Anthony Endrey - Origin of Hungarians

‘The Magyars are a race of Turks,’ writes the early tenth century Arab geographer, Ibn Rusta.¹ Another Arab, Mahmud Gardezi, writing about 1050 but quoting from a source dating from around 913, repeats this and adds, ‘These Magyars are a handsome people and of good appearance and their clothes are of silk brocade and their weapons are of silver and are encrusted with gold’.² We have already seen that when the Magyars are first clearly identified in Byzantine literature, they are repeatedly referred to as Turks (Chapter 2 ). That this term was not a mere misnomer but was based on the general appearance, customs, social and political organization and martial habits of the Magyars of that period, is clear from the various descriptions given by ninth and tenth century Byzantine writers.³ These Arab and Byzantine descriptions were so fundamentally different from the humble origins attributed to the Magyars by the protagonists of the Finno-Ugrian theory and were so irreconcilable with the way of life of the Ob-Ugrians, that Hungarian historians of the nineteenth century treated the Finno-Ugrian line promoted by the linguists with considerable reservations.⁴ Indeed, Laszlo Szalay in his definitive History of Hungary published in 1852, firmly declared that Hungarians were a ‘Turkish nation’, which originally resided in Central Asia, between the Altai Mountains and the Caspian Sea.⁵ Henrik Marczali, writing in the History of the Hungarian Nation, published in 1895 to commemorate the first millennium of the Magyars in the Carpathian Basin, declared that the tradition of relationship between Hungarians and Huns was based on ‘healthy historical sense’ and asserted that investigations as to the origins of a language, although important, did not throw light on the origins of a nation. He regarded the early Hungarians as a Turkish- Ugrian mixture, with the Turks as the dominant element.⁶

Before proceeding to the Türkic-Ugrian mixture (not Turkish, for the Turkey did not exist either 2000, or even 200 years ago), here is a primer on the hereto unacknowledged, and probably unfamiliar mechanism of the mixing.

The tribal Türkic societies rigorously followed traditional tenets of social life. The prime tenets were: 1. Preeminence of female line; 2. Rigid exogamy; 3. Dual exogamy. Naturally, there were many more tenets and distinctions, but these three were most powerful in defining society.

1. Preeminence of female line. The land and people belong to the maternal tribe, the power structure is based on dual exogamy. A head of the state is selected from the paternal tribe (in Türkic Kaganate, Ashide and Ashina respectively). A head of the maternal tribe is a Prime Minister (Councilor) and Supreme Judge, he leads the Council of Tribal Chiefs.

2. Rigid exogamy. The Türkic societies strictly followed anti-incest laws. A distinctively Türkic prescript of exogamy ruled the life of every individual, family, clan and tribe. A strict exogamy requires accurate long-term knowledge of the genealogy, even the links that ascend back for a millennia prevent incestuous conjugal unions well into the present time. The strict rule of exogamy works when a particular tribe has a permanent marital partner in another tribe. The exogamy law would keep each tribe as a separate unit, to trace the do's and dont's of the law. These marital relations were not symmetrical: while the women from the “khatun” (female) tribe were available to the dominating male tribe, the males of the “khatun” tribe were disadvantaged, and had to have their separate “khatun” tribe. This directional flow of genes, which lasted for dozens of generations, can't be overlooked.

Exogamy was a most powerful impetus that literally had a capability of changing a face of a nation, turning Paleo-Caucasians into ever-changing continuous spectrum of Eurasian people with a widest variety of personal flavors, from SE Asian to NW European. The nearly invisible but most powerful exogamy shaped not only the genetical code and physical anthropology of the peoples, but also their intrinsic culture, language, and the way of life, and created a unique type of bipolar societies with matriarchal-patriarchal social destinations and symbiotic differentiations. In its impact, exogamy is a closest runner-up after a population replacement.

Since Türkic societies were multi-ethnic, multi-tribal confederations, variations should be expected. The Türkic twin organization of the dynastic line, consisting, in case of the Huns, of a male Luyanti and female Kiyan (Kayi) and later Sui/Hui/Uigur lines, repeated over and over again for each constituent tribe, brings new blood and new traditions with every addition or change of the marital partner, and the rules of exogamy are conducive to different-ethnicity partners. Once the effort is undertaken, this twin breakdown is not difficult to detect archeologically, since the males and females come from different and distinct genetic lines

3. Dual exogamy. Two tribes united in a permanent marital union. The Türkic societies strictly followed anti-incest laws, and practiced long-term dual exogamy that united blood-unrelated tribes into marital unions and eventually produced a single tribe or nation. All Türkic nomadic tribes had a marital partner tribe and dependent tribes, mostly the martial partner and dependent was one and the same tribe, examples are numerous, Ases/Tokhars-Tuhsi, Luanti/Sui, and so on. The partner tribe was from a different ethnicity, or at least removed by a millennia to be able to cross the exogamy restriction, so as a minimum initially it was linguistically somewhat distinct. Apparently, with time, depending on the relative and absolute size of the partners, the partners fuse, like Suiluanti or Seyanto, i.e. they become so interlaced that the rules of exogamy restrict further intermarriages between them, and a need arises for a new marriage partner. In the meantime, all tribes in the union are linked by kinship ties, even though they may speak different languages or dialects, and they all run their economies independently, down to a clan and family level. A tribe may draw their livelihood from nomadic husbandry, or from production of charcoal, or from production of ore, or from smelting, etc.

Türks easily intermixed with every surrounding populations, creating innumerable admixtures with every neighboring peoples, some of which are well-known, some inferred, and most not documented. Among well-known are all brands of Chinese, Mongolian, Slavic, Indian, Tibetian, Persian; among the inferred are Tungus, Finnic, Baltic, and a number of European brands; undocumented are admixtures beyond the literary space and time.

A consequence of permanent marital unions is a loss of genetic diversity. The traditional Türkic practice of dual exogamy recycles the same genes over many generations. Hippocrates noted that Scythians are the most impotent of men. Impotence is more prevalent among aristocracy. The Hippocrates' observation on impotence is echoed by other Classical authors, who report the visible social phenomenon. Unknown to the ancient medicine, this effect became medically well-known after the experience of Middle Age ghettoes, and in modern conditions at ethnical island enclaves in metropolitan cities. [Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, Translated by Francis Adams//Internet Classics Archive http://classics.mit.edu//Hippocrates/airwatpl.html]. At the same time, the rigid rule of exogamy made marital unions and the martial partners biologically and culturally self-contained and temporally stable and enduring.

A factor in the marital unions was a nature of nomadic conquests. The female-transferred mtDNA carried by mostly male armies already in the second generation get replaced on mass scale by the mtDNA of the local women, creating very diverse mtDNA maps within reconstituted populations. A second generation inherits only half of the maternal genes, the third generation - one quarter, etc. In the West, this creates an mtDNA picture with a predominance of the Western Asian or Western clades, and correspondingly in the East this creates an mtDNA picture with a predominance of the East Asian haplogroups. In either case, a genetical assessment made without a complimentary picture of the male Y-chromosomes, or without accounting for the effect of mtDNA replacement, can't be relied upon. The phenomenon of mtDNA replacement equally applies to any predominantly male mass migrations.

On Kubars and Seklers

Kubars were 3 undefined tribal groups jointly called Kubars, in Türkic qubar/qobar = “risen, uprisen” and “moved, separated”, a suitable appellation for the rebels who did not want to submit to the religious conversion, be it Judaism or Islam, they were conservative religious rebels. Their appellation does not carry an ethnic distinction, it is a social category, after escape from Levedia at first they found a friendly welcome in Moldova (Atelkuzu) with their Bulgarian kins, and after migration they were to easily join in and melt in with the local Bulgarian population in Pannonia. The social organization of Kubars follows a standard dual exogamic pattern: Ugric women taken as wives to the Bulgarian men, their children are innately bilingual, but tilted toward the maternal language; their nomadic economy is inherited from the paternal side, with added skills and savviness of the maternal side; their mtDNA reflects the Ugric mtDNA, their Y-DNA retains the line of the paternal Y-DNA; their appearance tends to tilt toward the maternal side, but also may display some dominant gene traits; the in-breeding tends to benefit reproduction of the recessive traits, carrying recessive traits to the most remote offsprings. With a waning of the dual exogamic ties, their consequences get blurred, diluted, and washed out. But because the post-dual exogamy admixtures are random, they create a random backdrop theoretically distinguishable from the dual exogamy pattern.

Seklers were located in Dobrudja, their location and name points to their descent from the Skolot Scythians. That is corroborated by the Seklers' stand-alone mentality, they survived for 2 millennia as a coherent self-contained ethnical unit, analogous to many other dynastic tribes: Ases, Eastern Huns, Uigurs, Dulo Huns, Ashina Türks, Avars, Kayis, Kangars, Kirgizes, Djalairs, Chingizids. The self-esteem, folkloric knowledge of their former exclusivity, and ingrained knowledge of their blue-blood descent helped dynastic tribes to survive longer intact throughout the Türkic history than the less prominent Türkic tribes. Apparently, their survival was helped by the other Türkic tribes, who were respecting Sekler's pedigree, and deferred to their dynastic rights, a trait that parallels situation with every other dynastic line. Of all European Türkic tribes, Seklers were the only tribe that carried their distinct literacy into the Modern Age. Another factor in the Sekler exclusive longevity may have been the Türkic rigid rule of exogamy, which made the union of Seklers and their martial partners biologically and culturally self-contained. The name Tanus may reflect the location of the Tanus Scythians along the Danube, ascending to the Tr. tan = “large river” (which was borrowed into Ossetian as don = “river”, and was used to prove the Ossetian origin of the name Tanais).

This Turkish leaning of Hungarian historians received considerable impetus from the writings of Armin Vambery, a noted Hungarian orientalist, who devoted a lifetime to demonstrating a cultural and ethnic as well as linguistic relationship between Turks and Magyars.

In his principal work, Der Ursprung cler Magyaren (Leipzig, 1882), Vambery pointed out the Turkish etymologies of Hungarian personal, tribal and clan names found in Byzantine and mediaeval Hungarian sources, and after dealing in some detail with the Turkish aspects of ancient Hungarian culture, customs, military tactics and social and political organization, devoted some two hundred pages to a careful analysis of the Turkish features of the Hungarian language. He asserted that the phonetics, grammatical relationships and vocabulary of Hungarian were all closer to the Turco-Tartar languages than to the Finno-Ugrian group and maintained that almost two-thirds of the Hungarian vocabulary was more intimately connected with Turkish and could be better explained etymologically from the latter than from the Finno-Ugrian languages. He argued that Hungarian words of Turkish origin were not loanwords, but that Hungarian had a double or mixed character, as a result of which it could be equally classified as a Finno-Ugrian or a Turco-Tartar language.

Vambery stressed that the Turkish elements in the Hungarian language were so deep-seated and of such basic nature that they could not have been acquired by subjugation and cultural influence on the part of a Turkish people, but postulated an intensive mixing between a Turkish and a Finno-Ugrian people at an early stage of Hungarian prehistory. As to the ethnic origin of Hungarians, he considered them a basically Turkish people which came into extended contact with Finno-Ugrians, resulting in an ‘ethnic amalgam’ in which the Turks remained the culturally, socially and politically dominant element.

These propositions of Vambery were violently attacked by Hunfalvy, Budenz, Szinnyei and other members of the Finno-Ugrian school. Due to the preoccupation of that era with the study of linguistics in the field of prehistory, the controversy mainly raged on a linguistic level and the very important non-linguistic considerations raised by Vambery were largely ignored.
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Whilst Vambery may have been himself to blame, at least partly, for this trend in the dispute, as he had clearly attempted to attack the linguists on their home territory, it is nevertheless much to be regretted that his numerous non-linguistic arguments supporting the Turkish ethnic origin of the Magyars were simply swept aside. As it happened, the linguists carried the day and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences lent its complete support to the protagonists of the Finno-Ugrian ethnic theory (see Chapter 3).

Truth, however, shows a strange resilience at times and some twenty years after Vambery seemed to have been well and truly defeated, some of his propositions received cautious support from an unexpected quarter. Zoltan Gombocz, an eminent Hungarian linguist of the Finno-Ugrian school, published a treatise in 1912⁷ in which he analyzed the Turkish loanwords in the Hungarian language. He concluded that approximately two hundred and thirty basic words relating to domestic animals and animal husbandry, agriculture, buildings and household equipment, trade utensils and handicrafts, clothing and wearing apparel, social and political institutions and relations, parts of the human body, illnesses, religion, writing, numerals, time, nature, hunting and fishing, plants and the animal world and also a number of verbs of everyday use, had been borrowed from a Turkic language closely akin to that of the Volga Bulgars, the present-day Chuvash.

He observed, however, that the language perpetuated by these loanwords was not the same as that of the Volga Bulgars but was a language now extinct which only survived in the loanwords preserved in Hungarian.⁸ We shall later return to this finding as it is of immense significance in tracing the ancestry of the Magyars.

Gombocz demonstrated the great antiquity of this Turkish stratum in Hungarian by showing analogous phonetic changes undergone by both true Hungarian words and the adopted Turkic vocabulary.
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Gombocz further noted that the Hungarian verb roots which agreed with Turco-Bulgar verb roots had been taken over without the addition of any Hungarian suffixes, contrary to Hungarian verbs borrowed from Latin, German, and various Slavic languages.⁹ He explained this phenomenon with phonetic and morphological correspondences between Hungarian and Old Turkic,¹⁰ but this explanation was not universally accepted and at least one writer has since suggested the bilingualism of the ancient Magyars (already noted by Constantinus Porphyrogenetus) as the true cause for the natural acceptance of these Turkic verbs in Hungarian.¹¹

Gombocz originally did not draw any conclusions from his findings which could have offended the Finno-Ugrian school and ascribed the adoption of the Old Turkic vocabulary analyzed by him to mere cultural relations without any intensive mixing of populations.¹² Later on, however, he turned to a study of the Hungarian national traditions relating to the brotherhood of Huns and Magyars and attributing these to contacts with the Turco-Bulgars, concluded that elements of the latter must have contributed to the ethnic formation of the early Hungarians, resulting in a fusion of two races. He suggested that this amalgamation had taken place in the Caucasian region in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries AD, and sought to support his theory by the presence of Alan loanwords in Hungarian.¹³

These conclusions of Gombocz were rightly hailed by Homan as ‘marking the end of the exclusive reign of Finno-Ugrian linguistics in the field of Hungarian prehistory’.¹⁴ Although he had started out as a Finno-Ugrian linguist himself, Gombocz clearly laid the linguistic foundations for a new school of Hungarian prehistory which declared with increasing boldness the Turkish ethnic affiliations of the Magyars.

Since the documented Alan lexicon is practically zero, and that this near-zero lexicon is contested, reference to Alan loanwords in Hungarian sounds way too strange. Among the people who call themselves and are called by their neighbors “Alans” are only Balkarians, and the Slavic annals call Bulgars “Yasses” ~ Ases; in both cases Alans spoke some Bulgarian dialect, which can be called Turco-Bulgar language.

The breakthrough was achieved nearly twenty years later by Gyula Nemeth, the eminent Hungarian Turcologist. In his work A honfoglalo magyarsdg kialakiddsa (Budapest, 1930), Nemeth dealt exhaustively with the role played by the Turco-Bulgars in the formation of the early Hungarians. He stressed the significance of Turco-Bulgar loanwords in Hungarian and, after pointing out several historical data regarding the stay of the Magyars in the Caucasian homeland of the Bulgars, confirmed in many respects by early Hungarian chronicles and the national tradition, he embarked on a detailed analysis of the tribal system and tribe names of the Magyars of the Conquest period. He concluded that the Hungarian people resulted from an amalgamation between one large Finno-Ugrian and six to eight smaller Turkish tribes which came about prior to the sixth century AD. In his opinion, the Turkish clement had the dominant role in the organization and leadership of the people so formed.
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These views, which Nemeth had already expressed in some of his earlier writings, were received with great satisfaction by Hungarian public opinion which had always been lukewarm towards the Finno-Ugrian theory.¹⁵ The Magyars were by instinct more attracted to the martial Turks than the humble Ugrian relatives foisted on them by the linguists. The new doctrine of dual descent of Hungarians was adopted with equal enthusiasm by historians (although for more scientific reasons)¹⁶ and even Geza Barczi, the eminent Hungarian linguist, conceded that ‘from the ethnic point of view [the Magyars] became strongly mixed with Turkish elements, so that . . . around the time of the conquest of their actual country, the Finno-Ugrian kernel was perhaps no more than a minority’.¹⁷

The intervening forty-odd years have brought little change in the basic essentials of this new theory and it is now generally accepted that a Turkish people or peoples contributed strongly to the ethnic formation of the early Hungarians, resulting in a people of dual ancestry.¹⁸ The location of the ethnic melting pot in which this fusion of two races took place has been the subject of much speculation, being put by different writers in various places ranging from Central Asia to the middle Volga and the Caucasus. All these theories were based on conjecture and none of them has found universal acceptance. It is worth noting, however, that the leading contemporary Hungarian pre-historian, Gyula Laszlo, has come out increasingly strongly in favor of a Caucasian Urheimat, at least as regards the Turkish component of the Hungarian people.¹⁹

The period and duration of the Turco-Ugrian ethnogenesis has also been variously estimated but the general tendency has been to lengthen its duration and to put its commencement further and further back in point of time. A recent work by two Hungarian linguists, Lorand Benko and Samu Imre, suggests that it probably lasted a thousand years and took place between the fifth century BC and the fifth century AD.²⁰

It is interesting to note that the doctrine of formation of the early Magyars from a fusion of Finno-Ugrian and Turkish elements is still strongly based on linguistic study, although historical data and the national tradition are also invoked in its support. There are many other indications, however, pointing to the important and probably dominant role played by a Turkish people in the ethnic formation of Hungarians. It may be now useful to review these briefly.
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Anthropological studies of grave finds from the Conquest period in Hungary, carried out by Bartucz, Nemeskeri and Liptak, have demonstrated that the numerically strongest element among the Magyar conquerors was of the Turanid type, a racial type characteristic of Turkish peoples.²¹ According to Bartucz, this element comprised at least 35 to 40 per cent of the early Hungarians. All three authors mentioned agree that people of the Turanid type formed the leading social stratum of the Hungarian conquerors. Recent studies by Liptak have also shown that this leading Hungarian stratum was anthropologically related to the leading classes of the Volga Bulgars in the tenth century.²² It is not irrelevant to note that this racial type is still fairly dominant among present-day Hungarians and is generally regarded as the true Hungarian type’.²³

We have already referred to the conclusion long accepted by historians that the social and political organization and military tactics of the early Hungarians were characteristic of a Turkish people. More recently, Ferenc Eckhart has established by a careful analysis of old Hungarian legal customs and institutions, some of which have survived into the twentieth century, that these, too, were typical of the culture of Turkish peoples in the second half of the first millenium.²⁴

Hungarian folklore and ethnography show predominantly old Turkish elements.²⁵ This is true even of present-day Hungarian folklore, which suggests that what we are dealing with here is not a mere survival of borrowed cultural motifs but the continued cultural activity of a living people. Archaeological finds testify to a remarkable similarity between the funerary customs, weapons and ornaments of the Magyars of the Conquest period and the Volga Bulgars.²⁶ To a lesser degree, these finds are also similar to the relics of Huns, Avars and Khazars which are all generally accepted as peoples of Turkish origin.²⁷
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Several characters of the old Hungarian script, preserved by the Szekelys of Transylvania, are identical with the inscriptions of the Altai Turks dating from the sixth and seventh centuries AD.²⁸

Turanian, Sekler, and Türkic Runiform alphabets

The most ancient stratum of Hungarian folk music is, in its construction, methods and types of melodies, intimately connected with the musical traditions of Turkish peoples.²⁹ It may be safely stated that the musical idiom of the Hungarians is basically Turkish.³⁰ (This is conceded even by those who think they can discern faint traces of a ‘Ugrian’ stratum in Hungarian folk music.)³¹ It is significant that the only Finno-Ugrian people whose music shows any substantial similarity with Hungarian folk songs are the Tsheremiss (Cheremiss) (Mari Fennic people, aka Cheremis, Vyatiches, Ars; Tr. chirmysh = lightly armed warrior of the third line, with synonyms "aydar" (Gaidar/Haidar) and "guzar" (gusar) still active in Hunghary, Russia, and other E/ European countries; the use of the Bulgarian socio-military term as an ethnonym for the Mari people is a pronounced anachronism), and they have been under the cultural influence of the Chuvash (the descendants of the Volga Bulgars) over a considerable period.³²

That the (Russified) form “Chuvash” is a version of the ethnonym “Suvar/Subar/Sabir/Subartu/Subartoi” etc. is widely accepted. The discussion is only on the Chuvashes being Suvars proper, or originally Fennic Mari who adopted Suvar language. Under either scenario, the concept of Magyar - Subartu/Suvar, described in Chapter 8 “Subartu and the Hurri People”, presents a substantial discrepancy, since Chuvashes and Suvars were “Turco-Bulgarian” and not Hungarian speakers. On the other hand, the Suvar territory (Slavic “Severyane, pl.)” extended from Derbent to Desna, and from Chernigiv (Karajar) to Itil, covering the historical Chuvash territory, and the Suvars (aka Subartu) could very well be those “Turco-Bulgars” who endowed Hungarian with their Türkic lexicon.

Subar/Sabir/Suvar/Chuvash Anabasis

Political map of Eastern Europe ca 800 AD
showing Suvar domain within Khazar Kaganate

Lastly, returning again to linguistic considerations, there is the well-established fact that in addition to their ‘proper language’ the Hungarian conquerors also spoke a Turkic idiom. This idiom which, as the bilingual use of old Turkic names suggests, was still understood by the Hungarian upper classes in the second half of the tenth century and perhaps even a century later;³³ was clearly the same Turkic language of which Gombocz discovered some two hundred and thirty words in present-day Hungarian. These words then cannot be regarded as ‘loanwords’ from an ethnic point of view, since they represent the patrimony of a people which merged with the ‘Ugrian’ branch of the ancient Hungarians and formed a substantial part of the nation so born.

Russian language, where E. Shipova counted 2,000 Türkic words found in various dictionaries, and missed another 500 words that were not mentioned there as Türkic, demonstrates the same 2- or 3-layer traits, with the archaic and old borrowings totally integrated and assimilated in the pre-historical period (Russian pre-historical period ends in 10th c. AD), and newer borrowings belong to the Mongolian (13th-16th cc.) and post-Mongolian (16th-18th cc. to present) period.

As Gombocz has demonstrated, the old Turkic language from which these words were derived, was not the same as the language of the Volga Bulgars but was another variant related to the former. Consequently, in spite of the similarities between the early culture, social and political organization and customs of the Magyar conquerors and the Volga Bulgars, the ancient Hungarians — or more specifically, the Turkish element among them — cannot be regarded as a branch of the Volga Bulgars but merely as a related but different people.
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This view is confirmed by the role played by the wives of the sons of Belar in the Nimrod-legend (see Chapter 1). Assuming, as most historians do, that Belar represents the Bulgars or one of their branches, his people must have been clearly different from the Hungarians at the time of the events symbolized by the mythical rape. This part of the Hungarian national tradition therefore indicates that the Turkish component of the Magyar people could not have been identical with the Bulgars, although it was most likely ethnically related to them.

It now remains to find out who these Turkish Hungarians really were.

Convergence - Türkic folks and Hungarians
	*Anthony Endrey* (1922–2010) Sons of Nimrod The Origin o f Hungarians Melbourne, Hawthorn Press, 1975, ISBN 0725601302 / 9780725601300 / 0-7256-0130-2 © Anthony Endrey, 1975