The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1983 (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1983-05-01 / 5. szám

May, 1983

THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE

Page 9

most recent UNESCO manual: “Sumerian was unique amongst the languages of the Ancient Near East in being agglutinative; it belonged in this respect, to the same group as... Finnish and Hungarian’^ 064 p. 635). Western scholars also stated that there was a steady outflow of Sumerian population towards Europe beginning the New Stone Age, and that they had introduced the Higher Civilization to almost all regions of Europe, including distant Britain. In short, this conception places Early Hungarians into a considerably higher historical status.

After the above mentioned discoveries, it became increasingly exciting for Hungarian scientists to find out the true ethnic and linguistic identity of the ancient Near-Easterners: Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Anatolians. It was indeed hoped that the solution of this enigma, with the help of the Hungarian clue, might lead us to a global re-evaluation of the origin and affiliation of all European peoples and, in particular, to a reevaluation of the place of Hungarians amongst them. A formidable challenge was thus awaiting Hungarian scholarship.

2. It seems incredible, but the fact is that Hungarians were not encouraged to take part in these researches; on the contrary, they had been removed from the field of sumerology and egyptology, and redirected towards the Uralo-Siberian wildernesses. The new Orientalist researches had already produced decisive results which were going to alter the traditional Semitic image of the region in question. In fact, they discovered that the myth of the Creation, the story of the Flood, and the many hymns and parables recorded in the Old Testament, were not the literary invention of Semitic Genius, as it was believed until then, but that of the previous agglutinative-speaking peoples, from whom they were simply taken over. Therefore, to avoid further erosion of the Semitic Miracle, it seemed appropriate to divert all the potentially dangerous elements from the field of researches. The chief instigator of this militant policy was Joseph Halévy (1827-1917), a Jewishborn Rumanian, who managed to become professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. Actually, he had waged a lifelong battle to maintain the antiquated belief, namely, emphasizing the exclusively Semitic character of the Ancient Near East, where no other race was ever present, according to him. At the Orientalist Congress in Paris (1901), Halévy encountered Hungary’s delegate, Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921), who had a seat in the governing body

of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was, at the same time, general-manager of the Jewish Religious Community of Budapest for many years. So he was quick to understand Halévy’s concern and, back in Budapest, emphatically declared that Hungarian scholars were wasting their time searching for their ancestors in the Ancient Near-East, it being a purely Semitic area. And Bernét Munkácsy (Munk), another Hungarian educated orientalist, also member of the Academy of Sciences and school-inspector at the Jewish Religious Community of Budapest, submitted his “expert’s report” to the Academy, wherein declared “in good faith” that: “It is out of question... that we may envisage any closer relation between the Sumerian and the Hungarian languages. Therefore Hungarian scientists cannot rightly claim any part of the brilliant Sumerian heritage, nor can they take any credit from the Sumerians’ merits, under the pretext that they were their ancestors. If anyone would, nevertheless, do so, he would make himself ridiculous” (P 051 p. 55).

After that, the Academy systematically sabogated Sumerian studies in Hungary. It had refused to receive Zsófia Torma, the lady who wished to report on her epoch-making finding, that in Neolithic times there were close contacts between Hungary and ancient Mesopotamia. Professor Zsigmond Varga, another outstanding orientalist, who established several linguistic parallels between Hungarian and Sumerian in his imposing volume “At a distance of 5,000 years” (Debrecen 1942), was judged by his critics as an “impostor, charlatan, confused and unscientific.” A third scholar, Vilmos Hevesy (alias F.A. Uxbond), who discovered the ancient links between Hungarians and Indians (P 130), was aiso rejected, because his findings disagreed with the official Uralo-Siberian doctrine. Many other similar cases are known, but let us recall only one, that of Flórián Mátyás. This scholar, in his inaugural address at the Academy (1859), talked, to no avail, about the deciphering of hieroglyphs; he was unable to capture the attention of Pál Hunfalvy, who simply laughed it off. It was not until a great, independent, international authority, Prof. G. Childe, stated in his fundamental work on the Danubian Neolithic and Bronze Ages (P 031), that scholars all over the world agreed that the Early Hungarians had a respectable share in the heritage of the Ancient Near East. Thus ended the stormy, first period of the modern researches on the origin of Hungarians, wherein the imposed Uralian conception