Sabir People

The Sabir (sbr/Σάβιροι/Savirs) people inhabited the south-western Caspian Depression of Strabo's Sauromatae (not to be confused with the Sarmatians) prior to the arrival of the Caucasian Avars from Abarshahr (Khurasan). They appear to have been a Oghur Turkic people, possibly of Hunnic origin. "The name Sabir dates back to the kingdom of Subartu, which some scholars have linked with the name Sib-Ir (sleeping-Land).

The Sabir lived predominantly in the region of Azerbaijan (see Sabir, Azerbaijan) and Dagestan bounded on the east by the Caspian Sea, on the west by the Caucasus Mountains. Priscus mentions that the Sabir attacked the Saragur, Urog and Unogur tribes in 461 AD, forcing them North to the Volga once more, as a result of having themselves been attacked by the "Avars". In 515 having recovered from the Avar attacks of the 460s they "advertised their power in a huge raid south of the Caucasus, in which they attacked Iranian and Byzantine lands with scrupulous impartiality". They eventually came into allegiance with Persia.

However, in the face of the increasing Avar threat, the Sabirs, previously allied with Sassanid Persia, switched their allegiance to the Byzantines in 552 and invaded the Caucasus. Soon afterwards, they were conquered first by the Avars and later by the Göktürks. By the 700s they largely vanish from the historical record; probably being assimilated into the Khazars and Bulgars.

Byzantine documents normally refer to Sabirs as Sabiroi, although the Byzantine Emperor Constantinos Porphyrogenetos (Constantine VII, 908-959) writes in his Administrando imperio that he was told by a Hungarian delegation visiting his court in the 10th century that the Tourkoi (the Byzantine name for Magyars) used to be called “sabartoi asphaloi”, generally considered to mean “strong/firm/reliable Sabirs”, and still regularly sent delegations to those who stayed behind in the Caucasus region near Persia.

Dieter Ludwig suggested that the Khazars were Sabirs who had formed an alliance with the Uar of Khwarezm. The intimate ties between the Hungarians and the Sabirs led Lev Gumilev to speculate that rather than Oghuric they may have been Ugric speakers (both terms being of the same etymological origin), while Chuvash historians postulate that their nation is partially descended from Sabirs. They suggest that a Sabir tribe or fraction, called Suars, may have resettled in the Middle Volga region, where they later merged with Volga Bulgarians. Indeed, one of the foremost cities of Volga Bulgaria was called Suar or Suwar.