A Herman Ottó Múzeum Évkönyve 32. Kunt Ernő emlékére. (1994)

TANULMÁNYOK - TOMKA Péter: Belső-Ázsia a magyar népvándorlás kori régészet látókörében (magyar és angol nyelven)

(e.g. Mongols) and also because some groups (e.g. Yakuts) were sometimes forced to move towards the North. As for me, I confine the scope of my lecture to the grassy steppes with some occasional outlooks towards the four cardinal points - especially towards the East, because of topic of our session. Chronological frames can be determined more easily. The Migration Period in the Carpathian Basin covers a period of almost half thousand years between the 5th and 10th centuries A.D. This is the subject of archeology of the Migration Period in Hungary. Those population movements which had started beyond doubt from the remote East, like the migration of Huns and later of the Avars and to a lesser extent of late nomad peoples, made Hungarian archeology to be interested in Inner Asia as a possible original home of those peoples which later appeared in our area coming from the East during their westward migrations. Hungarian archeology is interested in Inner Asia also because there it finds (or thinks to find) the - contemporaneous or earlier or later - analogies of certain strange phenomena, alien in the Carpathian Basin. Furthermore several forms, evidences of Migration period way of life were studied in the recent past as subrecent phenomena or perhaps they are part of life even today. In fortunate case these sources available for us (e.g. Chinese annals, Turkic inscriptions, the Secret History of the Mongols, the rich ethnographic record from the Altay Mts. and Baikalian area) help us to explain or to make more understandable those phenomena which we experience here in the western end of the Steppe. That is why Hungarian archeology was always aware of the importance of Inner Asia. To this interest also some romantic sympathy was added, because earlier the roots of Hungarian people were suspected to be somewhere there. Apart from this, however, there are deep and far-reaching motives in Hungarian people to identify itself emotionally with the Huns and Avars. A national pride, meaning either to seek for glorious ancestors for the nation or to make comparisons declaring that, "see, the famous Huns and Avars had disappeared while we Hungarians could outdo them..." is only one of these motives... 2. Short research historical outline. Since in the 18th century Marquis Deguignes the great French sinologist, thought to find the ancestors of European Huns and of European Avars in the population groups mentioned in Chinese sources as Hiung-nu and Zuan-zuan, respectively, and since György Pray had agreed this view almost immediately, no serious doubt arose about it almost till our days - in spite of the cautious formulations given by L. Ligeti or of K. Czeglédy's readiness to make compromises or in spite of the resistance of Iranists, either. Certain new discoveries in Inner Asia from time to time aroused great hopes which, however, were only rarely followed by more profound studies. Making its first tentative steps in the second half of the 19th century Hungarian archeology of the Migration Period was influenced at the beginning by ethnological reports (here I think of Armin Vámbéry) though almost sinchronously with this a stream of informations from the Russian museums towards Hungary had started, too. Flóris Römer, father of Hungarian archeology had made a trip to Moscow and St. Peterburg in 1874 where, on the basis of his experiences, he found to be proved that the Hungarian Conquerors had arrived from the Altay region. Besides, he described those finds which Radlov had unearthed in the Katanda cemetery in 1865: 173