Narratives on the Wandering of the Nomadic Hungarians

Absztrakt

In modern Hungarian archaeological research it is stated as a fact that pre-conquest Hungarians did not live in the southern parts of the European steppe before the ninth century, although from the references given in the literature it seems obvious that a significant part of Russian authors represent the view that Ugric-speaking people took part in the Hunnic and Oguric migrations from Western Siberia to Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Since the Hungarian language belongs to the Ugric branch, the view of certain Russian authors is particularly important for Hungarian scholarship. This theory was formulated first by M. I. Artamonov in 1962, who was a contemporary of Gyula Németh, who in his well-known monograph – A honfoglaló magyarság kialakulása/The formation of the conquering Hungarians, 1930 – assumed that Hungarians arrived in Europe as part of the Onogur and Ogur migration from Western Siberia. Do the results of modern archaeology contradict such a narrative, or is it possible that the narrative of Gyula Németh and others is still a valid and relevant theory in the reconstruction of Hungarian origin and early Hungarian history?