Magyar News, 1999. szeptember-2000. augusztus (10. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2000-07-01 / 11-12. szám

AN ANSWER TO SOLVE THE SUMER-MAGYAR QUESTION

The Sabir connection

by L. Stephen Galambos, O.F.M.

For a culture to survive language is its most indispensable natural vehicle, capable of binding, transforming and preserving peoples, even of diverse origins into a living continuum. Language is more potent than racial or temperamental characteristics. Magyar is no exception. Those who give up their language, vanish, but peoples who cling to it, are preserved by it. The article below reflects this truth. We shall unveil the path of ancient Magyar. Because of its antiquity we can appreciate why Sir Browning, an Englishman, and Mezzofanti, an Italian, both of whom mastered numerous languages, agreed that Magyar was the most perfectly developed language.

Let us trace its early survival.

AN OVERVIEW

1. Byzantine Emperor Constantine Vll passed onto his son records in which he included information concerning the Magyars. He stated that the Magyars were FORMERLY known as SABIRS.

2. Dr. lgnace J. Gelb, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern languages at the University of Chicago, showed that the "Subarian" people, (alternate forms: "Sabarian," "Sabirian") the early Sabirs, were "DISTINCT" from the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Assirians and the Hurrians. Gelb discovered that the early Sabirs were the "ABORIGINAL people of the Near East", who had PREDATED all their conquerors! Those of the early Sabirs, who had stayed in the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris of Mesopotamia, were enslaved and "lived side by side" with their masters, but the waves of emigration away from there had also begun.

3. Gyula László, a highly respected Hungarian archeologist and historian, formulated a principle, that it is the language of the BASE POPULATION which normally prevails! He explained: the invaders, although less numerous but with weapons can come to control, would eventually succomb to the language of the predominant base population.

INTRODUCTION

When I was a young boy in Hungary, I had no idea about our people's origin. After a full day's work in the garden my grandfather would sit into his chair and began to lit his long stemmed pipe. It reached down to Iris knees and after a while he began recounting stories we, children loved to listen to. I recall that among them there was a long epic-poem which he recited a few times. This particular poem looked back to our people's past, when our ancestors moved through the great, great land East of us. I was moved and touched by this poem, but I noticed that by its end my grandfather had always tears in his eyes...

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Later on I became aware that our people's origin was hidden in a past mysterious and unknown. I remember that once my sixth grade histoiy teacher pointed to a land, which at one time was our people's earlier homeland near a large patch of blue, he called the Black Sea. Later in high school we red in our textbooks, prepared for us by the Communist government, that it were "the Finno-Ugric peoples from whom the Magyars came from", who had lived somewhere around the Ural Mountains. This was all we were supposed to know. Then, after our escape to the West, we, refugees were free to read other sources. Soon I red The Sumir-Magyar Question, / sic / authored by Dr. Ida Bobula, a well known and courageous scholar, who followed in the footsteps of Dr. Zsigmond Varga, her predecessor, who studied in Berlin, became a university professor and director of the Debrecen Museum and accumulated LINGUISTIC evidence for the link between the Sumerians and the Magyars. Such early data were already brought to the world's attention in the 19th century by several Western scholars. Bobula expanded tenfold this linguistic base offered by Varga and earlier by the other Western scholars. She published the results in English, in her SUMERIAN AFFILIATIONS. I was then a Seminarian in California. Her pioneering studies impressed me, but I wished to know HOW these languages were related. So, I wrote and asked her questions. I felt surprised and honored to receive her letter and her original English manuscript, the published text of which at the time circulated around the world. I felt grateful and challenged. She set me on a path of inquiry. No doubt, as she was approaching tire sunset of her life's work of research, she had hoped that SOMEONE would take the torch from her failing hand and continue the pursuit of truth about our people's heritage left hidden, repressed and neglected for so long. This was of titanic national interest requiring special scholarship and intense work. However, my focus at the time had to be on my priestly studies.

(Four years in Philosophy, four years in Sacred Theology, and two years in Clinical Pastoral Counseling for ordination.) I was neither qualified nor prepared to take up Bobula's challenge. I did what I could as my interest in our ancient roots and identity was intense. On my long and lonely path I encountered a lot of material that needed to be sorted out, to distinguish solid evidence from a plethora of false claims, because, as our ancient past was becoming uncovered without censorship in the free West, without the long accustomed repression and restriction at home, the OLD EXPLANATIONS and theories soon turned out to have been 1. only PARTIAL answers, 2. inadequate or false, 3. to serve ALIEN interests. But many uninitiated seekers and volunteers have tried to fill the gaps often with wishful thinking, sheer fancy and falsehoods causing many disappointments and plenty of ridicule by those whose old and partial theories had been challenged.

What is presented here are PIECES of information originally offered by others, who were in position to make professional contributions. Therefore, my claim here is only that of a little man, standing on the This sabretache plate was found in a Cheremis grave in the Volga region.

Probably it was crafted in Etelköz by a Magyar craftsman.