Dissertação
Entre ávaros e turcos: o estereótipo cita nômade na história de Menandro Protetor (século VI)
Fecha
2021-08-25Autor
Oliveira, Rodrigo dos Santos
Institución
Resumen
The Mongolian plateau, in the heart of Mongolia, served as a stage for the emergence
of diverse ethnic groups and nomadic empires throughout History. However, in the sixth
century, a new ethnic and linguistic entity, unknown since then, emerged in this space: the
Turkic Khaganate. Led by Bumin Qaghan, in 551, the Turks managed to overthrown Yujiulu
Anagui, khagan of the Rouran Khaganate, and establish their own nomadic empire, which
during its peek moment in the second half of the 6th century, stretched from the north of the
Caucasus in the West, to the north of Korea in the East. The rise of this new nomadic entity,
however, set in motion a series of nomadic tribes such as the Avars, who between 557 and 558
settled in the Caucasus Region, where they came into contact with the Eastern Roman Empire,
and in 568 settled in Pannonia, forming the Avar Khaganate. It was Menander Protektor, a
sixth-century Roman historian, who narrated in his fragmentary History the establishment of
the Avar Khaganate in Pannonia and one of the first diplomatic contacts between
Constantinople and the Turkic khagan of Eurasia. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the
representations of Menander Protektor about Avars and Turks. For this analysis, we understand
that Greco-Roman literature, based on the works of Herodotus and Hippocrates, built a
stereotype about nomadic groups that served as basis for future representations, specially by
authors of Late Antiquity. As a theoretical approach, concepts such as stereotype, fictive
ethnicity and representation will be operationalized from a post-Colonial methodological
approach, in which it is understood that Greco-Roman sources structure discourses and
narratives that reinforce political and ideological positions, often appropriated by the
contemporary academy in order to further strengthen center-periphery relationships for modern
European and Asian territories. The main documentation used for the development of this MA
thesis is the History of Menander Protektor, a fragmentary work whose excerpts survived
through the Suda and the Constantinian Excerpts, and were compiled and translated into
English by Roger Charles Blockley (1985).