The Khazars, members of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes, are in contact with the Persians in the early seventh century. (The origin of the term Khazar and the early history of the Khazar people are obscure, but it is likely that the Khazars were originally located in the northern Caucasus region and were part of the western Turkic empire in present Turkestan).
The tribes constituting the Khazar union are, according to the most widely approved view, basically Turkic groups, such as the Oğuric peoples, including Šarağurs, Oğurs, Onoğurs, and Bulğars, who formed part of the Tiĕlè confederation.
These tribes, many driven out of their homelands by the Sabirs, who in turn fled the Asian Avars, had begun to flow into the Volga-Caspian-Pontic zone from as early as the fourth century CE and are recorded by Priscus to reside in the Western Eurasian steppelands as early as 463.
They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia in the aftermath of the fall of the Hunnic/Xiōngnú nomadic polities.
A variegated tribal federation led by these Tűrks, probably comprising a complex assortment of Iranian, proto-Mongolic, Uralic, and Paleo-Siberian clans, had vanquished the Rouran Khaganate of the hegemonic central Asian Avars in 552 and swept westwards, taking in their train other steppe nomads and peoples from the Sogdian kingdom.
The Khazars have by about 630 become independent of the Turkic empire to the east.
