Now the whole history of the Avars, as well as their locality and alliances, is Turk; and their ruler is regularly spoken of as the Khaghan, or Khan, of the Avars.
The Turk affinity of the Avars has never been doubted.
The Alani.—The locality, the history, and all à priori evidence make the Alans Turkish;—two facts only, that I know of, militate, even in the smallest way, against their being so.
1. The well-known alliance between the Alani and Vandals; a fact of value only in the eyes of him who believes that none but ethnologically related tribes enter into offensive and defensive alliances.
2. The accredited identity between the Alani and the Oseti of Caucasus; a tribe undoubtedly not Turkish. Let us analyze the grounds of this belief. The Oseti name themselves Irôn, but are named by the Turks and Georgians, Osi; by the Russians, Yassy; by the Arabians, As. This is the first fact.
The second is a pair of quotations from Carpin and Barbaro:—
a. Alains ou Asses.—Carpin.
b. La Alania è derivata da populo delli Alani, liquali nella lor lingua si chiamano As.—Barbaro.
Now the most that this proves is, that the same name which the Alans gave to themselves, the Georgians, &c. gave to the Irôn; a fact which is by no means conclusive. On the other hand, it shows that the two indigenous names, As and Irôn, were different. This subject will be noticed again when speaking of the Oseti. At present it is not unnecessary to add, that the name Uz (Οὐζ) has already been mentioned as a name of a tribe in this locality; and that, possibly, it may=As. If so, the Alans, Uzi, and Cumani, are the same people at different times. Nothing is more likely than this, especially as we know that Alani was not a native name, and have good reasons for thinking the same of the term Cumani.
Again, the Oseti, a limited mountain tribe of the Middle Caucasus, with all its supposed affinities in Media and Persia—since the same writers who identify the Alans with Oseti, identify the Oseti with the Medes—could never have passed as Scythians. Now the Alans did so pass, as is shown by a remarkable passage in Lucian:—"so said Makentæs, being the same in dress and the same in language as the Alani (ὁμόσκευος καὶ ὁμόγλωττος τοῖς Ἀλανοῖς ὤν); since these things are common to the Alani and the Skythæ; except that the Alani are not altogether so long-haired as the Skythæ. In this respect, however, Makentæs was like a Skythian, inasmuch as he had shaved himself to the extent to which an Alan head of hair falls short of a Skythian one."[25]