At least some of them! It is known that Magyars, the ancestors of Hungarians arrived in Pannonia, right at the end of the 9th century AD, more precisely in the year 896. There they found Romanians and Slavs who had been living there for a long time, especially the Romanians and their Daco-Illyrian ancestors who had lived there for thousands of years, from the 6-5 millennia BC, being the direct descendants of the Neolithic population that came from Anatolia, almost 9000 years ago. Archaeological, linguistic, historical and, more recently, archaeogenetic evidence amplify the historical data.
Constantin C. Giurescu, in his famous work Istoria Românilor (History of Romanians), shows that upon their arrival in eastern Europe from Central Asia, Hungarians settled after a while in Atelkuz (Hungarian Etelköz), today’s Bugeac. Then Giurescu continued: “In Atelkuz the Hungarians could not stay for a long time. In the year 894, a war broke out between Tsar Simeon of the Bulgars and the Byzantines and the latter, turned to the Hungarians and asked them for support. Indeed, the Hungarians attacked the Bulgars in the same year and defeated them in three battles, occupying the very capital, which forced Simeon to make peace with the Byzantines. He then decided to take revenge against those who had not only defeated him, but had also robbed him of a part of the country. So, he concluded an alliance with the Pechenegs, the enemies of the Hungarians, and together they attacked the camp of Atelkuz. Part of the Hungarian army was missing, having just been taken out on an expedition to the north. Simeon together with the Pechenegs were therefore able to easily defeat the remaining troops and horribly devastated their camp. When the Hungarians saw the disaster, many of their own had already perished, others had been taken prisoners, a large part of the herds were lost so they decided to leave Atelkuz and look for a new place to settle” (C. C. Giurescu, Istoria Românilor, vol. 1, page 290, Bucharest, Fundația regală, 1946).
For his part, Roesler in his work Romänische Studien (Leipzig, 1871), recounting the same episode of the history of the Hungarians, shows that practically here in Atelkuz, the attackers killed or took captive the women and children who had remained in that camp. This detail must be corroborated with the results of archaeogenetic research done even by Hungarian specialists, which show that from the very first generation, at least on the maternal line, the Hungarians were already mixed with the locals. Neparáczki, et al (2018) show that the Ugric genetic contributions to present day Hungarian is really negligible, about 0-5%. Although the 9th century nomadic Magyars subjugated the inhabitants of the Carpathian Basin, they left virtually no mark on the genetic pool of Slavic and Germanic people living there. Several DNA studies were conducted in this matter. In this article, the authors state “Modern Hungarians have very small Asian components pointing at small contribution from the Conquerors. Of the 289 modern Hungarian mitogenomes 272 are newly deposited”. One should point out to this data since the Hungarians, feeling a crisis of legitimacy, had several attempts making up all kinds of theories to free themselves from this complex with a view persuade others as well, but their theories can be easily dismantled if one knows some essential details about their history and about the territories they invaded at the end of the 9th century and also after that. They did the same with Roesler’s theory, a theory which claims that Romanians would have been formed as a nation south of the Danube and would have arrived in Transylvania starting at the end of the 12th century, although the archaeological, archaeogenetic, and linguistic evidence tell a completely different story. May I just remind the readers that Romanian toponyms and hydronyms are attested in the oldest Hungarian documents. In addition, Hungarian has a lot of lexical borrowings from the old and newer Romanian language, as it also has from the Slavic languages, while the Finno-Ugric lexical fund of the Hungarian language is actually quite small. As a linguist, I would like to add that all the macro-hydronyms in Hungary, as well as in Transylvania, in fact in all of Romania, as well as in the adjacent areas are of Proto-Indo-European origin and attested since ancient times from Herodotus onwards, whose etymology is discussed in the Etymological Dictionary of the Romanian Language, published last fall, signed by the author of these lines. Therefore, these macro-hydronyms are inherited from the Thraco-Dacian, thus being an unbeatable proof that Pannonia and Transylvania were not unpopulated the way the Hungarian historians and politicians would have the world believe.
Recently, a very interesting article appeared in the journal Mediterranean Archeology and Archaeometry, entitled ‘Inscription on a Naxian-Style Sphinx Statue from Potaissa Deciphered as a Poem in Dactylic Meter’, signed by Peter Z. Revesz, professor at Nebraska University. The purpose of the article is to ‘decipher’ the inscription on the statue of a winged sphinx with a female head, similar to the one from Naxos. The statue in question is supposed to have been discovered in Potaissa, a Dacian city, present day Turda, Romania, at that time in the Roman province of Dacia. Legend has it that it was discovered in the 19th century by Jόszef Kemény, but no one has ever seen this statue, only a drawing of it where the inscription appears. The whole story began in February 1847, when the Leipzig newspaper Illustrierte Zeitung published the inscription and a drawing of the statue. No one knows where the statue with the inscription may have disappeared. As part of our attempt to shed light in this matter we need to mention that Jόsef Kemény was known since the 19th century as a notorious forger. He later spread the word that the statue was lost during the War of Independence and since then the original ‘artifact’ was never found. Could it really be the case? I have to mention that since the 19th century, Martyn Rady in this article shows that some 52 of the documents discovered by him are actually forgeries, and more recent research shows that five of them are, in fact, authentic, while 47 of them are still considered to be forgeries. The forgeries of Baron Kemény are analyzed in detail by Martyn Rady in the article ‘The Forgeries of Baron József Kemény’ (in The Slavonic and East European Review). However, some of the Baron’s forgeries did end up as object of academic study where an invented inscription on a non-existent statue ‘confirms’ the existence of the ‘Proto-Magyars/Proto-Hungarians’ in Potaissa, in the year 270 AD, which is preposterous. If one had not known that the baron was a notorious forger, they might have ended up taking it all for real. Meanwhile, the whole story of the sphinx had been forgotten, as the vast majority of Hungarian and foreign researchers showed that the statue was in fact but a fabrication.
Nowadays, Levente Nagy, a professor at the Faculty of Romance Studies, ELTE University (in Budapest), commenting on professor Revesz article, shows that there is a big problem with this inscription and he states: “Here is the secret, because József Kemény was the greatest forger of the nineteenth century. If there is a source that we only know from him, which has survived only in his copy, it is 99.9% certain that it is a forgery”. The statement was made in an interview (January, 2024), published on the Hungarian-language website 24.hu. He further adds “He was a master of jokes. Although there were some very reputable researchers who believed the statue to be genuine, they did not investigate the Kemény statue sufficiently”. He also states “I don’t think we should fetishize foreign journals so much, because we devalue our national journals. I am not sure this study would have been published in this form in a Hungarian journal of history, archeology or linguistics”. I really appreciate the scientific probity of Professor Levente Nagy. We cannot help but asking ourselves again: Did the American professor of Hungarian origin not know these details?
Let’s come back and discuss some details of this inscription. It is an inscription consisting of 19 letters written, according to Revesz, in an ancient Greek alphabet, an alphabet that had not been used in the Greek world at that time for hundreds of years. However, the alphabet in question is also very similar to the Etruscan one or other ancient alphabets of the Mediterranean region. If the alleged inscription from Potaissa dates from about AD 270 as we are told, then why did they not use the classical Greek alphabet in use at the time or even the Roman alphabet since it was an inscription from a Roman province. The author tries to steamroll us with all sorts of convoluted links that I do not intend to discuss here. Anyway the article is worth reading in order to understand what lurks in the minds of those who want to promote a fake or a fake idea at all costs.The text is to be read from right to left, because that is the only way Professor Revesz’s decipherment makes sense. The original inscription looks like this: Ν Α Λ Σ Ρ Α Σ Ε Ρ Ε Ι Θ Ι Τ Α Μ Ι Α Μ Ι, read from left to right, as it appears on the statue, but read from right to left it looks like this: Ι Μ Α Ι Μ Α Τ Ι Θ Ι Ε Ρ Ε Σ Α Ρ Σ Λ Α Ν. Note that here the letters are rendered in the classical Greek alphabet, not as they appear in the ‘original text’ on the statue.The author of the article divides the inscription into five segments, as follows: im[e] ‘behold’, imat ‘worship’, ith ‘here’, hiere ‘holy’ arslan ‘lion’ which in today’s Hungarian sounds something like this: ‘Íme ímádd: itt hires oroszlán’, the English translation of which would be ‘Lo, behold, worship: here is the holy lion’.
Revesz shows that the supposed ‘Proto-Hungarian’ form ΙΕΡΕΣ can be associated with Greek ἱερός/ hierós ‘holy’, without overtly saying that it would be a loanword from Old Greek in ‘Proto-Hungarian’, although this is what it is implied. Moreover, it could not be otherwise if the two forms are identical in meaning and almost identical as form. As far as I know there is no such term similar to the Greek ἱερός having roughly the same meaning in any known language, where ‘Proto-Hungarian’ could have borrowed it from. He also shows that the present-day Hungarian form hires is considered to be of unknown origin, but he associates it with the supposed form from the ‘Proto-Hungarian language’. At a subliminal level, we are led to believe that the so-called Proto-Hungarian form has the same origin as the one in present-day Hungarian, even though in present-day Hungarian this word means ‘famous’, not ‘holy’. Yes, of course the meaning could have changed, but we are not told how the form landed in present-day Hungarian, it is only hinted that those ‘Proto-Hungarians’ could have lived in Potaissa until the Middle Ages Hungarians arrived there, sometime in the 12th century, while, according to the Roesler’s theory, the ‘Romanized’ Dacians who were a lot more numerous than the putative ‘Proto-Hungarians’, took refuge south of Danube river, with the Aurelian retreat, at about the same time when the ‘Proto-Hungarians’ were busy making the famous statue. On the other hand, the word in question had no way to be borrowed into Hungarian language from medieval Greek, especially since they simply have quite different meanings. The term for ‘saint’ in Hungarian is szent, considered to be a loanword from the Latin sanctus, but most probably it was borrowed from Romanian sânt ‘holy’. Hungarian language contacts with Greek culture in the Middle Ages are almost nil, although at the beginning there were certain attempts to Christianize the Hungarians in the Byzantine rite. Obviously, we have here a logical fracture that turns Revesz’s interpretation on its head. In other words, the Hungarians who came at the end of the 9th century, took this word from those of the 3rd century? But how else? It seems obvious that the forger missed these details. So even if we don’t know it’s a fake, this detail is definitely puzzling.
Therefore the hoax of a famous 19th century forger proven to be a bad joke of Baron Kemeny is still being taken as undisputed evidence by some researchers, in this case in America, although those from today’s Hungary, as professor Nagy made it plain, would not stoop to it.
REFERENCES
Csösz, Aranka, et al (8 authors) (2016) – Maternal Genetic Ancestry and Legacy of 10th Century AD Hungarians, Scientific Reports, 1-13, 16th September.
Giurescu, Constantin C. (1937) – Istoria Românilor (History of Romanians), Fundația Regală pentru Literatură și Artă, Bucharest.
Rösler, Robert – Romänische Studien: Untersuchugen zur älteren Geschichte Rumäniens, Duncker & Humboldt, Leipzig, 1871.
Rady, Martyn (1993) – The Forgeries of Baron József Kemény (in The Slavonic and East European Review, Jan., 1993, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 102- 125).
Pamjav, Horolma, et al (5 authors) (2022) – The paternal genetic legacy of Hungarian speaking Rétköz (Hungary) and Váh valley (Slovakia) populations, Frontiers in Genetics, 17 October.
Revesz, Peter Z. (2023) – Inscription on a Naxian-Style Sphinx Statue from Potaissa Deciphered as a Poem in Dactylic Meter’, Mediterranean Archeology and Archaeometry, vol. 23, no. 3, pp 1-15.
Tömöry, Gyöngyvér, et al (10 authors) (2007) – Comparison of Maternal Lineage and Biogeographical Analyses of Ancient and Modern Hungarian Populations, AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, 134:354-368.
Neparáczki, Endre, et al (13 authors) (2018) – Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of central-Inner Asian and Srubnaya origin in the conquering Hungarians, PLOS ONE, October 18, 1-24.
Vinereanu, Mihai (2023) – Dicționarul Etymologic al Limbii Române 2 vols., Editura Uranus, Bucharest.
