The Eastern Relations of Early Hungarian Folk-music

• Published in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
• Main Author: Szabolcsi, Benedict
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1935
• Subjects: General Arts and Humanities; Cultural Studies; ural mountains
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0035869x00087189; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0035869X00087189

The latest scientific opinions concerning the origin of the Magyars may be summed up as follows. The primary home of the Magyars as an Ugro-Finnish tribe was probably in Eastern Europe between the Volga and the Ural Mountains. Here they may have lived with kindred Ugro-Finnish peoples, the ancestors of their near relatives, the Ostyaks and Voguls, and of their more distant relatives, the Finns, Lapps, Mordwins, Zyryäns, and Tsheremis, about 2500–2000 b.c. From there they drifted eastward. In the fifth century a.d. they moved south-westward in close connection with several peoples of the Turkish race, chiefly with the Bolgars, Sabeers, “Blue” Turks, and Khazars, absorbing a considerable Turkish stratum, to become organized into a nation, or rather an alliance of several tribes, on the territory of South-Eastern Europe of to-day. About the year 800 they were in the region of the Caucasus, then on the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the last years of the ninth century the Magyars, under the pressure of kindred tribes, proceeded westward and occupied their present home in the basin of the Carpathians.