Trilingual coin of Tegin Shah towards the end of his reign. Iranian god Adur on the reverse. Obverse legend: "His Excellence, the IltĂ€bĂ€r of Khalaj, Worshipper of the highest God, His Excellence, the King, the divine Tegin [âŠ]".[1] Date in Pahlavi: 728 CE
The earliest extant mention of the term is for a ruler of the North Caucasian Huns in the 680s, referred to in Christian sources from Caucasian Albania as Alp Ilutuer. The title was also mentioned in Letter to KĂŒltegin in 732. It was used by rulers of pre-Islamic Volga Bulgaria during the period of their vassalage to the Khazars.
RĂĄsonyi (1942:92), apud Golden (1980:149), glossed an "il teber" as "one who steps on the il at the head of conquered tribes"; with il descending from Proto-Turkic *Äl "realm" (Clauson, 1972:121; Sevortijan, 1974:339) whereas tĂ€bĂ€r from Turkic root *tĂ€p- "to kick with foot" (or *tep- / *dÄp- "to stamp, tramp"). However, Erdal (2007:81-82) objects to RĂĄsonyi's proposal: Erdal points out that "the Orkhon Turkic aorist of tĂ€p- would be tĂ€pĂ€r" and instead suggests a non-Turkic origin for the title. RĂłna-Tas (2016:72â73) proposes an Iranian etymology; he compares the Turkic title (H)elteber to Manichean BactrianlâdÎČr, Written SogdianÎŽÄtÎČar, Sogdian ryttpyr / dyttpyr (*litbir), etc. from Middle Iranian *lÄtbĂ€r < Old Iranian *dÄta-bara "who brings the law", ultimately from Proto-Indo-European roots *dÊ°ÄH "to put, place" & bÊ°er- "to bring", respectively.
^Alram, Michael; Filigenzi, Anna; Kinberger, Michaela; Nell, Daniel; Pfisterer, Matthias; Vondrovec, Klaus. "The Countenance of the other (The Coins of the Huns and Western Turks in Central Asia and India) 2012-2013 exhibit: 14. KABULISTAN AND BACTRIA AT THE TIME OF "KHORASAN TEGIN SHAH" Chorasan Tegin Shah". Pro.geo.univie.ac.at. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Archived from the original on October 31, 2020. Retrieved July 16, 2017.
^Ethno Cultural Dictionary, TĂRIK BITIG
Kevin Alan Brook. The Jews of Khazaria. 3rd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018.
Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
AndrĂĄs RĂłna-Tas, "Bayan and AsparuÏ. Nine Notes on Turks and Iranians in East Europe", in Ăva Ă. CsatĂł et al.(ed.), Turks and Iranians. Interactions in Language and History.The Gunnar Jarring Memorial Program at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. (Turcologica, Vol. 105), Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-447-10537-8, pp. 65â78.
Ervand Sevortjan. Etymological Dictionary of Turkic Languages (in Russian), volume 1, Moscow: Nauka, 1974.
"*tep- / *dÄp-" in Sergei Starostin, Vladimir Dybo, Oleg Mudrak (2003), Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.