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Introduction

‘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 organisation 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 millenium 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
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A Race of Turks

This Turkish leaning of Hungarian historians received considerable impetus from the writings of Annin 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 organisation, 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 О О 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 011 a linguistic level and the very important non- 45 linguistic considerations raised by Vambery were largely ignored.

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 analysed 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.

Gombocz further noted that the Hungarian verb roots which agreed with Turco-Bulgar verb roots had been taken over withSons of Nimrod 46

A Race of Turks

out 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 analysed 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 A.D. 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.

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 A.D.

In his opinion, the Turkish clement had the dominant role in the organisation and leadership of the people so formed.

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 prehistorian, Gyula Laszlo, has come out increasingly strongly in favour 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 HunSons of Nimrod 48 garian linguists, Lorand Benko and Samu Imre, suggests that it probably lasted a thousand years and took place between the fifth century B.C. and the fifth century A.D.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 brieflv. J 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 organisation 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

A Race of Turks

4Q testify to a remarkable similarity between the funerary customs, weapons and ornaments of the Magyars of the Conquest period and the Volga Bulgars.-0 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.-7 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 A.D.-8 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 and they have been under the cultural influence of the Chuvash (the descendants of the Volga Bulgars) over a considerable period.32 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.

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 50

A Race of Turks

early culture, social and political organisation 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.

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 symbolised 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.

51 CHAPTER 5