Man, Past and Present by Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (free reads .TXT) 📕

Then came the opportunity of the Hunagars (Hungarians), who, after advancing from the Urals to the Volga (550 A.D.), had reached the Danube about 886. Here they were invited to the aid of the Germanic king Arnulf, threatened by a formidable coalition of the western Slavs under the redoubtable Zventibolg, a nominal Christian who would enter the church on horseback followed by his wild retainers, and threaten the priest at the altar with the lash. In the upland Transylvanian valleys the Hunagars had been joined by eight of the derelict Khazar tribes, amongst whom were the Megers or Mogers, whose name under the form of Magyar was eventually extended to the united Hunagar-Khazar nation. Under their renowned king Arpad, son of Almuth, they first overthrew Zventibolg, and then with the help of the surviving Avars reduced the surrounding Slav populations. Thus towards the close of the ninth century was founded in Pannonia the present kingdom of Hungary, in which were absorbed all the kindred Mongol and Finno-Turki elements that still survived from the two previous Mongolo-Turki empires, established in the same region by the Huns under Attila (430-453), and by the Avars under Khagan Bayan (562-602).

After reducing the whole of Pannonia and ravaging Carinthia and Friuli, the Hunagars raided Bavaria and Italy (899-900), imposed a tribute on the feeble successor of Arnulf (910), and pushed their plundering expeditions as far west as Alsace, Lorraine, and Burgundy, everywhere committing atrocities that recalled the memory of Attila's savage hordes. Trained riders, archers and javelin-throwers from infancy, they advanced to the attack in numerous companies following hard upon each other, avoiding close quarters, but wearing out their antagonists by the persistence of their onslaughts. They were the scourge and terror of Europe, and were publicly proclaimed by the Emperor Otto I. (955) the enemies of God and humanity.

This period of lawlessness and savagery was closed by the conversion of Saint Stephen I. (997-1038), after which the Magyars became gradually assimilated in type and general culture, but not in speech, to the western nations[733]. Their harmonious and highly cultivated language still remains a typical member of the Ural-Altaic family, reflecting in its somewhat composite vocabulary the various Finno-Ugric and Turki elements (Ugrians and Permians from the Urals, Volga Finns, Turki Avars and Khazars), of which the substratum of the Magyar nation is constituted[734].

"The modern Magyars," says Peisker, "are one of the most varied race-mixtures on the face of the earth, and one of the two chief Magyar types of today--traced to the Arpad era [end of ninth century] by tomb-findings--is dolichocephalic with a narrow visage. There we have before us Altaian origin, Ugrian speech and Indo-European type combined[735]."

Politically the Magyars continue to occupy a position of vital importance in Eastern Europe, wedged in between the northern and southern Slav peoples, and thus presenting an insurmountable obstacle to the aspirations of the Panslavist dreamers. The fiery and vigorous Magyar nationality, a compact body of about 8,000,000 (1898), holds the boundless plains watered by the Middle Danube and the Theiss, and thus permanently separates the Chechs, Moravians, and Slovaks of Bohemia and the northern Carpathians from their kinsmen, the Yugo-Slavs ("Southern Slavs") of Servia and the other now Slavonised Balkan lands. These Yugo-Slavs are in their turn severed by the Rumanians of Neo-Latin speech from their northern and eastern brethren, the Ruthenians, Poles, Great and Little Russians. Had the Magyars and Rumanians adopted any of the neighbouring Slav idioms, it is safe to say that, like the Ugrian Bulgarians, they must have long ago been absorbed in the surrounding Panslav world, with consequences to the central European nations which it would not be difficult to forecast. Here we have a striking illustration of the influence of language in developing and preserving the national sentiment, analogous in many respects to that now witnessed on a larger scale amongst the English-speaking populations on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Austral lands. From this point of view the ethnologist may unreservedly accept Ehrenreich's trenchant remark that "the nation stands and falls with its speech[736]."

FOOTNOTES:

[671] Natural History of Man, 1865 ed. pp. 185-6.

[672] Science of Language, 1879, II. p. 190.

[673] The Heart of a Continent, 1896, p. 118.

[674] O. Peschel, Races of Man, 1894, p. 380.

[675] See Ch. de Ujfalvy, Les Aryens, etc., 1896, p. 25. Reference should perhaps be also made to E. H. Parker's theory (Academy, Dec. 21, 1895) that the Turki cradle lay, not in the Altai or Altun-dagh ("Golden Mountains") of North Mongolia, but 1000 miles farther south in the "Golden Mountains" (Kin-shan) of the present Chinese province of Kansu. But the evidence relied on is not satisfactory, and indeed in one or two important instances is not evidence at all.

[676] J. B. Bury, English Historical Rev., July, 1897.

[677] L'Anthropologie, VI. No. 3.

[678] T. Peisker, "The Asiatic Background," Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. I. 1911, p. 354.

[679] Academy, Dec. 21, 1895, p. 548.

[680] "Budini Gelonion urbem ligneam habitant; juxta Thyssagetae Turcaeque vastas silvas occupant, alunturque venando" (I. 19, p. 27 of Leipzig ed. 1880).

[681] "Dein Tanain amnem gemino ore influentem incolunt Sarmatae ... Tindari, Thussagetae, Tyrcae, usque ad solitudines saltuosis convallibus asperas, etc." (Bk. VIII. 7, Vol. I. p. 234 of Berlin ed. 1886). The variants Turcae and Tyrcae are noteworthy, as indicating the same vacillating sound of the root vowel (u and y = ue) that still persists.

[682] Not only was the usurper Nadir Shah a Turkoman of the Afshar tribe but the present reigning family belongs to the rival clan of Qajar Turkomans long settled in Khorasan, the home of their Parthian forefathers.

[683] Of 59 Turkomans the hair was generally a dark brown; the eyes brown (45) and light grey (14); face orthognathous (52) and prognathous (7); eyes mostly not oblique; cephalic index 68.69 to 81.76, mean 75.64; dolicho 28, sub-dolicho 18, 9 mesati, 4 sub-brachy. Five skulls from an old graveyard at Samarkand were also very heterogeneous, cephalic index ranging from 77.72 to 94.93. This last, unless deformed, exceeds in brachycephaly "le celebre crane d'un Slave vende qu'on cite dans les manuels d'anthropologie" (Th. Volkov, L'Anthropologie, 1897, pp. 355-7).

[684] Quoted by W. Crooke, who points out that "the opinion of the best Indian authorities seems to be gradually turning to the belief that the connection between Jats and Rajputs is more intimate than was formerly supposed" (The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Calcutta, 1896, III. p. 27).

[685] Virgil's "indomiti Dahae" (Aen. VIII. 728): possibly the Dehavites (Dievi) of Ezra iv. 9.

[686] Herodotus, Vol. I. p. 413.

[687] From Pers. [Arabic Symbol], dih, dah, village (Parsi dahi).

[688] Les Aryens, etc., p. 68 sq.

[689] De Bello Persico, passim.

[690] Crooke, op. cit. IV. p. 221.

[691] The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 1892; The People of India, 1908.

[692] Discovered in 1889 by N. M. Yadrintseff in the Orkhon valley, which drains to the Selenga affluent of Lake Baikal. The inscriptions, one in Chinese and three in Turki, cover the four sides of a monument erected by a Chinese emperor to the memory of Kyul-teghin, brother of the then reigning Turki Khan Bilga (Mogilan). In the same historical district, where stand the ruins of Karakoram--long the centre of Turki and later of Mongol power--other inscribed monuments have also been found, all apparently in the same Turki language and script, but quite distinct from the glyptic rock carvings of the Upper Yenisei river, Siberia. The chief workers in this field were the Finnish archaeologists, J. R. Aspelin, A. Snellman and Axel O. Heikel, the results of whose labours are collected in the Inscriptions de l'Jenissei recueillies et publiees par la Societe Finlandaise d'Archeologie, Helsingfors, 1889; and Inscriptions de l'Orkhon, etc., Helsingfors, 1892.

[693] "La source d'ou est tiree l'origine de l'alphabet turc, sinon immediatement, du moins par intermediaire, c'est la forme de l'alphabet semitique qu'on appelle arameenne" (Inscriptions de l'Orkhon dechiffrees, Helsingfors, 1894).

[694] See Klaproth, Tableau Historique de l'Asie, p. 116 sq.

[695] They are the Onoi, the "Tens," who at this time dwelt beyond the Scythians of the Caspian Sea (Dionysius Periegetes).

[696] It still persists, however, as a tribal designation both amongst the Kirghiz and Uzbegs, and in 1885 Potanin visited the Yegurs of the Edzin-gol valley in south-east Mongolia, said to be the last surviving representatives of the Uigur nation (H. Schott, "Zur Uigurenfrage," in Abhandl. d. k. Akad. d. Wiss., Berlin, 1873, pp. 101-21).

[697] Ch. de Ujfalvy, Les Aryens au Nord et au Sud de l'Hindou-Kouch, p. 28.

[698] "Notes on the Physical Anthropology of Chinese Turkestan and the Pamirs," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLII. 1912.

[699] "The Uzi of the Greeks are the Gozz [Ghuz] of the Orientals. They appear on the Danube and the Volga, in Armenia, Syria, and Chorasan, and their name seems to have been extended to the whole Turkoman [Turki] race" [by the Arab writers]; Gibbon, Ch. LVII.

[700] Who take their name from a mythical Uz-beg, "Prince Uz" (beg in Turki = a chief, or hereditary ruler).

[701] Both of these take their name, not from mythical but from historical chiefs:--Kazan Khan of the Volga, "the rival of Cyrus and Alexander," who was however of the house of Jenghiz, consequently not a Turk, like most of his subjects, but a true Mongol (ob. 1304); and Noga, the ally and champion of Michael Palaeologus against the Mongols marching under the terrible Holagu almost to the shores of the Bosporus.

[702] Gibbon, Chap. LVII. By the "Turkish nation" is here to be understood the western section only. The Turks of Mawar-en-Nahar and Kashgaria (Eastern Turkestan) had been brought under the influences of Islam by the first Arab invaders from Persia two centuries earlier.

[703] "Die Stellung der Tuerken in Europa," in Geogr. Zeitschrift, Leipzig, 1897, Part 5, p. 250 sq.

[704] "Ethnographic Researches," edited by N. E. Vasilofsky for the Imperial Geogr. Soc. 1896, quoted in Nature, Dec. 3, 1896, p. 97.

[705] A. Erman, Reise um die Erde, 1835, Vol. III. p. 51.

[706] Quoted by Peschel, Races of Man, p. 383.

[707] M. Balkashin in Izvestia Russ. Geogr. Soc., April, 1883.

[708] Kara = "Black," with reference to the colour of their round felt tents.

[709] On the obscure relations of these Hordes to the Kara-Kirghiz and prehistoric Usuns some light has been thrown by the investigations of N. A. Aristov, a summary of whose conclusions is given by A. Ivanovski in Centralblatt fuer Anthropologie, etc., 1896, p. 47.

[710] Although officially returned as Muhammadans of the Sunni sect, Levchine tells as that it is hard to say whether they are Moslem, Pagan (Shamanists), or Manichean, this last because they believe God has made good angels called Mankir and bad angels called Nankir. Two of these spirits sit invisibly on the shoulders of every person from his birth, the good on the right, the bad on the left, each noting his actions in their respective books, and balancing accounts at his death. It is interesting to compare these ideas with those of the Uzbeg prince who explained to Lansdell that at the resurrection, the earth being flat, the dead grow out of it like grass; then God divides the good from the bad, sending these below and those above. In heaven nobody dies, and every wish is gratified; even the wicked creditor may seek out his debtor, and in lieu of the money owing may take over the equivalent in his good deeds, if there be any, and thus be saved (Through Central Asia, 1887, p. 438).

[711] See especially his Reiseberichte u. Briefe aus den Jahren 1845-49, p. 401 sq.; and Versuch einer Koibalischen u. Karagassischen Sprachlehre, 1858, Vol. I. passim. But cf. J. Szinnyei, Finnisch-ugrische Sprachwissenschaft, 1910, pp. 19-20.

[712] Peschel, Races of Man, p. 386.

[713] In a suggestive