Hungarian prehistory
Hungarian prehistory spans the period of history of the Hungarian people, or Magyars, which started with the separation of the Hungarian language from other Ugric languages around, and ended with the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin around. Based on the earliest records of the Magyars in Byzantine, Western European, and Hungarian chronicles, scholars considered them for centuries to have been the descendants of the ancient Scythians and Huns. This historiographical tradition disappeared from mainstream history after the realization of similarities between the Hungarian and Uralic languages in the late. After the 2000s, archaeological research aimed at exploring the early history of the Hungarians resumed, with a primary focus on the Ural Mountains and Siberia. Today, these efforts are regularly supplemented with archaeogenetic studies. In addition to linguistics, archaeology, and archaeogenetics, the re-evaluation of well-known written sources has also begun. Together, these fields of study may provide new information regarding the origins of the Hungarian people.
Study of pollen in fossils based on cognate words for certain treesincluding larch and elmin the daughter languages suggests the speakers of the Proto-Uralic language lived in the wider region of the Ural Mountains, which were inhabited by scattered groups of Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the. Linguistic studies and archaeological research evidence that those who spoke this language lived in pit-houses and used decorated clay vessels. The expansion of marshlands after around caused new migrations. No scholarly consensus on the Urheimat, or original homeland, of the Ugric peoples exists: they lived either in the region of the Tobol River or along the Kama River and the upper courses of the Volga River around. They lived in settled communities, cultivated millet, wheat, and other crops, and bred animalsespecially horses, cattle, and pigs. Loan words connected to animal husbandry from Proto-Iranian show that they had close contacts with their neighbors. The southernmost Ugric groups adopted a nomadic way of life by around, because of the northward expansion of the steppes.
The development of the Hungarian language started around with the withdrawal of the grasslands and the parallel southward migration of the nomadic Ugric groups. The history of the ancient Magyars during the next thousand years is uncertain; they lived in the steppes but the location of their Urheimat is subject to scholarly debates. According to one theory, they initially lived east of the Urals and migrated west to "Magna Hungaria" by at the latest. Other scholars say Magna Hungaria was the Magyars' original homeland, from where they moved either to the region of the Don River or towards the Kuban River before the. Hundreds of loan words adopted from Oghuric Turkic languages prove the Magyars were closely connected to Turkic peoples. Byzantine and Muslim authors regarded them as a Turkic people in the.
An alliance between the Magyars and the Bulgarians in the 9th century was the first historical event that was recorded with certainty in connection with the Magyars. According to the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the Magyars lived in Levedia in the vicinity of the Khazar Khaganate in the early and supported the Khazars in their wars "for three years". The Magyars were organized into tribes, each headed by their own "voivodes", or military leaders. After a Pecheneg invasion against Levedia, a group of Magyars crossed the Caucasus Mountains and settled in the lands south of the mountains, but the majority of the people fled to the steppes north of the Black Sea. From their new homeland, which was known as Etelköz, the Magyars controlled the lands between the Lower Danube and the Don River in the 870s. The confederation of their seven tribes was led by two supreme chiefs, the kende and the gyula. The Kabarsa group of rebellious subjects of the Khazar turksjoined the Magyars in Etelköz. The Magyars regularly invaded the neighboring Slavic tribes, forcing them to pay a tribute and seizing prisoners to be sold to the Byzantines. Taking advantage of the wars between Bulgaria, East Francia, and Moravia, they invaded Central Europe at least four times between 861 and 894. A new Pecheneg invasion compelled the Magyars to leave Etelköz, cross the Carpathian Mountains, and settle in the Carpathian Basin around 895.
Ethnonyms
The Hungarians were mentioned under various ethnonyms in Arabic, Byzantine, Slavic, and Western European sources in the 9th and 10th centuries. Arabic scholars referred to them as Magyars, Bashkirs, or Turks; Byzantine authors mentioned them as Huns, Ungrs, Turks, or Savards; Slavic sources used the ethnonyms Ugr or Peon, and Western European authors wrote of Hungrs, Pannons, Avars, Huns, Turks, and Agaren. According to the linguist Gyula Németh, the multiple ethnonymsespecially Ungr, Savard, and Turkshow that the Magyars integration into various empires of the Eurasian steppesthe tribal confederations of the Onogurs and of the Sabirs, and the Göktürksbefore gaining their independence. The designation Bashkirs likely comes from proximity to the Turkic-speaking Bashkirs, a group which still today remains in the southern Urals.Ibn Rusta was the first to record a variant of the Hungarians' self-designation; '. According to a scholarly theory, the ethnonym "Magyar" is a composite word. The first part of the word ' is said to have been connected to several recorded or hypothetical words, including the Mansi's self-designation ' and a reconstructed Ugric word for man '. The second part ' may have developed from a reconstructed Finno-Ugrian word for man or boy ' or from a Turkic word with a similar meaning . Alan W. Ertl writes that the ethnonym was initially the name of a smaller group, the Megyer tribe; it developed into an ethnonym because Megyer was the most powerful tribe within the people. Most scholars agree that the Hungarian exonym and its variants were derived from the Onogurs' name. This form started spreading in Europe with Slavic mediation.
Formation of the Magyar people
Before the separation of the Hungarian language (before 800 BC)
Hungarian has traditionally been classified as an Ugric language within the family of Uralic languages, but alternative views of its classification within the Uralic family exist. For instance, linguist Tapani Salminen rejects the existence of a Proto-Ugric language, saying Hungarian was a member of an "areal genetic unit" that also included Permic languages. Paleolinguistic research suggests the speakers of the Proto-Uralic language lived in a territory where four treeslarch, silver fir, spruce, and elmgrew together. The study of pollen in fossils shows these trees could be found on both sides of the Ural Mountains along the rivers Ob, Pechora, and Kama in the. The land between the Urals and the Kama was sparsely inhabited during this period. From around, the Neolithic material culture of the wider region of the Urals spread over vast territories to the west and east. Regional variants emerged, showing the appearance of groups of people who had no close contact with each other.About 1000 basic words of the Hungarian languageincluding the names of the seasons and natural phenomena, and the most frequently used verbshad cognates in other Finno-Ugric languages, suggesting the temporary existence of a Proto-Finno-Ugric language. Between around 2600 and, climatic changes caused the spread of swamps on both sides of the Urals, forcing groups of inhabitants to leave their homelands. The Finno-Ugric linguistic unity disappeared and new languages emerged around. Whether the groups speaking the language from which Hungarian emerged lived to the east or to the west of the Urals in this period is debated by historians.
Further climate changes occurring between 1300 and caused the northward expansion of the steppes by about, compelling the southernmost Ugric groups to adopt a nomadic lifestyle. Around, the climate again changed with the beginning of a wetter period, forcing the nomadic Ugric groups to start a southward migration, following the grasslands. Their movement separated them from the northern Ugric groups, which gave rise to the development of the language from which modern Hungarian emerged. According to historian László Kontler, the concept of the "sky-high tree" and some other elements of Hungarian folklore seem to have been inherited from the period of the Finno-Ugric unity. The melodies of the most common Hungarian funeral songs show similarities to tunes of Khanty epic songs.
Original homeland ( 800 BCbefore 600 AD)
The origin of Hungarians, the place and time of their ethnogenesis, has been a matter of debate. Due to the classification of the Hungarian language in the Ugric family, they are sometimes considered an Ugric people who originated in the Southern Urals or Western Siberia. Fóthi et al. 2022 suggests that the conquering Hungarians originated from three distinct regions on the Eurasian steppe, where different ethnicities joined them: the Lake Baikal-Altai Mountains, the Southern Urals-Western Siberia and the Black Sea-Northern Caucasus. Meanwhile, Neparáczki et al. 2018 proposes that over a third of the Hungarian conquerors' maternal lineages derive from Inner Asia, centred in present-day eastern Mongolia and southeastern Siberia, while the remainder is derived from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.The stag and the eagle, which are popular motifs of 10th-century Magyar art, have close analogies in Scythian art. The Scythians, Sarmatians, and other Indo-Iranian speaking peoples dominated the Eurasian steppes between around and. During this period, all ethnic groups in the steppes were nomads with almost identical material cultures, for which the certain identification of the Magyars is impossible. Consequently, the exact location of their original homeland is subject to scholarly debates. Róna-Tas says the development of Hungarian started in the region of the rivers Kama and Volga, west of the Urals. Archaeologist István Fodor writes that the original homeland lay to the east of the Urals. He says that some features of the tumuli erected at Chelyabinsk in the, including the northward orientation of the heads of the deceased and the geometric motifs on the clay vessels put in the graves, are similar to older burials that he attributes to Ugric peoples.