To the question of ethnic and political relationships of the Hunno-Bulgar tribes of IV–VI centuries AD (based on the analysis of a one group of ethnonyms). Part 1.

Written sources of the early Middle Ages recorded several dozen ethnonyms of the steppe tribes, attributed by historians to the peoples of the Hunno–Bulgar circle. This diversity creates certain problems with identifying individual tribes, determining their localization, and analyzing the chronology of their movements. Questions arise as to how these peoples correlated with each other and with large nomadic empires. The main attention of the author was drawn to a group of six similar ethnonyms, which the sources refer to the tribes of the Hunno–Bulgar circle of the 4th–6th centuries: Alpidzurs, Alcildzurs, Amilzurs, Altziagirs, Ultzinzurs, Ultizurs and one anthroponym Ultzindur. Mentions of these ethnonyms can be found in three historians of the 5th–6th centuries: Jordanes, Priscus and Agathias, who brought information about these tribes who lived in Northern Black Sea region. Researchers of the 19th–20th centuries addressed the topic of the studied tribes and their ethnonyms, however, as a rule, in their works, they considered from one to three ethnonyms and did not pay attention to relationships within the entire group as a whole. In this study, for the first time, the information of written sources about all six ethnonyms and tribes to which they belonged is comprehensively considered in connection with the known historical information about the Hunnic and Bulgar confederations of the 5th–6th centuries. The existing historiography is also presented and a conclusion is made about the possible belonging of a number of ethnonyms to one people.