Abstract
Turkic Name of the River Dnieper and the 2500 Years To Be Explained
Jordanes of the 6th century relates that the Huns used to call the river Dnieper as ?Ver?. This name is etymologised by linguists as connected with the name ?Özü? given by the Turks of near ages to the same river. Al-Bîrûnî of the 11th century tells about the ?Vâr? steppes, where the Peceneg Turks lived in his days. This word is associated with the name given by Jordanes for the Dnieper, which was in the mid of the Peceneg country. No other source gives this name and it seems to be reserved only to Turks. A similar word occurs in Herodotus of the 5th century BC in the form ?Oares?. This name, used by only Turks for a wide time interval, may indicate the very antiquity of settlement of the Turks in the region.<
Keywords
Dnieper, Özü, north of the Black Sea, Turkic homeland, the Scythians, the Huns, the Pecenegs.