Possible Uyghur origin of the Hungarian Árpád dynasty

[Dunai]

There is much evidence that Turks had a significant impact in organizing and leading Old Hungarians, and in the past years two Hungarian history academy members (B. Szabó János, Sudár Balázs) have seen the quite striking similarity between Ügyek, the father of Álmos, who was the first leader of a Hungarian state, in Etelköz, and father to Árpád, the first Grand Prince of Hungary, and Üde (Wujie Qaghan), the last emperor of the Uyghur Empire. The similarities are striking: Ügyek lived between the second half of the 8th and first half of the 9th century, while Üde has died in the second half of the 9th century. We also know from early chronicles that Álmos, the son of Ügyek, was originating from a kingly family, however Old Hungarians never had a state or king before. We also know that Árpád and his father Álmos didn't originate from one of the Hétmagyar (7 Hungarian tribes), but had the needed know-how and leadership vision and qualities to establish the first Hungarian state, in Etelköz, and later in the Carpathian Basin. It was very often in the steppe world when a confederation of tribes have asked a foreigner of kingly origin to be their ruler. We know that the Uyghur Empire have disintegrated by 850, just little bit before the Hétmagyar and another 3 Kabar tribes have moved into the Etelköz, and founded a state there. Well, it is obvious that they were searching for someone from a famous dynasty with the needed know-how to rule them and help them organize this new state. This was Álmos who could've been the son of the last Uyghur emperor, Üge-Ügyek, and he might have fled westwards from his devastated empire. Üge belonged to the Ädiz clan, which in origin seems to not have been Uyghur, but one of the Tiele people, who were also Turkic. This theory would definitely explain the quick success of the Hungarians to form two states, both East and West to the Carpathian Mountains in just 50 years after leaving the Ural region. Somebody, Álmos, with his knowledge and pedigree to lead, that he could have learned in the upper echelons of the Uyghur Empire must have been the decisive ingredient for Hungarians to not disintegrate and remain but of footnote in history, like with most steppe people, but to achieve an important role in European history to this day.

[Dunai]

Magyarul beszélőknek:
https://azeletmegminden.hu/023-sudar...n8w5hwAEgvVGi8

[Kökény]

Amúgy nekem már egy ideje feltünt, hogy kettejük között kísértetiesen sok a párhuzam.

[Aileron]

Interesting...

[Pribislav]

Stears on appliances.

[Dunai]

Interesting...

It's even more interesting that Uyghurs seem to consider Hungarians as some distant cousins, at least based on what a member of the World Uyghur Congress speaks here:


Even if Modern Hungarians have no more connections with Central Asia today, but based on recent genetic studies, and also Medieval chronicle digging and comparing, the people who came into the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century seem to have been related to Central Asian Turks to a certain degree.

[oszkar07]

It's even more interesting that Uyghurs seem to consider Hungarians as some distant cousins, at least based on what a member of the World Uyghur Congress speaks here:
Even if Modern Hungarians have no more connections with Central Asia today, but based on recent genetic studies, and also Medieval chronicle digging and comparing, the people who came into the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century seem to have been related to Central Asian Turks to a certain degree.

Yes but its quite possible those conquerors were not Hungarian speakers but rather political and military elite whom took leadership of the nation.

In any case according to linked study below modern Hungarians can carry very small % of genetics from the various Central Asian peoples whom were either part of the conquerors or other central asian immigrants of the time.


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...0205920#sec019
Relation of the Conquerors to modern Hungarians

Modern Hungarians are genetically very similar to their European neighbors [89] nevertheless they contain some 3–5% east Eurasian components traceable with uniparental markers [29,90,91], (Fig 6). Genome wide SNP data also detected the presence of 4% east Asian component in modern Hungarians [92] with an approximate time of admixture dated to the first millennium AD, corresponding to the invasions of Huns, Onogur-Bulgars, Avars and Hungarian Conquerors from the Asian steppes, which are completely in line with our results.

Thus genetic heritage of the Conquerors definitely persists in modern Hungarians, but they contributed to less than 10% of the recent Hungarian gene pool, as they were not alone to bring in east Eurasian lineages. This dilution could have started with the conquer, as contemporary local population size in the Carpathian Basin was estimated larger than that of the Conquerors [93,94]. Anthropological data also have the same implication, as the Conquerors differed from the subsequent Árpádian Age population, which was more similar to preconquest Avar Age populations [95,96]. According to early anthropological studies people of the Avar and Conquest age Carpathian Basin were very heterogeneous and immigrants arrived in several phases between the 5th and 9th centuries [97], which in our view admixed with the autochthonous population, of which genetic data are still barely available between the Bronze Age and Conquest period.

The large genetic diversity of the Conquerors which seemingly assembled from multiple ethnic sources and their relative low proportion, having no lasting effect on Hungarian ethnogenesis, raises doubts about the Conqueror origin of the Hungarian language. Even if our samples represent mainly the Conqueror elite, the “elite dominance” linguistic hypothesis seems inconsistent when it presumes that the same Turkic elite was first readily assimilated linguistically by Finno-Ugric groups, and then it assimilated locals of the Carpathian Basin. Turkic character of the Conquerors is indicated by their “Turk” denomination in contemporary sources as well as Turkic tribal names and person names of tribe leaders of the conquest-period [98]. Above data infer that preconquest presence of the language in the Carpathian Basin, is an equally grounded hypothesis, as had been proposed by several scientists (a summary in English is given in [99]).

[Dunai]

Yes but its quite possible those conquerors were not Hungarian speakers but rather political and military elite whom took leadership of the nation.

In any case according to linked study below modern Hungarians can carry very small % of genetics from the various Central Asian peoples whom were either part of the conquerors or other central asian immigrants of the time.


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...0205920#sec019
Relation of the Conquerors to modern Hungarians

Modern Hungarians are genetically very similar to their European neighbors [89] nevertheless they contain some 3–5% east Eurasian components traceable with uniparental markers [29,90,91], (Fig 6). Genome wide SNP data also detected the presence of 4% east Asian component in modern Hungarians [92] with an approximate time of admixture dated to the first millennium AD, corresponding to the invasions of Huns, Onogur-Bulgars, Avars and Hungarian Conquerors from the Asian steppes, which are completely in line with our results.

Thus genetic heritage of the Conquerors definitely persists in modern Hungarians, but they contributed to less than 10% of the recent Hungarian gene pool, as they were not alone to bring in east Eurasian lineages. This dilution could have started with the conquer, as contemporary local population size in the Carpathian Basin was estimated larger than that of the Conquerors [93,94]. Anthropological data also have the same implication, as the Conquerors differed from the subsequent Árpádian Age population, which was more similar to preconquest Avar Age populations [95,96]. According to early anthropological studies people of the Avar and Conquest age Carpathian Basin were very heterogeneous and immigrants arrived in several phases between the 5th and 9th centuries [97], which in our view admixed with the autochthonous population, of which genetic data are still barely available between the Bronze Age and Conquest period.

The large genetic diversity of the Conquerors which seemingly assembled from multiple ethnic sources and their relative low proportion, having no lasting effect on Hungarian ethnogenesis, raises doubts about the Conqueror origin of the Hungarian language. Even if our samples represent mainly the Conqueror elite, the “elite dominance” linguistic hypothesis seems inconsistent when it presumes that the same Turkic elite was first readily assimilated linguistically by Finno-Ugric groups, and then it assimilated locals of the Carpathian Basin. Turkic character of the Conquerors is indicated by their “Turk” denomination in contemporary sources as well as Turkic tribal names and person names of tribe leaders of the conquest-period [98]. Above data infer that preconquest presence of the language in the Carpathian Basin, is an equally grounded hypothesis, as had been proposed by several scientists (a summary in English is given in [99]).

You are correct, there still seems to be some Central Asian heritage in Modern Hungarian genetics, also easy to look at the anthropology of the people, among whom the Alföld Turanid type appears quite in some cases, definitely in much higher proportions than in fellow Europeans. But what I was emphasizing is that generally Modern Hungarians would look alien in Central Asia (maybe with the exception that they might be considered Russians, as there are relatively many Russians living there) and wide majority of native Central Asians would look alien in Hungary. Also culturally, mentally we are very different type of people, which in my opinion are the most important things for kinship. To me a Serbian, Norwegian, Basque is closer than a Kirghiz, Azerbaijani, Volga Tatar, and I don't even say this out of biological perspective.

[oszkar07]

You are correct, there still seems to be some Central Asian heritage in Modern Hungarian genetics, also easy to look at the anthropology of the people, among whom the Alföld Turanid type appears quite in some cases, definitely in much higher proportions than in fellow Europeans. But what I was emphasizing is that generally Modern Hungarians would look alien in Central Asia (maybe with the exception that they might be considered Russians, as there are relatively many Russians living there) and wide majority of native Central Asians would look alien in Hungary. Also culturally, mentally we are very different type of people, which in my opinion are the most important things for kinship. To me a Serbian, Norwegian, Basque is closer than a Kirghiz, Azerbaijani, Volga Tatar, and I don't even say this out of biological perspective.

Well there is still some question about who were the Hungarian speakers, maybe originally a Uralic people whom had come in different waves into Karpat medence possibly with earlier Avar or Bulgar tribes , and maybe the rest of them came in 896 as the Magyar tribe with Arpads peoples.
My point is I dont think Hungarians/Hungarian speakers were ever purely Central Asian ,certainly there were central asian folk amongst the conquerors and some earlier and later migrants.
It seems the Hungarian speakers had already mixed in well with the European population of Karpat medence by time Arpad arrives in 896 ... at least the genetic studies seem to show this was the case.

Culturally modern Hungarians are European , we have nothing akin with Kirghiz, Azerbaijani's or Volga Tatar's.

[Dunai]

Well there is still some question about who were the Hungarian speakers, maybe originally a Uralic people whom had come in different waves into Karpat medence possibly with earlier Avar or Bulgar tribes , and maybe the rest of them came in 896 as the Magyar tribe with Arpads peoples.
My point is I dont think Hungarians/Hungarian speakers were ever purely Central Asian ,certainly there were central asian folk amongst the conquerors and some earlier and later migrants.
It seems the Hungarian speakers had already mixed in well with the European population of Karpat medence by time Arpad arrives in 896 ... at least the genetic studies seem to show this was the case.

Culturally modern Hungarians are European , we have nothing akin with Kirghiz, Azerbaijani's or Volga Tatar's.

Indeed, there is no clear evidence how and when did the Hungarian language arrive in the Carpathian Basin. The most established theory is that with the arrival of the Árpád Magyars, the language also arrived and has spread out all over the Carpathian Basin, but we clearly don't know what language these people spoke, as there is no linguistic evidence from that era. We know however that they were the people that first identified as Magyars, and they imposed this political identity on the local people of the Carpathian Basin. A major issue with this theory is that these conquerors were very few compared to the population that they found in the Carpathian Basin (around 1 million), between 50-80.000 according to latest estimates. It is even more mysterious how could such a small population Magyarize the whole area in under a century, when there is no evidence of any forced policies from their behalf over the native population. The transition went very smoothly, compared to most historical cases, as if the natives were already familiar with who they were and what they wanted to achieve here. In 1000 the Magyars already were capable to organize and administrate a kingdom in the same way as in Western Europe, defeating the Holy Roman invasions twice (907, 1030) so for hundreds of years no European power dared to invade Hungary again. There are many other possibilities for the Hungarian language to have arrived into the Carpathian Basin before 895, as since Antiquity many steppe nomad confederations of people have arrived here and they could have had among them people who spoke Magyar. Obviously these people never called their language Magyar, since this name only appeared as a political identifier in the 9th century, when the 7 (actually 8) Proto-Magyar tribes (Jenő, Kér, Keszi, Kürt-Gyarmat, Megyer, Nyék, Tarján) united and formed their first state in Etelköz under Álmos. Based on the etymology of the tribe names they were a combination of Turkic and Uralic origin, but this still doesn't tell us anything about their language, since even then names didn't equate ethnic origin, just as today most names don't have any relevancy about ethnic origin. Surely the autosomal genetic results that will be published in this and in the coming years will give us more of an idea what relationship was between the Árpád Magyars and the local people of the Carpathian Basin, because for now we only have mtDNA and Y-DNA results from them, which obviously only tell a narrow story about them.