The Eighth Hungarian Tribe, 1982 (9. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1982-12-01 / 12. szám
December, 1982 THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE Page 7 time a cause too, a just cause, that of giving back to a distressed nation her place under the sun, her right to life; of which she was robbed. Dear reader, if you belong to the kind of human beings, who still believe in the principles once promulgated by Sir Launcelot of the Lake and his king Arthur, then I appeal to you frankly. I am asking you, to help the Hungarians. Centuries of calumny have ruined the Hungarian image in the Western world. Several powers were interested, are interested in sucking Hungarian blood, robbing Hungarian goods, using* Hungarians for slave-labor. These were and are interested in keeping the Hungarian image such, that you and the likes of you, dear reader, should not be interested in what happens to Hungarians. To achieve this was a masterpiece. You were first told that Hungarians came from Central Asia — they are total strangers in Europe, no members of the Indo-European family. Nobody told you, that the Hungarians were Scythians. You were told about the nomad hordes of Hungarians. You were not told, that they were not nomads, but refugees, in quest of a homeland; they did not live in hordes but in strict and efficient organizatios. You were fed in school-books and encyclopedias glowing stories about the “savage and cruel” Hungarians. Nobody told you that Hungarians on horseback were not more savage and cruel, not less bold and adventurous than the contemporary Vikings in their boats. Did anybody tell you that “savagery” and “barbarism” being reserved in anthropology for the preliterate stages, using these terms for the Magyars of the ninth century is not legitimate? They came to the shores of the Danube with a script of their own. You will understand me better, if I tell you the story of the fight about the authenticity of the Hungarian runic writing. Pray, abide with me a little longer. We know that many Scythian peoples were literate, such were the Huns, Avars, Turks. They had scripts of their own, though relatively few monuments and documents survived. In the Hungarian chronicles and early histories notes keep reappearing about the Scythian writing of the Hungarians. Bonfini, Italian chronicler of the Hungarian king Matthias wrote in the fifteenth century about this script, which is usually carved in wood and expresses much, with a few signs. With the spreading of Latin letters, the ancient pagan scripts fell into oblivion. It seems that while it was fairly well known during the sixteenth century, around 1,600 it became a rarity. In the following century, several clerics, Catholic and Protestant, wrote down for posterity’s information the signs and rules of the ancient writing. They called the writing Scythian, Hunnic or Siculian, because the script survived longest in Transylvania, home if the Hungarian-speaking Székely or Sicul people. We know from the notes of these clerics, that the script went to left from right, and some vowels could be eliminated. Longer texts were written or carved in bustrophedon. In the next, 18th and 19th centuries it became fashionable and lucrative to detract everything in Hungarian history, for reasons I have already explained. So the authenticity of those poor good friars and ministers, who left us the ancient alphabets, was flatly denied. The argument was that since there is no Scythian relationship and since Hungarian is obviously related to the language of the primitive, inarticulate Lapps, Hungarians of ancient times could not have a script of their own. Árpád’s people were barbaric nomads. If we conceded the possibility that they had a writing, we would have to regard them as civilized people. This the scholarly guild did not want to admit. So it was decided by the authorities, that early Hungarians could not have had a writing — period. Every evidence to the contrary was was dubbed nonse or deliberate fraud. The notion was floated, that obviously one of those chauvinistic Protestant ministers abused of his knowledge of Hebrew and constructed a script written backwards, like Hebrew. The others, including the Franciscan friars, were fools, who copied. In spite of this well established official version, the question of the authenticity of the “rovás-írás”, the runic writing was dragged in again and again by believers, who kept finding documents of it, in old bricks, on the ceiling of an old church, even faithful copies among the writings of an Italian officer, who worked in Transylvania, in the 17th century, and was interesteed in antiquities. The authorities were not impressed. One of the believers, Gy. Sebestyén wrote a treatise on the script and mailed a copy to W. Thomsen, the famous decipherer of the old Turkish runes. The Danish scholar filed the essay in his library. It was well known that Hungarian herdsmen still carved their accounts of the animals on sticks
