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)

a carved wooden horse, camel and wonder animals, all plated with fine golden sheets. I should like to return this point later, towards the end of my lecture... Searching for analogies of horse burials Géza Nagy in 1893 (and later Bernát Munkácsi in his supplementary comment paper in 1896) mention the data of Mongol Age travellers (Piano Carpini, Rubruquis, Marco Polo) and also some recent burial customs of certain Eastern Asiatic Mongolian or Turkish tribes - referring first of all to Katanov's collection which was soon published in the 1st issue of Keleti Szemle founded in Budapest. In the meantime another great personality of Hungarian science in that period, Béla Posta, had an opportunity to study Russian (even also Siberian) collections as a participant of Count Jenő Zichy's Asia expedition. His experiences contributed to the development of his paleoethnographic attitude, an attitude which is coming of age nowadays again. The informations and documents brought home by his expedition and published later served the proof for Géza Nagy to claim the Minusinsk Basin to be the original home of the Avars. His main arguments were the forms of stirrups. Studies on the chronology of the Avar period were considerably promoted by the determination of stone statues holding cups (kamennaia baba) as belonging to the Turcs, by the runiform inscriptions (following Radlov's decipherment) and by the use of representations - like the sabre types - on the statues. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács's activity is worthy of regarding it to be a separate part of oriental studies in itself. Between 1913 and 1935 he wrote several studies on the connection between Hungarian archeological remains and Inner Asia (and the Far East). As is usual in the oeuvre of great scientists, itt includes great discoveries - for example it was he who recognized and proved the eastern origin of Hun cauldrons (thought earlier to be Scythian finds), determined their correct chronology and their relations to Chinese ritual vessels - and also some errors - e.g. searching for analogies of Late Avar cast bronze belt ornament in the Far East. However, that time the existence of Far Eastern parallels of Late Avar cast belt ornaments was not an anachronism because a their comparison with the Ordos bronzes and with the bronze pieces of the collection of Peter The Great suggested the Inner Asian origin of this bronze working put erroneously into the Hun period. We find this attitude even in the first works of Nándor Fettich (Bronzeguss und Nomadenkunst 1929), the fact that Zoltán Felvinczi Takács insisted to his error till the end of his life has nothing to do with it. The studies of Radlov, Vámbéry, Katanov and of the orientalist Marquart (Osteuropäische und ostasiatische Streifzüge, 1903), the discoveries of Sir Aurel Stein in Asia (Innermost Asia, Oxford, 1928), the excavations of the Kozlov expedition in Noin-Ula in 1925 (and Camilla Trever's summary* published in 1932 which was instantly reviewed by András Alföldi), Lajos Ligeti's study tour in China, Manchuria and Mongolia, the recognition of the chronology of antiquities from the Hun and Avar periods, the use of Russian technical literature (Excavations in N. Mongolia and in the Altay region) could create a favourable scientific atmosphere which made possible a more and more upto-date use of these data and more and more exact formulations. For example, Nándor Fettich, an outstanding researcher of Hungarian archeology of the Migration Period, referred to a figure representing a bone saddle ornament with drawings from Kudyrge (a piece recalled many times since then) already in 1931. He himself made studies in the museums of Russia. He wrote a separate chapter on the culture of nomad equestrian peoples in the Minusinsk region (using Radlov's, Aspelin's and Béla Pósta's data) in the XXI volume of Acheologica Hungarica entitled A honfoglaló magyarság fémművessége. According to his formula174