpolation remains obscure and the clever interpolator may have read his own sense into his source. Therefore in our own explanation of the Muslim texts we have to go principally by their internal evidence.
1. The most striking example is the Arabic form *Ṣlawiyūn, Kokovtsov, o.c. 98-9.
2. See, however, supra, p. 217.

References: § 22
 § 22
 § 43
 § 42
 § 46
 § 52
 V.