(d. 586 ca.). Prophecy about the Khazars invasion (627 CE) In the Christian Alexander romance literature, Gog and Magog were sometimes associated with the Khazars, a Turkic people who lived near the Caspian Sea. The invasion of the Khazars around 627 CE appears in the Syriac Christian Legend as an ex-eventu prophecy involving the Huns (including Gog and Magog) passing through the gate and destroying the land, which gives the terminus post quem of 628 CE for its final redaction. In his 9th century work Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, the Benedictine monk Christian of Stavelot refers to the Khazars as Hunnic descendants of Gog and Magog, and says they are "circumcised and observing all [the laws of] Judaism"; the Khazars were a Central Asian people with a long association with Judaism. A Georgian tradition, echoed in a chronicle, also identifies the Khazars with Gog and Magog, stating they are "wild men with hideous faces and the manners of wild beasts, eaters of blood." Early Muslim scholars writing about Dhul-Qarnayn also associated Gog and Magog with the Khazars. Ibn Kathir (1301–1373 CE), the famous commentator of the Quran, identified Gog and Magog with the Khazars who lived between the Black and Caspian Sea in his work Al-Bidayah wa al-Nihayah (The Beginning and the End). The Muslim explorer Ahmad ibn Fadlan, in his travelogue regarding his diplomatic mission in 921 AD to Volga Bulgars (a vassal of the Khazarian Empire), noted the beliefs about Gog and Magog being the ancestors of the Khazars. Thus Muslim scholars associated the Khazars with Dhul-Qarnayn just as the Christian legends associated the Khazars with Alexander the Great. The rising place of the Sun A peculiar aspect of the story of Dhul-Qarnayn, in the Quran, is that it describes Dhul-Qarnayn travelling to "the rising place of the Sun" and the "setting place of the Sun," where he saw the Sun sets into a murky (or boiling) spring of water (or mud). Dhul-Qarnayn also finds a people living by the "rising place of the Sun," and finds that these people somehow have "no shelter." In his commentary of the Quran, Ibn Kathir (1301–1373 CE) explains that verse 18:89 is referring to the furthest point that could be travelled west: (Until, when he reached the setting place of the sun,) means, he followed a route until he reached the furthest point that could be reached in the direction of