1rona Tas a Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages An

HUNGARIANS AND EUROPE IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES An Introduction to Early Hungarian History by

a n d r As r o n a -tas

» *» ‘■r C E U u. 3 00

Introduction

19

species that grow, other than firs, are willow and poplar. The northern part o f the taiga is called the dark taiga on account o f the density o f the crowns o f the trees which prevent the developm ent o f undergrowth. To the south, the bright taiga does have undergrowth. The Am ur-Usuri relict is a fascinating area within the taiga. W idespread forest species withdrew here as the glacial period advanced, and spread towards the west as the glacial period ended. The most characteristic anim als o f this area are furry anim als such as the sable, the ermine, the stone marten, the otter, and the beaver, but also the bear, the w olf and the lynx. It is rich in birds, especially water-fowls. The belt o f deciduous forests covers the 4 -500 kilom etre-w ide area that begins with the Carpathians, stretches down to the Southern Ural, gradually narrows towards the R iver Yenisei, and fades away around the Altai M oun­ tains. Its northern region features a vegetation o f mixed forests (willow, poplar, oak, maple, lime, ash and firs), its central region purely deciduous forests, while the southern parts gradually fade into the steppe. C haracterised by beech in Europe and poplar in Asia, this belt sustains furry anim als, as well as bison and wild boar, and the animals o f the southern steppe tend to m ove north here. The zone has arable areas, and it served as the m ost valuable agricultural land after the clearance o f the forests. The temperate grasslands stretch from the Carpathians through the Ukraine to the Central Volga region, and then follow the borderland o f Siberia up to the River Yenisei. The steppe is grassland with a black subsoil. The now extinct aurochs and the eohippus used to live here. Today’s fauna includes various species o f antelope, wolf, fox, ground squirrel, hamster, field m ouse and the mole-rat. Large birds o f prey are indigenous to all o f its regions. This zone is the m ost suited to nom adic animal husbandry, and it served as the setting for the large migrations. The arid subtropical and tropical zone stretches to the south o f the steppe zone. The mean yearly rainfall is extrem ely low, and the zone features saltwater lakes, waters w ithout outlets, shifting sands, and stone deserts. Very sparse, vegetation here includes various species o f thistles, needlegrass and wormwood. The boundaries o f the geobotanical zones are not clear-cut, and they tend to shift with changes o f climate. The natural environm ent o f peoples living in these borderlands can undergo substantial change as a result o f even the slightest clim atic change.

20

Methodological introduction and the sources

c) The Stone mid M etal Ages The earliest ages were nam ed after the m aterials and the techniques used in im plem ent-m aking. In the rem otest age, m an used unpolished, chipped stone. Scientifically term ed Palaeolithic A ge in those regions which com e into play regarding the prehistory o f the M agyars, this age ended in approx. 20 000 BC. A n interim period ensued, characterised by m ore finely shaped, but still unpolished stone implements: the M esolithic A ge lasted roughly from 20 000 to 5000 BC. It was after 5000 BC that the age o f polished stone im plem ents, the N eolithic A ge began. O f the metals, it was copper that first entered the w orld scene, in w hat is today southern Italy. It becam e widespread throughout the Central Ural region, and in the latter h alf o f the m illennium in Siberia, too. Used together with stone im plem ents, copperware was w idely introduced. Im ported from M eso­ potam ia through the Caucasus, the first bronze objects cropped up in the first h alf o f the 3rd m illennium BC. Bronze has been shown to have been produced locally as o f the early 2 nd m illennium only, but then it spread apace: it ap ­ peared in the Carpathian Basin betw een 1900 and 1700 B C , reaching the Ural, to day’s Khazakhstan and the regions o f Central Asia, in the m id-m illennium . Superseding the various bronze alloys, iron, too, entered the steppe through the Caucasus, records o f which date back to the 8 th century BC. The new m etal rapidly conquered the world from the Black Sea to China. On the turn o f the 6 th and the 5th centuries BC it m ade its way up the Altai M ountains to Inner Asia, reaching the Transbaikal areas o f Siberia in the 3rd century BC. The ages briefly described above provide a very broad setting w hich further research m ay alter slightly. The N eolithic A ge is o f overriding im portance, for it m arks the beginning o f a production economy. Earlier, gathering, fishing and prim itive forms o f hunting provided m ankind the m eans o f subsistence. This is im portant with respect to ethnic and linguistic history, because the N eolithic Age saw some fundamental changes. In the Palaeolithic and M eso­ lithic ages, large territories provided the m eans o f subsistence for very small groups o f people. These small groups frequently m oved from one locality to another, consequently a durable com m unication situation could not develop. The developm ent o f a perm anent— from our point o f view, assessable— com ­ m on sem iotic system and culture in a large com m unity postulates cohabitation based on relatively prolonged interaction. Consequently, any fam ily o f lan­ guages and ethnos could only come into being in the N eolithic Age. Naturally, by the Palaeolithic and M esolithic Ages hum an com m unication substantially differed from anim al com m unication; nonetheless it lacked one im portant elem ent which did not appear until the N eolithic Age, nam ely

Figure 3 Clim atic, geohistorical, archaeological and language historical periods

22

M ethodological introduction and the sources

permanence. Accordingly, there is a sharp line (which lasted for centuries, o f course) betw een the M esolithic and the N eolithic Ages. Even given today’s scientific apparatus, we cannot study the pre-N eolithic languages and peoples, due to the fact that all our know ledge and m ethods pertain to the nascent N eolithic peoples and languages. I f a group w ith a pre-N eolithic culture were to be found som ew here on the globe, this culture would surely be the result o f some secondary developm ent. The Neolithic Age began in the river-valley cultures in the 7th -6 th m illen­ nia, however, it did not come to the areas we are concerned with before the 6 th m illennium . It is not simply coincidence that the peoples and languages whose ancient history we know m ost about did not emerge earlier than the 6 th or 5th m illennium BC. That date can be assigned to the earliest apprehensible periods and proto-languages o f the Indo-European and Sem itic linguistic com m unities, as well as to the nascent ancient Indo-European and Sem itic peoples w hich shared features o f a perm anent structure— in the m odem sense. W hat this chronological boundary means, in effect, is that those ethnogenetic or linguistic relationship theories which seek to encom pass periods earlier than the Neolithic Age cannot be considered m ore than pure speculation and, consequently, cannot be granted scientific credit. Accordingly, neither can the prehistory o f the M agyars have begun prior to the N eolithic Age, and even then only in those territories o f Eurasia where those nucleus groups are to be found from w hich the M agyars gradually em erged in the 5 th -4 th m illennia BC. As will be pointed out later, it happens to coincide with the putative period o f the Uralic linguistic community. The subsequent m ajor change was brought about by the appearance o f bronze, and it is probably not mere chance that the splintering o f the FinnoUgrian peoples roughly coincides with that period. The scattering o f the Ugrian group which had broken away from the Finno-U grian peoples, and the form ation o f the M agyar people m ust have been concurrent w ith iron gaining currency in the first h alf o f the 1st m illennium BC.

d) Some co-ordinates in world history Let us next attem pt to link the M agyars’ prehistory with som e w ell-know n dates in w orld history. The Uralic com m unity o f peoples m ust have begun to splinter about h a lf a m illennium after the Indo-European com m unity had broken up. At the time when copper first appeared in M esopotam ia, the more prim eval Neolithic forms still existed in the Ural region. T hat attests to the delay o f the periphery o f world history at the time. The form ation o f the Ugrian com m unity, as we have seen, m ust have been concurrent w ith the appearance

23

Introduction

o f copper. That roughly coincides with the age o f the B abylonian Empire (Ham m urapi, the law-giver, lived in the 18th century BC). The C retan Culture prospered then; the m agnificent Palace o f Knossos was erected at that time; and new peoples came into view in Asia Minor, N orthern G reece and N orthern Italy. This period coincides with the beginnings o f Chinese civilisation when the em peror Huangdi ruled the Yellow River region. The M agyars’ independence roughly coincides with the founding o f the Roman Republic (504 B C ), the nascent Athenian democracy, Cleisthenes o f A thens’s constitution (507 B C ), and A eschylus’s dramas. H aving introduced his reforms and com m itted his thoughts to writing in the form o f analecta, the Chinese Kong Fuzi, better known in Europe as Confucius, also lived around then. The dates o f the above sim ultaneous events naturally should not be read verbatim. Our knowledge regarding the dates o f the form ation o f the M agyar people is a lot vaguer than would perm it linking events to years or even decades. The degree o f uncertainty regarding the form ation o f this people is in the order o f centuries.

e) Chronology and continuance Establishing the date, chronology or continuance o f two or m ore events with precise written sources at our disposal is a fairly easy matter. Nevertheless, even in well-recorded cases (the farther back in time we go the scarcer they get) source criticism is extrem ely im portant (m ore about that later). Besides the written sources, however, there are other varieties o f sources that contrib­ ute to our endeavours in establishing certain particulars o f time. The absolute chronology, i.e. chronology with num erical citation, is natu­ rally always relative to the calendar system used by the source. We m ust not lose sight o f the fact that accurate observation and registration o f the year, month and day in an astronom ical sense is a very recent achievem ent, although the calendar and year calculations, which rely on them , nevertheless boast traditions going back thousands o f years. Only to a certain degree o f accuracy can calendars keep up with astronom ical events which is why, even today, they occasionally need to be adjusted to astronom ical time, by the system o f leap-years, for instance. H um anity has used a great many different calendar system s, and w ithout accurate knowledge o f these it is im possible to identify any date whatsoever, even in the written sources. However, experts can do the job, given some com petent handbooks. The identification o f date, chronology and continuance w ithout available written sources is significantly harder. There are two ways

24

Methodological introduction and the sources

to establish dates in such cases. One alternative is absolute, w hich involves the conversion o f a date to our own calendar system , expressed in term s o f years. The other alternative is relative. We do not know the date, but we do know a notable event which it came after {post quem dating), or which it preceded (ante quem dating). The actions o f an em peror can only be recorded after the em peror has acted (provided we exclude prophesies), but not in every case do we know how many years later the event was recorded. We do not know when the scribe jotted down the event, but we do know w hen he died. Consequently, his notes m ost have been w ritten before that. In m any instances we only know that an event cannot have occurred before a know n date (ante quem non), or cannot have occurred after it (post quem non). Often, although we are unable to establish the exact date o f an event, the decade or century we can. Historical science has other means, besides written sources, to establish absolute or relative chronology.

3. THE ROLE OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES IN ESTABLISHING CHRONOLOGY The role o f the natural sciences in historical science is increasing apace. In m any cases when examining the genuineness o f a historical source, the same natural scientific m ethods can be applied as in court cases. For instance, paper and ink analysis can be important. There are four areas in which the natural sciences are indispensable for the reconstruction o f past ages and the ancient history o f the M agyars: (a) deter­ m ination o f age; (b) determ ination o f origin; (c) determ ination o f environ­ ment; (d) determ ination o f production and technology.

ci) The determination o f age Archaeologists have methods o f their own to determ ine age, but concurrent with these, they increasingly tend to rely on natural scientific m ethods. These m ethods can be grouped twofold. On the one hand, there is a distinction betw een absolute and relative m ethods o f dating, and on the other, betw een the different branches o f natural science whose results history draws on. Consequently, there are, for instance, physical, chemical, botanical, zoologi­ cal, or geological methods. Naturally, this book cannot attem pt to give an expert presentation o f these, due to the fact that the rapid developm ent o f science and the research work o f entire professions underlies these methods. We can but briefly refer to the m ost im portant ones.

Introduction

25

The prim ary m ethods o f age-dating include those m ethods that are based on radioactive decay. These are called radiom etric m ethods on account o f the fact that radioactive disintegration can be m easured w ith great accuracy. Thus it can be determ ined when certain substances w ere absorbed in an archaeologi­ cal find. The m ost com m on m ethod is carbon dating, nam ed after the radio­ active C 14 isotope o f carbon, a product o f cosm ic radiation. The half-life o f carbon-14 is 5730 years. W hat this m eans is that after 5730 years, h alf o f the C 14 atoms will have decayed into nitrogen-14. Living plants and anim als take up the isotope via carbon-dioxide contained in air. H aving penetrated organic tissues, C 14 is no longer exposed to cosmic radiation. If later the plant or the animal, or parts o f it (e.g. leather) are buried, com paring their C 14 content with the С 14 content o f a current-day sample o f the same organic m atter will reveal when the isotope was taken up by that organic matter. And because the age o f organic matter, as well as the time they were buried, can be determ ined more or less accurately, the age o f the artefact can also be established. The method, which experts have been refining for decades now, has its limits, o f course, and its application requires not only expertise— as do all radiom etric m eth­ ods—-but also a critical approach. Having a relatively fast half-life, carbon-14 is less and less useful as a chronom eter in age-dating finds older than 50,000 years. It was once assum ed that the m agnitude o f cosmic radiation at that time was m ore or less constant. That is unlikely, however, and consequently the error percentage due to the fluctuation o f radiation has to be reduced by other methods. The origin o f the carbon infiltrating organic m atter also varies. Carbon atoms can enter plants from the soil, anim als from other anim als or plants or drinking-water, therefore the ratio o f carbon isotopes is not neces­ sarily constant. Because the main problem o f the C 14 method is that the isotope has a relatively fast half-life, science has searched for other radioactive elements, with longer half-lives. O ther radiom etric m ethods include the helium m ethod and the lead method. These isotopes feature a considerably longer half-life, therefore, the proportion or ratio o f the daughter isotopes o f lead and helium (the latter is released in the process o f the disintegration o f heavy m etals) to their respective parent isotopes, can inform us about much earlier ages. The potassium to argon and the rubidium to strontium techniques are used to age-date rock. All other geochronom etric m ethods concern us purely for m ethodological reasons. The underlying principles o f the so-called dendrochronological m ethod or tree-ring dating are quite different. The widths and the tones o f colour o f the individual tree-rings reflect the rainfall and tem perature conditions o f the given year, hence there are no identical tree-rings, and adjacent rings form a sharo contrast to one another. However, the tree-ring features o f the same year

26

Methodological introduction and the sources

are very similar. First a tree-ring sequence is established from sam ples taken from living trees. This sequence is extended by the ring sequences o f felled trees— some o f which were alive at the sam e tim e as those living trees from which the first sam ples were taken. Thus, working one’s way backw ards, one can go back several thousands o f years. Sequoias and redw ood— m any o f which are several thousands o f years old— can serve as a control. D endrology is today capable o f establishing the exact age o f a fortunately preserved piece o f wood, in certain areas, from 8000 years ago. M ore accurate results are available by applying the carbon m ethod to the lignin and cellulose content o f the tree-rings. Wood, however, decays relatively quickly, and consequently archaeological finds rarely have wood rem ains that can be tested dendrologically. Also, the clim atic conditions o f each belt are different, hence the tree-ring standards m ust give consideration to tim e and space. The secondary use o f a piece o f wood can also be m isleading: w hen a crypt, for instance, was built from “second-hand” m aterial, taken from an old building, or another know n grave. Notwithstanding these calls for caution, tree-ring dating pro­ vides archaeologists with a wide range o f chronological data. Natural scientific techniques are not uncom m on in age-dating clay pots or tiles— so frequent among archaeological finds. All objects are continually exposed to ionising radiation. Thermoluminescence dating m easures the em is­ sion o f light from heated crystals previously exposed to this radiation. At low tem peratures objects will em it this radiation instantly (fluorescence), or prolongedly in the form o f light (phosphorescence). Sensitive devices are capable o f m easuring the unem itted light energy w hich can be released by heating (therm olum inescence). Clay objects are fired at high tem peratures, therefore im m ediately after firing they do not preserve light energy (phospho­ rescence). Thus the radiation dose is preserved from the very m om ent the object was made. The retained light energy can be m easured and com pared with the results o f laboratory irradiation. This highly refined m ethod has its limits and problems. The discrepancies caused by the location-dependent intensity o f ionising radiation can be elim inated in m any cases w ith com para­ tive methods. The m ost skilled forgers, however, can produce an artificial radiation value equivalent to that o f a clay object m any thousands o f years old. Also, the ionising effect o f other objects, or possibly the secondary exposure o f an object to fire m ust also be given consideration. N otw ithstanding these problem s, given due caution and circum spection, the m ethod presents the opportunity to age-date clay objects and other archaeological finds from the same site. There is another m ethod for dating clay pots. The Earth has two m agnetic poles— that is general knowledge. The location o f these poles changes at a pace which is m easurable in term s o f decades. Consequently, the direction and

Introduction

27

intensity o f the m agnetic field o f the Earth also changes, and these changes can be traced back relatively accurately. The clay used in the m aking o f pottery contains an array o f different iron-oxides. U nder norm al circum stances the m agnetic poles o f these iron-oxide particles are situated random ly in the clay, hence their outward m agnetism is zero, they neutralise one another. W hen, however, the clay is fired at a high tem perature (approx. 700 °C) the m agnet­ ism o f m ost o f the iron-oxide particles becom es aligned with the E arth’s m agnetic field. The directional character and intensity o f the m agnetic field existing at the time the pot was last heated up are preserved after it has cooled. Because scientists can describe the past shifts o f the E arth’s m agnetic poles, as well as the change o f the intensity o f magnetism , all that is left is to establish how a given location relates to these. A fired clay pot forgotten in the kiln after it was fired is ideal for the purpose, because not only can the vertical position o f the object at the time o f firing be determ ined (the shape and the firing traditions are the give-away usually), but also its horizontal axis. Good results can be obtained even if only the vertical axis at the time o f firing is known. With clay bricks, however, one can never be sure. Still, archaeom agnetic dating is a fairly accurate m ethod for dating up to approx. 7000 years back. Astronom y can also contribute to absolute dating. O bservation o f the sky at night has always helped Earth dwellers to find their bearings. N ot only the large river-valley cultures, but also the nom adic steppe peoples possessed substantial knowledge about the stationary points in the sky. This enabled them to determ ine directions and arrange their activities according to seasons. These observations have come down to us in w ritten sources, languages and legends. The night sky, however, does not appear the same everyw here and consequently the analysis o f archaic astronom ical nam es can provide infor­ mation as to where an ethnic group dwelt at the time it gave a vernacular name to one particular star or constellation. The analysis o f the nam es that a people gives its calendar, the years, days and festive days, can shed light on where that people view ed the sky from; accordingly, these calendrical nam es yield a wide range o f inform ation regarding the m igrations, form er hom elands or cultural connections o f the peoples. The tw elve-year calendar o f the steppe peoples— in which each o f the twelve signs o f the zodiac stands for one year— is very ancient indeed. It has been conjectured that the word sarkany ‘dragon’, o f Turkic origin, entered the Hungarian language during the use o f the Turkic tw elve-year calendar. Naturally, the night sky itself is ever-changing, with real events— for instance, solar eclipses, or the appearance o f large m eteors; and seeming ones— for instance, the change o f the Pole Star caused by the m ovem ent o f the globe’s axis. If these were registered in the written sources, we have some im portant chronological points o f reference. Even if they survived in written

28

M ethodological introduction a n d the sources

calendars rooted in plain tradition, they can shed light on the history o f words, nam es and cultures. We shall only m ention some other absolute age-dating techniques. These include the flu o rin e, the ultraviolet ray, the neutron activation, and the derivatographic dating methods. R elative chronology seeks to answer other questions, and consequently it has other working m ethods com m only characterised by the fact that they do not offer an absolute answ er to tim e-related issues. W hat they do inform us about, however, are the geological, geom orphological, clim atological and biological changes— especially the change o f the faunal and floral environ­ m ent— as well as about the succession o f these changes. A lthough a historian is less concerned with the geophysical strata, in m any cases the dates o f archaeological finds can be identified with full knowledge o f the relative position o f the different geophysical strata. Likewise, one m ust not fail to consider the clim atic, botanical and zoological changes o f an area exam ined from a historical viewpoint. The desertification o f regions, the shifts o f their clim atic and geobotanical zones can contribute im portant inform ation to historically significant events, the lack o f absolute tim e notw ithstanding. Rivers used to play an im portant role in the history o f peoples, in irrigation, transport, or sim ply as sources o f water. However, they did not alw ays flow where they do today, and the hydrographic netw ork o f certain territories m ust have undergone substantial change. Thus, for instance, the R iver Kam a, which played an im portant role in the ancient history o f the M agyars, originally flowed north, and only as a consequence o f the last great glacial period did it turn south and becom e a tributary o f the Volga, and through it, o f the Caspian Lake. The presence o f wild and cultivated plants m ust have been im portant, econom ically speaking. The characteristics o f the flora, however, have under­ gone m ajor changes in the course o f the ages. Fortunately, am ple am ounts o f pollen have been excellently conserved. Pollen analysis enables us to recon­ struct the wild and cultivated flora o f an area in a given age. M oreover, it offers som e inferential evidence regarding clim atic changes, too. B ut know ledge about the flora and fauna o f an early period is not only com pelling on account o f the interpretation o f economic issues and m igrations it can afford us, but also because o f the ancient plant and anim al nam es w hich m any m odem languages have preserved. M ore about this issue below (see pp. 34, 93, 111, 192).

29

Introduction

b) The determination o f origin Even in the ancientm ost ages, objects would often travel afar. Objects, knowledge, and even the words designating them, journeyed to and from China and Egypt along the Silk Route. But objects w andered in other im por­ tant ways, too. We often need to know where exactly the objects buried in a cem etery w ere made. That can shed light on the connections o f a people, and furtherm ore, on the locality they moved from. M etal artefacts are particularly suitable for determ ining where the metal which they are made o f has come from. Spectrum analysis can detect such elem ents in m etals which are char­ acteristic only o f one particular region, or with luck, one specific mine. This is especially im portant with early bronze items. With cloth, it can be estab­ lished which com ponents are o f animal or o f plant origin, and w here those raw m aterials cam e from. M any different techniques exist for m anufacturing glass. Given that we know the specific technique, the origin o f a glass object can be determ ined. Also, for instance, the origin o f raw paper m aterial o f excavated written docum ents, can be o f importance.

c) The determination o f environment The historical determ ination o f the natural environm ent seeks to answ er two questions, nam ely w hat kind o f econom y and w ay o f life did the natural conditions o f a given area in a given age provide the m eans for, and w hat kind o f historical, econom ic and population-related changes (decrease or increase, m igrations) did they bring about. Historical clim atology has a key role in the determ ination o f environm ent. Furtherm ore, we m ust distinguish historical climatology, relevant to large regions, from m icro-clim atology which is concerned w ith sm aller areas. With regard to the history o f the M agyars, it is im portant to consider w here they developed their nom adic life style, although the forebears o f the M agyars were hardly involved directly in the global process. We will com e back to the em ergence o f nom adism later (see pp. 142-145 and 320). W hat specific cli­ matic changes played a role in the M agyars’ switching from an equestrian-hunter type o f economy to being pastoral nomads is quite another matter. Finally, it is o f fundamental significance what the clim ate, phytogeography and zoogeography o f the Carpathian Basin w as like at the time o f the Conquest. We shall discuss these briefly later (see p. 155). The sciences o fpalaeobotany, concerned with the history o f the flora; archaeobotany, researching the history o f dom esti­ cated plants; palaeozoology, studying the historical changes o f the fauna; and archaeozoology, concerned with the history o f dom esticated anim als have made significant progress in the past decades.

30

Methodological introduction and the sources

d) The determination o f production and technology Historians are generally keen to find out for how m any people a given area was able to provide the m eans o f subsistence. The reconstruction process is facilitated by knowledge about the efficiency o f the m eans o f production under the given set o f circum stances. One can assess carefully, for instance, the depth a specific type o f plough tilled the soil, and the size o f area it was capable o f tilling in a day. The life span o f a harness, or how long a specific w eapon was passed down in a family or was kept in enem y hands can also be o f some interest. The annual metal needs o f a group can be im portant in many respects— provided they used it for m aking tools only— as can the quantities o f jew ellery they m ade or bought, as well as the techniques these were made with. Careful study o f the N agyszentm iklos treasure has enabled us to establish how m any hands used how m any tools in creating the treasure, and w hether certain inscriptions could have been m ade with the same tools as used for the decorative motifs. Thus new knowledge can be obtained about the late Avars— this we shall come back to below (see p. 131).

4. OTHER ANCILLARY DISCIPLINES IN ESTABLISHING CHRONOLOGY

a) Numismatics Coins can provide chronology with much inform ation about the times and places which m oney in circulation reached. Consequently, num ism atics, the study o f coins or medals, is an im portant ancillary discipline to historical science. The issuing o f m oney was always a m onopoly to some degree. The nam e or image o f the issuing ruler or o f a deity w orshipped by the issuer, or some kind o f sym bol, served as a rem inder o f the person who had the coin minted. Coins usually featured inscriptions and tokens. M ore often than not, these enable us to establish the date the coin was issued. M oney was naturally copied, over-struck, used, and forged very early on. Giving these due consid­ eration, coins can be very helpful in establishing chronology. Coins and m edals generally only allow for p o st quem dating, on account o f the fact that we have no knowledge about how long they w ere in circulation for or were hoarded or used for secondary purposes, e.g. as w om en’s jew ellery. Generally

31

Introduction

speaking, however, coins are in circulation for short periods o f time only, simply because the stocks becom e exhausted. So-called treasure finds are problem atic, since they m ay contain the hoarded coins o f treasuries o f many decades or even centuries earlier. W hen an archaeologist finds such treasure, the oldest and the m ost recent coins can shed light on who hid the m oney and when. The circum stances o f the find m ust be given special attention. It is perfectly feasible that a coin found in a grave is in no way linked to the age the buried person lived in. Possibly we are looking at a grave robber, and a coin robbed in his youth followed him to his grave. H ow ever unlikely it may appear, it has actually happened— possibly due to the workings o f the animals in the soil— that a coin has wandered down from one grave into the grave below, presenting researchers with a seemingly insoluble puzzle! Such cases are rare, o f course, but the critical assessm ent o f finds m ust be open to possibilities o f every nature. Plate III shows the coins unearthed with the famous Conquest-period royal grave o f Karos. Two out o f the three Arabic coins com e from the m int o f Esmail ibn Ahm ad whose attacks forced the Pechenegs to set out on their wanderings. The coins date to 904-905 AD, and were used as funeral obols. The other coins were issued by the Frankish Louis the Infant (900-911). The latter, as well as the third Arabic dirhem are pierced and w ere used to decorate dress hems.

b) Archaeology A rchaeological finds them selves can serve as chronometers. The relative age-dating o f these (in relation to one another), and absolute dating (with a specific num ber o f years given) is one o f archaeology’s m ost im portant fields o f interest. Decoration, form, structure and function can all contribute to establishing dates or periods. The more elem ents an archaeological culture consists of, the more distinctive and isolatable it is, and consequently, the more reliable as regards chronological assumptions. A grave w hich m erely contains a small urn with the ashes o f the deceased is less helpful in this respect than a grave w hich contains the deceased in full m ilitary pomp, w ith accoutrem ents and every object o f his lifetime, or even his dom estic animals. Provided, with the help o f external means, such graves or groups o f graves can be given a chronological setting, researchers will have obtained knowledge about the age o f other, identical or quasi-identical types o f graves. The relative physical position o f graves to one another can also help. Any large cem etery will have an inner chronology o f its own, for the reason that m ost cem eteries are used not ju st for decades, but centuries. However, w hat archaeologists really want

32

Methodological introduction and the sources

to know is the chronology o f archaeological cultures. Besides the above described m ethods, archaeology has many other m eans o f testing its finds for chronology. Naturally, it takes into account w ritten sources. The m ost com m on problem with this is the same as with the ancient period o f M agyar history, nam ely that the sources rarely, if ever, unam biguously state w here exactly a people lives. Consequently, its archaeological identification m ay be doubtful even if the date o f the finds can be established.

c) Linguistics Language can serve as an im portant source in historical reconstruction. We shall consider the relevant parts o f linguistics later (pp. 92-116), and only focus here on some theoretical and m ethodological issues. Language is an ever-changing system whose every part and level has a history o f its own. W hat this m eans is that phonem es, words, the m eaning o f w ords, affixes (inflectional or other), gram m atical structures, phrasal syntax, etc. have their own history. Linguistic change— language history— has general theories o f its own, owing to the fact that m any regularities are characteristic o f every change o f every language, while other regularities pertain to certain languages, or certain parts o f speech only. Such regularities form processes w hich can be traced back. Exam ples o f these will be given w hen the linguistic sources are discussed in Chapter II.4. W hat generates those changes and how they appear on the surface are issues one m ust be fam iliar with. Changes are effected by language usage. Dead languages do not change, unless they are used, as for instance was Latin in the M iddle Ages. Usage can bring about m any different types o f language change. There is a difference between frequently and rarely used words and elem ents. Interest­ ingly enough, very often it is the m ost frequently used parts that change more often, but the contrary is equally true: the m ost frequently used parts rem ain the m ost stationary ones. There are several reasons for that. One reason for the stationariness o f the m ost frequently used words— verbs, for instance— is that they assum e a m ajor role in com m unication, and consequently in m aintaining linguistic continuity. The ch ief explanation for w hy m ore frequently used w ords change faster is w ear and tear. The m ore frequently a word is used the greater the probability that a new variant emerges and becom es rooted. Language alw ays has a tendency to economise. If a w ord is too long, it will w ear in the course o f usage, but if it is too short, it hinders com m unication. Accordingly, m onosyl­ labic words stretch out and become longer. One com m on feature o f all languages is that words are preponderantly disyllabic— languages have a

Introduction

33

propensity for that. Sounds, too, keep changing, but when the pronunciation o f two sounds becom es very similar, understanding becom es difficult. Thus, either the two sounds eventually coincide in the course o f their history, or the process o f sound change comes to a halt. A state o f isolation favours change, for if a word has m any derivations, the com m on stem will be preserved in all o f them. Anyone w ho has learned an Indo-European language— Latin, Eng­ lish, Germ an or Russian— will know that the conjugation o f the m ost fre­ quently used verbs is irregular. Yet irregular verbs are always m ore scarce than regular ones. R egular verbs form an ever-expanding majority, while the num ber o f irregular verbs remains invariable, or decreases. The present-day Hungarian language has less and less verbs with the -ik ending, and in many cases the less frequently used verbs with this ending no longer follow the conjugation characteristic o f this group o f verbs. Although all languages are com m only characterised by perpetual change, it is debatable w hether the speed o f language change is always identical. With those languages whose history we can trace back a long way with the help o f written sources, such as Indo-European, Sem itic or Chinese, the experience is that the speed o f the change o f the language and its constituent system s (e.g. sound system, vocabulary, affixes, etc.) is not even. Som etim es the pace o f change accelerates, som etim es it greatly slows down. M any scholars have studied the problem. Changes are usually precipitated by the isolation o f groups o f speakers. The splinter group will subsequently retain certain features which in the main, unfragm ented linguistic com m unity have already been changed, and will thus preserve various ancient elem ents, so-called archaisms. The present-day languages o f the Szekely in Transylvania and o f the M ol­ davian Hungarians, the Csango, are examples here. Conversely, the lan­ guage o f the isolated group o f speakers will undergo changes which proceed at a faster pace than in the larger, undivided group. A t the same time, the pace o f language change is surprisingly slower am ong those highly m obile groups o f peoples who m eet m ore regularly, like the nomads, for instance. Regional dialects will develop faster in the language o f settled peoples. By processes o f isolation these dialects m ay subsequently becom e independent languages. It is very difficult to draw the line betw een dialect and “m ain” language— m u­ tual understanding is a good test, however. The language o f nom adic peoples splinters into dialects much more slowly. No doubt, the lack or insignificance o f dialects can have m any other reasons, such as the interior m igrations o f groups o f peoples, or the high prestige o f a ruling group. W hich brings us to another im portant reason that effects language change: prestige. Language learning itself is a process o f imitation; a child acquires the language by im itating his or her parents and peers. But language groups, too, will change their language depending on whose language usage they begin

34

Methodological introduction and the sources

to imitate. Even in the days w hen printed writing, television and radio did not exist, there were groups whose political, cultural or econom ic prestige was high and w hose speech, pronunciation or vem aculism s the m ajority o f society sought to im itate and master. Linguistic change often started earlier in certain groups o f speakers, from where it spread to the other groups. Consequently, it frequently happens that old and new forms coexist in a language. This can com e in very handy, because linguistic changes can be used in the chronologi­ cal reconstruction o f history, provided one has extensive know ledge o f the linguistic change theories and research methods. The so-called biogeographical m ethodused to be the m ost com m on m ethod in the reconstruction o f ancient history. Naturally, the distribution o f plants and anim als can change. O f the cultivated plants, potato and sw eet com were im ported to Europe after the discovery o f Am erica. The nam es o f these plants shed light on their transit route, and also attest to popular linguistic creativity. Both the fruit and the designation narancs ‘orange’, o f Indian origin, entered H ungary and its language by Persian, A rabic and eventually Italian m ediation. W hen eventually a people m igrates, the plant and anim al nam es o f its form er hom eland w ill travel with it, so long as those plants and anim als can be found in the environm ents the people passes through. W hen, however, the flora and fauna lacks those plants or anim als for a long period o f time, their nam es will be forgotten. If subsequently the people encounters them again in the course o f its wanderings, it will coin new words to designate them. Such new nam es can be borrowed from locals, freshly coined, or form ed from existing plant nam es, by adding on an adjective, for instance. It is interesting in this respect that, as opposed to all the other Finno-U grian languages, the only word in Hungarian collectively designating coniferous trees is fe n y o ‘fir’, w hile the language boasts a vast array o f nam es for deciduous species. This goes to show that, for a long period o f time, the M agyars m ust have lived in a biogeographi­ cal environm ent which essentially lacked a coniferous flora. A closer look at the other Finno-U grian languages reveals that the various conifers have nam es o f their own. Thus, at least four coniferous species can be distinguished in the Uralic languages, nam ely the spruce fir, the arolla pine, the silver fir, and the larch. However, o f the deciduous trees only the elm existed in the proto-language. Therefore, it is the other way round in the Uralic languages: it has one deciduous tree and several coniferous species. Pollen analysis, m entioned above, as well as various other m ethods have enabled us to reconstruct where and when this mix o f trees was characteristic o f one particular large area. Rapidly spreading afresh after the last great glacial period, the taiga featured this particular flora in the 6 th -5 th m illennia BC in the Ural region. Hence, the Urheimat o f the Uralic peoples and the Uralic languages is thought to have been located there (cf. pp. 93-94).

35

Introduction

Southern boundary of P ic e a { t$ n r ' >

„ Barents

European distribution of Pinus

sibirica (arotla pine; , - ■_

Southern, eastern and northern boundaries of Quercus (oak)

l i i l

Northern bbundary of the spread of fhe hedgehog 4

Lhk .S aint

Petersburg

M osco w

•,A„

В 1 “ С (,

Figure 4 Biogeographical features o f the Uralic Urheimat This m ethod hitherto enjoyed high popularity. Experim ents w ere m ade to locate the Urheimats o f the Indo-European peoples by exam ining the nam es o f fish species, a m ethod which the research o f the Finno-U grian languages adopted. It transpired, however, that fish and other anim al nam es are too readily transferred to similar, yet taxonom ically rem ote species. For a long

36

Methodological introduction and the sources

time it was thought that the Hungarian name for ‘b e e ’, me/?, and the spreading o f the m elliferous bee could afford some historical assum ptions. But, as it transpired, m any peoples had no separate nam e to distinguish ‘wild b e e ’ and ‘honey b ee’, yet the biogeographical distribution o f the two species differs greatly. The reconstruction o f the biogeography o f m any thousands o f years ago has undergone rapid developm ent over the past decades. For instance, today we can draw the northern boundaries o f the distribution o f koris ‘a s h ’, alma ‘apple’ and vadszolo ‘w oodbine’ a lot m ore precisely. All three H ungar­ ian plant names are o f Turkic origin, and we have exact know ledge about where the M agyars m ust have adopted the words, and w here these plants and their names could not be adopted. Naturally, such linguistic evidence is not enough in itself. A lm a ‘apple’ could easily have entered the language through trade, as did narancs ‘orange’. As a m atter o f fact, throughout the w orld the equivalents o f ‘apple’ originate from the diverse offshoots o f one very ancient name. The Indo-European, Turkic and Hungarian nam es for ‘apple’ are distantly related, and the word was known as early as the Hettite language o f Asia Minor. The Turkic word is o f Indo-European origin (see p. 192). The Turkic equivalents o f the Hungarian szold ‘grape’, ‘v ine’ are used to denote w oodbine everywhere, yet it seems m ore probable that, together with bor ‘w in e’ and m any other Hungarian vinicultural expressions, the w ord was adopted north o f the Caucasus, near the shores o f the Black Sea. Historical and ethnological evidence from Hungarian viniculture attests to this (see pp. I l l and 141). In this case, biogeography helps to determ ine the place rather than the date. However, the Hungarian szold typifies a Turkic sound change which cannot be very old, and certainly cannot have occurred prior to the end o f the 8th or the early 9th century. Given these facts, the m ethod affords con­ clusions regarding both location and time. A nother theory contends that languages have parts whose speed o f change is invariable. The glottochronological m ethod was propounded by Swadesh and his team. Swadesh held that the core vocabulary o f languages changed at an invariable speed. He collectively term ed “core vocabulary” the m ost im portant and m ost frequently used words o f a language, and picked from this assortm ent a hundred words, or rather m eanings, which he held to be the m ost essential. These included words such as ‘all’, ‘and’, ‘anim al’, ‘ashes’, ‘a t’, ‘b ack ’, ‘bad’, ‘b ark’, ‘because’, ‘b elly ’, ‘b ig ’, ‘b ite’, ‘b lack ’, ‘b lo w ’, ‘bo n e’, ‘breathe’, ‘b u rn ’, and ‘child’. He also set up control lists alongside his basic word lists. He then introduced the rule which he had inferred from the history o f the longest observable languages. According to the rule, 14% o f the “m ost fundam ental” one hundred words dropped out in a thousand years, or were replaced by new words. As the second m illennium passed by, 86% o f the leftover 86 w ords remained. W hat this means, in effect, is that given a com m on

Ъ1

introduction

language group which features a core vocabulary o f one hundred words, and from w hich younger languages peel off, a thousand years after breaking up, those languages will have preserved 8 6 % o f the com m on word-stock. H ow ­ ever, there is no guarantee that all splinter groups will have “replaced” the same 14 words. The probability must, therefore, be exam ined o f the same word dropping out o f both languages, or from one or the other only. Swadesh set up a formula which produced the following result: The com m on “top 100” lists o f two languages will share 74% o f their words after 1000 years o f separation; 55% after 2000 years; 41%) after 3000 years; 30% after 4000 years; 22% after 5000 years; 16% after 6000 years; and 12% after 7000 years. Conversely, given a 30% identity o f the core vocabularies o f two related languages today, the above chart tells us that these language speakers sepa­ rated 4000 years ago, that is, their com m on original language splintered 4000 years ago. The m ethod provoked much interest and debate. Some claim ed that it was the C 14 m ethod o f linguistics. The m ethod was im proved, and researchers tested it for several languages. Thus, the separation o f the M agyar and Finnic languages, that is, the splintering o f the Finno-Ugrian proto-language, was dated 4000-5000 years ago, which surprisingly coincides with earlier results obtained from other methods. Nonetheless, the glottochronological m ethod did not prove to be successful, for two reasons. One is that it is im possible to draw a “top 100” list valid for each and every language. For instance, Sw adesh’s list included am ong the first twenty words the English at preposition, on the grounds, reasoned Swadesh, that it was the m ost com m on and m ost fundamental expression denoting location. However, the Finno-Ugrian languages, hence Hungarian, do not have prepositions, and express relations o f location with affixes (the Hungarian equivalent o f at is the affix -nal). Yet affixes can hardly be included in a vocabulary. The other reason is that Sw adesh’s definition o f core vocabulary tended to confuse the notion o f “m ost frequent” and “m ost fundam ental” . Usage frequency varies. By now, we have a great m any word occurrence dictionaries which have processed vast bodies o f texts. These tell us that the equivalent o f the word ‘m eat’ is am ong the first five hundred m ost frequently used words in Spanish, whereas, in French, it is m erely am ong the first three

38

M ethodological introduction and the sources

thousand. Also, the category “m ost fundam ental” is problem atic. M any lan­ guages do not use the conjunctive and for gram m atical co-ordination, there­ fore these languages either lack the word altogether, or assign it other functions. A nd other unforeseen problem s arose. In old G erm an (Gothic), the w ord denoting ‘m an’ was originally wafr which M ann superseded by process o f secondary change. However, this brought about secondary agreem ent with the English word man. The sam e thing happened with the words equivalent to ‘tru e’ and ‘to w ash’, both o f which are, however, included in the list. Very often the m eanings o f the m ost fundam ental words overlap, as, for instance, in the com pounds o f the Hungarian words kez ‘hand’ and kar ‘arm ’; sem an­ tically speaking,felkezii andfelka ru indistinguishably m ean ‘one-arm ed’. The w ord a scholar will add to the “top 10 0 ” list in such cases will be the one that is best suited for the specific scientific test. No linguist today w ould use the glottochronological method. Nevertheless, the scientific debate o f four dec­ ades has produced much im portant knowledge about linguistic change in general, the changes o f specific languages, and about the usability o f change descriptions for chronology. The negative outcom e o f the debate has also proved to be instructive, inasm uch that it confirm ed the speed o f linguistic change is never constant, not even in the seem ingly m ost stationary parts o f the core vocabulary. This is hardly surprising. The circum stances are im por­ tant. The drastic changes o f history can stim ulate language change, more peaceful conditions tend to slow down the process, w hereas certain types o f life style, such as nom adism , stabilise linguistic change. Although the speed o f language change is not invariable, know ledge o f the changes can nevertheless help in dating historical events. Here is an example. We know that in old Finno-Ugrian the initial k- changed to h- in Hungarian words containing back vowels (for example, in the Hungarian hab ‘foam ’, had ‘arm y’, hagym a ‘onion’, hal ‘fish’, haj ‘hair’, hall ‘to h ea r’, him ‘m ale’, ho ‘snow ’, hollo ‘raven’, husz ‘tw enty’, huz ‘to puli’, and m any other words). Seeing that in the m ajority o f Turkic loan words the w ord-initial k- has rem ained invariable (such as in kantar ‘bridle’, kanyaro ‘m easles’, кари ‘gate’, karam ‘(cattle)pen’, karvaly ‘sparrow -haw k’, kom lo ‘h o p ’ (the plant), кого ‘w eed ’, kos ‘ram ’ (the anim al), etc.) we are inclined to assum e that the M agyars could only have adopted them after the ancient Finno-U grian wordinitial k- changed to h-. But for that matter, the adopted Turkic /к/, too, m ight easily have changed to 1Ы. I f we knew when the shift from k- to h- ended, we w ould also be able to establish after w hat date the M agyars and the Turkic lived together. That, however, is very difficult to ascertain. The closest relatives o f Hungarian, Vogul and Ostyak, feature sim ilar changes, but not in every dialect. This strongly suggests that the к > h change in the Ob-U grian languages is m ore recent, and it is independent o f the same change in the

39

Introduction

Hungarian language. Further difficulties arise from the fact that there are quite a few Turkic words whose w ord-initial k- is equivalent to h- in the Hungarian, such as hajo ‘b o at’, hom ok ‘sand’, hitvdny ‘contem ptible’. For some time the same group o f words was thought to include hattyu ‘sw an’ and hod ‘b eav er’. Even distinguished scholars thought that these items entered the Hungarian prior to k- becom ing h-, on account o f a putative period o f very early M agyar-Turkic interaction which was followed by another sim ilar period later on. This conjecture could have contributed to establishing relative chronology. Unfortunately, however, the Turkic etym ology o f the w ords hattyu ‘sw an’ and h od ‘b eaver’ proved to be mistaken. But our loss on one side proved to be a gain on the other; as it transpired, the other words entered the Hungarian from one Turkic language— nam ely the prevailing language o f the K hazar Em ­ pire— in which the same change had also previously occurred. This we know from the fact, am ong others, that a Khazarian river, for instance, was called H ara siu or H ara siv which in Turkic is K ara sub (or later K ara su), and the title o f the K hazar ruler was haghan or hakhan instead o f kaghan. The em erging к > h sound shift in the K hazar dialects, as attested by many sources, could not have begun earlier than the late 8 th or early 9th century. Thus, in Ibn Fadlan, the Arabic kadzi ‘cadi’ (judge) appears in the K hazar form o f hazi. Hence, this interaction at least can be dated with linguistic methods. Linguistically speaking, it can be very interesting w hen a language adopts the same word twice, and the two variants o f that w ord shed light on the two periods o f the source language. Hungarian is fortunate in this respect, since alongside karvaly ‘sparrow -haw k’, o f Turkic origin, another Hungarian bird name, herjd, w hich disappeared in the 19th century, happens to be a later variant o f the same Turkic word in which the к > h shift had already taken place. Although only a single variant o f the above quoted szolo ‘grape’, ‘vine’ entered the Hungarian, gyiimdlcs ‘fruit’ evolved from the derivation o f the very same Turkic stem, providing a fine parallel for the chronology o f kai-valy and herjd ‘sparrow -haw k’, gyiimdlcs ‘fruit’ and szolo ‘grape’, ‘v in e’.

NOTES 7. Tenninology, methods It is extremely difficult to translate the Hungarian term ostortenet. The word has a historically conditioned connotation. Literally it can be rendered both as ‘the history o f the ancestors (as ‘ancestor’) and as ‘prehistory, the time before history’. In m ost cases it denotes the ‘ori­ g in s’, the ‘history o f the origins’. The term ostortenet was not in favour for a long time, while beginning with the 1980s it has becem e a fashion. This is behind the fact that in som e cases

40

Methodological introduction a n d the sources

I have used proto-history, in others p rehistory for translating the Hungarian ostdrtenet. The issues o f ethnicity, people, nation and linguistic relationship, as w ell as the earlier literature, are discussed in R6na-Tas (1978a) which was an extended version o f my dissertation for the D Sc degree at the Hungarian Academy o f Sciences. Later I developed my view s and they have been summarised in Rona-Tas (1988a), a paper read before the Academ y o f Rhein-Westphalia; see also Rona-Tas (1989). M y view s were greatly influenced by the works o f Jeno Sziics who first outlined his ideas in Sziics (1966). H is ideas can be follow ed in Sziics (1981) in German, and in Sziics (1986) in French. H is book on the “three historical regions o f Europe” had a great impact on Hungarian historical and political thinking. The English version was published in 1983, the German in 1990. For his other works see the bibliography. The Hungarian K om oroczy discussed the concept o f cthnicity and nation in K om oroczy (1992). Packed with important conclusions, his studies unfortunately disregard the differences between ethnos and nation. See also E. Canetti’s (1977) autobiographical novel. The full Hungarian translation o f Mendander Protector’s text is available in Lukinich (1905, pp. 5 9 -6 0 ), which I adopted with minor m odifications in R6na-Tas (1989, p. 9 = Rona-Tas 1995a, p. 175). The famous place is also cited by Pohl (1988, p. 21). The Greek original is available in D e B oor’s edition E xcerpta (1903, pp. 170-171). Wenskus (1961) is a fundamental work in the field. H. Wolfram continued the work Wenskus had begun, see, for instance, Wolfram (1979b, 2nd edition 1980), as w ell as the publications o f the Vienna scientific circle, hence W olfram -Daim (1980); W olfram - Schwarcz (1985); Friesinger-Daim (1985); W olfram-Pohl (1990); Friesinger-D aim (1990). For W olf­ ram’s article on the types o f ethnogenesis see Beumann-SchrOder (1985, pp. 9 7 -1 5 2 ). For Pohl’s article on the types o f ethnogenesis see W olfram -Pohl (1990, pp. 113-124). For further research consult E ntstehung (1985); Girtler (1982). The works o f som e German scholars o f this field are published in Studien zu r E thnogenese I—II, 1985, 1988. O f the articles published in these volum es, special mention must be made o f the study o f W.E. MOhlmann (S tu d ien 1 , 1985, pp. 9 -2 8 ); J. Untermann (Studien I, pp. 13 3 -1 6 4 ) discussed the relations o f language and ethnic history. The same publication includes R6na-Tas (1988a, pp. 1 0 7 -1 4 2 = Rona-Tas 1995a, pp. 2 7 5 -3 1 0 ). Although not fully devoid o f ideological constraints, van den Berghe (1987) gives a good overview o f the issues o f ethnicity. Bromlej (1976) is outdated, but interesting. Anderson (1990) represents a modern trend in nation research. He claim s that modern com munication technology has significantly contributed to the em ergence o f nations. See also G ellner (1987). The latest overview available to me on the issues o f nation and nationalism w as Greenfield (1992), the topic is, however, inexhaustible and the bibliography endless.

2. Chronology and chronological assumptions and

3. The role of the natural sciences in determining age I wrote these chapters primarily drawing on the studies contained in H ajdii-K rist6-Rona-Tas (volum e IV), and especially the chapters written by Mrs M agda K om l6s JSrai, L4szl6 Kordos, Sandor Som ogyi, Janos Tardy and Peter Marton. I would hereby like to take the opportunity to thank these authors for their contribution. For a summary see Rona-Tas (1979). I am aware that research has progressed in the last decades. For an up-to-date natural geographical outlook on

Introduction

41

the Carpathian Basin and the EtelkOz, see GyOrfFy-Zolyomi (1994, pp. 3 4 -3 7 ) which also has an ample bibliography. Consult Rona-Tas (1978a) on linguistics as an ancillary discipline used for establishing chronology. For the latest literature in historical linguistics, a review o f research, and a bibliography, see Bynon (1977) and Anttila (1989). Sociolinguistics lends fresh help to historical linguistics and here the works o f Labov are o f eminent importance. There exist a handful o f university textbooks on sociolinguistics and most deal with historical changes as well. See Labov (1994). The spreading o f coniferous and deciduous trees, and the questions o f the U rheim at o f the Uralic peoples have been discussed in detail by Hajdii (1971, 1976), H ajdu-D om okos (1978, pp. 4 5 -5 7 ; 1987, pp. 2 7 3 -2 9 9 ). The Swadesh method was first propounded in Swadesh (1950); the first decade o f the method was reviewed by H ym es (1960). Literature and Hungarian opinions are available in Fodor (1961) and Rona-Tas (1978a, pp. 2 4 3 -2 5 1 ). The questions o f к > h chronology were first discussed by Barczi (1 9 5 2 ,1 9 6 5 ,1 9 7 1 ,1 9 7 2 ). See also Ligeti (1986, pp. 2 7 -2 8 ), and Rona-Tas (1988d) and below (p. 106).

11. THE SOURCES

1. THE CONCEPT OF SOURCE MATERIAL In this work the concept o f “source m aterial” is broader than usual. This expanded concept was first em ployed in 1976 in the volum es o f the Szeged Proto-History Research Group. We consider as sources, all factual material from which inform ation can be obtained, directly or indirectly, regarding the ancient history o f the M agyars. Since written m aterial on the period is relatively scarce, naturally the significance o f other sources is greater. Besides written sources we have used language itself as a historical source, and also archaeological research, physical anthropology, ethnography and num erous other scientific methods. This complex or interdisciplinary approach was always utilised in research. One great problem is that the scope o f some researchers— due to the rapid “expansion” apparent in these sciences— sim ply cannot cover all the different source fields. The use o f incom plete, old or simply out-of-date results from neighbouring branches o f science also poses a threat. Sometim es we experience very specific selections. Am ong the results o f related sciences there is a tendency to withhold those findings w hich either do not agree or could only w ith difficulty be reconciled with individual “pet” theories. At other times we can observe that type o f indirect p ro o f which is m erely m entioned som ewhere as a potential hypothesis but w hich is accepted as p ro o f in another science, and as such, theories are then built on the back o f it. A fter this, the person who put forward the idea as a hypothesis in the first place then quotes the findings o f his colleagues as proving his idea. It is not possible to com pletely elim inate these difficulties as they go hand in hand with any study o f a com plex science such as this. Even so, every effort m ust be made to avoid these pitfalls. This is only possible if one has a good under­ standing o f the nature o f the sources, and their limitations, and thus in our work we endeavour to speak not only about the evidence provided by the sources but also about the lim itations o f these sources, and in every case we com plete a source critique. Naturally this does not m ean that every person, in every case, has to start everything right from the beginning, but a sober critical approach always provides greater safety.

44

Methodological introduction and the sources

2. SOURCE CRITICISM Every source type and every individual source dem ands a different critical approach, and there are certain general principles w hich are equally valid for large source groups. Let us take a sim ple historical event, for instance the rise to pow er o f a ruler. The event itself occurs in a tem poral frame, and it is by no m eans certain that the entire process will be observed, rather perhaps only highly sym bolic events (election, coronation, etc.). The event is recorded, the record passes into the written source, the written source is com pleted, the author finishes or m aybe edits his work, and then later he m ay even transcribe or enlarge the docum ent. A fter com pletion, and som etim es w ithin the lifetim e o f the author and under his supervision, it is copied, the final w ork is then later still copied again, w hile later writers take extracts or quote from it. These nine stages describe m erely the sim plest o f cases. It is not uncom m on to find corrections, om issions and later additions, etc. m ade to details in the source. The m ajority o f copies are m ade long after com pletion o f the original, and thus it is necessary to reconstruct retrospectively the original text from the copies. Occasionally, to decide what exactly was in the original, it is necessary to com pare the copies and their provenance. And we are yet to m ention forgeries, errors and m istakes, w hether intentional or from sheer ignorance. C learing up all these presum es an understanding not only o f the language o f the sources but o f the writing, the specific orthography and abbreviations as well. Naturally, historians m ust often rely upon those who professionally edited the sources, because they are sim ply unable to com plete source critiques in every case. However, an effort m ust be m ade to use critiques, and if the historian is unable to com plete such, it m ust be clear exactly w hat problem s the source brings with it. Source criticism cannot only enquire into the understanding o f the language and writing, the palaeography o f the source, but the publisher m ust be in possession o f those facts upon w hich unclear, problem atic aspects can be interpreted and explained. W ith the advances being m ade by researchers, science is constantly being enriched by ever new er discoveries, and for this reason source critiques should be continually updated for some tim e to come, even if the original w ork was com pleted in a fully professional m anner in its time. Source interpretations m ust be separated from critiques, and this is true even if the task is not always straightforward. The interpretation o f source infor­ m ation, o f course, influences (or can have an influence on) the critique. However, it is m ethodologically pertinent to differentiate betw een critique and interpretation. Unfortunately, one has to note that am ong the w ritten sources covering ancient Hungarian history there are only very few where the critical analysis

45

The sources

has been carried out to a satisfactory and m odern standard. A notable exception is the publication o f the D e adm inistrando imperio. Sources can be interpreted in a m ultitude o f w ays. In the sources them selves, the quantity and quality o f inform ation directly related to the M agyars, as well as data which can be linked to this topic, are restricted. For the period prior to the Conquest we have sufficient sources relating to the neighbours o f the M agyars to be able to reconstruct the history o f the area subsequently also settled by the M agyars. In the following we attem pt to sketch out an Eastern European history in w hich the pre-Conquest M agyars undoubtedly had a part. Thus we have only taken into consideration w hat the sources have to say about the area bounded by the Eastern European steppe and forested steppe belt, the Ural m ountains and river, the region defined by the Caucasus, the Black Sea and the eastern side o f the Carpathians, and those details relating to the Balkan region. Those sources relating to the state o f the Carpathian B asin prior to the Conquest, respectively to the Conquest itself, constitute a separate group.

3. THE WRITTEN SOURCES The b rief outline o f written sources is presented according to the language o f the source, and if necessary, within this subdivided according to the type o f writing. In the survey o f sources, we generally do not go back earlier than the 5 th, and in some cases the 6 th century BC. The works o f early writers frequently alluded to such sources w hich possibly could be related to the M agyars or their predecessors, but from our point o f view these can be disregarded. The Yiirka people m entioned by Herodotus (d. 425 B C ) are generally related to the Ugor people and the ancestors o f the M agyars on account o f the sim ilar sound o f the nam es and their location. Behind the nam es o f peoples m entioned in different steppe descriptions, others claim to see the M agyars or peoples related to the M agyars. We will not deal with these m atters here. However, it is im portant to m ention Ptolem y who lived in ancient A lexandria and who put together a collection o f m aps from earlier w ork by M arinos o f Tyros com piled betw een 107 and 114 A D , bringing them together in an eight-volum e cosm og­ raphy. The collection was com pleted betw een 151 and 178 A D , and although there is no direct M agyar connection, the nam e o f the Finnish people appears here for the first time. The Ptolem y work served as a basis for later geographi­ cal works, and the Arabs also adopted it. A lthough the structure and the descriptive principles o f the original work were slowly m odified, it still fundam entally defined geographical studies right through to the end o f the M iddle Ages, and as such, also those works which are im portant from our

46

Methodological introduction and the sources

point o f view. The other early sources are only im portant because in many cases quotations taken from them colour, but o f course also corrupt, w orks by later writers.

a) Byzantine sources The Byzantine Em pire was established on the basis o f Rom an law, in a Greek-speaking area and professing C hristianity as a state religion. Dual rule o f the Greek-Rom an Em pire lasted for some time. A fter the downfall o f the West Rom an Em pire (476), Byzantium becam e fully independent. In 740 it halted the advancing Arabs, but it lost Ravenna in 751. In 843 the civil war betw een the iconoclasts and iconodules (the Iconoclastic C ontroversy) was finally term inated, a struggle which had considerably w eakened the B yzantine Empire. The year 867 m arked the break from the Rom an C hurch (for details see pp. 257-260), although the date o f official rupture was 1054. Leo the Wise took to the throne in 8 8 6 , and the B yzantine Em pire underw ent a resurgence. The southern shore o f the Black Sea, today’s Anatolia, and the Balkans to the D anube w ere under the sphere o f influence o f Byzantium . Im portant trading towns were located in the Crim ean Peninsula under B yzantine rule. To the east, the em pire bordered on Sasanian Persia, and betw een these tw o worlds lived such peoples as the Arm enians, Georgians and Syrians. Efficient protec­ tion o f the Byzantine E m pire’s northern borders and trade routes dem anded inform ation about happenings in the steppe. Frequently, protection m eant form ing an alliance w ith one group or people against another. In order to do this it was necessary to have a good grasp o f the history, pow er relations, location, m ilitary strength and tactics o f these peoples. The m ost im portant genres in B yzantine historical literature are w ritten works covering the history o f the empire, ecclesiastical historical w orks and route itineraries. But we also find historical references in such genres as courtly verses praising the em perors, the panegyrics. Byzantine works were w ritten in M iddle Greek. By this tim e the reading o f characters and character clusters had deviated from that o f the classical Greek period. A t the sam e time, however, w riters with a predilection for the use o f contem porary syntax and gram m ar em ployed classical rules as w ell, and these w ere all m ixed in num erous w orks (see Figure 7 on page 50). To present an exam ple o f ju st the sort o f variable results a single source can provide, it is worth taking a b rief look at the w ork entitled The G overning o f Empire. Am ong those sources that the author, Em peror Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959), used were original texts, reports, accounts and already com pleted sum m aries w hich were extracted for him. These w ere transcribed

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Figure 5 The Roman Empire under Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD)

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Figure 6 The Byzantine Empire under Justinian (527-565)

The sources

49

and copied for the emperor, who generally dictated or som etim es wrote him self using these sources. Thus w ere those parts com pleted w hich w ere then originally brought together in two works with the titles On Peoples and On Provinces. These works, m ay have been com pleted around 945, but im m edi­ ately afterwards the em peror re-edited the whole work, and the final version was only ready by around 952. The court scribe, or scribes, then m ade copies o f the work. These have been lost, but a new copy was m ade around 979. This was lost too, but some time between 1059 and 1081 yet another copy was made, and luckily this has survived. C urrently it is stored in Paris. Am ong its many readers there were those who added their own rem arks, those who m ade corrections, and those who m ade notes in the margin o f the codex. Occasional unknown or indecipherable words were supplem ented or corrected. Two copies were made o f the Paris document. There are notes and corrections which date from before the copies were m ade, while others date from later. A copy stored in the Vatican was com pleted in 1509, and one in M odena between 1560 and 1568. N ot long after the Vatican m anuscript was com pleted, a new copy o f it was made between 1509 and 1529. The work was first published by M eursius in 1611 on the basis o f the Vatican m anuscript, and then in 1711 by Bandur, who knew the Paris m anuscript and was able to read those parts which are unreadable today. B ekker’s 1840 edition is based on B andur’s text. The critical edition o f the text by M oravcsik and Jenkins is based on an understanding o f this background to the material, and it endeavoured to reconstruct the m ost accurate picture possible o f the original text. A ssistance was provided by the fact that The Governing o f Em pire contains quotations from earlier written works. Am ong these, we know o f some which derive from other textual traditions, and thus it is possible to establish how copies were made during the imperial age. But naturally, some parts o f The Governing o f Empire from around 952 were o f a quite variable quality, there are parts edited precisely and parts negligently, some with a great deal o f attention and others with less care. In approaching such a text, there are two extremes. The excessive critic cannot, in the end, accept any parts o f the w ork as authentic. On the other hand the naive reader considers every letter, every assertion noted down, as the absolute truth. At the same time it is not ju st a m atter o f finding a m iddle way, but rather to back up reasoned criticism with philological argument. We should not blithely correct the text as we please, but then again w e cannot accept it as fact carved in stone and com pletely unalterable. The basic principle rem ains the principle o f the least possible change. Any alteration m ust always be in harmony with the entire work, its spirit and details, and furtherm ore with those facts deriving from other sour&es.

50

Methodological introduction and the sources

Greek character

Greek cluster

a

Transliteration

Transcription accord­

according

ing to M iddle Greek

to classical Greek

pronunciation

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th

th

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71 P

i

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n

n

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0 01

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0 1

ou

ou

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P r

s

s

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t

t

ii

i

ui

i

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ph

f

X V

kh

h

ps

ps

CO

6

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Figure 7 Transliteration and transcription o f G reek characters and clusters

The sources

51

The appearance o f the Huns was dealt with by several B yzantine writers, the m ost im portant being Priskos the Rhetor born betw een 410 and 420 AD. He accom panied senior am bassadors calling on the court o f Attila in 448^449, com piling in eight books the events o f the period from both his own notes and other sources. The w ork in all likelihood covered the period betw een 411 and 472. He copied up notes on his trip to the Huns im m ediately upon his return home, and slotted in the description to his work, finally com pleted 23 years later. The original w ork is lost, and we only know about it through extracts. Several m ade abridgem ents, for instance Cassiodorus who died around 580, from whose work these parts are only known to us from the quotations o f Jordanes. The main source, sum m aries prepared by C onstantine, dates from around 950. Copies o f the sum m aries that we know about are no earlier than from the 16th century. Follow ing the disintegration o f the Hun Empire, the first references ap­ peared in Byzantine literature to definite Turkic-speaking peoples, among them the Onogurs. From among the sources covering the period between the appearance o f the Turk peoples and the Avars, it is worth m entioning the cosm ography com piled around 540 by world traveller Cosmas Indicopleustes. The oldest known copies o f his work can be dated to the 8 th or 9th century. The rem aining part o f the 18-volume world chronicle o f John Malalas, in the existing copy, ends at the year 563. The author probably died in 578, and so it is possible that the lost parts contained further chapters. M any have abridged this work. One m anuscript contains the com plete rem aining text, this being an 1 lth-century copy o f contem porary extracts from the original. Q uotations from the work are still with us in the works o f num erous other writers. One o f the m ost significant historians o f the age was Procopius; we know o f three works by him. The eight-volum e H istory detailing the wars o f Justinian could have been com pleted around 553. His second work later becam e know n as the Anecdota, or the Secret H istory, while the third work gave an account o f im perial constructions. The earliest known copy o f the historical work— with the exception o f one part from the 13th century— originates from the 14th century. A gathias continued the work o f Procopios, treating the period be­ tween 552 and 558, and noting the appearance o f the Avars. The earliest known copy o f this w ork dates from the 10 th to 1 1th centuries. The appearance o f the Turk peoples and the Avars only elicited greater attention in writers o f the follow ing period. A ten-volum e history by Theophanes Bizantius, covering the years between 566 and 581, survived only in a few short extracts. The work by Protector M enander follow ed events until 582. Similarly, his w ork did not survive the passing centuries, but ex­ tracts (copies from the 16th century) by later B yzantine w riters, Theophilactus Sim ocattes and Constantine, preserved m uch o f the work.

52

Methodological introduction and the sources

M enander’s w ork was continued by Theophylactus Sim ocattes, in whose book events w ere follow ed until 602, and the death o f Em peror M aurice. The oldest extant copy dates from the 11 th—12th centuries. U nder M aurice a w ork on m ilitary tactics (Strategicon) was prepared, including notes on nom adic warfare. A lthough the w ork included m any elem ents taken from classical G reek tradition, such as com m onplaces on the Scythians, the text also included notes on the Turk peoples. C ertain inform ation reflects the position in the last decades o f the 6 th century. Besides extracts, the w ork survived in several copies. The oldest known copy has been dated to the 10th century. During the rule o f H eraclius (610-641) B yzantium developed close ties with the Avars and various Turkic peoples. In the constant cam paigns w aged against Persia, the em pire took advantage o f m ilitary assistance from steppe dwellers. Heraclius replied to a com bined attack m ade up o f an alliance o f Persians, Avars and Slavs by going on the offensive, and in 627, with help from the Khazars, he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Sasanian Persian Empire. A w ork by an unknow n writer, know n as the E aster Chronicle because it also gave details on calculating Easter, dealt w ith the period. The chronicle introduces earlier periods on the basis o f w orks by other authors, although it contains independent inform ation regarding the contem porary period up to 628. The earliest existing m anuscript dates from the 10th century. The Avars are m entioned in a book o f serm ons by Theodorus Sinkellos originating from around 627 (10 t h - 11 th-century copy) and in a history in verse by Georgius Pisides (14th-century copy, including extracts by other authors). The Introduction, com pleted before 715, w ritten for the A gathon alludes to historical events surrounding the Khazars and the B ulghars driving into the Balkans. The work, docum enting the life o f the patron saint o f Thessaloniki, Saint D em eter (m artyred before 305), also contains num erous later historical facts. The part covering 7th-century historical events can be dated to the end o f the 7th century (copy from the 12th century). B yzantine sources list contem porary sees, such as the one o f the C rim ean m etropolitan, several times. We know o f such a list from the 8 th century (betw een 733 and 746, copy from the 14th century) and from the beginning o f the 9 th century (betw een 805 and 815). Theophanes w ho died in 818 wrote his highly influential historical w ork C hronographia betw een 810 and 814, w hich he com piled in part by incorpo­ rating extracts o f the works o f predecessors, w hile he gathered inform ation partly from his contem porary writers and partly eyew itness accounts for those chapters connected to the 7th and 8 th centuries. The w ork w as translated into Latin som e tim e betw een 873 and 875 (copy from the 10th century). Broadly speaking, Patriarch N icephorus (d. 829) w orked from the sam e sources. His

The sources

53

short history covers the period betw een 602 and 769 (copy from the 12th—13th centuries). W riters o f the following period w ere able to report on the events leading up to the Conquest and provide inform ation related to the Conquest. These works were com pleted under two em perors, Leo the Wise (886-912) and Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959). Philotheas, who wrote a handbook on the proto­ col o f the Byzantine court in 899, and Arethas, author o f a speech praising Leo the Wise in 902, were the first to m ention the M agyars under the nam e Turki (Turkoi), that is Turk. Around this time, the M agyars w ere frequently m en­ tioned in b rief and by different names. A few w orks on strategy also probably term ed the M agyars as Turk. But Leon D iakonus m entioned the M agyars as Huns and Scythians in his work originating from around 992, and w hich covers events between 959 and 976 (12th-century copy). M eanw hile, in connection with the Italian raids the Chronicle o f the Popes (copy from the 13 th century), docum enting the period between 891 and 929, m entions in the events o f 922 the M agyars under the nam e Ungri, term inology also em ployed in the work M iracles o f Saint George and in an 11 th-century surviving copy o f the L ife o f Saint B asil (Basileios, d. 944). A treatise entitled Tactics by Leo the Wise com pleted around 904 used as its main source the sim ilar work by M aurice, as well as experiences from the em peror’s own time. Leo the Wise m ade additions in at least six places to the M aurice w ork relating to the M agyars. The w ork refers not only to M agyar warfare but also to their way o f living, their role in the B ulghar-B yzantine w ar (894-896), as well as to the alliance with them. The earliest copy dates from the 10 th century. Nicholas M isticus, patriarch o f C onstantinople who died in 925, referred to the M agyars as “Western Turk peoples” in a letter to the B ulghar ruler Simeon ( 10 th-century copy). The m ost im portant Byzantine source regarding the conquering M agyars is a w ork by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. He received the nam e Porphyrogeni­ tus (B om in Purple) after the purple m arble cham ber where the m le r’s first-born son, heir to the throne, was bom . However, such a nam e w as given to others bom heir to the throne as well. He was only seven w hen his father died (912), and thus first his uncle, and then follow ing his u ncle’s death the admiral o f the fleet, Rom anus Lecapenus, took over the reins o f power. Constantine only exercised true pow er from 944 after R om anus Lecapenus was sent into exile. In the intervening period Constantine retreated from public life and devoted him self to the sciences. He w orked together w ith a large staff who collected and abridged works o f earlier writers. This collection o f extracts preserved the works o f num erous historical chroniclers. C onstantine him self was a prolific writer, and it is*1difficult to say which, from am ong the many

54

Methodological introduction and the sources

works, he actually wrote himself. In any case these works survived under the nam e o f the emperor. As far as we are concerned the m ost im portant work was originally unnam ed; a Greek inscription revealed that the author presented the work to his son, who was then already an emperor. The w ork was given the title D e adm inistrando imperio by M eursius, the first publisher, in 1611. Since then, this w ork in Greek is com m only referred to by its Latin name. The work took its final form in 951-952, and in all likelihood Constantine presented it to his son in 952. Originally each part was written separately and at a different time. Based on internal dating, it is possible to ascertain that it was w ritten starting from 948, furtherm ore that certain parts were com pleted indepen­ dently o f one another. It appears that originally Constantine wished to write a large encyclopaedic sum m ary o f peoples (peri ethnon), but he later changed his m ind in favour o f putting together a scholarly collection dedicated to his son. The m ajority o f those parts written to m eet the original intent were retained in the work, and it is worth noting that they did not always suit the later structure. Constantine strove for exactness in his use o f sources, and where there has been an opportunity to check back, it is possible to establish that he follow ed earlier works very precisely. He not only em ployed written sources, but reports o f em issaries and eyewitness accounts as well, and it is evident that som e o f these were actually noted down by his own scribes. Those sections concerning the M agyars are derived from several sources. A m ong these were two M agyars, Termecsii and Bulcsu, who, obviously with the help o f an interpreter, gave answers to questions posed about their people. It appears as though these were highly specific questions. At the end o f C hapter 40, six sentences begin with ‘it is know n’ ( ’isteon). These were answ ers given to such questions as “who is who in H ungary” . It is quite possible that there were other records on the M agyars in the im perial court, and not everything came from the same source. The text o f D e adm inistrando im perio— as we have seen above— only survives to this day in an 11 th-century B yzantine copy. Porphyrogenitus’s other project was in reality a collection o f w orks, also generally known by the Latin nam e given by the publisher: D e cerim oniis aulae Byzantinae. The work docum ents court cerem onies, but it also covers num erous other topics as well. A fter thorough exam ination it becam e evident that the available original 12 th-century m anuscript cannot be the work o f Constantine Porphyrogenitus, as his burial place is also m entioned w ithin, and it cannot be a direct copy o f the original work either. On the other hand, other parts o f the work contain the introductory words to the em peror’s son. Georgius M onachus wrote a World Chronicle on the history o f the world known by him until the year 842. This w ork was then continued by an unknown writer. It closes with the death o f Rom anus Lecapenus, and it w ould

The sources

55

appear that it was som ewhat hostile towards Constantine, who was at that time rather ignored. This is im portant because it is likely the w riter was not from among the group surrounding Constantine. Two com pilations o f the Continu­ ation o f the Chronicle by George the M onk ( Georgius m onachus continuatus) survived. Version В is later and som ewhat m ore extensive than version A. Both have 11th-century copies. There were also continuations o f the original Theophanes w orld chronicle extending to 813. These writers divided the works into six volum es covering events up to 961 (Theophanes continuatus). According to the title it was prepared for Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who also provided sources for the compilation. The m ain source for the part covering the period 886-948 was the above-m entioned Continuation o f the Chronicle by George the M onk version B. The Vatican has a copy dating from the 11th century. Later B yzantine works only supply occasional references to the history o f the conquering M agyars. A few works copied or abridged some earlier sources as well, the m ajority o f which are im portant sources o f the history o f Hungary in the age o f the Arpad dynasty.

b) Latin sources Sources from outside Hungary Ancient Latin sources do not contain any inform ation that we can use. There are occasional references to the names o f Finnish and Estonian peoples. The Yiirka people found by Herodotus were absorbed into m aterial, although in places they appear in the form Turcae, but these sources are interesting only from the point o f view that in later sources containing m aterial interesting from our aspect there are many quotations taken from the ancient classics. The earliest author writing in Latin— and worth citing here— was the Rom an w riter o f Gothic origin Jordanes, who com pleted his w ork (De origine actibusque Getarum, or in b rief Getica) in the m iddle o f the 6 th century. His work is certainly an adaptation o f the history o f the Goths by Cassiodorus. The now lost work o f Cassiodorus covered the history o f the G oths until 533, followed by Jordanes’s own work for the period up until 551. The latter’s Latin did not always m eet the norm s o f classical grammar. This work, w hich is also im portant as regards the relation between the Huns and the Goths, was frequently used by later literary, thus Hungarian-related sources as well. The history o f the sword o f Attila also derives from Jordanes. A near contem porary copy has survived.

56

Methodological introduction and the sources

A 7th-century w ork by an unknown writer, usually quoted as being entitled the Exordia Scythica, is im portant for us because a later copy was one o f the sources em ployed by the Hungarian chronicler Anonym us. The w ork is actually an abridgem ent o f a 2nd-century work, strongly influenced by H ero­ dotus. The Cosmographia was possibly created around 700, in Ravenna, edited by an unknow n w riter (Geographus Ravennas). A m onk from Pisa took an extract from the w ork in 1118. The work includes references to O nogoria and the Khazars. A t the end o f the 8 th century we find a work w ritten under the nom -deplum e o f A ethicus (Ethicus) Ister. The work, a fantastic description o f the w orld (Cosmographia), m entions the Turk people living in the Black Sea region. A ppended to the w ork is an alphabet, about w hich the first publishers stated that it contained invented characters. In attem pting to refute this, several experim ents were carried out unsuccessfully, which aim ed to show a connec­ tion with Turkic or Avar runiform script. The end o f the M erovingian dynasty was signalled in 751 with the crowning o f Pepin the Short as “king o f all the Franks” . U nder the rule o f his son, Charles the Great (Charlem agne) (768-814, em peror from 800), the new C arolingian Em pire began to flourish, and ever closer ties were established with the Avar Empire. Thus, sources from this time have im portant inform ation to tell us about the eve o f the Conquest and details related to the C onquest period. On the orders o f Aldwin, archbishop o f Salzburg (859-873), an unknown m onk wrote the Conversion o f the Bavarians and Carantans (Conversio bagoariorum et carantanorum) in 870. The purpose o f the w ork was to support the Salzburg see’s legal claim to Lower Pannonia. The work, w hich analyses the m issionary activities o f the Salzburg see, contains m uch im portant infor­ m ation about the history o f Pannonia prior to the Conquest. The nine m anu­ script copies w hich are available to us today date from the 12th century. An early extract was also prepared from the Conversio at the turn o f the 12 t h - 13 th centuries (Excerptum de karentanis) in w hich there are a few w ords which do not originate from the Conversio. Am ong other sources it is im portant to highlight the A nnales iuvavenses m axim i, in the original text o f which there is m ention o f a jo in t attack launched by the M agyars and Khavars around Vienna in 881. Theotmar, archbishop o f Salzburg (873-907), fell in battle fighting the M agyars at Pozsony. A letter (long regarded as a fake) w ritten to Pope John IX in the spring o f 900, contained im portant inform ation not only about argum ents raging w ith the see o f Passau, but also relating to the history o f the Avars, the Slavs and the Magyars.

The sources

57

Between 892 and 899, Regino (d. 915) acted as abbot o f the Priim m onastery situated 100 km w est o f Koblenz. He resided in Trier from 899 until his death. Here he com pleted his World Chronicle, the last year being 906. The chronicle docum ents events following the death o f Charles the G reat on the basis o f verbal statem ents and contem porary sources. The M agyars are m entioned for the first tim e in the year 889, and here the author sum m arised everything he knew about the conquering M agyars. Copies o f this work date from the 10th century. Later writers frequently took extracts. Am ong the m any m onastic annals, that o f the Fulda m onastery is critically important. Notes w ritten year after year were occasionally collected together in “instalm ents” . The last instalm ent o f the annals— which covered events from 680 to 901— and in which we can find details related to the M agyars, was not actually prepared in Fulda but in Bavaria. After this cam e the western Latin sources, authorities on the age o f incur­ sions. However, a few writers used the surprise caused by the sudden appear­ ance o f the M agyars to portray these new com ers, and to record earlier events. Am ong the resultant w orks the one by Liudprand who died in 972 as bishop o f Crem ona stands out as particularly significant. As m inister o f B erengar II, king o f northern Italy, Liudprand travelled to Byzantium in 949 and m et C onstantine Porphyrogenitus as well. Three years after the battle o f the Lechfeld he m oved from Italy to the court o f King Otto, where he wrote Antapodosis (Repaym ent) (i.e. in answer to slights he suffered at the court o f Berengar). There are details o f raids by M agyars in Italy, but references are also m ade to earlier periods. In addition, m ore inform ation is given about the raids in two other works (Historia Ottonis and Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana), 10 th-century copies o f w hich have survived. Between 1077 and 1079, Lam pert o f H ersfeld (1025-1081) w rote about the history o f the Hersfeld m onastery in his annals. He noted that in 1071 King Henry IV visited the monastery, and on his departure one o f his captains, Leopold o f M erseburg, fell aw kwardly from his horse in such a w ay as to die from injuries he sustained from his own sword. The king returned to H ersfeld and granted the m onastery 30 villages so that the m onks w ould pray for the salvation o f the soul o f Leopold. In relation to the incident, Lam pert notes that the sword w hich caused the accident was the very sword w hich Anastasia, wife o f the Hungarian King Andrew I and m other o f Salam on, originally presented as being the sword o f Attila to the Bavarian prince Otto in return for helping her son to the throne in 1063. Lam pert him self travelled to Hungary in 1058, learning at first hand about circum stances there. M any charters originated from the Frankish Em pire and the eastern border region (Ostm ark). Am ong them , several are directly related to the history o f the Carpathian Basin b efo reth e Conquest or at the time o f the Conquest. In a

58

Methodological introduction and the sources

few rare cases the original docum ent itself has survived, for instance the deed o f foundation o f the abbey o f Krems from 777. In this w e can find the first reference to the office o f zhupan (zsupari) in the form jo p a n . The charter o f the king o f the eastern Franks, Louis o f Germany, dated 8 May, 860 in Regensburg, granted land to the m onastery next to M attsee. In the charter one o f the borders is denoted as uuangariorum marcha, “the m arches o f the Vangaros”, w hich we will com e across again in the discussion on the ungri people (see p. 285). Besides the charters, other types o f sources can also be o f assistance. Some tim e before 923 a letter in Latin was despatched to Dado, bishop o f Verdun, in w hich the author w rote o f the origins and nam es o f the M agyars who were then present in the area. We will quote from this letter later (see p. 282). We will also refer to m onastery registers in connection with the ungri p eople’s nam e (see p. 285).

Hungarian sources The Latin-language sources written in H ungary date from after the Conquest. We do not have the opportunity here to provide even a b rief survey o f the two main groups, narrative sources and charters. From our point o f view, we only have to note the following. It is certain that the com pilation o f a chronicle was started in the royal court o f the House o f A rpad in the 11th century, based on w estern models. W hat was im portant in the so-called ancient chronicle was— underlining the acclim atisation o f the M agyars in Europe— the reliance on w estern sources. Authors and writers o f w estern chronicles frequently travelled to H ungary in the 11 th century, in the process transm itting exam ples and sources. C ourt clerics travelled abroad, becom ing w ell versed in the chronicles prepared in the courts o f foreign rulers, docum ents w hich also served to legitim ise claims. This should not be taken as m eaning that early Hungarian chronicles were com pletely o f w estern origin, but ju st that they were prepared on the basis o f w estern patterns and styles. Text-wise, extant or known chronicles can, broadly speaking, be split into two groups. In essence the first group com prises A nonym us’s Gesta. A nonymus used a version o f the ancient gesta. To a certain extent, it was independent o f other chronicle traditions. The latter traditions lead on the one hand to the chronicles o f Simon de К ёга w ritten betw een 1282 and 1285 through a version w hich although lost can in part be reconstructed, and on the other hand to the Illum inated Chronicle w ritten in 1358. Besides the Illum inated Chronicle and continuations, the B uda Chronicle o f 1473 has preserved details w hich are not to be found in the chronicle o f de K eza or the Illum inated Chronicle tradition.

The sources

59

Furtherm ore, this chronicle branch has secondary branches: versions in which we occasionally find specific events which cannot be found elsewhere. At this point we should therefore briefly m ention the w ork o f the notary to King Bela III, nam ed in the chronicle as M aster P., but generally known as Anonymus. Today researchers agree that the author o f the Gesta was notary to King Bela III, and the work was w ritten a few years after the death o f Bela III, that is after 23 April 1196. Thus the Gesta dates from the last years o f the 12th century. In style it is a historical rom ance, allowing m any o f the leading nobility o f the age to play a role. Anonym us was able to com bine on the one hand noble family traditions, and on the other historical legends connected to place nam es or made up by the author. The structure on which he strung together his stories m ust have been that o f a copy o f the lost ancient chronicle. From this he linked Almos, Arpad and his dynasty to Attila. A nonym us lived some three hundred years after the Conquest, and that is why we have learned more about the conquering M agyars from contem porary western sources than from Hungarian. Even so, A nonym us rem ains a prim ary source for inform ation on the language, geography and the history o f names o f his own period. The work can be used only very occasionally for direct inform ation regarding the conquering M agyars, and then only w ith the greatest care. There again, indirectly— because o f the rich linguistic m aterial— it is still an indispensable source for us. Likewise, charters from the age o f Arpad are im portant for their linguistic and geographical inform ation. The last few years have seen enorm ous strides taken in the critical editions o f the Arpad-age charters. The earliest such charters were drawn up in the 11th century, but few o f them are original. O f surviving copies there are a few authenticated docum ents, but because o f obvious interests surrounding ownership rights, m any are fakes or have been corrupted with insertions. Over time, the num ber o f sources increased, but naturally these can only be used indirectly for details regarding the conquering M agyars. By the m iddle o f the 11th century, descendants o f the conquering M agyars w ere already in the sixth-eighth generation. Personal nam es or names that survived in place nam es and which appeared in charters reflect a fundam entally altered historical circum stance. It is conspicuous in this m a­ terial ju st how m any obviously Turkic-origin personal nam es there are. The question im m ediately arises as to w hether these w ere surviving per­ sonal nam es dating from before the Conquest, or should we be seeking other linguistic reasons. The continuation o f clan and tribal nam es is m uch more obvious. The nam es o f the conquering tribes, clans and the peoples who joined them can be reconstructed after the critical evaluation o f charters from the age o f the Arpad dynasty.

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c) Slavonic sources The beginnings of Slavonic literacy Today, scientists fully agree that the creator o f Slavonic w riting was that Constantine w ho prior to his death in 869 in Rom e adopted the m onastic name Cyril. There is also no dispute about the fact that the original alphabet invented by Cyril w as the so-called G lagolitic alphabet, w hich was em ployed to record the first Christian religious texts. The alphabet was probably com piled in M oravia around 863. This was later succeeded by a type o f writing, later called Cyrillic after Cyril, and which is closer to Greek. A few characters from the Glagolitic alphabet were transferred into the Cyrillic alphabet. Early G lagoli­ tic texts were later rewritten in Cyrillic. The origin o f the Glagolitic alphabet is o f interest to us because according to sources, the Slavs had a runiform script, elem ents o f which G lagolitic writing partly used to record Slavonic phonem es w hich had no equivalent in Greek or in any other w riting system know n to Constantine. This putative runiform alphabet m ay be linked to both the Avar and the Szekely runiform letters (see Chapter XVI). Although the first records o f G lagolitic writing were in M oravia, it was not used there for long. Follow ing the death o f M ethodius in 885, his followers were driven out o f M oravia. They were given refuge by B olghar ruler Boris (852-889) who was baptised in 864, and with the enthronem ent o f Simeon (893-927) the Slavonic old Bolghar language becam e the official language o f Bulgharia in 893. From then on first translations, and later independent works were w ritten in the so-called Old Church Slavic or Old B olghar language.

The legends of Cyril and M ethodius The lives o f the two Slavonic apostles are generally called the Pannon Legends. The L egend o f Constantine, a life o f Constantine who later adopted the m onastic nam e Cyril, was originally w ritten around 870 in Rom e after his death. The legend is probably the w ork o f his brother, M ethodius. In all likelihood it was drafted for the cerem ony o f canonisation, and was w ritten in Greek. The Slavonic-language version prepared by M ethodius cannot be from m uch later. The latter was probably recorded first in Glagolitic script and later transcribed into Cyrillic. O f the 50 known copies, not one is earlier than the 15th century. These copies can be divided into two groups, Russian and Serbian redactions.

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The sources

The life o f M ethodius was preserved in the Legend o f M ethodius, probably written by a follower, and dating from some time before the expulsion o f the followers from M oravia, that is before the end o f 885. O f the eight known copies in existence the oldest is from the 12 th century.

O ther early Bolghar accounts The lives o f earlier Slavonic saints are contained in a collection dedicated to a soldier who lived during the rule o f Boris and Simeon, B olgharia’s first Christian rulers. The w ork tells o f the soldier’s m iraculous escape from the M agyars (ugri) in relation to events taking place betw een 894 and 896. Naum was am ong several followers o f M ethodius who fled to the Bolghar ruler Boris; Naum continued his activities in Preslav, then capital o f the Bolghars. A record o f his life dates from about 924. In it we can read o f the M agyar Conquest, and o f how the M oravians fled before the M agyars to the Bolghars. The work was originally w ritten in Greek, but it survived only in an Old Church Slavic translation. The oldest extant copy dates from the 15th century. A longer narration relates the foundation o f the Bolghar church and the split between the Latin people and the Greeks. The work was originally penned in Greek, and can be traced to around the 12th century, but certain parts originate from 1Oth—1 lth-century sources. The Greek text has not survived, but it was translated into Old C hurch Slavic, probably some time in the 14th century. The text traces the baptism into the Christian faith o f the different peoples, and it is here that we find reference to the word the M agyars used for them selves, magere. According to the source, two M agyar chieftains travelled to Constantinople to be baptised. Some believe these two w ere Termecsii and Bulcsu.

The Bulghar regal list The w ork contains a list o f the Danube Bulghar rulers. A fter the nam e o f each ruler there is a num ber written in letters indicating for how m any years the prince reigned, and after this the name o f the ruling clan. There then follows a phrase “his year (let yem u) was X X X ” . The text, translated probably from Danube Bulghar into Old Church Slavic, has survived in three m anuscripts, the oldest dating from the end o f the 15 th century and the other two from the 16th century. The texts have been severely corrupted, allowing m uch room for speculation. The first name in the list is Avitohol, m ost probably Attila,

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the dynasty’s legitim ising founder; the second Im ik, A ttila’s son; the fourth Khuvrat, ruler o f G reater Bulgharia; and the sixth nam e is A sparukh, who actually founded the Danube Bulghar Empire. The first nine rulers belonged to the Dulo dynasty, the last four to the Vokil dynasty. The clearly Danube B ulghar expressions— which generally consist o f two w ords— com ing after the phrase “his year” have sparked the greatest debate. M ost o f those persons appearing in the list o f princes can be identified in Byzantine sources. O f the Danube Bulghar words, only a few have been deciphered with any certainty.

Ancient Russian chronicles The conversion o f the Kiev state to the Christian faith is com m only dated from the baptism o f V ladim ir in 988, although Christianity had appeared much earlier, at least during the rule o f Igor (913-945). In any case, it was only several decades after 988 that the m etropolitan seat was actually established, and m onks installed here began to chronicle events. R ussian annals are generally considered to have been started betw een 1037 and 1039. The first m aterial was put into chronological order by igumen, that is abbot, N ikon o f the Kiev cave m onastery in the 11th century, supplem ented with fur­ ther m aterial to 1073. This early work was expanded with inform ation from chronicles from other m onasteries to 1095. It is generally term ed the prim ary com pilation (nachalniy sv o d ). Nestor, a m onk in the Kiev m onastery, used this prim ary com pilation as a base in 1113 for his new version o f the chron­ icle. This new version w as in turn then revised for V ladim ir M onom akh, an enem y o fN e sto r’s com m issioner, Svatopolk. Follow ing Svatopolk’s death, M onom akh seized the Kiev throne. The revised chronicle was com pleted in 1116 by Silvester, abbot o f the Vidubec monastery. This becam e the chron­ icle’s second edition. However, the Kiev m onks, seeking the patronage o f M onom akh, began to rework the text once again, subm itting it to the new ruler in 1118. This was the third and last edition o f the early chronicle. Copies found their w ay to different m onasteries where they w ere either copied further or supplem ented with local events, in other words, the chronicle was continued. The oldest surviving copy is from the 14th century. M aterial for the Russian prim ary chronicle relating to the 9th and 10th cen­ turies was taken partly from local tradition, and partly from B yzantine sources. The chronicle was earlier known as the N estor Chronicle, w hile today it is m ore often called by its Russian title, Povest (Povest vremennyh let). As one can see from the above, inform ation in the old Russian prim ary chronicle related to the pre-Conquest M agyars has to be treated w ith extrem e caution.

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The sources

d) Middle Iranian sources The M iddle Iranian period ran from the 4 th -3 rd centuries BC until the Arab conquest, that is to the 7th century, although according to the reckoning o f some, until the 9th century. W ithin this, the period at the beginning o f the 3rd century AD is clearly defined by the ruling Sassanids in Persia (Ardashir I 227-241). The rule o f the Sasanian dynasty was brought to an end by the Arabs in 637. At this time, o f the peoples living in Iran the Persians, the Sogdians, the Sakas, the Bactrians and the Hephthalites had their own forms o f writing. These scripts were used to record religious and lay texts, as well as inscriptions on m edals and other objects. Although to date, no inform ation directly related to the M agyars has been discovered in these sources, they do still throw im portant light on the Turkic peoples— am ong them the K haz­ ars— from the 6 th century. At that time these Turkic peoples w ere neighbours or close allies o f the M agyars. M iddle Persian literature was w ritten in Pahlavi. Pahlavi is one continuation o f the Aram aic branch o f the Semitic family o f writing, containing so-called ideogram s. This m eans that words w ritten in A ram aic were retained in the Persian texts, but they were not read letter for letter. R ather the word was read and understood according to the m eaning o f the Aram aic word, in Persian, as for instance, in an English text the French w ord w ritten roi w ould be read as king. One o f the m ost im portant sources is the Book o f Rulers (H vaday nam ag) which although now lost was drawn on by m any M iddle Persian and new Persian (e.g. Sahnam e) sources. A nother genre was the apocalyptic literature relating the vision o f the end o f the world, through which many peoples were introduced, am ong them the Turks. The Bahm an Yast is one such representative o f the genre. Im portant historical references are to be found in Zoroastrian religious literature, am ong them the D enkard and the Bundahishn. Persian religious leaders played a particularly significant role in the dis­ sem ination o f M anichaeism throughout Central Asia, an influence w hich also reached the Turkic peoples. Texts were generally w ritten in the so-called M anichaean script, a version o f Palm yrian from the Sem itic fam ily o f alpha­ bets, further developed by M ani. Texts in M iddle Persian M anichaean speak about, for example, the court titles o f the Uighurs. A few M iddle Persian texts have survived only in Syrian or Arab translation. These also contain inform ation about Turkic peoples, for instance the Kangars. The Sogdian m aterial is particularly illum inating. M aterial w ritten in Sogdian script (which refers back to Aram aic) dating from the 2nd and 3rd cen­ turies records steppe history, and here, for example, we find the Xiongnus

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m entioned with the nam e Hun. Today we know that the court language o f the First Turkic Khaghanate was Sogdian, and therefore it played a role in the m iddle o f the 6 th century sim ilar to that o f Latin in m ediaeval Europe. In­ scriptions created during the First Turkic K haghanate were also com pleted in the Sogdian language. Am ong these inscriptions, we know o f but one that has survived: the B ughut inscription. There are m ulti-language inscriptions from the tim e o f the Uighur Khaghanate which also contain text in the Sogdian language: the K harabalghasun inscription. Charters and letters in Sogdian reflecting the everyday life o f Turkic society are also important. The Sakas organised their lasting rule from K hotan in Turkestan; the state survived until the M uslim invasion in 1000. They follow ed the B uddhist faith, and their written docum ents can be traced as a Central A sian offshoot o f Indian writing. K hotanese rulers interm arried w ith the Turkic leading strata, and were related to those Turkic peoples who had settled in A fghanistan, but they also had affinities with the Turkic peoples o f the steppe. Thus we find m uch in Khotanese texts about the Turkic peoples, and we know o f a Turkic-K hotanese glossary dating from the 10 th century.

e) Sources by M uslim authors In 622 AD, M uham m ad (m uham m ad ‘praised, glorious’) was forced to flee M ecca for the safety o f M edina where he sought alliances against his own tribe, the Kuraysh. N ot only does Arab history start w ith his exodus (hegira), but am ong the M uslim religious world, dates are also reckoned from this point, and even today in every M uslim country tim e is counted from this focal event. By the tim e o f M uham m ad’s death in 632, he had succeeded in uniting the m ain tribes o f the Arab Peninsula. His first successor, the first caliph (Arabic kalafa ‘to follow ’ > kalifa ‘successor’) Abu Bakr, and his troops reached the borders o f Syria and Persia. The second caliph, Omar, established the foun­ dations o f the A rabic world empire. O m ar took Dam ascus (635) and Jerusalem (636), and then turned against Persia. He captured Ctesiphon (636), and delivered the final blow to the Sassanid Em pire at N ehavend in 642. His generals then drove the Byzantine troops from Alexandria. In 644, the next caliph continued the conquest o f the known world. He attacked Byzantium , and established a fleet o f Arab warships. In 656, Ali, M uham m ad’s son-in-law, in a bid for power, opened hostilities against the w idow o f M uham m ad, follow ing w hich the M uham m adan world suffered its first and still lasting m a­ jo r split into those following Ali, the Shiites, and the Sunnis, supporters o f the successor dynasty, the Um ayyads. In 661 M u’aw iya founded the Um ayyad

Figure 8 The spread of Islam until 750

66

Methodological introduction and the sources

I

P r a n k is h

C A U W f t ^ КЙ1•&>&$

^ B e g lid a d

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л ь »M edina

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• Mecca

Figure 9 Islam ic dynasties in the 9th-10th centuries

dynasty and battled successfully against the sons o f Ali. He organised the country’s military, financial and political system. Dam ascus was settled on as the capital. However, Byzantium w ithstood all attacks, and thus atten­ tion turned eastward: troops o f the caliph captured Khabul, B ukhara and Sam arkand. The form er Carthage fell to the Arabs in 698, and their own currency, the dirham, was introduced. By 711 the Indus valley w as under their control, while in the same year the suprem e com m ander, Tariq, crossed into Spain (Jebel al-Tariq ‘Tariq H ill’ > Gibraltar). In 732, the European powers under the leadership o f Charles M artel halted the M uslim Arab invasion at the gates o f Poitiers. On the eastern front, a coalition o f forces headed by Chinese generals stopped the Arabs at the River Talas east o f the Lake Aral in 751. The Khazars halted the incursion o f Arabs across the Caucasus, and they were unable to take Byzantium . In 750 a new dynasty, the A bbasids, came to rule the Arab state. The seat o f the em pire was shifted to Baghdad, and with Persian assistance it was com pletely reorganised. The direction o f the em pire’s military, political and indeed cultural affairs quickly fell into the hands o f the Persians who in the m eantim e had been com pletely converted to Islam. Harun al-R asid (786-809) ruled during the

67

The sources

second culm inating point in the history o f the Arab Empire. He is know n in the tales o f The Thousand and One Nights. The Arabs adopted m any elements o f Greek culture and translated m any o f their works. Arab culture built on Hellenistic, Persian and Indian elem ents reached its apogee in the 10th century. It is in this environm ent that we m ust seek those sources containing references to the conquering M agyars and neighbouring peoples. In using Arab written sources, attention has to be paid to the fact that Sem itic-origin writing originally com pletely ignored vowels; the m eaning was carried solely by the consonants. Arabic writing has several consonant marks which have no equivalents in non-Sem itic languages, while it does not have separate letters for a few such sounds o f the non-Sem itic languages. Certain letters can only be differentiated by one or several points placed below or above the character, furtherm ore these diacritical points are frequently om itted in scripts. The reading o f Arabic words generally causes no problem , but when foreign words or nam es have to be transcribed, this not only opens up the opportunity for mistakes, but the scribe will often try to m odify the transcription in favour o f a sim ilarly constructed word already existing in Arabic.

Sources in Arabic Geographers. “G reek” and “Persian” approaches to the w orld are m ixed in Arabic geographical literature; some schools further developed the m apping m ethod o f Ptolemy, adding new discoveries, while other writers arranged the world according to the points o f the com pass alone. The efficient governing o f the Arabian empire, which had unexpectedly grown so huge, also dem anded that geographical knowledge be constantly updated and expanded. In this, key roles were played by traders and m inisters w ho diligently reported to Baghdad on their journeys, and if not in person, then to som eone else who was on his way to Baghdad. It is no w onder that the favourite genre and at the same time the m ost recurrent book title o f the age was The B ook o f Routes and K ing­ doms (Kitab al-masaliq val-mamaliq). The m aps came com plete w ith cap­ tions which could be extended w ith new inform ation. The Arabs, too, did not recognise au th o r’s rights, and thus they frequently copied each o th er’s work without due recognition. However, in many cases it is possible to pinpoint the author o f a particular piece o f information. From the 12th century prim ary geographical literature ended, but at the same tim e there was an upsurge in grand lexicons and the com pilation o f collected works, and this was im por­

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tant because in m any cases only these preserved the contents o f m uch earlier works. Al-Khwarezmi, who was bom in the town o f K hw arezm and died around 847, w rote addenda and explanations to a map o f the w orld by Ptolemy. In the explanations he concerned him self with Eastern Europe. Likew ise in the m iddle o f the 9th century al-Jarm i, on his return hom e from im prisonm ent in Byzantium , com pleted a work on the B yzantine Em pire and its neighbours. Although the work was subsequently lost, there are many extracts. Sim ilarly Harun ibn Yahya languished in jail in Byzantium around 900. His work de­ scribing the B yzantine Em pire and its peoples, as well as his own journeys, only survived in quotations used by other authors, including Ibn Rusta. The caliph’s confidant Ibn Hordadzbeh, founder o f The B ook o f Routes and K ingdom s genre, died in 911. He is usually m entioned as the m inister o f post, but in truth his m ission was probably to obtain intelligence about m ilitary and trading routes. His first known collections were com piled betw een 846 and 847, and he revised the work between 885 and 8 8 6 . He kept num erous route reports, am ong them one on Central Asia, the Report on the R oute o f Salam the Interpreter from before 847. The w ork o f Ibn H ordadzbeh form ed the b a­ sis for Arab geographical studies at the end o f the 9th century. The earliest surviving m anuscript o f the work dates from before the 12 th century. Al-Yakubi (d. 897), Ibn al-Fakih (9th century), Kudam a (died ca. 958) and others contributed to these foundations with new material. We m ust deal with Ibn Fadlan in slightly m ore detail, since he is particularly im portant for an appreciation o f M uslim sources dealing with the history o f the conquering M agyars. W ithout w ishing to touch here on questions (dis­ cussed later in m ore detail) o f B ulghar-Turkic history relating to the history o f the conquering M agyars, we m ust mention what is absolutely necessary for an understanding o f the political-historical background to the journey o f Ibn Fadlan. At the beginning o f the 10th century, significant groups o f Bulghars seeking to escape K hazar rule and centralised pressure lived around the area defined by the rivers V olga-K am a-C herem shan. The increasingly inde­ pendent Bulghar mler, while organising neighbouring tribes, still rem ained nom inally a K hazar subject. The control o f Volga trade as w ell as the key position o f being m ler o f trade routes, prim arily to K hw arezm , east o f the Slavonic territories, significantly contributed to econom ic strengthening. In this situation, the caliph in Baghdad represented a natural ally for the Bulghar m ler in opposition to the Khazars with its leading strata o f the Jewish faith. For this reason, he requested in a letter the support of, and an alliance with, Baghdad. It was proposed that the caliph despatch a person w ho could teach the Bulghar m ler the word o f Allah, Islamic law, and it was also suggested that a m osque and m ihrab be built for him in order to help him in converting

The sources

69

the w hole country. Further assistance was requested by the Bulghars in con­ structing fortresses and castles to defend them selves against opposing kings. It is clear from extracts from the letter that in exchange for conversion to Islam, m ilitary assistance w ould be provided, also for defence against the Khazars. Interestingly enough, the Bulghar ru ler’s letter was actually taken to the caliph by a Khazar, al-Hazari, obviously a m em ber o f the K hazar rul­ e r’s opposition who had escaped to the Volga Bulghars. In response, caliph A l-M uqtadir (908-932) com m issioned a delegation to make arrangements. The costs were covered by the incom e from an estate near Khwarezm which had recently been confiscated by the state from a fabulously w ealthy treasurer who had fallen out o f favour. The caliph’s delegation com prised four persons: the leader Sausan al-Rasi, Tegin al-Turki, Bars al-Saqlabi and Ibn Fadlan, that is there were two Turks, o f whom Fadlan referred to one as just “the Turkic” (al-Turki), the other being a Volga Bulghar. In this text the nam e Saqaliba, generally signifying the Slavs, always means the Volga Bulghars. The dele­ gation left Baghdad on 2 April 921, and travelled only indirectly to the Volga Bulghars. There were two reasons for this. One was, obviously, to avoid the Khazars, the other that they had to pick up m oney in Khwarezm . In all likelihood there was in addition a third reason for this roundabout route. At that time, Khwarezm bordered on the ruling Sam anid dynasty’s centre o f Bukhara, and to a certain extent it was dependent on it. The Sam anids, form ally vassals to the caliph o f Baghdad, had earlier also attem pted to convert heathen Turkic tribespeople living beyond the K hazar Em pire to the Islam ic faith, and thus to extend the Arab alliance. It is likely that Khwarezm and Bukhara thus played an im portant role even then in the conversion o f the Volga Bulghars. On arrival in Bukhara, Ibn Fadlan and his com panions im m ediately w ent to al-Jayhani, m inister o f the local ruler, “Baghdad governor” N asr ibn Ahmad. In his diary, Ibn Fadlan only referred to al-Jayhani as “the respected elder” . Jayhani arranged a servant and accom m odation for them, and gave instruc­ tions that all their wishes be met. For a variety o f reasons, Ibn Fadlan and his com panions rem ained in Bukhara longer than originally planned, and as he wrote, by the 28th day they were highly im patient, fearing that the onset o f w inter would obstruct their further passage. From our aspect the relevance is that at this time Jayhani was an old man, and the travellers w ere together with him in Bukhara for nearly a month. Because there were several Jayhani’s, the source under the name Jayhani is probably not the w ork o f one single Jayhani, still it is clear that here we are talking about Abu A bdullah M uham m ad ibn Ahm ad al-Jayhani, whose son took over his m inisterial post in 937. This Jayhani died in 941, and his grandchild becam e m inister in 976. It is highly likely that he then com pleted his grandfather’s work. At any rate Ibn Fadlan and his fellow travellers spent long enough in B ukhara to allow Jayhani to

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question them. The Jayhani report on these m eetings contains parts that Ibn Fadlan could not have known then. Unfortunately we do not know w hat route Ibn Fadlan took on his return to Baghdad, but it is unlikely that he took any other than the one he came on. Even though it is true to say that Ibn F adlan’s travel record ends with a description o f the K hazar Em pire, it w as probably written from inform ation supplied by his com panion al-H azari, and not from personal experience. Naturally it is necessary to note that one o f the m em bers o f the m ission in Bukhara was a Volga Bulghar, and Jayhani could have received a lot o f inform ation from him as well. In any case, one thing is certain and that is that m aterial on Jayhani’s report com prised m any parts, and some o f his sources were contemporary. Jayhani’s other know n close source, which we can actually trace was al-Balhi. Balhi died in 934, leaving a detailed geographical w ork o f w hich nothing rem ains, although the larger part is preserved in extracts by Istahri and Ibn Hauqal. Balhi and Jayhani had such a close personal relationship that Balhi sent slave girls to his friend. A nother writer, A bu D ulaf, recorded in 943 that as an emissary, he travelled through Turkic, Persian and A rm enian territories, and collected inform ation. O f his two route itineraries, the one concerning the Turks is not reliable, being full o f secondary and som etim es inaccurate inform ation. However, he did write that he travelled on the orders o f Jayhani, and thus this Jayhani can only be the son (d. 941), as the first Jayhani— the “respected elder” in the tim e o f Ibn Fadlan— was unlikely to be still living (although it cannot be ruled out). As we have seen above, Ibn Fadlan travelled from B ukhara to K hw arezm , from w here via the land o f the Pechenegs and the Bashkiris he arrived in the land o f the Volga Bulghars. For a long time the work o f Ibn Fadlan was only know n from extracts in the great geographical dictionary by Yakut. Then, in M ashhad in A fghanistan, a m ore com plete m anuscript w as discovered in 1923, and a photocopy was m ade for H erzfeld for the first time. A second photocopy was arranged in 1935 for the Soviet Academy. The text was then published— partly independently o f each other— in the Soviet Union by K ovalevsky (at that time w ithout his nam e, but under the nam e o f the editor Krachkovsky) and in Bonn by Zeki Validi Togan in 1939. A photocopy was also m ade for Ligeti who travelled to A fghanistan in 1936. This docum ent is kept in Budapest. Facsim iles o f this copy (com plete w ith notes) w ere publish­ ed by K aroly Czegledy in 1950. O f course, the M ashhad docum ent is also not original, but an abbreviated, in m any places corrupted and relatively late, copy. We know this because works by A hm ad Tusi and N ajib H am adani w ho lived in the 12th century, and the w ork o f Am in R azi w ritten in 1593 all quote freely from Ibn F adlan’s work, while they also contain parts w hich cannot be found in the dictionary o f Yakut or the M ashhad m anuscript. Yakut m ade a note that he w orked from several Ibn Fadlan m anuscripts. The M ashhad m anuscript

The sources

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is not com plete, and it certainly lacks the end, thus it is only possible to reconstruct the original with the help o f the later copies and the Yakut dictionary. As we have seen above, questions concerning the Jayhani source critique have not been fully resolved. The dates o f Ibn Rusta, another im portant Arab writer, are sim ilarly disputed. Only the last volum e o f his seven-volum e work survived. In it there are parts which correspond to the Jayhani work, and for this reason m any date the work later than the second decade o f the 1Oth century. According to others, the work dates from before 913, and was possibly written in 903. The reasons they give are so-called ex silentio, referring to certain events w hich occurred after these dates and are m issing from the work. Countering the opinion that Ibn Rusta could use the Jayhani w ork only after the second decade o f the 10 th century com es the response that the quoted sections originate not from Jayhani, but from an earlier source or sources used by Jayhani. The current state o f the debate favours those who reason that Ibn R usta’s work is later rather than earlier. The Persian w riter Gardizi— we speak o f him in m ore detail below — also used Jayhani’s work, as did the Persian w ork H udiid al-alam w ritten in 982/983, the 1 lth-century al-Bakri, M arvazi from around 1120, the 13th-cen­ tury Aufi, and Sukrullah writing in Persian in 1456. The latter’s work was translated into the Turkic language, respectively revised, and some details appear in these Turkic versions, the originals o f which have not yet been found, in the text o f later m ediators. The accom plishm ents o f al-Balhi w ere continued by al-Istahri who lived in the 10th century, and who, after spending m any years in Baghdad, eventu­ ally died in Samarkand. There were two versions o f his work. The first was translated into Persian before 933, w hile the second version dates from around 951. Ibn Hauqal, who joined Istahri in Baghdad, eventually becom ing his follower, travelled extensively throughout the then know n Islam ic w orld and in bordering regions betw een 943 and 973. His w ork was w ritten before 987, com plem enting the B alhi-Istahri w ork with his own findings. Ibn Hauqal also noted that on his travels he took with him the works o f Hordadzbeh, Jayhani and Kudama, and made notes on the spot directly into their m anuscripts. M uqaddasi or M aqdisi (known as “the Jerusalem ite”; the A rabic nam e o f the town is al-Quds, hence al-M uqaddas), the last im portant representative o f the Balhi school, who enriched the geographical docum ents with much new information, probably died some time around the year 1 0 0 0 . W hile the above-m entioned were travellers or inhabitants o f the M uslim east, al-Bakri (d. 1094) never left the M uslim state established on the Iberian Peninsula, Um ayyad Andalusia. It is surprising ju st how well he knew early

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geographical literature, or in any case he took extracts from num erous earlier writers. Extracts taken from Jayhani’s work are shorter than those taken by Ibn Rusta, but he selected inform ation about other Eastern European peoples the like o f which cannot be found elsewhere. M ore detail is provided later (see pp. 291-293) about A bu H am id al-G arnati who travelled in H ungary between 1150 and 1153, and died in Dam ascus in 1170. It is necessary to briefly introduce Idrisi, who lived and w rote in Sicily, and who died around 1165. Com m issioned by Roger II, ruler o f Sicily, he w rote a book on the world as it was then perceived. Know n as The B ook o f Roger, this is a particularly im portant work in which contem porary H ungary appeared, although the writer had used the works o f several earlier authors. We have already referred to the geographical dictionary by Yakut (d. 1229). In his work, com pleted in 1224, individual places and peoples appeared under the place nam es in Arabic alphabetic order. W hen talking about places and peoples he quoted the works o f earlier authors, nam ed them, and generally conscientiously copied extracts. But there is also inform ation collected by the author him self, for instance on the Hungarians. Although he gave the correct pronunciation beside the place nam es, that is the author wrote dow n the vowels, this is o f little use because the w ritten forms w ere generally gathered from other books and manuscripts. A fter Yakut, Arabic geographical studies do not, in practice, contain any­ thing new for us. Certain writers had access to early docum ents since lost, while others influenced European literature because they w ere recognised and translated early on, such as A bul Fida (d. 1331). Historians. Insofar as Arab geographers wrote about the geography o f the Islam ic world, the aim o f Arab historians was to preserve the history o f the Islam ic conquests. As such, much was naturally written about the peoples o f Eastern Europe. One o f the earliest writers was al-Baladhuri w hose work, H istory o f the M uslim Conquests, was com pleted in 892, ju st before his death. Com pleted in 872, the World H istory o f al-Yakubi is alm ost contem porary. This world history describes, am ong others, the known history o f non-A rabic peoples, including the Turkic, covering the period from the Jewish patriarchs to the time o f M uham m ad. Al-Tabari (d. 923) wrote a sum m ary o f world history up until M uham m ad, and from then he changed to an annalistic form o f presentation. M any parts o f the original are lost, the w ork is known through copies, w hile several writers continued Tabari’s labour. The works o f the 10th-century al-D inavari and the

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Syrian Agapius writing in Arabic are significant because o f their references to the Khazars. However, the historian al-Masudi, who died in Cairo around 956, is far more im portant than those authors already mentioned. He w rote an abridged history o f Islam com plete with a thorough geographical introduction. The work was originally entitled The B ook o f G old Fields and Precious Stone M ines, and was w ritten between 943 and 947. He also created several other works, am ong them the extant B ook o f Warning and Correction, in which, not long before his death, he endeavoured to bring some order to his historical-geographical understanding. Al-Biruni, bom in Khwarezm in 973, included ancient historical inform a­ tion in his im portant work which also contained m uch that was new. The works o f Spanish Arab historians contain indirect inform ation relating to the conquering M agyars. We have already seen the broad geographical knowledge o f the Andalusian al-Bakri. A local Arab centre o f historiography had been established in Cordova even before the 10th century, the focus o f which, naturally enough, was events in the Iberian Peninsula, but m any authors also covered other parts o f the Islam ic world. Unfortunately, this rich and well preserved literature remains to this very day w ell-nigh unstudied. W ithout doubt, o f all the writers Ibn Hayyan takes a particularly distinguished place. Some are o f the opinion that he was the author o f a 60-volum e grand work, one part o f which is the M uqtabas (M uqtabis, Extract), the fifth volum e o f which was published in 1979. The publication was based on the only known m anuscript (which is certainly a copy) kept in Rabat, M orocco. Ibn Hayyan also wrote about the spread o f Islam with particular attention to the Iberian Peninsula. The w ork was com pleted ju st before the author died in 1076. He em ployed num erous earlier works, from one o f w hich he took records o f the M agyar raids into Spain in 942. W hen m entioning the M agyars he used the word Turk to explain who they were, inserting some inform ation on the M agyars and the nam es o f the seven M agyar chieftains. These nam es were seriously dam aged in the course o f repeated copying; deciphering w ill require the help o f the M uqtabas source itself or other copies.

Sources in Persian Within the Abbasid C aliphate the larger provinces becam e increasingly inde­ pendent, while still formally recognising the authority o f Baghdad, the Arab centre. The G aznavid family in Persia was one such sem i-independent dy­ nasty. With the expansion o f pow er o f the Persian local ruling stratum , the cultivation o f Persian language literature also began.

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The Regions o f the World (H udiid al-alam) is a geographical work by an unknown author. It is likely, however, that the author lived in Northern Afghanistan, and according to the dedication in the w ork it could have been com pleted for one o f the local feudal dynasties in 982/983. The only known copy dates from 1258. Gardizi lived in the Gaznavid court in the 11 th century. His w ork, The Book o fth e E m bellishm ent o f the Reports, w ritten between 1050 and 1052, contains both a history o f Persia and the histories o f neighbouring peoples. The sections relating to the Turkic peoples refer in part to a so-called Pseudo Ibn M uqqafa and partly to Jayhani or Hordadzbeh. However, the author used a Jayhani m anuscript which differed from that used by Ibn Rusta. O f the two known m anuscripts, the earlier is a 1 6 th -17th-century copy, while the other dates from the 18th century. The Persian language was em ployed by ever m ore writers from the 12th century, am ong them a great m any historians. They did not have any direct inform ation relating to the M agyars prior to the Conquest, and w hat little they did have on the early Turkic peoples can be traced back to earlier works. One such exam ple is the faithful chronicler o f steppe history, Juzjani, who com ­ pleted his work in 1260. In fact with the M ongol period Juvaini (d. 1283) and R ashidud-D in (d. 1318) represented a new historians’ school; their works are im portant for M ongol-era nam es o f the M agyars.

f ) Syrian sources A group o f Syrian people living on the fringes o f Byzantium and Persia spoke an old language related to the Sem itic language family. The survival o f the com m unity is largely put down to the fact that the western group o f Syrians professed M onophysite Jacobite Christianity, and the eastern com m unity N estorian Christianity. The significance o f this is that although their groups, one under the sway o f Byzantium — centred on Edessa— and the other under the protection o f the Persians— centred on N isibis— engaged in internecine warfare, at the same tim e they played a sort o f m ediatory role betw een the two great cultures. Their significant ecclesiastical historical literature contains a w ealth o f detail. Scripts were recorded in a version o f A ram aic-S em itic, so-called Estrangelo (“rounded”) Syrian writing, and o f the tw o further developed form s o f Estrangelo the western Jacobites used Serto and the eastern Syrians Nestorian. A sm aller sect, the M elkites, used Arabic, allowing them to act as m ediators with the A rabic-language world. Some o f their groups, such as the M aronites, still play a significant role in Lebanon to this very day.

The sources

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Legends w oven around the eastern m ilitary cam paigns o f A lexander the Great spread throughout the east, even reaching the M ongols. Contem porary geographical and historical elem ents were introduced into local variants o f the legends, w hich were noted down as well. Thus, we find references to the steppes in the A lexander the Great Syrian Legends. In the sam e w ay ethno­ graphic elem ents creep into so-called doom sday literature, in the chapter on the peoples o f Gog and Magog. The Syrian revision o f the ecclesiastical history by Zakarias, bishop o f M itilen, and originally w ritten in Greek, is an im portant w ork from the aspect o f steppe history. The work deals with the period betw een 450 and 518. A Syrian geographical appendix (not to be found in the original) was added, and thus it is usually referred to as Pseudo Z akarias’ work. Textual evidence indicates that the appendix was com pleted in 555, and it lists the peoples liv­ ing beyond the Caucasus, that is north o f the Caucasus. Although the only surviving copies date from around 600, and there is some doubt as to the credibility o f the data, as far as m ore recent inform ation goes, like the form o f the nam e o f the K hazar people recently discovered from Turkic sources, it does have some authenticity. But a word o f caution: some parts o f the older data can be traced back to Byzantine sources, e.g. Priskos. The Syrians started writing chronicles in the first h alf o f the 6 th century. These chronicles frequently copied each other, or new insertions were made into old texts. There are references to the Huns in early Syrian chronicles, while later chronicles m ention the appearance o f the Avars and the Turks. It is particularly worth highlighting the chronicle o f M ichael o f Syria com pleted in 1199, a detailed history o f the w estern Syrian (Jacobite) church. Events recorded in this great historical w ork com prising 21 volum es are presented in three parallel columns: w orld history, ecclesiastical history, and natural events. For some time the text was only known in Arab translation, w ritten in A rm enianand Syrian script, but later a Syrian language and Syrian script version was found in the m onastery at Edessa. Even though the w orld history section is m ostly a com pilation, it still preserves m uch inform ation on the history o f the steppes which cannot be found in any other surviving material. B ar Hebraeus (d. 1286), son o f a doctor born into a Jew ish fam ily but converted to the Christian faith, becam e leader o f one o f the groups o f Jacobites. The earlier sections o f his great historical work are a slightly revised version o f the M ichael o f Syria World H istory Column. H ebraeus him self wrote the section on events after 1199. Its significance lies in the Arabic translation which he com pleted. This Arabic translation has m uch to offer in resolving certain problem s o f source criticism and reading. He also used other

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sources in preparing the Arabic translation. In addition he w rote an ecclesias­ tical history. The H istory o f Saints a n d M artyrs contains the lives o f several saints.

g) Armenian sources The beginning o f the history o f the people speaking the A rm enian lan­ guage— an independent Indo-European language branch— is traceable to the first m illennium BC. The state founded by tribes who had m igrated into the site o f the ancient U rartu culture soon came up against the Greeks and Iranian peoples, but it always m anaged to preserve its distinct cultural, and in m any cases political, independence. C hristianity becam e a state religion in A rm enia in 301 AD. A round 400, the A rm enians established their ow n alphabet using elem ents o f Sem itic writing strongly influenced by the system o f G reek literacy, and began translating the Bible into Arm enian. The m ajority o f the great w orks o f G reek culture w ere translated into A rm enian from the 5th century. Parallel with this developm ent, independent A rm enian literature was born as well. Scribes in the royal court, in m onasteries and in the palaces o f the aristocracy began noting events and glorifying the past, leading to the creation o f A rm enian chronicles. This heroic chronicle tradition recorded for posterity the wars against the Persians and the barbarian peoples, and such historical inform ation was also included in w orks recording the lives o f the saints o f the A rm enian church. A round 640 A rm enia was invaded by the Arabs, and although the state then becam e a suzerain it m anaged to preserve its religious and cultural identity. A rm enia suffered greatly during the A rab-K hazar wars w hich spilled over into its territory, and thus we find a great deal o f inform ation relating to this period in the chronicles. The Bagratid dynasty, w hich had been helped to pow er by the Arabs, consolidated its position in 885, and in recognition o f this, the B yzantine em peror sent a crown in 8 8 6 . A rm enian historical literature w ent through a golden age in the 10th century. The Bagratid Kingdom collapsed in 1045, having becom e victim o f the B yzantine-Seljuk war. So started the m ass m igration o f Arm enians. A new A rm enian Kingdom was founded in 1080 around the southeastern shore o f today’s Turkey, in the form er province o f Cilicia. The dom inant dialects in this new state were w est Armenian. The Arm enian alphabet and orthography are relatively conservative. The characters have eastern and w estern A rm enian readings. The eastern is closer to old Arm enian. The overwhelm ing m ajority o f A rm enian literature today is available only in not older than 12 th-century copy form.

Figure 10 The Armenian Em pire

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Methodological introduction and the sources

Early Arm enian chronicles survived only in copied form ats transcribed many times, but we do find some references to the Huns and the Ephthalites. The great historical w ork H istory o f Arm enia, conventionally attributed to M ovses H orenaci (Moses o f Horene), was com pleted in the 440s, leading many to presum e that the author lived in the 5th century. The oldest extant m anuscript fragm ent dates from not earlier than the 10 th century, and it is highly likely that it was copied m any times, supplem ented, and had anachro­ nistic interpolations. It is particularly disturbing to find references to later northern peoples in legendary histories, e.g. the Vlendur Bulkars, who are placed into the A rsak I era, that is the 2nd century BC. Arm enian additions to the basic geographical work o f Ptolem y w ere also started in the 7th century. Because earlier it was believed to be the work o f Horenaci, it is com m only term ed the Geography by Pseudo M ovses Horenaci. More recently, Ananias o fS h ira k has been suggested as the author. The work was revised m any times, but the basic editing dates from before the Arab invasion, perhaps around 640. The work includes a later intrapolation on the peoples o f the north— that is those living north o f the Caucasus— m aking it one o f the m ost im portant sources on the history o f Eastern Europe, and w ithin this the history o f the Khazars and M agyars from the 6 th—7 th centuries. There are m ore than fifty known m anuscripts o f the w ork in existence, but o f the extended versions it appears that the m ost useful is a m anuscript dating from the 15 th century. The identity o f an author who wrote a chronicle around 687, patterned on earlier such forms, has rem ained unknown, but the last part m entions a few events from the contem porary period. The earliest known m anuscript dates from the 10 th century. A w ork com m only referred to as the Sebeos was com piled from m any separate parts. The earliest surviving m anuscript dates from 1672, but unfor­ tunately this preserved at best mere fragm ents o f the com plete w ork o f the author, who probably lived in the 7th century. At the same time, other works were also copied into early manuscripts, such as an extract o f a 1Oth-century w ork prepared in the 15th—16th centuries. Despite this, im portant 6th-7th-century steppe history has been preserved, and it rem ains an im portant source for the history o f the Khazars. L evond (died ca. 790) probably finished his work shortly before his death. The work deals with the history o f A rm enia betw een 732 and 789. A signifi­ cant part (a theological dispute between the Byzantine em peror and the caliph) is a later interpolation. The only m anuscript o f the w ork was prepared in the 13th century. It ranks as an im portant source on the A rab-K hazar wars which devastated Armenia.

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The so-called H istory o f Albania, probably com pleted in the 10th century but with 1 1t h - 12 th-century interpolations, should be seen as a history o f Caucasian Albania. The nam e o f the writer is uncertain, some refer to him under the name M ovses K alankatvaci (originating from Kalankatuyk), and others as D ashuranci (originating from Dashuran). The work can also be considered an im portant source for steppe and K hazar history. Later A rm enian ecclesiastical and historical literature is only w orth exam ­ ining for its extracts and quotes preserved from earlier works.

h) Georgian sources There is no affinity between the several different languages found in the Caucasus today. However, the so-called Kartvelian language group is particu­ larly noticeable in this diverse group, o f which Georgian is the m ost recog­ nised, although M ingrelian-Laz and Svan also belong here. The first G eorgian state grouping the ancient inhabitants o f the Caucasus was established at the end o f the 3rd century (although there had been earlier moves in this direction). Then at the beginning o f the 4th century, parallel with the Arm enians, the state becam e Christian. During the 7th century it also fell under Arab rule. The Georgian branch o f the Bagratid dynasty proclaim ed independence in 930. In the 12th century this small kingdom experienced its first golden age, a period w hich was brought to an abrupt end by the M ongols. Georgian writing also originates from a branch o f A ram aic o f the Semitic family o f alphabets, although the Greek alphabet also played a role in its formation. The oldest m aterial dates from the 5th century, w hen the Bible was translated into Georgian and the first inscriptions were recorded. Translations aside, the first original Georgian m anuscripts recorded the lives o f Georgian martyrs and saints. These docum ents were later copied and supplem ented with subsequent events relating to the saints or places connected with them. In the course o f writing these hagiographies, a great deal o f inform ation on the neighbouring peoples was included, for instance on the K hazars, and the A rab-K hazar wars were also mentioned. The work The M artyrdom o f Abo, dating from around the end o f the 8 th century provides us with im portant historical source inform ation on contem porary Georgia and its neighbouring peoples. The Georgian Chronicle, the Kartlis chovreba (the с and the h are pro­ nounced separately), a history o f Kartlis, that is, Georgia, was com piled from numerous earlier historical works. The first ten volum es cover the history o f Georgia from its earliest times to the 14th century. The first chapters were written with the help o f early chronicles, thus the 11 th-century works by Leonti

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M roveli and Juanser cover history from the first stages to the 5th century, and from the 5th to the 8 th century respectively. The section on 8 th- to 9th-century history was w ritten by an unknow n author, and it is here that we can find much on those peoples w ho lived to the north o f the Caucasus and in the Caucasian mountains, as well as on the A rab-K hazar wars. The earliest known and surviving version o f the chronicle was edited in the 15th century. There is also an Arm enian translation o f the chronicle dating from betw een 1279 and 1311.

i) Turkic sources A fter defeating the Ruanruans around 552, the Turks founded the First Turk Khaghanate. W ithin ju st a few years the em pire was m aster o f the entire steppe. A fter 556, the Turkic peoples o f the Eastern European steppe w ere also under the em pire’s dom ination, and it then opened contacts with Persia and the B yzantine Empire. Around 630, internal and external w arfare gradually underm ined the tribal confederations, leading to a split into the w estern and eastern Turk empires. A fter 680 the eastern Turks, subjugated by the Chinese, revolted and established the Second Turk K haghanate. This w as brought to an end in the 740s by a tribal confederation led by the Uighurs. The Uighurs, headed by an alliance o f the N ine O ghuz ( Tokhuz Oghuz) tribal union, quickly rose to becom e rulers o f today’s M ongolia and the eastern steppes. Uighur rule was in its turn broken in 840 by the Khirghiz. The focal point o f the Uighurs was shifted to later Turkestan. Three sm aller states w ere created, o f w hich Turfan and Gansu rose to prom inence. Khirghiz hegem ony on the steppe was shattered by the arrival o f the Khara-K hitai around 1112. The chancellery o f the eastern territories o f the First Turk K haghanate was in Sogdian hands, and as an inscription from B ughut (betw een 572 and 580) attests, Sogdian language and writing w ere em ployed. A section o f 6 th-century Sogdian coins and objects can be directly linked to the Turks. During the second h alf o f the 7th century a new form o f script using carving techniques spread across the entire steppe region. We will com e back to the western, that is the Eastern European, versions later. The Turkic language replaced Sogdian during the Second Turk K haghanate, and a runiform script created to m eet the dem ands o f the Turkic language was introduced in place o f Sogdian writing. This w riting quickly spread and becam e dom inant throughout the eastern h a lf o f the steppe, although Sogdian w riting and language were reverted to on occasions. A t the end o f the 10th century other form s o f w riting overshadowed the Turkic alphabet. The m ajority o f Turkic runiform script is to be found in inscriptions carved into stone, but we also

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know o f texts being written on paper, scratched onto objects or engraved onto coins. We now know o f nearly 300 objects displaying Turkic runiform inscrip­ tions. These are usually divided into seven geographical groups: 1. the area around Lake Baikal and the R iver Lena; 2. the area around the R iver Yenisei; 3. the area o f the Republic o f M ongolia; 4. the area around the Altai M ountains; 5. Eastern Turkestan and the D unhuang caves; 6 . Khirghizistan and Khazakhstan; 7. Ferghana, the Altai M ountains and North Tokharistan. Contrary to earlier opinions w hich believed that the inscriptions o f groups 2 and 4 w ere the earliest, today we are certain that the oldest inscriptions come from group 3. The m onum ental inscriptions o f the Second Turk Khaghanate and the U ighur Khaghanate are to be found here. Some thirty inscriptions have been found on the territory o f the Republic o f M ongolia. Am ong them the most im portant (which can be dated) are: Inscriptions o f the First Turk Khaghanate: 1. Koli chor or Ihe Hoshiitii inscription 720-725; 2. Ongi inscription, 720 or 732; 3. Ihe Ashete inscription, 724; 4. M inister Tonyukhukh inscription, 726; 5. Kol Tegin (prince) inscription, 732; 6 . Bilge Khaghan inscription, 735. Inscriptions o f the Uighur Khaghanate: 1. Taihir or Hoitu Tam ir ten inscriptions, the seventh 735, the others between 744 and 756; 2. Tez II inscription, 750; 3. Terh inscription, 753-754; 4. M oyin chor or Shine usu inscription, 759-760; 5. Sevrei sum un inscription, 763; 6 . K harabalghasun I inscription, 810 or 821; 7. Suj inscription, 840. Some o f the other M ongolian inscriptions can only be dated far more generally, and in some cases they cannot yet be ascribed any date at all, but none can be later than the m iddle o f the 9th century. The Kol Tegin and Bilge

82

Methodological introduction and the sources

K haghan inscriptions are twin inscriptions containing partly identical texts, and are to be found standing by the R iver O rkhon, which is w hy these inscriptions, and indeed som etim es the w hole group, are com m only called the Orkhon inscriptions. These inscriptions date from some tw o hundred years before the M agyar Conquest. They stand in the eastern part o f the steppe where to the w est the M agyars lived in close contact w ith the Turkic peoples. The m ajority o f the inscriptions serve as m em orials to the dead. The texts recording the lives o f dead people, and praising their heroic deeds, are contem porary and for the m ost part authentic. The texts are not copies, but having defied the elem ents for centuries they survive to this day as originals w here they were first erected. As the U ighur Khaghanate flourished so it attracted the proselytising religions. Soon the M anichaean, the Nestorian C hristian and the Buddhist faiths and m issionaries— who w ere not above rivalling each other for souls— converted large num bers o f Turkic groups to their faiths. In 762, the U ighur K haghan converted to M anichaeism. The three m ajor religions brought with them different scripts. B uddhist texts w ere w ritten in an U ighur form refined from Sogdian and in the so-called Brahm i script a Central A sian version o f Indian writing. M anichaean texts were recorded in the w riting o f the Iranian M anichaeans and later in Uighur writing. The N estorians used a version o f Syrian writing. First religious literature translated from foreign languages, and then religious texts originally in the Turkic language appeared in these different forms, although those texts which date from the 9th century also contain references to contem porary history. The beginning o f the 1Oth century saw the birth o f geographical and historical records. A significant proportion o f the literature from the period im m ediately follow ing the downfall o f the Uighur Em pire and the establishm ent o f the southern Uighur states has com e to light from excavations carried out around Turfan and in the famous Dunhuang caves. Am ong this m aterial are originals and m any early, p re - 12 th-century, copies.

j ) Tibetan sources A t the beginning o f the 7th century a new em pire arose on the Tibetan plateau, bounded by the Him alayas, the Turkestan Basin, and China. B y the m iddle o f the 7th century the Old Tibetan Em pire had strengthened to such a degree that it rated as an im portant historical factor in Eurasia. Troops o f the Tibetan king m arched to the Chinese capital in 763, w hile Turkestan and the border regions o f China cam e under Tibetan rule. In the battle o f the R iver Talas o f 751, the Tibetans took the side o f the Arabs against the Chinese. Reports that the

83

The sources

Tibetans enjoyed close ties w ith the Turkic w orld com e not only from Tibetan but from old Turkic sources as well. A Tibetan m inister was present at the burial o f Turk khaghan Kol Tegin in 732. Tibetan rulers adopted a northern variation o f Buddhism , and at the beginning o f the 7th century a Central Asian version o f Indian writing was adapted to the requirem ents o f the Tibetan language. Thus was established the astonishingly rich Tibetan w ritten litera­ ture. The very first texts were religious texts translated from Sanskrit and Chinese, but from the m iddle o f the 7th century independent Tibetan literature also appeared. The golden age o f the Old Tibetan Em pire w as brought to an end in 842 by an anti-B uddhist uprising. The m ajority o f m onasteries in central Tibet along with their libraries were destroyed, although inscriptions survived. However, Tibetan literature located in m onasteries on the fringes o f the Old Tibetan Empire passed unscathed through these difficult times, and num erous copies o f central Tibetan w ritten literature were also preserved here. The fringes o f the empire, and particularly the Chinese border region, also m aintained their traditions o f independent literature; 9th- to 1lth-century texts were stored in the walled-in Dunhuang cave library, and have com e to light in excavations in Turkestan.

Figure 11 The Old Tibetan Empire and its contacts

84

Methodological introduction am i the sources

Buddhism received fresh im petus at the end o f the 11th century, followed alm ost im m ediately by a resurgence in Tibet and in m onastic life in the country. The rich religious and historical literature o f Tibet has preserved, in copies or in extracts, m any early sources which in their original form have long been lost, or if they did survive are barely legible, such as som e central Tibetan inscriptions. It is possible to divide Old Tibetan sources into four groups according to content and character: 1. Charters, for instance royal edicts, m ilitary and other adm inistrative documents; 2. Inscriptions, am ong them epitaphs, privileges and inscriptions recording the transfer o f gifts; 3. Statutes; 4. Historical works, thus chronicles, annals, works o f church history. The rich collection o f adm inistrative m aterial includes a great deal o f local inform ation related to the Turkic peoples. Am ong the best known are reports o f U ighur envoys, the extracts o f which were translated into Tibetan, and which contain im portant inform ation on the Turkic peoples, including the Pechenegs. Currently, we know o f 18 central Tibetan inscriptions, the oldest dated one being the Zhol inscription from 764, the last the text o f a peace treaty betw een the Tibetans and Chinese inscribed in two languages and dated 821/822. The O ld Tibetan Annals record events on an annual basis starting with the year 650. Several chronicle fragm ents have also survived. The great Old Tibetan Chronicle is the m ost com prehensive, even though som e om issions in the copy have caused serious problem s in textual criticism . It gives an account o f the legendary forebears o f Tibetan royalty through to events from the first decades o f the actual foundation o f the m onarchy, w riting about the adoption o f Buddhism but, im portantly, w ithout the characteristic distortion o f later Buddhist historical works. The text includes not only reference to the Turks under the nam e Dru-gu, but num erous other Turkic peoples, for instance the Uighurs, Turgesh, Kharlukhs, Basm ils, Khirghiz, Pechenegs, the different Iranian peoples and the Arabs. N aturally enough, the focal point o f history is the relationship with the Chinese. This was not only a m ilitary-political struggle, but also one betw een the different trends o f Buddhism , one prom oted by China and one opposed to China. The reason this is im portant from the aspect o f historical sources is because in the historical events and interests behind these apparently purely B uddhist religious debates are concealed the peoples o f Central Asia, am ong them figures from steppe history, and the events surrounding these peoples.

85

The sources

к) Chinese sources A brief history of China The core o f ancient C hina was established at the beginning o f the 2nd m il­ lennium BC on the central region o f the Yellow River (Huang-he), at the point where the north-south flowing river suddenly breaks to the east, at the confluence with the R iver Wei. Before long, the culture spread towards the coast, and in the Bronze Age, some time around 1600 BC, the C entral Empire, the very core o f later China was established partly under the legendary Shang or Yin dynasty. The Zhou dynasty centred on Loyang was form ed in the 11 th century BC, rapidly extending its authority over a large new territory. The rule o f the Zhou dynasty lasted— with some m inor breaks— until the 3rd century BC. The end o f this period was m arked by constant w arfare betw een individual vassal states across China. The succession o f dynasties ruling a unified China was ushered in by the rise to power o f the Qin dynasty. In the 3rd century BC (206 BC), the Han dynasty took over. The Great Wall o f C hina was constructed to keep out the X iongnu or Asian Huns who launched attacks from the north. The Early or Western Han dynasty ruled until 9 AD, to be followed by the Later or Eastern Han dynasty (25-221 AD). With the collapse o f the Han dynasty, China split into three parts, a situation which lasted until 264. A fter this, a bew ildering succession o f short-lived dynasties ruled the north or south. Only one o f these dynasties is o f interest to us: the Tuoba Wei dynasty which ruled the north from 386 to 532, because they were o f M ongolian descent. China was reunified around 580 AD by the Sui dynasty, to be succeeded by the Tang dynasty which retained pow er until 907, when China once again fragmented. Five dynasties ruled alongside and fought each other. In 960, the Song dynasty once again unified China. In the north the K hitai Liao dynasty rose to pow er in 907, and the Jurchen Jin in 1115. This latter dynasty together with the Song dynasty were overthrown by the M ongols, who ruled under the nam e o f the Yuan dynasty until 1368. The Chinese M ing dynasty, successors to the Yuan, were in turn suppressed by the M anchu Qing dynasty in 1644. The dynasty o f the M anchus was brought to an end in 1912 by the first Chinese Revolution. It is thus clear that the sim plest way to divide up Chinese history is by dynasties, with subdivisions by rulers. Rulers had one or m ore so-called ruling periods, m arked by im perial slogans (nienhao). The year o f notable events is given by the year o f the im perial period.

Metnoiiological introduction and the sources

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Chinese script C hinese script, as with the written forms o f m ost o f the w orld’s languages, evolved from icons. The earliest extant exam ples date from the Shang dynasty. The writing system , whose fundamental principles have rem ained unchanged to this day, took shape relatively quickly. Barring a few exceptions, Chinese characters consist o f two elements. The conceptual elem ent carries the ‘m ean­ ing’, while the phonetic elem ent indicates the pronunciation. We can get a general idea o f this if we take as an exam ple the w ord bank, m eaning the bank o f a lake. The Chinese would represent this word by a small drawing. Now, if we had to write down the words bank ‘bench’, ‘ro w ’ and ‘bank’ as an institution, in the first case the Chinese w ould write, or to be m ore precise, draw, the w ord bank for ‘shore’ and add a small draw ing o f a bench; in the

The sources

87

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latter case it would add a small sym bol for money. In the first case the m eaning would be bank ‘bench’, in the second bank ‘institute which deals with m oney’. If w e then had to write bank counter, tw o signs w ould be needed. The first would consist o f the phonetic elem ent for bank ‘shore’ and the sem antic elem ent ‘m oney’; the second sign o f the phonetic elem ent for ‘shore’ and the sem antic for ‘b ench’. It w ould be pronounced ‘bank bank’ but actually m ean ‘bank counter’. O f course these are non-existing exam ples, and they serve to give an idea o f how Chinese script developed. This peculiar form o f pictographic writing has one serious difficulty. Given that both the sem antic and the phonetic part o f the word are represented by pictographs, it does not follow changes in the (spoken) language. The stock o f sym bols has in principle remained unchanged for thousands o f years, and neither m inor nor m ajor sim plifications have altered the essence. The contem porary pronunciation o f

88

Methodological introduction and the sources

a given Chinese character m ust thus be separately determ ined according to the age in question. Scholars have carried out reconstructions with the aid o f contem porary rhyme dictionaries and other sources, and today it can be reconstructed with a m ore or less reliable degree o f accuracy how a given character was pronounced in a given period o f history. Each character, then, has a current pronunciation and num erous earlier pronunciations. The current pronunciation is dependent upon the region o f China w here the word is spoken, since the various dialects o f contem porary China are so far rem oved from each other as to be m utually incom prehensible to their respective speakers. N ever­ theless, they are connected in their use o f a com m on w ritten form, albeit pronounced in a variety o f ways. For this reason, it is extrem ely difficult to transcribe Chinese characters into the Rom an alphabet. The official pronun­ ciation o f the language today is that o f the capital Peking (Beijing). In sim pler Chinese dictionaries, the pronunciation o f Chinese characters is rendered into Rom an script according to the spoken dialect o f Peking, and this is also the version used by international scholarship. If, however, a m ore ancient pronun­ ciation o f a given character m ust be reconstructed, then only a scholarly phonetic transcription will suffice. Sinology m akes a distinction betw een A ncient Chinese, M iddle Chinese, Early M odem Chinese and C ontem porary Chinese pronunciation. A ncient Chinese, form erly know n as A rchaic Chinese, derives from the earliest period from which tangible evidence rem ains, the Han period. M iddle Chinese pronunciation has an earlier variant, roughly reflecting the state o f the language as it evolved around 400 AD and was set down around 600 AD, as well as a later variant, reconstructed based m ostly on sources from the Tang and Song dynasties. This latter is not only a later variant, but represents a different dialect. Early M odem Chinese gives us a phonetic picture o f the so-called M andarin, or clerical language current in the Yuan dynasty, w hich is closely related to M odem Chinese.

Transcription of Chinese script There are m any know n m ethods o f transcribing Chinese script into the Rom an alphabet. Recently, however, use o f the so-called pinyin system o f transcrip­ tion into Latin script, as officially adopted by the Chinese them selves, has been gaining ever increasing ground. The characters it uses m ust generally be pronounced as they would be by an English speaker. H ow ever “q ” is like ch, “r” like zh, “x” like hs. In this book all Chinese proper nouns and other w ords occur in p inyin transcription.

89

The sources

Chinese historical sources Am ong surviving Chinese inscriptions, the greatest am ount o f historical data is contained in grave epitaphs and titles o f privilege. These latter relate historical events where, by virtue o f their participation, the person concerned gained certain privileges. During the reign o f each successive dynasty, official court records were continuously kept, arranged according to years. W hen an im portant individual passed away, a biography would be prepared. O f great im portance as a literary genre in the Chinese state was the petition, in which zealous functionaries or subjects w ould call the attention o f the Em peror and his court to certain events and tasks at hand. The court itself w ould publish a variety o f docum ents, copies o f which w ould be stored in the im perial archives. These contem porary w rit­ ings would also be consulted after the fall o f each dynasty, when the succeed­ ing dynasty would have its historians set down the history o f its predecessor. Chinese historical writing em ployed a rich schematic system. Particularly when describing the history o f foreign, barbarian peoples, it showed a special predilection for formulas adopted from earlier times. Thus it was not always o f vital im portance to record the exact provenance o f a new ly em erged people, nor to reveal from which earlier people they m ight be descended, nor even what might be the real nature o f their custom s, but rather to adapt one o f the already recognised m odels to their description o f the newcom ers. Chinese historical literature proper begins with the work o f Sim a Qian (145-86 B C ) known as the Shiqi, prepared by order o f the Han dynasty in around 90 BC. In this the author sets down the history o f China from its m ythical beginnings up to his own time. The basic structure o f the work breaks down into five chapters: (1) M ain chronicles; (2) Chronological charts; (3) M onographs (on cerem onies, m usic, the calendar, astronomy, etc.); (4) He­ reditary families; (5) Biographies. In essence this structure becam e the model for subsequent works, while the Shiqi’s depiction o f barbarian peoples sim i­ larly served as a m odel for later authors to follow. The history o f the Early Han dynasty was com piled prior to 92 B C , and that o f the L ate H an dynasty in around 300 A D . The history o f the Three K ingdom s was prepared in around 289, and that o f the Yin dynasty ( Western Yin 265-419) only as late as between 644 and 646. The chronicle o f the Song dynasty was com pleted in 488, that o f the Southern Chi in around 530, and those o f the L iang and Chen dynasties in 636. The annals o f the M ongol-descended Tuoba Wei dynasty w ere finished in about 554, and those o f the Northern Chi and Zhou dynasties in 636. A com prehensive history o f the northern and southern dynasties was also put together in 659. An older chronicle o f the Tang dynasty was com pleted in 945, and a newer, revised and updated version, the new Tang chronicles, in 1060.

90

Methodological introduction and the sources

Besides these dynastic histories, m ediaeval China also saw the com pila­ tion o f several encyclopaedias, sim ilarly rich in historical m aterial arranged according to topics or peoples. As early as the 11th century, collections o f historical docum ents were assembled, wherein copies o f earlier records were stored in them atic order. These dynastic chronicles and other historical sources have not survived in their original form, and m odem critical editions have been prepared based on a variety o f m ultiple copies, block prints and revised versions. R ecent archae­ ological excavations, however, have turned up a num ber o f older editions or fragm ents thereof. The dynastic chronicles, w hich w ere always put together by the succeeding dynasty, partly to seal the legitim acy o f its own rule, are generally reliable with regard to the area w hich concerns us, the history o f the steppes. A lthough the Chinese court was not always consistently ‘far-sighted’, there w ere periods when it was able to follow events as far as E urope’s border, all the way to the Caucasus or the River Volga. The chronicles o f the M ongol dynasty even give an account o f the Tatar invasion o f Hungary in 1241-1242. Besides m ilitary expeditions, a succession o f Chinese travellers, envoys and B uddhist m ission­ aries, who roved far and wide and then returned hom e with tales o f distant lands, greatly contributed to C hina’s knowledge o f the outside world. M any o f these reports have survived, as they were filed aw ay am ong official records. The nam es o f peoples and places featured in Chinese sources are exceedingly difficult to m ake consistent with the names in w estern sources, having been passed down through a variety o f different speakers. The Chinese form often does not provide the local pronunciation o f a place nam e or people, but rather reflects the form used in the language o f some interm ediary m erchant, people or neighbour.

I) The Hebrew sources The Jew ish people scattered far and wide in large num bers in the 3rd century, into the various provinces o f the Rom an Empire. Their situation was particu­ larly favourable in the Caliphate o f Cordova. Although by the 10th century Jews had established settlem ents in alm ost every country in Europe, the m ajor m igration took them up from the Iberian Peninsula into the regions o f the Rhine, where a section o f the Jewry adopted a local G erm an dialect which later evolved into Yiddish. The m ore significant Jewish centres in the C aliph­ ate o f Cordova, France and Italy, and subsequently in the Rhine provinces, kept in close contact with each other, building up a fully-developed trading netw ork organised by the Radanite m erchant house from its seat in M arseilles.

The sources

91

The C ordovan ruler Abdul Rahm an III (912-961), under whose reign the Cordovan state blossom ed, m aintained contacts with every significant country in the world, and even m anaged to take over the institution o f the caliphate from the failing Abbassid dynasty. His m inister o f finance, the Jew H asday ibn Shaprut, learned that there existed a country in the east, the K hazar Empire, whose ruler was o f the Jewish faith. First through the m ediation o f Byzantium , and when this failed, via Europe and hence through Hungary, he dispatched a letter to Joseph, the sovereign o f the Khazars. The khaghan received the letter and replied to the greater part o f the queries contained within, although evading those o f a m ilitary nature. A lengthy debate has evolved around the letter and the question o f its authenticity. The original m ust have been w ritten before 962. The reply o f the khaghan Joseph, m eanw hile, is extant in both a shorter and a longer version. Although the m anuscripts currently known are certainly copies, the texts are quoted in detail as early as the first decade o f the 12th century by the Catalonian Judah ben Barzillai, and so even if they were to prove to be forgeries, they are still docum ents o f considerable age. A num ber o f errors in the text point to an interm ediate Arab source. The St. Petersburg m anuscript o f the longer version m ay originate from the 13th century, while the shorter redaction o f H asday’s letter and khaghan Joseph’s reply survives only in the form o f a 16th-century m anuscript kept in Oxford. The St. Petersburg m anuscript was brought from Cairo in the 1860s. The entire correspondence was published as early as 1577, together with the other two texts also based on the Cairo copy. Several other H ebrew docum ents are also known from the 10th century. Im portant am ong these is the letter from Kiev known as the Schechter text, m entioned in regard to the alleged Savarti Asfali name o f the Hungarians (see p. 288). This is a letter to H asday from an unidentified Jew concerning the Khazars. The Sepher Yosippon was w ritten in Italy around 940. In the light o f these w orks, the question o f the authenticity o f other contem porary correspondence regarding the K hazars also becam e clearer. The Jews were driven out of England in 1290, and from France in 1394. In 1492, the year o f the discovery o f the N ew World, the arm ies o f Ferdinand and Isabella put an end to Arab rule in Spain. The great m ajority o f the Jewry, which had until then lived under the shelter o f Arab rule, fled eastw ard to escape the new inquisition. Passing through the O ttom an Turkish Em pire, they reached the territory o f today’s Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, where they met with Jews who had been continuously m igrating there through Germ any since the 12th century. East European Jews thus m igrated from the w est to the east o f the continent, and w ere not descended from the inhabitants o f the Khazar Empire.

Methodological introduction and the sources

92

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Figure 14 W anderings o f the Jews expelled from Spain A large portion o f works w hich described the history o f the Jews in the 9th and 10th centuries perished or w ere lost, but fragm ents remain. Am ong these, particular value m ay be attached to the observations o f the R adanite m erchants who m aintained contact w ith the conquering M agyars.

4. THE LANGUAGE AS A SOURCE The Hungarian language itself represents a source for H ungarian history. The language retains the circum stances o f its own genesis, and preserves each and every contact through history w hich involved linguistic com m unication in one form or another. For this reason, the Hungarian language can be seen in a certain regard as the im print o f Hungarian history.

The sources

93

Words change in a given language according to the rules o f that language. However, if a w ord is adopted by another language, then from that point on it no longer follows changes in the original language, but rather those o f its adoptive language. Such adoption, or borrowing from another language, always m eans assim ilation into the system o f the adoptive language. Let us take an example. In the Proto-Indo-European language, the num ber five could be heard as penkve. Through the m illennia this steadily evolved in each o f the various Indo-European languages, w ith the ancient penkve becom ing the Germ an f u n f ( by way o f the transitional form fin ke), the English fiv e , the Latin quinque (by w ay o f pinkve), the ancient Slavic penti (by way o f p en k i), the G reekpenta, and the Indiepancha. The Latin quinque then becam e the Italian cinque and the French cinq, while the ancient Slavic penti becam e the Russian pyaty, the Bulgharian, Serbian and Croatian pet, the Slovak p a t, the Polish pyench, and so on. This Indo-European word is also recognisable in at least three forms in the Hungarian language. The Hungarian w o rd p en tek ‘Friday’ is boiTOwed from the Old S lavicpen tik ‘fifth (day)’, w here the IvJ phonem e is still preserved, as it also is in sim ilarly Slavic-derived Hungarian words szent ‘saint’ or ‘sacred’, and donga ‘stave’. M eanwhile, our w ordp eta k (which survives in the saying egy petdkot sem i r ‘it’s not w orth a penny’) comes from the Croatian form o f this same w ord, p etek ‘five (-penny piece)’, where the phonem e /x\I is no longer present. Thirdly, the Hungarian w ord pun ko sd ‘Pentecost’, although not taken directly from the Greek, conceals the Greek penta-kosta ‘fiftieth (day after E aster)’. For a time there were no words in Hungarian that began with sk-, sp-, st- or szk-, and thus the Latin schola becam e iskola ‘school’, the Slavic-Avar span becam e ispan ‘a title’, the Germ an Strang becam e istrang ‘traces (o f a harness) ’, and the Latin Stephcmus becam e Istvan ‘S tephen’, in order to conform to the rules o f the Hungarian language. A fter a while, however, this rule ceased to apply, and there is no longer need to prefix consonant clusters at the beginning o f new ly adopted words, such as, for example, the H ungarian studio ‘studio’, skala ‘seale ', start ‘start’, sparga ‘asparagus’, and spendt ‘spinach’. A lthough the latter word has been m entioned in this form in various sources since 1500, to this day certain dialects are nevertheless still fam iliar with the form ispindt. These regularities m ake it possible to attach a date to the various changes and adoptions o f words, as well as to the evolution o f these regular forms. At the same time, they help us to draw conclusions about the way in which contact betw een speakers o f the languages concerned m ay have developed. The com m on Urheimat o f the Uralic peoples m ust have been located where the four different species o f coniferous tree (‘spruce’, ‘arolla p in e’, ‘silver fir’, and ‘larch’), as well as the deciduous ‘elm ’, could be found together in one region. This is to say that the nam es o f these trees were com m on to all the

94

M ethodological introduction and the sources

U ralic or Finno-Ugrian languages. Even w hen the w ords w ere lost from one language or the other, as for exam ple happened with Hungarian, it is still possible to reconstruct their earlier existence. The period concerned here was following the last Ice Age, at the flowering o f the Neolithic era. The com m on presence o f these trees can be proven through pollen analysis and other scientific methods. The region itself probably covered roughly the territories o f the Volga and Kam a rivers and the m id-ranges o f the Ural M ountains, but m ay also have extended som ew hat beyond the Urals, w hich never constituted a geographical dividing line. The shared territory o f the various peoples speaking the Proto-U ralic tongue probably began to break up around 4000 в с (see also pp. 34-35). Attem pts both past and present have been m ade to go yet one step further back in time, to postulate the theory that the Uralic languages once belonged to an even larger fam ily o f languages. Views o f this kind include tw o w orthy o f special m ention here. The so-called N ostratic theory (from the Latin word nosier ‘ou rs’) endeavours to prove that the Uralic, Altaic, Indo-European, Sem itic-H am itic, Dravidian and K artvelian language groups (the latter includ­ ing G eorgian and its close relatives) can be traced back to a com m on ancient language, to ‘o u r’ language. A lthough this theory, propounded by H. Pedersen, and elaborated by a research team in M oscow, is today enjoying som ething o f a second flowering in the United States, it is im probable and uses com plex suppositions and unprovable assertions to bolster its argument. From our view point, moreover, this hypothesised ancient language w ould be so far in the distant past— around 7-8000 BC, or some 10,000 years ago— that w e could still happily disregard it even if fresh data were to back up the supposition. The prospects o f such data em erging, however, are non-existent. The other theory to be m entioned traces back the U ralic and A ltaic lan­ guages to a com m on, ancient parent. No notew orthy exam ple o f the UralicA ltaic linguistic relationship rem ains today. However, interesting structural parallels do exist betw een the tw o language groups, and as w e shall see, early interlinguistic contact did occur. Still, this is insufficient for the reconstruction o f a com m on ancient language. Attem pts have been m ade using linguistic m ethods to determ ine w ho m ight have lived in the vicinity o f this, then still scarcely heterogeneous, Uralic community. Two linguistic groups have been taken into serious consideration. The Altaic languages w ithout doubt came into contact w ith other languages at a very early stage. Such contacts, however, can be divided into two dis­ tinctive groups. Although a num ber o f early analogies betw een the U ralic and Turkic languages do exist, for the tim e being these are very few in number, including, for example, the nam e o f a species o f w ild duck, the angga. M eanw hile, a surprising, albeit not very great, num ber o f analogies can be

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M ANCHU -TUNGU ZIAN U RALIC

M ONG OLIAN TURKIC

IND O-EUROPEAN

Figure 15 Relative locations o f the Uralic and the neighbouring peoples

found betw een the U ralic and M anchu-Tunguzian languages. For example, the ancient Uralic form o f the Hungarian eger ‘m ouse’ can be found in every language o f the M anchu-Tunguzian family. A t the same time, no early contact whatsoever can be proven with the third Altaic subfamily, the M ongolian. As we shall see later, the relationship betw een the various subfam ilies o f the Altaic language group is likewise hotly disputed. For this reason, we are able to say that while the speakers o f the Uralic languages lived in a region where they cam e into loose contact with the ancestors o f speakers o f the Turkic languages on the one side, and o f M anchu-Tunguzian languages on the other, they did not live together with a people w ho spoke a com m on, ancient Altaic language. Early connections between the Uralic and Indo-European languages have also been exhaustively investigated. This is o f great im portance because the Indo-European languages have bequeathed us a very ancient and diverse body o f historical source material, and consequently the early evolution o f the Indo-European languages can be far m ore reliably reconstructed than that o f languages o f which only com paratively recent historical evidence remains. Here, too, genuinely early and indisputable analogies are very few and far between. Nevertheless, the Hungarian words in ‘sinew ’, nev ‘nam e’ and vas ‘iron’, ancient words which can be dated back to the Uralic period, ultim ately are o f Indo-European origin. Thus the word in is o f identical origin to the Germ an Sehne ‘sinew ’ or ‘string’, w hile the Hungarian nev shares the deriva­ tion o f the English name. M eanwhile, the sim ilarly Indo-European-derived Hungarian w ord vas ‘iron’, probably with the original m eaning ‘o re’, was a word denoting a naturally occurring m etal w ith which the U ralic com m unities may well have become acquainted even before the Iron Age.

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Methodological introduction and the sources

The fact that early analogies scarcely exist (but do) betw een the Uralic and Turkic, Uralic and M anchu-Tunguzian, and U ralic and Indo-European lan­ guage groups suggests that contact could not have been very intensive, and that neighbouring peoples w ere not on a significantly dissim ilar, m ore ad­ vanced level o f culture; in other words, contacts such as they w ere m ust have been very early indeed. All things considered, linguistic data indicates that the Uralic Urheimat was situated som ewhere between the Turkic, M anchu-Tun­ guzian and Indo-European peoples, or at least in a territory w here contact betw een these peoples was possible. This territory m ost likely com prised the central and the southern ranges o f the Ural M ountains. The M anchu-Tunguz w ould have been to the northeast o f this, the Turkic peoples to the southeast, and the Indo-Europeans to the south and southwest. Based on the available linguistic data, therefore, the oldest area o f habitation that we can reconstruct for the ancestors o f the Uralic peoples, am ong them groups speaking the Hungarian language, is represented by the central and southern regions o f the Urals. In around 4000 BC, the ancestors o f the Finno-U grian peoples separated from the larger Uralic community. The Indo-European peoples also scattered abroad, by w hich time the com m on ancestor o f the later Indie and Iranian languages— known as Indo-Iranian— had already becom e detached. From this point on, evidence can be dem onstrated in the Finno-U grian languages solely o f contact with the Indo-Iranian, and subsequently Iranian and Tocharian languages. The lands inhabited by speakers o f the Finno-U grian languages expanded significantly on the western side o f the Urals, chiefly tow ard the w est and northwest. At the same time, to the south and southeast, the A ncient Iranian peoples had begun to advance northward. This can principally be ascertained from the large num ber o f words borrow ed from A ncient Iranian to be found in the Finno-Ugrian languages. The Ancient Iranian period lasted from around 4000 BC until about 800 BC. Hungarian words such as dr (in its sense o f ‘value’), dr (in its sense o f ‘tool’), haz ‘house’, meh ‘b e e ’, mez ‘honey’, szaz ‘hundred’, szarv ‘horn’, agyar ‘tusk’, ostor ‘w h ip ’, tehen ‘co w ’, tej ‘m ilk \ f e j n i ‘to m ilk (a cow )’, het ‘seven’, and m any others besides all derive from Iranian languages o f various periods. We can also see from these words that the Finno-U grian peoples came into contact w ith a people w ho was fam iliar with agriculture and kept animals. The beginning o f these contacts can be established by exam ining Iranian words w hose date o f origin is easier than m ost to pinpoint accurately. The oldest forms o f these, as they appear in the Finno-U grian languages, can be dated to around the 3rd m illennium BC. As early as around 2000 BC, the com m on ancestors o f the peoples who speak the Voghul, Ostyak and Hungarian languages, the Ugrians, separated from the

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Finno-Ugrian linguistic community. N evertheless, the contact with the Iranian languages endured. W hile a significant num ber o f words borrowed from the A ncient Iranian period can be found in the Ugrian languages, the situation changed m oving into the early part o f the O ld Iranian period. A few words such as arany ‘gold’ (which in the other Ugrian languages m eant ‘copper’), or tal ‘d ish ’ (a w an­ dering word o f Indian origin), tend to suggest contacts o f a com m ercial nature. Attem pts have been made to dem onstrate that words w ere also borrow ed from the Turkic languages during the Ugrian period. H attyu ‘sw an’, szd ‘w o rd ’, Id ‘h orse’, ho d ‘beaver’, ir ‘w rite’, hajo ‘boat’, hom ok ‘sand’, nyak ‘neck’, nyereg ‘saddle’ and nyar ‘sum m er’ have been suggested. However, these suppositions have not weathered critical examination. Only the argum ent for szd ‘w ord’ holds w ater in every respect, while the word ir ‘w rite’ has been independently borrowed in both Hungarian and the O b-U grian languages. The remaining words present unsolvable phonetic or semantic problem s either from the Turkic or the Ugrian side, or both; or are adoptions from the Turkic not in the Ugrian period (hajo, homok)\ or are quite clearly o f non-Turkic origin (nyar). These findings together indicate that the population w hich spoke the Ugrian language m ay have lived in the first h alf o f the 1st m illennium BC in a region where they did not come into close contact with either the Iranian or the Turkic world. At the same time, a good num ber o f H ungarian words from the Ugrian period (lo ‘horse’, nyereg ‘saddle’, f e k ‘bridle’, szeker ‘wagon ’) suggest that the Ugrians were already an equestrian people, although they probably used saddle-anim als prim arily for transport and hunting pur­ poses, rather than for more significant nom adic wanderings. The separation o f the Hungarian people from the larger com m unity o f Ugrian peoples cannot be fixed to a precise point in tim e using the tools o f linguistic science. Nevertheless, it is in the Hungarian from this indeterm inate time onward that we find a significant num ber o f words borrow ed from M iddle Iranian, and within this specifically eastern M iddle Iranian, no sign o f which can be found in any other Ugrian language. W hile perhaps no m ore than six words entered H ungarian’s Ugrian-age predecessor from Old Iranian (8th-2nd centuries B C ), certain scholars believe that Hungarian borrow ed around 45 words from the M iddle Iranian languages (from the 2nd century B C , until the 7th— and in some opinions— the 9th century A D ). Although it is indisputable that both older and m ore recent adoptions can be found am ong these M iddle Iranian borrowed words, not one o f them possesses a phonetic m arker which would enable us to date these words to the first half o f the Ancient Hungarian period. On the contrary, these adopted words show the kind o f m utations which occurred in the language during the second half o f the A ncient Hungarian period. Thus, for example, the Hungarian word kincs ‘treasure’ was taken up

98

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at a time when there was as yet no Hungarian word beginning w ith /g/, and consequently the Hungarian language substituted а /к / for the /g/ phonem e in the Iranian genj. A t the same time, the phonetic cluster /nch/ already becam e /j/ (as in m ancha > maj), given that the /nch/ in kincs has been preserved. M eanw hile, the word gazdag ‘rich ’ was adopted into Hungarian from an Iranian language, nam ely the ancestor o f O ssetic (com pare the O ssetic gazdig), at a point when the status o f /g/ as an initial had becom e established. The borrow ing o f Turkic words also began at this time. These, however, can be dem onstrably shown to have passed into the Hungarian language during the second h alf o f the A ncient Hungarian period. It w ould appear, then, that the speakers o f the Hungarian language, follow ing their split from the larger Ugrian com m unity, lived for a time in a region where they had very little or no contact with Iranian or Turkic peoples, but then all o f a sudden saw their language inundated with an increasing num ber o f Iranian, and still greater num ber o f Turkic words. The question is: does any trace o f this period rem ain in the language? The H ungarian language preserves not only the traces o f contact w ith other, different families o f languages, but also o f relations with kindred peoples. As far as earlier periods are concerned, such evidence is difficult to reconstruct, ju st as it is difficult to dem onstrate the existence o f Dutch loan w ords in G erm an, or Ukrainian words in Russian, but the task is not im possible. It seems that the Hungarian language holds on to traces o f its contact w ith the Perm ian languages, i.e. the com m on ancestor o f the Zyryan and Votyak languages, two such types o f traces being distinguishable. On the one hand, Hungarian has a num ber o f borrow ed words such as eziist ‘silver’ and kenyer ‘bread ’. Even m ore interesting is the adoption o f certain elem ents o f a w ord’s construction. Thus the latter phonetic elem ent o f the Hungarian num erals kilenc ‘nine’ and harm inc ‘thirty’ can be attributed to a Perm ian word m eaning ‘ten ’ (in sim plified terms: [-mis] > [-ns] > [-nc]). K ilenc ‘nine’ is the num ber ‘outside’ ten, (the num ber before ten), while harm inc ‘thirty’ is equal to harom tiz ‘three ten s’. M eanwhile, the num eral nyolc ‘eight’ has m erely taken an analogical phonetic ending. It seems likely that the order o f num erals in today’s H ungar­ ian m ay have taken its final shape at this time. At the sam e time, the em erging o f voiced plosives (/b/, /g/ and /d/) in word initial position occurred solely in the Perm ian languages and Hungarian, while nasal consonants preceding other consonants disappeared, thus effecting the follow ing changes in the Perm ian languages and Hungarian: /nt/ > /d/, / т р / > /Ь/, /пк/ > /g/, and /nch/ > /j/. For exam ple, the w ord agyar ‘tusk’ harks back to the form *onychara o f the Finno-U gric age. From this cam e the Ancient Perm ian *vojer (in today’s Zyrian *vodzer, in Votyak vajer), and so too in Hungarian ojar, and thence to the m odern form agyar, while the closest linguistic relatives, the Voguls,

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have anjer, and the Ostyaks anzhar, thus preserving the nasal consonant. These m utations m ay o f course have occurred entirely independently o f each other, and also took place in other linguistic families. All the same, it does appear that, at least in this case, we are dealing with w hat am ounts to a regional linguistic phenom enon, in other words a phenom enon which occurred sim ul­ taneously over a large area and am ong peoples speaking a variety o f languages. This is known as an areal phenom enon. As we have indicated in the above, while in the Old Iranian period— i.e. between 800 BC and 300-200 BC — scarcely any Iranian loan w ords can be found in Hungarian, at the same time some surprising signs point to increased Iranian contact with the speakers o f the A ncient Perm ian languages. Indeed, the stock o f Iranian loan words in the Perm ian languages begins to swell considerably at this time. Speakers o f the shared ancestral language o f the Zyrians and Votyaks adopted about five times as m any Old Iranian words as the ancestors o f Ugrian language speakers did. This indicates that the Permians came som ewhere between the H ungarians’ ancestors and the Iranians, or in other words, we m ust suppose an advance o f the Iranian peoples which brought significant groups o f Iranians into the vicinity o f Perm ian language speakers, but w hich did not take them into the territories o f H ungarians’ ancestors. This m uch the language has to say as a historical source o f inform ation regarding the period at hand. The second h alf o f the A ncient Hungarian period again saw increasingly significant contacts with the Iranian peoples. This time also saw the beginning o f Turkic-H ungarian com m unication. To m ake clear how this process can be conceived in term s o f the history o f the Hungarian language, we will use here a schem atic model. In the diagram , the letter С represents every possible consonant in the given language, while the letter V represents every possible vowel. The G reek letter gam m a [y] represents a voiced spirant consonant, such as the Hungarian /h/ pronounced as voiced. The Greek letter eta [r\] sym bolises the sound w hich we find on the end o f the Hungarian words harang ‘b ell’, borong ‘be sorrow ful/cloud o v er’, and lang ‘flam e’, where we pronounce a sound som ewhere betw een M and /n + g/, as opposed, say, to our word langos ‘a large, savoury fried doughnut’, w here the /п/ and the /g/ are pronounced separately. The raised v signifies that a vowel is m ore closed, i.e. an /о/ becom ing Ini, or an / 6 / becom ing /ii/, etc., at the same time being spoken shorter. This short, closed vowel has now disappeared from the end o f words in Hungarian (for instance: hodu > had ‘arm y/w ar’).

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Form ation o f guttural word finals in Hungarian Period

Finno-Ugrian 0

Ancient Hungarian 2 3

1

Old Hungarian 4

M iddle H ungarian 5

Category I CVKVKV CVKVCV

>

CVKKV

>

CVKKV

>

CVKv

>

CVKv

>

CVK

CVnKV

>

CVtiGV

>

CVGV

>

CVGV

>

CVG

CVKVKV C V t|V C V

C ategory II CVKV

>

CVKV

>

CVGV

>

CVyV

>

CVhv

CVt) V

>

CVGV

>

CVyV

>

CVyV

>

CVhV

cvv >

CVV

Examples: 1. PFU *pakke > fa k k e >fa k f > fe : k ‘ >f e k ‘h alter’ 2. PFU *pw]ke > furjge > fo g f > fo g ' > fo g - ‘to grasp’ 3. PFU *yoka> yo g o > y o g u > y o h u > jo (in its form er sense o f ‘riv er’, e.g. in the latter part o f the river nam es Sajo, Hejo) 4. PFU *pat]a > fa g e > fa g f >fa h ' >fe j/fo ‘h ead’/ ‘m ain’ These exam ples o f course stand in for other words as well. Thus as far as the configuration o f phonetic sounds within the word is concerned, the word mancha, which in the late A ncient Hungarian period becam e m aja (and later m agy o f m agyar ‘H ungarian’), belongs under the second example. We can see, then, that two subperiods can be distinguished w ithin A ncient Hungarian (see colum ns 2 and 3 o f the above diagram ), and one o f these, the period num bered 2 , we shall classify as early, while the other period, num bered 3, we shall classify as late Ancient Hungarian. We have observed that words adopted from both M iddle Iranian and Old Turkic entered the language in the third period in the diagram , i.e. in the late Ancient H ungarian period. The fact that the A ncient Hungarian, O ld Turkic and M iddle Iranian periods are here revealed as contem poraneous should not bother anyone, since these chrono­ logical designations are connected to different periods w ithin each language’s history, and there w ould be no point, m erely for the sake o f consistency, in

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altering designations w hich are already accepted in Hungarian, Turkic and Iranian linguistic science respectively. However, for the sake o f easy com pa­ rability, we have presented these periods in a table (see Figure 3 on p. 21). As the Iranian-derived word kincs ‘treasure’ and Turkic-derived kantar ‘b rid le’ or kender ‘hem p’ dem onstrate, these words entered the Hungarian language after the cluster /nch/ becam e /j/, and /nt/ becam e /d/. That is, if they had entered earlier they would have taken part in the above linguistic proc­ esses, and would be spelt in today’s Hungarian as *kij, *kadar and *keder, respectively. We have arrived, therefore, at the second, later phase o f the A ncient Hungarian period (see the column m arked 3 in the above diagram ). We do not know precisely when it m ay have begun, but we have found that it was after H ungarian-Perm ian contacts began. From the Iranian point o f view, given that the M iddle Iranian period began in the 2nd century B C , we can locate this period to after the 2nd century BC. From the Turkic point o f view, m eanwhile, the chronology o f this time cannot yet be supported by w ritten evidence, and thus we m ust briefly present here the set o f linguistic tools which can help us to establish a Turkic linguistic chronology. We will return afterw ards to the question o f precisely when Old Turkic borrow ed words m ay have entered Hungarian. The question o f an A ltaic linguistic affinity at this point is unavoidable. Certain scholars believe that the Turkic languages m ake up one branch o f the Altaic family o f languages. According to this view, the Turkic language began an independent life o f its own having split from the other A ltaic languages. The A ltaic family also contains, besides the Turkic languages, the M ongolian and M anchu-Tunguzian linguistic subfamilies. Renew ed attem pts have been made to include Korean and Japanese in the sphere o f languages w ith an Altaic linguistic affinity, but such theories, although proclaim ed loudly, are still only at a very elem entary stage. Various arguments supporting relationships within the Altaic linguistic family tend to collide with hard historical facts. It is indisputable that there is a great deal o f early regular correspondence between the Turkic, the Mongolian and the Manchu-Tunguzian languages. The question, however, is to w hat can these correspondences be attributed? A fter all, the fact o f their antiquity and regular correspondence rem ains valid w hether these languages are actually related, or w hether the correspondences are m erely the consequence o f early contacts am ong the respective peoples. Let us exam ine two examples. In the Turkic family, the word m eaning ‘o x ’ is spoken in most languages as okiiz, or some standard linguistic variant o f this. However, in Chuvash, the m inor language spoken in the vicinity o f the River Volga, we find a form o f the word derived from the earlier form o f okiir. M eanw hile, am ong names given to various peoples, the name Oghuz was used sim ultaneously

102

Methodological introduction and the sources

with the nam e Oghur, in other words in one group o f the Turkic languages the word ended in Ы , while in the other it ended in /г/. On this evidence, it has becom e the custom to refer to the Turkic languages either as z-Turkic, Oghuz or common Turkic, or r-Turkic, Oghur, or som etim es Chuvash or BulgharTurkic. In addition, we find the form iiker in M ongolian (or hiiker in M iddle M ongolian). Two explanations are possible. On the one hand, we begin with the view that the /г/ is the original final o f these words, which opens up two possible chains o f developm ent. The first is that the form okiir is an ancient Altaic form, which becam e iiker in M ongolian and okiir in Turkic, the latter then changing from okiir to okiiz in the m ajority o f Turkic languages. It is also conceivable that okiir is the ancient Turkic form, which was then borrowed by M ongolian. The second explanation is that the okiiz form is the elder o f the two. In this case, however, only one chain o f developm ent is possible, nam ely that M ongolian (and Hungarian) borrowed this word from a Turkic language in which the Izl > /г/ transform ation had already taken place. Thus, there are in fact a total o f three possible explanations: I

II

Altaic/- Turkic r —» M ongolian r

Turkic r

T urkics

M ongolian r

Turkic z

Turkic r

III Turkic z > Turkic r —> M ongolian r

Turkic 2

Turkic r

Turkic r

Debate over this question has been raging for alm ost one hundred years, during which time a great deal o f m inor details have been clarified. It would appear that in recent times explanation III has finally proven m ost able to w ithstand the criticism s o f general linguistics and language history. Debate only seems to revolve around w hether the /z/ or the /г/ is the original. This is to say that in Turkic there exists another /г/, found, for exam ple, in such com m on Turkic words as kara ‘black’ or er ‘m an’. These words contain an /г/, and nowhere a Izl, in all Turkic languages. The argum ent is thus based around w hat the original state o f the language was: w hether it was w hen the /z/:/r/ phonem ic opposition existed; or if it was w hen there was only an /г/, which in certain words subsequently becam e a Izl, and in others rem ained an /г/. Although researchers have attem pted to avoid answ ering this question by postulating the existence o f two kinds o f /г/, there is no evidence or likelihood o f this, nor any parallel in other languages. At the same time, from a m eth­ odological point o f view this is irrelevant, since if the original oppositions o f two types o f /г/ had disappeared in the O ghur or C huvash languages, this would

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still m ean that this was a secondary, or later change, since an originally existing opposition would have ceased to exist. According to this view, then, there originally existed a /z/:/r/ phonem ic opposition in the Turkic languages, which disappeared from the O ghur sub­ group o f Turkic languages. It was subsequent to this process that the M on­ golians, and later the Hungarians began to borrow words from this language. We m ust therefore attem pt to determ ine exactly when this /z/:/r/ dichotom y disappeared from the O ghur languages. A suitable exam ple to help us here may be the Turkic w ord for ‘stirrup’. The stirrup is not a particularly ancient innovation, and how ever inconceivable it m ay seem, neither the Rom ans nor the Huns were fam iliar with them. The stirrup was originally a sim ple loop o f leather, which merely helped the rider climb onto the horse’s back. However, once horsemen began to use such loops on both flanks o f the horse, cavalry warfare was revolutionised, as it thus enabled the rider to rise up in the saddle and turn around to fire arrows at his pursuers. Leather loops w ere soon replaced by metal stirrups which at first im itated the shape o f the leather loops. This made com bat still easier for the horsem an, facilitating the use o f the sword and lance. The appearance o f stirrups can be dated relatively accurately. A num ber o f exam ples o f metal stirrups have been found in Eastern Asia dating from the 3rd century A D , and they can be seen both in Chinese il­ lustrations and graves from this time onward. They were introduced into Europe by the Avars. We must, however, take into consideration that the antecedent o f the metal stirrup, the leather stirrup, m ay have preceded the metal version by several hundred years. W eighing up the entire body o f data, we cannot date the appearance o f the stirrup to earlier than a few centuries before the birth o f Christ. The stirrup has the same nam e in every language o f the Turkic family, but with an /г/ in accordance with the rules o f r-Turkic, and with a IzJ in z-Turkic (taking the respective forms o f irenge, and izertge or iizengu). On the one hand, this m eans that the branching o ff o f the various Turkic languages occurred after the appearance o f the stirrup, and on the other hand it indicates that the m uch-debated phonetic change m ay also have occurred only after the appear­ ance o f the stirrup, i.e. in the last: centuries BC, since the w ord m eaning stirrup was involved in this process o f change. We can o f course no longer posit the existence o f a still uniform Altaic proto-language at this time. Consequently, explanation I can be ruled out for historical reasons. From a historical aspect, explanations II and III w ould also m ean that the C huvash- or O ghur-type languages evolved in the centuries before Christ. At the sam e time, as we have seen above, out o f general linguistic considerations, we m ust assum e that the /z/:/r/ dichotom y disappeared from the Oghur languages. This chronology is

104

Methodological introduction and the sources

supported by other data. Thus the earliest Turkic loan words in the Sam oyed language m ust have entered the then still uniform com m on Sam oyedic before the separation o f the Sam oyedic languages, in other words in the centuries around the birth o f Christ. Am ong these there are words w hich already bear the r-Turkic form. It w as at this time that the bulk o f r-Turkic forms m ay also have entered the M ongolian language. This view is also supported by the existence o f early Tocharian loan w ords in the Turkic language, around w hich a lively debate has flared up in recent times. All this m ust be clarified because the overw helm ing m ajority o f loan w ords w hich entered the Hungarian language in the A ncient Hungarian period were o f r-Turkic or Chuvash-type Turkic origin. M oreover, this could only have happened after the Oghur-type languages had separated from the other Turkic languages, around or shortly after the birth o f Christ. This thus serves to confirm two independent linguistic sources, nam ely the words adopted from the M iddle Iranian and Chuvash-type Old Turkic, which m ay both have entered the Hungarian language only in the early centuries after C hrist’s birth, or in term s o f the history o f the Hungarian language, during the later A ncient Hungarian period. In this way, we have o f course m erely obtained a date after w hich (post quem ) contacts m ay have been established. We m ust further look into the question o f w hether linguistic data can be isolated w hich m ight indicate when and w here the Hungarian language adopted these words. The current convention is to differentiate betw een the follow ing M iddle Iranian languages: (1) Western M iddle Iranian or M iddle Persian (southw est­ ern) and Parthian (northwestern); (2) Eastern M iddle Iranian, including K hotanese Saka, Bactrian, Sogdian, K hwarezmian and Alanian. With the exception o f A lanian, we know o f self-penned texts in each o f these languages. The last three have significance as far as the history o f the Hungarian language is concerned. O f these, a particularly im portant role is played by the A lanian language, o f which several dialects m ay have existed. The Jasz (Jazygian) people who m igrated to Hungary spoke one dialect o f the A lanian language, and continued to speak it even as late as the 15th century, as w e can see from a Hungarian Jasz glossary. At the same time, a very close relative is the Caucasian language o f the Ossets, o f which the two m ain dialects are Iron and Digor. A very helpful contribution to the historical investigation o f the conquering H ungarians is provided by the words borrow ed from Turkic, which, as has long been recognised by Hungarian scholarship, have done m uch to assist the exploration o f details and m ajor interrelationships. With regard to the Turkic loan words in the Hungarian language, the question to ask is how m uch can

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these help to determ ine where and for how long the H ungarians dw elt prior to the Conquest, w hat was the nature o f their social and political structure and culture, with which Turkic peoples did they com e into contact, and w hat kind o f conditions did they find in the Carpathian Basin. The Turkic words in the Hungarian language are usually divided into three main groups: words adopted before the Conquest, those borrow ed from im m igrants follow ing the Conquest, and those taken from O ttom an Turkish. Words which entered the language during the Turkish occupation (16th—17th centuries) w e m ay set aside here, as they do not help to clarify questions relating to the conquering Hungarians. The languages o f the Cum an, Pecheneg and Uzian groups which m igrated to H ungary are o f greater interest. On the one hand, they are im portant sources regarding the language o f the Turkic peoples who lived east o f the Carpathians, while on the other hand knowledge o f them m ay be essential in singling out the borrowed words o f the pre-C on­ quest period. In m any cases, unfortunately, there are no criteria that reveal w hether a Turkic loan word belongs to the first or the second period. In the case o f the words borrowed from Turkic before the Conquest, chronological queries also arise: such as w hen did Turkic-H ungarian contacts begin, what periods can we divide this era into, where the adoption o f words m ight have occurred, w hether we can isolate the language o f the Turkic groups which attached them selves to the Hungarians or not, and if it can be successfully determ ined w hether a Turkic language was spoken in the C arpathian Basin at the tim e o f the Conquest. Linguistic criteria can be divided into three principal groups. T he first group contains criteria w hich unequivocally point to a Chuvash-type language. In the second category, we m ay include criteria which point only indirectly to Chuvash origin. There are characteristic features which occur in some words alongside unequivocal Chuvash criteria, thus indirectly indicating a Chuvash type, but which o f them selves are typical not only o f the C huvash language, but o f other Turkic languages as well. Finally, the third group includes those words which, while displaying none o f the above criteria, nevertheless possess chronological criteria which unequivocally show that they cannot be Turkic loan words adopted after the Conquest, or w hich in term s o f linguistic geography are so widespread am ong the Turkic languages as to m ake it probable that they w ere adopted from a Turkic language o f C huvash type. There are currently around 450 borrowed words belonging to the pre-C on­ quest or pre-O ttom an categories. These 450 words are o f course not o f equal value as far as the reliability o f their etym ology is concerned. We shall mention here only those words o f a certain or very probable Turkic origin, which also assist us in our historical reconstruction.

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Unequivocal Chuvash criteria can be found in the follow ing types o f words: 1. W here in com m on Turkic there is a /z/, we find an /г/ in Hungarian: borju ‘c a lf’ [-ly-] change occurred in the region o f the Volga as well, where the old place nam e Bulghar becam e Bulyar, then B ilyar or Bular (according to the Hungarian Anonymus: Bular). The title o f nandorispan was therefore originally the ‘O noghundur (Bulghar) zhupan’, the ch ief o f the Turkic population, just as the szekelyispan was the head o f the Szekely people. Just as the Latin name Caesar gave us the titles K aiser, Czar and the Hungarian csaszar (while the original Turkic form o f the K hazar nam e was Kasar), thus the nam e o f khaghan Bayan, the founder o f the Avar Empire, gave the title o f ban ‘B an’. The name o f khaghan Bayan is Turkic, not M ongolian. Although in the Turkic languages, the w ord m eaning ‘rich ’ always takes the form bay, in C huvash it is puyan, which can be traced back to an

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earlier bayan form. This m ay suggest that at least the leading stratum o f the Avars spoke a Chuvash-type Turkic language. We shall return to this when discussing the Avars in more detail. In Turkic, however, the [-y-] is not dropped from between the two vowels. It m ay in fact have been dropped only in certain Slavic languages, for exam ple in Croatian, while the Slavic o f Pannonia m ay also have followed this change. We are therefore dealing here with the Slavic form o f a Turkic word. The Conversio bagoariorum et carantanorum com piled in 870, w ith regard to a Church consecrated in 8 6 6 in the region o f Lake Balaton, m entions the place nam e o f Termperhc. This sam e place nam e features in a docum ent drawn up in 860. The second elem ent o f the place name is the G erm an w ord -berg ‘h ill’. The nam e also appears in Baranya county in a docum ent from 1332 in the form o f Teremhegy. The w ord terem, here m eaning ‘p alace’, is m ost likely o f G reek origin, but was also current am ong the Turks and the Slavs. In this event, it entered the Slavic through the m ediation o f the Turkic. The title o f palatinus ‘palatine’, o rp a lo ta g ro f was termecsii, w hich becam e the personal name Termecsii, borne by the grandson o f A rpad who visited C onstantinople in around 950. The title o f termecsii is only indirectly related to the K hazar title o f termecs ~ tarmacs recorded from 730. The Hungarian w ord belyeg ‘stam p’ m eant a m ark branded onto an anim al with a red-hot iron. In Turkic we m ust begin from the form belek. The Slavic word o f identical m eaning, beleg, is also derived from the Turkic. By linguistic m eans we are able to dem onstrate that the w ord entered Hungarian either from the Turkic, or from the language o f a Turkic people w ho were becom ing Slavicised. This Slavic-oriented Avar-Turkic language also lent words to Hungarian, although not in very great numbers.

5. THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOURCES W hile the discovery o f fresh linguistic sources o f data is a very rare occur­ rence, advancem ent o f research in this area being confined m ainly to the refinem ent o f methodology, the situation is entirely different in the case o f archaeology. New m aterial is constantly em erging from the bow els o f the earth, while other relics gathering dust in the depositories o f m useum s becom e ever more readily accessible. The difficulty with archaeological m aterial lies not m erely in the problem s o f determ ining age, as we have seen in the above, but also in attaching each archaeological culture, group o f finds or objects to a given people. Researchers do not always succeed in finding the sober m iddle road betw een too rapid conclusions and total scepticism .

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The treasure o f archaeological findings relating to the conquering M agyars is w ell known to science, and even if certain m atters o f detail rem ain unre­ solved, this is chiefly the result o f advancem ents in m ethodology, which although producing more results, also generate more problem s. For a long time Hungarian archaeologists were sustained by the hope that the com paratively easily identifiable store o f archaeological finds from the Conquest period could be traced back in time, that the place from which the M agyar tribal confederation launched its Conquest o f the future hom eland would be easy to locate. A fter all, we are fam iliar with relics from even the earliest generations following the M agyar Conquest, and by no m eans can it be assum ed that the possessions or burial custom s o f the first-generation conquering M agyars buried in the C arpathian Basin w ould have been signifi­ cantly different from those o f their fathers’ or grandfathers’, laid to rest in the pre-Conquest Etelkoz region. Before the First World War, a num ber o f attempts w ere m ade to unearth this m aterial, but not only was it a case o f trying to find a needle in a haystack, but moreover, the ‘haystack’ at this time, nam ely the archaeological findings from southern Russia, were not system atically categorised, and thus it was im possible to know the local context o f each potentially interesting find. Burial sites from the pre-C onquest period were not found (or if rum our o f such a site began to circulate, it w ould later prove to be false), and for a long time it was believed that the reason for this was the closing down o f frontiers w ith the em erging Soviet Union in the 1920s, which prevented Hungarian archaeologists from carrying out their field work. The com plaint was ever m ore frequently heard, albeit not through official chan­ nels, that Soviet archaeologists, partly with regard to their professional stand­ ards, and partly because o f their particular prejudice against nom adic peoples, scarcely carried out any excavations in these regions, and if they did actually find anything, would fail to recognise or be unw illing to identify it as H un­ garian. For this reason it was im possible to identify M agyar m aterial from before the Conquest period. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, H ungarian archae­ ologists were given the opportunity to em bark on research expeditions, and from the 1970s jo in t excavations took place. An incredibly rich treasure o f archaeological m aterial began to emerge from southern Russia, the Volga and northern Caucasus regions, and while the publication o f finds was not always o f a desirable standard, after a time both the sheer abundance o f m aterial and the sporadic nature o f publications began to hinder research into M agyar parallels. From the end o f the 1970s, however, the surprising conclusion began to emerge that despite all endeavours, and even with possession o f a great store o f com parative m aterial, it was still im possible to trace back, either in time or space, the archaeological relics o f the pre-C onquest M agyars.

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C onquest-period sites beyond the Carpathians: (1) Przem ysl; (2) Sudova Vishnya; (3) Krilos; (4) Frumu§ica; (5) Probota; ( 6 ) Groze§ti; (7) Bucharest-Tei; ( 8 ) Subbotici

This state o f affairs then becam e m ore precisely defined, and in three directions. In the eastern lower reaches o f the Carpathians, burial sites did nevertheless begin to em erge which yielded archaeological m aterial displaying wellfounded sim ilarities w ith relics o f the conquering M agyars. This strip o f territory em bracing the Carpathians from the east, from Przem ysl in the north to Bucharest in the south, has thus far provided us w ith six archaeological sites (Przem ysl, Sudova, Krilos, Probota, Groze?ti and Bucharest-Tei). There can scarcely be any doubt that we are dealing here w ith lookout garrisons posted from the Carpathian Basin, i.e. after the C onquest o f the hom eland, and that here w e find evidence o f the inhabitants o f sentry posts set up to w atch over the outerm ost reaches o f the new ly founded settlem ent, not the graves o f those who w ere m aking their way toward the Carpathian Basin. It is som ew hat more difficult to determ ine the nature o f two other sites located further to the east,

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one in M oldavia (Frumu§ica), the other beside the River Ingul (Subbotici). The chronology and other circum stances o f the finds are yet to be adequately ascertained, and these m ay be the remains o f groups which w ere either left behind, or chose to settle, or perhaps even returned from w anderings else­ where. In all events, these sites do not help solve the problem o f finding a location for the M agyar people prior to the Conquest o f their hom eland. The second direction in which renewed waves o f em erging data point is concerned with the individual types o f archaeological relics o f the conquering M agyars, the various ornam entation and techniques applied, one or other o f which can be found on each archaeological object found outside o f the Carpathian Basin. Here we are looking not for the antecedents o f individual stylistic elem ents, but for instances o f exact likeness. Recently, for the occa­ sion o f an exhibition in Hungary, the celebrated Sword o f Kiev, often used in com parison with H ungarian archaeological finds, underw ent a successful restoration in Budapest. Thus, much has been determ ined o f this, by now scrutinised, m asterpiece that “its blade m ay have been fashioned som ewhere in the region o f the Rhine, and its hilt end and cross-piece ornam ented by Viking m aster craftsm en, while its plate o f silver— decorated in very close conform ity to Hungarian taste— was in all probability attached to the hilt in Kiev” . In any event, it is a good example o f ju st how com plex a historical background can be revealed when an object is subjected to thorough exam i­ nation, and suggests that we can take for granted a sim ilar result even where such a thorough exam ination is not possible. In the case o f the Hungarianstyled silver plate on the Sword o f Kiev (see Plates 1/1 and 1/2), we still do not know where the craftsm an lived, for whom he was working, and to which workshop he belonged. Caches o f coins have already proved that as early as the decade following the Conquest, m erchants arrived from the region o f the Caspian Lake, and that such contacts were clearly reciprocal. Each object, as a piece o f m erchandise, m ay have travelled quite considerably, even as far as Sweden, while either voluntarily or o f necessity, craftsm en were also capable o f journeying very great distances. To what degree they would have then retained the M agyar style in their new location obviously depended partly on their new masters. For this reason, from the Caucasus to Scandinavia, certain individual objects displaying unm istakable Hungarian parallels, or the orna­ m entation to be found on such objects, can be regarded exclusively as pro­ viding clues to the history o f the given object itself, and not as sources o f information regarding a people’s history— although they m ay serve well to indicate the trading routes, connections and econom ic contacts o f the age. While we are unable to take a firm stand regarding the ethnic provenance o f these craftsm en, it is conceivable that am ong them there w ere not only M agyars, but also wandering craftsm en belonging to other peoples. This

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question m ay be further com plicated by the possibility that associates o f a craftsm an arriving in Hungary from a foreign workshop m ight have continued to m anufacture the same type o f object in their original w orkplace which their colleague who had em igrated to Hungary had introduced, and perhaps brought into general use in the Carpathian Basin. Under these circum stances, we can again obtain im portant inform ation regarding economic channels and trading contacts, but nothing about the m ovem ent o f peoples. The third group o f evidence is the m uch-debated body o f archaeological m aterial which has come to light at Bolshie Tigani, near to the confluence o f the Volga and Kama rivers. The finds uncovered here bear a very close resem ­ blance indeed to the Hungarian finds from the Carpathian Basin, and experts are in little doubt that the Bolshie Tigani burial site contains the rem ains o f Magyars. The sim ilarities are unquestionably striking, particularly as regards the partial burial o f horses. Unfortunately, however, the determ ination o f exact or partial correspondences has not been followed by a thorough analysis o f the dissim ilarities. There are no metal sabretache plates, for exam ple, while the three-leaved belt-end decoration is far rem oved from palm -leaf ornam en­ tation, and so on. There has scarcely been any debate with regard to the dating o f the cemetery. The m ost recent coin found in the graves was m inted in 900 A D , and evidently ended up in the earth a few years or decades after. Debate is centred around how we may reconstruct the history o f this sm all ethnic group which is regarded as Magyar. There is agreem ent that these people may be identical with those whose descendants were m et by Friar Julianus not far from the capital o f the Volga Bulghars in the year 1235, and whose name appears in an inscription from 1311 which we shall discuss later (see pp. 301-302). From this point on, however, there are two divergent opinions which have two diam etrically opposed sets o f precedents. There is some argum ent as to when this group o f M agyars arrived in Bolshie Tigani and the environs o f the River Kama. The first opinion states that it was from here that the M agyar people set out on their final peregrination ending in the occupation o f the ultim ate hom eland, while the group based around B olshie Tigani rem ained in the form er hom eland. The second opinion, m eanw hile, has it that this M agyar people drew back northward from the south, having gone their separate ways further south, with a section o f the M agyar people proceeding westw ard, and the other section, joining up with the Volga Bulghars as they withdrew northward, m igrating into the region o f the Volga and K am a confluence. It is clear that w hichever point o f view we choose to stand by, as far as the early history o f the M agyars and o f Eastern Europe in general is concerned, we have hit upon a question o f vital importance. Here it is only archaeological argu­ m ents that we are holding up for com parison. The argum ent w hich takes the

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view that the M agyars in the K ama region “rem ained in place”, in other words in the one-tim e Urheimat, thus reasons that the Bolshie Tigani culture was not isolated. Strikingly sim ilar burial practices can be inferred from earlier archae­ ological m aterial unearthed in the vicinity, nam ely that belonging to the K ushnarenkovo culture. This theory dates the beginning o f the Kushnarenkovo culture to the 6 th century, thus allowing the local antecedents o f the Bolshie Tigani culture to be traced backward. The burial sites at Kushnarenkovo, 50 km to the northw est o f Ufa, and Sterlitamak, some 130 km to the south o f Ufa, together with the archaeological culture which has come to be connected with them, have long occupied the m inds o f experts in the field. The type o f ceram ic objects unearthed at these sites can also be found on the far side o f the Urals, and for this reason some have traced the origin o f this culture to w estern Siberia. However, the uni­ formity and chronology o f this culture are still the subject o f dispute, although it can at least be said with certainty that it still existed in the 9th century. This is important because the territory it occupied is by and large identical to the territory where Ibn Fadlan encountered what he named the Bashkir people in the year 922. Bashkirian researchers wasted no time in identifying the Kushnarenkovo-Sterlitamak culture as Old Bashkirian. The remains o f the people who populate the 150 or so graves o f the Bolshie Tigani cemetery m ay thus actually reveal a connection with this territory. While the archaeological relics o f Bolshie Tigani reveal a link with the Kushnarenkovo finds, the testimony provided by the Bolshie Tarhani and Tankeyevka burial sites cannot be disregarded; these latter displaying an unequivocal connection to the Volga Bulghars. Bolshie Tarhani is located at the Kuybishev bend, and is the earliest known burial site o f the northbound Volga Bulghars, w hile the cem etery at Tankeyev­ ka is one o f those very few Volga Bulghar burial grounds lying on the right, or northern side o f the River Kama, and belonged to the garrison posted to the far side o f the Kama, the river which roughly constituted the Volga Bulghars’ line o f defence. Accurate dating o f the Bolshie Tarhani burial site is as­ sisted by caches o f coins, the m ost recent o f which m ay date from 787-789, and which can hardly have ended up in the ground m uch earlier than 800. M eanwhile, two dirhem coins found in the Tankeyevka cem etery can be respectively dated to 846 and 892-902. This m eans that the Volga Bulghars m ay have crossed the line o f the Kama in around the year 900. The Bolshie Tigani cem etery can be dated to betw een 850 and 920. The question is: where and when did those buried here come into contact with the Volga Bulghars? Given that the territory o f Bolshie Tigani was reached by the Volga Bulghars only after 850, then either contacts began at around this time, or the two groups arrived simultaneously. The first alternative can be ruled out on archaeological grounds, lin g u is tic arguments we will deal with sepa-

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rately later. The second alternative is, however, feasible. Throughout the territory bordered by the Volga, Kama, Cherem shan and M ayna, there are m ore than one thousand archaeological sites that can be dated to betw een 800 and 1200 AD , and these are all Volga Bulghar sites. This region is the m ost thoroughly explored territory in Russia in archaeological terms. W hile it is no sm all feat that archaeologists have succeeded in finding traces o f the M agyars in this ocean o f evidence, nowhere can there be found any archaeological relic which w ould prove to be not only connected to the finds o f Bolshie Tigani— as is the m aterial unearthed in Kushnarenkovo, B olshie Tarhani or Tankeyevka (entirely understandably if such links came about through m arriage)— but which m ight also be revealed as an antecedent o f Bolshie Tigani. The highly specialised horse burial revealed in the grave at Sterlitam ak is o f course worthy o f attention, but only because it m ay shed light on the origins o f this charac­ teristic form o f burial. The m atter o f funereal shrouds is also not w ithout interest. A great num ber o f such funereal shrouds or face coverings have been found in C onquest-pe­ riod M agyar cemeteries, where the position o f the eyes and the m outh is indi­ cated by pieces o f m etal sewn onto canvas, or som etim es leather (see Plate 11/2). In exceptional cases, as in R akam az-Strazsadom b (NE Hungary), the face m ask is m ade o f metal, with openings indicating the position o f the eyes and the m outh (see Plate II/l). Two types are known in the province o f the Rivers Volga and Kama. One is a gilded silver or plain silver cerem ent covering the entire face, and leaving openings for the eyes and m outh (such as that found in Bolshie Tigani), while another m erely places plates o f a precious metal sewn onto leather or canvas over the eyes and mouth. The variant leaving openings and the type where the eyes are covered reveal two differing spiritual beliefs. One “protects” the deceased against evil spirits w hich m ight break through openings, while the other “eternalises” the deceased, setting the face in perpetuity. The theory that these represent ancient Finno-U grian or Ugrian burial rites, which the M agyars brought with them from the region o f the Kama, scarcely w ithstands close scrutiny. Such funereal shrouds and masks are far m ore widespread, and cannot be attached to any particular ethnic group. Even if plates such as those designed to be placed over the eyes and the m outh were taken separately in an attem pt to prove such an ancient connection, the problem w ould still rem ain that this type appears in the territory o f the Urals only in the 8 th century, in the later Lom ovato culture. It is quite im possible, therefore, that we are dealing here w ith some kind o f “ancient” Finno-U grian phenom enon, as was claim ed by some scholars. A rchaeological arguments, therefore, do not support the theory that the M agyars em erged from this region. We shall, however, return to the question in connection with M agyar groups left behind in the east (see C hapter XV).

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The burial site o f the M agyars o f Bolshie Tigani does nevertheless provide us with one other piece o f testimony. If taken to be the resting place o f M agyars who m igrated northw ard from the south or southw est together with Volga Bulghars in the 8 th century, then this w ould suggest that the burial custom s o f the M agyar people had already become fairly uniform by the tim e the M agyar groups separated. A parallel phenom enon was the preservation o f self-designation in both groups (see pp. 297-308). If, however, this can be established, as it m ost certainly can, then once again we find ourselves facing the problem o f why no M agyar archaeological evidence can be found in the one-tim e Etelkoz and Levedia regions, or indeed anyw here the M agyar people dwelt in earlier times. At the same time, the theory that the archaeological culture o f the M agyars took shape in the Carpathian Basin itself also falls by the wayside. In order to exam ine the archaeological culture o f the M agyar people, we m ust briefly survey the archaeological antecedents in the Carpathian Basin. Although archaeological evidence, and even inscriptions, o f Celts, Romans, Huns, Gepidae, Longobardi and other peoples can be found in great abundance in the C arpathian Basin, from the point o f view o f the M agyar people only the Avars who im m ediately proceeded them in the Carpathian Basin have any direct significance. Rather than the archaeological relics o f the Avars them selves, it is more appropriate to speak here o f the archaeological relics o f the Avar period, since in this way we use term inology w hich does not attach such relics to a specific people. As a result o f the m ost recent research we can divide the period in question into four subperiods: (1) Early Avar period; (2) transitional period; (3) Late Avar period; (4) closing phase o f the Avar period. In the year 567, the king o f the Longobardi form ed an alliance with the Avars as they arrived from the east, inflicting an annihilating defeat on the Gepidae who then lived in the eastern half o f the Carpathian Basin. Sub­ sequently recognising their strategic position, the Longobardi w ithdrew to northern Italy after Easter in 568 to the region o f Spoleto, Benvenuto and to Lom bardy which bears their name to this day. The Avars follow ed in their footsteps into the Carpathian Basin, and with them arrived a new archaeologi­ cal culture. This lasted until the 640s, when the Bulghars o f K huvrat from the east, and the Slavic tribes o f D alm atia from the southwest, joining forces with the subject peoples o f the em pire, dealt a decisive defeat on the Avar Empire. It was at this tim e that the characteristic archaeological culture o f the early Avar period came to a close, and the relics o f several subsequent decades reveal transitional forms. A round 670, the Khazars overthrew the O noghur-Bulghar em pire o f Khu­ vrat, after which one group oftthe Onoghurs m igrated to the Balkans, while

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another departed for the territory o f the Avar Empire. The O noghur chieftain was elevated to a high rank in the Avar Em pire, and archaeological rem ains o f his entourage can be found separately along the banks o f the R iver Sio and in the M ezoseg region. A t the end o f this m ajor internal transform ation, i.e. around the year 700, pow er was once again consolidated in the Avar Em pire, leading to the flow ­ ering o f an archaeological culture w hich we shall call the Late Avar p e­ riod. C harles the Great (Charlem agne) and the Frankish Em pire launched

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