Makkay János: A magyarság keltezése – A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok közleményei 48. (1994)

Dating Hungarian An overwiew It is clear from the accounts of our early chronicles that amongst the Hungarians themselves oral tradition preserved the memory of the name of Árpád (the son of Almos and the highest warlord at the time of the Conquest). It also transmitted a number of stories and legends recalling the conquest in 895-896 of the part of Europe that later came to be called the Land of the Hungarian Holy Crown, the Land of the Holy Virgin, or the Arpádian Kingdom of Hungary. The purpose of this overview is not to summarize the sources, recorded observations, archaeological finds, debate, interpretations and controversies, old or new. Nor will I deal here with the broader history of the conquest in AD. 895—896, which has already been covered in detail by three or four generations of scholars, including historians, linguists and archaeologists. Finally, I do not intend to enter into all the details of the theories and hypotheses that have been proposed as solutions. Instead, as an outsider and amazed prehistorian, I have allowed myself a little latitude to go into the details of some crucial questions that have not earlier received sufficient or proper treatment. Some of them have entirely escaped the attention of historians. In my opinion some of the complicated ideas held about the Arpádian Conquest are no more than confusion or fantasy, not only in the minds of the historians but also in the minds of the Hungarian people as a whole. Linguistic and historical data have established beyond doubt that Hungarian is derived from the dialectal group of the Proto-Ugric linguistic subcontinuum; this was the oriental dialectal area of Finno-Ugric speech, and belonged to the reconstructed *Uralic protolanguage family. The existence of the main branch of the Uralic 199