Andras Rona-Tas – författare

This volume, a product of international collaboration, presents readers with the state of the field in Khazar Studies. The Khazar Empire (ca. 650 - ca. 965-969), one of the largest states of medieval Eurasia, extended from the Middle Volga lands in the north to the Northern Caucasus and Crimea in the south and from the Ukrainians steppelands to the western borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the east. Turkic in origin, it played a key role in the history of the peoples of Rus’, medieval Hungary and the Caucasus. Khazaria became one of the great trans-Eurasian trading terminals connecting the northern forest zones with Byzantium and the Arabian Caliphate. In the ninth century, the Khazars converted to Judaism. This book sheds new light on many unanswered, but fundamental questions regarding the Khazar Empire, so important in medieval Eurasia.

Based on the Tibetan loanwords in an archaic Mongolic language, the author reconstructed an unknown Tibetan dialect which pertains to the North Eastern Archaic Tibetan group. The result is compared with the data known from other NEAT dialects, with the material of the West Archaic Tibetan languages such as Balti, Purig and Ladak, and also with the non-archaic dialects from Central Tibet and Lhasa. With the use of Literary Tibetan and data from Old Tibetan, Tibeto-Mongolica proposes a new approach to the reconstruction of the history of the Tibetan language. Originally published in 1966, and long out of print, the book has served as a standard handbook for historical Tibetan studies for several generations of scholars and is now updated by a new Introduction and enhanced by reprints of a selection of the author’s relevant Tibetological papers.