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

1983-05-01 / 5. szám

Page 8

THE EIGHTH HUNGARIAN TRIBE

May, 1983

The rough road of Hungarian Ancient History

Hungarian Ancient History deals with that period of the national past which begins around 3000 B.C. and ends in 895 A.D. when the last Magyar ethnic wave arrived and settled in the Carpathian basin. This delimitation is mainly based upoq a longstanding tradition, but is justified by methodological considerations as well. Indeed, in the elaboration of ancient history, the so-called subsidiary studies of History play a considerably greater role than in more recent periods, on account of the scarcity of written documents, which are the usual sources of historical knowledge. The most helpful of such subsidiary studies are, first, linguistics and arrchaelogy, then mythology and paleography, to which most recently, the science of place-names or toponymy was added. This many-sided approach renders the task of the historians more difficult. The importance of their researches is however great, since the results have a strong bearing upon the national consciousness. Because of this, Ancient History is usually exposed to strong political interferences.

1. When modern historiography was born, in the middle of the XIXth century, Hungarian scholars found themselves before a difficult alternative: they had to adopt either the Finno-Ugrian conception of their past or the Orientalist conception. The foundation of the Finno-Ugrian or “Uralian” conception was laid down by Swedish, German and Russian scholars, and in particular, by August Ludwig Schloezer, professor at Goettingen University, Germany. Its basic thesis was the linguistic and ethnic kinship of Hungarians with Finns and Esthonians living in the Baltic area, and with the Uralian peoples in the Volga-Ural region. The holder of this theory placed the original homeland of the Finno-Ugrians in the vast Siberian plain. This theory was welcomed and strongly supported for political reasons by the Habsburg dynasty, which was anxious, after the tragic events of 1849, to curb Hungarian influence in the Double Monarchy just then, by injecting the leaders of that nation with an inferiority complex. They first sent Miklosits, the professor of slavistics at Vienna University, to Budapest, to supervise the program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Miklosits had understood the point of his mission and prepared a long list of words which were all “borrowed” from the Slavonic languages, according to him. After Miklosits. a German scholar was sent

to Budapest, J. Budenz (1836-1892), who became, with his companion Pál Hunfalvy (Hunsdorfer, 1810-1891), the main architect of the Finno-Ugrian conception of Hungary’s ancient history.

The two pioneers proclaimed that the Hungarian people and the Hungarian language were of Finno-Ugrian origin, consequently, their original common homeland could not have been situated anywhere else than in the Uralo-Siberian region. They also found that the early Hungarians stood, in respect to civilization, on the lowest step of evolution: they were forest-dwelling nomads, living on the mere product of Nature, eating mushrooms, berries, digging up roots, fishing and hunting. As such, they were ignorant of the fundamental achievements of Higher Civilization: stockbreeding and foodproduction by farming. In short, the early Hungarians were depicted as a backward populace, in a state of semi-savagery, whose later civilization developed entirely from constant borrowings, first from the Turkish peoples, thereafter from Slavs, Germans and Latins, who were their teachers and instructors.

The second conception of Hungarian ancient history linked the Hungarian language to the oldest one of mankind, viz. the Sumerian, and placed the original home of the Nation in the Ancient Near East, between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (Sumer and Babylon). This conception was also first outlined by Western scholars, namely by A.H. Sayce, J. Oppert, F. Lenormant and C. Rawlinson.

From a Hungarian point of view, the most important finding of the West-European sumerologists was the discovery that the Sumerian language was neither Semitic nor Indo-European in structure, but agglutinative, like the Hungarian. The far-reaching significance of this statement was obvious, because speakers of this early agglutinative language were the authors of the first Higher Civilization of mankind. A. H. Sayce summed up this thesis as follows: “The earliest civilized inhabitants of Babylonia did not speak a Semitic language and therefore they were not Semites... Eastward of Sumer, the type of language was thus agglutinative, as it was in Sumer itself. And in the days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the language we call inflectional... Babylonian culture owed its origin to a race whose type of language was that of the Finns, of the Magyars or the Japanese” (P 112 pp. 70-72). The same opinion was upheld by all later sumerologists, including Prof. Woolley, who writes in the