Magna Hungaria

The academic controversy over whether Magna Hungaria is actually the original home of the Magyars or whether they settled there during their westward migration from the West Siberian Plain is doomed to remain unanswered.567 According to a different scientific hypothesis, Magna Hungaria is neither the original home of the Magyars nor their first permanent stop on their long journey towards Europe.

According to another academic hypothesis, the name of at least one Magyar tribe, probably that of the Gyarmat, is linked to the name of a Bashkir population group, the Yurmatï.9 Traditional funeral rites, notably the use of death masks, as well as the presence of parts of horses in the tombs, could be reconstructed thanks to the discovery of a cemetery dating from the 9th or 10th century and located at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama, near present-day Bolšie Tigany .

It is interesting to note that the two uses mentioned above are also found in Hungarian burial sites located in the Carpathian basin and dating from the 10th century.

An important point of reference for historians is that of the culture of Prohorovo, which, according to available archaeological data, certainly spread to the present-day region of Bashkiria around 400 BC.

The migration of the Huns towards the west forced many population groups established in Western Siberia to flee towards Europe between 350 and 400 AD.

Subsequently, the Sabirs, Avars, Onogurs, Khazars, as well as other Turkic peoples kept the grasslands of the Eastern Europe more or less continuously for several centuries.

Abu Saʿīd Gardēzī, a Persian geographer and historian active during the first half of the 11th century, ventured to consider the Magyars as being “a branch of the Turks” , a form of description taken up by Leo VI the Wise and Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.

Certain particularly atavistic characteristics of the songs Hungarian folklore shows similarities with those of the Chuvashes, a Turkic ethnic group established mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Based on these characteristics, it is concluded that the Magyars were closely related to the Turks during the long period that they spent in the Pontic steppes.

(en) Denis Sinor, « The outlines of Hungarian prehistory », International Commission for a History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind, vol.