Sources on the Alans.

• Author: Thordarson, Fridrik
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Sources on the Alans. By agusti ALEMANY. Handbook of Oriental Studies, sect. 8: Central Asia, vol. 5. Leiden: BRILL, 2000. Pp. xxi + 461, maps.

This book, which grew out of a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Barcelona in 1997, is a meticulous study of Oriental and Western sources on Alan history from antiquity till late medieval times.

The Alans made their first appearance in Classical sources in the first century A.D. (Pliny the Elder, Josephus [Jewish Antiquities and History of the Jews]; brief allusions in Lucan's Bellum Civile and Seneca's Thyestes). The identification of the Alans and As with the Yancai and Wusun of Chinese sources from the second century B.C. is dubious (pp. 396-402).

In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the Iranian-speaking Alans were a predominating political force in the northwest Caucasus, but were gradually ousted, politically and linguistically, from their territories by invading Circassian and Turkic tribes. Today the Ossetes, the Alans' linguistic descendants, inhabit a comparatively small area in the Central Caucasus (the North Ossetic Republic--Alanija, and the (formerly autonomous) South Ossetic region of Georgia).

After an introduction (chap. 1), where the ethnic names [[blank].sup.*]al(l)an- and [[blank].sup.*]as- (Georgian o(v)s-), apparently synonymous designations, are discussed, the author examines in four chapters the ancient and medieval Latin and Greek sources. There follow ten chapters, where sources in Arabic, Armenian, Catalan (Ramon Muntaner's Cronica from the early fourteenth century), Georgian, Hebrew, Iranian (literary Persian and epigraphical texts), Mongolian, Russian, Syriac, and Chinese are scrutinized from philological and historical points of view. The texts are in part retold, in part translated and quoted from the original languages. Each chapter contains an onomasticon, where proper names, occurring in the texts, are explained and etymologized insofar as our present state of knowledge allows. Chapter 16 gives a detailed chronological table, which begins with year 107 B.C., the alleged date of the first appearance of the Rhoxolani in South Russia, and goes down to 1400/39, the age of Arugtai, an Alan chieftain in Mongolia. The bibliographic references testify to the author's wide reading and an intimate knowledge of the historical sources treated in the book.

In a study containing such a wealth of information, some defects and omissions are unavoidable. From the...