Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)
to power in the area North of the Pontic (453—635 AD.). The localisation was also uncertain but Gombocz clearly preferred the steppe and the area to the North of the Western Caucasus, i.e. the Kuban. The best modern promoter of Gombocz's theory was J. Szűcs until his untimely death in 1989. His model — which can be termed the balancing school — simply reiterates the opinion of Gombocz and concludes that the amalgamation of Turkic and Proto-Hungarian (as two main components of Old Hungarian) took place in the area west of the river Don during the 6th —7th centuries and the following 2-3 hundred years. The main concept and conclusion in all these theories is that the amalgamating and assimilating processes between Turkic and Finno-Ugric elements occurred in the vast area east of the Carpathians and well before 895 AD.. Therefore Árpád's people or peoples arrived in the Carpathians already as native speakers of *Proto-Hungarian (although some of them may have been bilingual or diglossial i.e. speaking some Turkic, too). This knowledge of Turkic, however, was not a heritage from their ancient Turkic traditions but the result of Turkic influences from the Khazarians, especially the three Khazarian tribes , the so-called Kabars or Kovars, who apparently spoke a Turkic dialect and joined the seven tribes of Árpád a short time before the Conquest. A number of already well known but at the same time very old arguments, and some new discoveries (mostly from the field of archaeology) have kept another explanation from oblivion. According to this the displacement or displacements of speakers of Proto- or Old-Hungarian may have been mostly (or partly) unrelated to the 895—896 Conquest. These speakers could have moved into the Carpathian Basin well before 895, for instance as united, subjugated tribes under the rule of the Huns, of the early Avarians, or around 670—680 AD. as adjoined folk of the Onogurs. These latter would have belonged to the Onogur-Bolgarian empire of Kuvrat at about 635 to 642. After his death and under the leadership of his fourth son Kuber one segment of the population of Great Bolgaria moved into the Carpathian Basin, and joining the early Avarian tribal supremacy ruled over different ethnic groups living in the Carpathian Basin. This theory suggests that within the populous Avar empire there was place for other ethnics than the pure (still undialectalized) speakers of Old Slavic. This 206
