Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans

The Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans (Bulgarian: Именник на българските ханове) is a short text which is presumed to contain the names of some early Bulgar rulers, their clans, the year of their ascending to the throne according to the cyclic Bulgar calendar and the length of their rule, including the times of joint rule and civil war. It is written in Church Slavonic, but contains a large number of Bulgar names and date terms. The manuscript also does not contain any reference that this is a list of rulers of Bulgaria.

The Nominalia was found by the Russian scholar Alexander Popov in 1861, during his research on Russian chronographers. So far, three Russian copies of the document have been found. The earliest of them, the "Uvarov transcript", dates from the 15th century and the other two, the Pogodin and Moscow transcripts, from the 16th century. There are certain differences in the names' spellings in the manuscripts. Despite the commonly accepted name of the nominalia, the preserved Slavic transcripts from the 15th and 16th centuries do not mention the Central Asian title khan. Only Asparuh (the founder of Danube Bulgaria) and his five predecessors are assigned the Slavonic title knyaz. It is believed that the preserved texts in Russian Church Slavonic are transcripts of a lost original, written in Old Bulgarian during the 9th and 10th centuries. However, some researchers believe that the Old Bulgarian original from the 10th century is a translation from two stone inscriptions, which were composed in Greek and Bulgar languages, during the 7-8 century.^[1]