Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)
present logical arguments, historical facts, and archaeological finds which demonstrate the survival until the Árpádian Conquest of the mass of population of the Late Avarian chiefdom of the 9th Century AD. Studying the archaeological arguments favouring the survival of ethnic groups from the Late Avarian khaganats, the author established a new method of estimating population numbers from the number of excavated graves from the different periods (see Fig. 1!). If we suppose that the burials of the Avarians and of the colonising Hungarians are directly comparable in their conditions and manner of discovery, then the proportion of excavated graves from the Avarian and "Hungarian" (10th —11th centuries; see Table 1!) periods would directly reflect the proportion between the autochthonous inhabitants and the newcomers. The conclusion drawn from some quite complicated argumentation that there is no place to describe in this short summary, is that the proportion of natives to newcomers should have been 4 : 1 or 5 : 1. Therefore the orthodox count put forward by Györffy (400,000 or 500,000 Hungarian-speaking conquerors and 200,000 natives i.e. a proportion of 2 : 5) is totally wrong. The highest possible number of Árpád's conquering force (including auxiliary subjects) should have been around 100,000 people (but was very probably much fewer), and the number of the original inhabitants was four or five times that of the newcomers i.e. a half million or more. The nearly total Hungarian ethnicity of the Hungarian Land of the Holy Virgin in the 11th —12th centuries can only be traced back to the original Hungarian-speaking population existing in the Carpathian Basin before 895 AD, and cannot be attributed to the numerically inferior people of Árpád. Chapter 3 deals with the recurring movements of different Turkic speaking peoples after AD. 375, who crossed the frontiers of the Roman Empire and also occupied the Carpathian Basin. In this region their political and military centre usually lay near to the heart of the Great Hungarian Plain, between the Danube and the Tisza rivers. These groups included Huns and/or early Onogurs, the early Avars (perhaps from the fusion of two Turkic tribes: Var and Chunni = Varchunni or Varchonitae > Hung. Várkony which returns in old place names in Hungary); there followed Onogurs of the Kuvrat empire in the last quarter of the 7th century, Árpád's people, the Pechenegs, the Uzes, and finally the Cumans. During these continuous military campaigns, 215
