Huns and Hungarians

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been replaying Age of Empires II: The Conquerors again on my PC. One of my favorite campaigns is Attila the Hun, which (I supposed) chronicled my mother’s ancestors slaughtering those of dear old dad. But realistically, I know that the Italians today probably have next to NO relation to the inhabitants of ancient Rome, given how many conquests there have been since then.

But what about Hungary? It’s had its share of invasions from Germans and Turks which probably made their splashes on the gene pool. But is there a group of the population that can trace their bloodline back to the steppes of Central Asia?

I once read about the Sami people in Finland being link to Asian ancestry through DNA analysis, and I guess I’m wondering if any of the same methods have been used to definitely prove (or disprove) a link between the Magyars and Attila’s hoard.

Thanks!

2

Why do you think so? It wasn’t uncommon for conquering armies to bring small numbers of people in and intermarry with the local population. They would often displace the local language, religion, self-identity, or culture, but leave the genetic pool largely undisturbed.

3

Hungarian people.

4

The equation of Huns and Hungary is faulty – and likely a misunderstanding that derived from the latin term “hungarus” which was used for the onogurs who had a kingdom close to the ancestors of the present day Hungarians but were different people. Anyway, the Hungarians surprisingly did not use an English word to name their country, instead they stubbornly used their own language and called it Magyar Köztársaság. The magyarok are one of the tribes that are the ancestors of our Hungarians and the etymology of their name is quite interesting but beyond the point. Genetically, the descendants of the magyarok seem to be close to undistinguishable nowadays from their neighbours; their language, however, tells us that they belong to the Finno-Ugrian people.

What we call Huns is not a clearly defined tribe but an umbrella term either for a couple of tribes or – as modern research suggests – a pretty heterogenous group.

added:
Ah, yes, or simply follow njtt’s link. Sigh, too late.

5

However the Onogurs are a name associated with the Bulgars who some consider to have formed the Turko-Iranian rump of the old Hun state. A branch of said Bulgars ( probably not very numerous ) then entered eastern Europe and established themselves as hegemons over a substantially Slavic population of earlier invaders, mixed with them and the native Hellenized Thracians and birthed the modern Bulgarians. So if you want to look for modern descendants of the Huns in Europe, they’re as good a bet as anybody ;).

6

Not just Finland, but Sweden and Norway. They speak a Uralic language (Finnish is also Uralic), and there are DNA markers that show some ancestry to Siberian peoples. But after so many centuries, they are mostly European, like their neighbors.

7

Attila’s hoard is his stash of treasure (often implying hidden or guarded).

Attila’s horde is his nomadic army.

Attila’s whored is a description of one of his pastimes (“Attila’s whored, gambled, and murdered his way through the Balkans.”)

.

8

He paid for it? Mighty civilized of him.

9

Interesting discussion. The claimed influence of Andronovo on Ugric speakers in the Wiki article was new to me.

One factoid that may be of interest: the Y-chromosome Q-haplogroup is quite rare in Europe, with tiny amounts in Hungary and among the Norse.
Some hypothesize that this haplogroup arrived with the Huns:

10

Supposition, I guess. If we accept “Roman” as “Those people from the Italian city states whose families predate Julius Caesar,” then I imagine the huge influx of people from Germany, France and Spain makes the actual Roman contribution to the gene pool insignificant. Between the 4th century and the 20th century, they were conquered by the Huns, Goths, Greeks, Spanish, Austrians, Germans, as well as a few viking raids along the way that involved raping and pillaging.

I don’t know–perhaps there’s a case for another thread to be made and discuss that–but my inclination is to doubt Roman origin until presented with a case for it, if that makes sense.

11

The Chuvash people in Russia speak an r-Turkic language that is thought to be descended from the old Bulgar language. The Chuvash and their neighbors the Volga Tatars are thought to be in part direct descendants of the Volga Bulgars. The Chuvash population being mixed with a lot of Finnic ancestry similar to their Finnic neighbors the Mari and Mordvin. The Volga Tatar population being mixed with a lot of Kıpçak Turks from Kazakhstan or southern Siberia, speaking a z-Turkic language, and some Mongol ancestry, dating from the 13th century.

I don’t know about the Bulgars being a rump state of the Hun empire; rather as I’ve understood it they were a rump state of the Western Göktürk empire, dating to the 6th century CE. Anyhow, the percentage of Bulgar ancestry in modern Bulgarians is probably a good deal less than in the Chuvash and Volga Tatars.

The Magyars’ earliest origins are traced to the central Ural Mountains. On both the east and west sides of the Urals, and also smack in the middle (it’s a fairly low mountain range). That region was called Magna Hungaria in the Middle Ages. Today that area is called Bashqortostan. The Bashqort people and language are of Kıpçak origins, related to their neighbors the Volga Tatars. They represent a Kıpçak takeover of land that was formerly Magyar, from which the Magyars moved to the Pontic steppes and ranged from western Kazakhstan to eastern Ukraine, before they moved west to Pannonia (present-day Hungary) in the 9th century.

The Huns were one early example of the “steppe empire” phenomenon that persisted through many historical eras. The Göktürks, Onogurs, and Mongols carried out the same pattern. The empire-building forces originated from a given tribe which accreted around it more and more tribes as allies within an expanding territorial radius of political/military influence. In the Eurasian steppe, a region without natural borders, for empires to grow large they had to become multi-ethnic or trans-ethnic in composition, even while they were named after the original ethnic group or tribe that started it. The structure meant that a large empire could dissolve overnight if said alliances were broken. The steppe tribes that acquired large empires were the ones who could bring together many other allied tribes under their banner.

So the Magyar homeland had successive waves of westward-expanding steppe empires running right over it. The Magyars participated in this system during their steppe phase, when they were close allies of the Onogur tribes (who spoke an r-Turkic language related to Chuvash). There are many old r-Turkic loanwords in Hungarian from that period, which are distinct from the z-Turkic Ottoman loanwords that came many centuries later.

12

But that’s where you’re making an assumption that might very well be untrue. There was a huge number of invasions of Italy by armies of Huns, Goths, Greeks, Iberians, etc., but that doesn’t mean there was necessarily a huge number of people displacing the local population genetically.

13

Nice introduction, Johanna, well done.

Some researchers derive Bulg(h)ar or Bolgar from the proto-bulgarian bulganmış which means intermingled, and might point us to yet another heterogenous group of tribes that came from the steppe, just like you explained with regard to the Huns.

The Proto-Bulgarians who came to the Balkans were assimilated into the mostly Slavic (but also Thracian and Roman) population – yet, their dominance during another nation-building time resulted in an adoption of the name for all the relevant tribes within the region of their dominion.

I know that a couple of researchers add the Hungarians to the Proto-Bulgarians too, but I don’t think that their arguments are generally accepted.

Tamerlane, the connection to the Huns was news to me too - but I’ll admit that my knowledge about those tribes is superficial. Could you point me to the research that discusses the evidence? I’d like to take a closer look.

14

The Eastern Bulgars were subjects of the Göktürk, (with the Western Bulgars falling under the control of the Avars), but before that, the Bulgars (at that time, called the Onogur), were part of the Hun Horde, and were ruled by the descendants of Attila’s son Ernakh.

15

I’m afraid the only work I’ve read focused solely on the Huns is Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s old tome. As one piece of evidence he notes the conflations of the Bulgars among contemporary sources. So, for example:

Sidonius’ letter confirms our thesis about the prolonged stay of Huns in the Bakans, but neither Casiodorus nor Jordanes could refer to the 470’s as “the present day.” The phrase makes sense if the Huns were the Bulgars of 505, when Ptzia and his Goths defeated Sabinian’s army, which consisted of ten thousand Bulgarian horsemen. Cassiodorus, writing his Gothic history in the 520’s or early 530’s and Ennodius d. 521 ) repeatedly calls the Bulgarians “Huns.”

Of course that could identifier by geography, a common habit of classical sources.

But beyond that there is the tradition, noted by Captain Amazing above that Attila’s 2nd and 3rd sons are variously listed as leaders of tribal sections identified as the source of various Bulgar groupings. Quoting wikipedia here:

*According to tradition, after Ellac’s loss and death, his brothers ruled over two separate, but closely related hordes on the steppes north of the Black Sea. Dengizich is believed to have been king (khan) of the Kutrigur Bulgars, and Ernakh king (khan) of the Utigur Bulgars, whilst Procopius claimed that Kutrigurs and Utigurs were named after, and led by two of the sons of Ernakh. Such distinctions are uncertain and the situation is not likely to have been so clear cut… Indeed, subsequently, new confederations appear such as Kutrigur, Utigur, Onogur / (Onoghur), Sarigur, etc., which were collectively called “Huns”,“Bulgarian Huns”, or “Bulgars”. *

Then there is the conflation of the old Hunnic language with that of the Chuvash/Volga Bulgars as Johanna cited above and the connections between them and the western Bulgars.

So it is all somewhat speculative and it seems based on a sizeable collection of circumstantial evidence. But ethnogensis questions tend to be tricky anyway. Were the Bulgars or the separate tribes that later became the various Bulgar groupings part of the original Hun group that entered the western steppes? Or were they swept up into confederacy after the fact, much like the Mongol Golden Horde was largely formed through the absorption of Kipchak Turks? Dunno.

But any rate the connection has apparently been mooted about for some time. Maenchen-Helffen notes that C. Schirren spotted what he says is Jordanes’ conflation of the Bulgars and Huns in Jordanes’ Getica, back in 1856. So, when Jordanes says…

Beyond them extend above the Pontic sea the territories of the Bulgars, whom the punishments of our sins have made notorious. After these the Huns, like a cluster of mighty races, have spawned twofold frenzied people.

…Schirren and Maenchen-Helfen say that here Jordanes is using Bulgar and Hun as synonyms.

16

Germans invaded Hungary a grand total of once, in 1944. I doubt their presence of a few months had much impact on the gene pool. Besides, any significant admixture would have occurred centuries earlier when Hungarian kings invited ethnic Germans to settle in various parts of the country.

17

Thank you, Tamerlane - looks like I didn’t miss as much as I feared. I’ve read Maenchen-Helfen too (damn, a long time ago) and the partly even older contributions by F. Altheim (Geschichte der Hunnen / History of the Huns 1-5) that were outdated and controversial when I read them in the early 1990s. István Bóna has added more of an archaeological point of view to the discussions in 1991 (and earlier, of course), and so did Bodo Anke a couple of years later with his studies.

If we consider the more aggressive strategies that the Asian nomads developed to deal with the endemic conflict between them and the settled down cultures, it’s not surprising that we have so much trouble to equate specific tribes with umbrella terms, like The Huns.

If the nomads wanted to persist in times of conflict, they had to organize hard-hitting mobile units in numbers that must have exceeded the resources of a single clan or tribe on more than one occasion. Hierarchies that arched over the clan and tribal structure must have been an obvious option for the more open-minded clan-leaders very early and every success of such an alliance added a lot of prestige to the responsible leader and reinforced the arguments in favour of those hierarchies.

Otoh, traditions, the lifestyle, the scarce resources and the importance of a charismatic leader to hold the clans and tribes together explain, why such alliances were usually temporary and fluent and rarely exceeded beyond one generation.

The oral narrative, however, must have spread beyond the involved clans further and further throughout the nomadic cultures and added a template for action and designations for identification.

The once suggested identity of the Asian Xiongnu and the European Huns, for instance, is more than doubtful – which doesn’t mean that the successes of the former had no impact on the latter.

That we find traces of the various Asian nomads that rode westwards in the European gene-pool, the cultures and languages is not surprising at all. That those traces can be more prominent in the territories that were once ruled by those nomads is not an outlandish idea, neither that they might be considerable in pockets that were more isolated during the following centuries (for whatever reason).

But to accentuate direct lines of ancestry from heterogeneous groups to populations that never stopped to mix and migrate in the following millennia and are pooled together under a national indicator, like Hungarians, is of doubtful value, imo.

18

Less than a mile from where I am sitting is a Hungarian United Church and the first name of the pastor is Attilla. It is impossible not to think of him as Attilla the Hun(garian). I’m disappointed to learn that there is no connection.

19

Then I have to add some etymology that might disappoint you even more. :wink:

Attila is most likely not even a word of some “Hunnish” language. If we follow the thesis that was first developed by Wilhelm Grimm – yes, one of the Brothers Grimm – Attila is Gothic, a Germanic language, and is a diminutive of atta, which meant “father”. IIRC, this explanation was considered the most likely by Maenchen-Helfen too (but Tamerlane might remember this better than I do and will correct me if I’m mistaken).

Another thesis derives Attila from Old Turkic. And though it sounds weird, ata meant “father” in that language too - the difference is just one “t”, but the languages are not related. An alternative explanation adds the Old Turkic word il (I think, “territory”, “area” or “country” are acceptable translations, though I’m not a turcologist and just repeat what others have researched) to ata, so we would have a term that means something like “father of the country”.

It’s doubtful that the Huns are early Turks*, so the Turkic origin is less accepted than the Gothic one. In any case, the term Attila is most likely a honorific title and not the name of the person.

*Turcologists might see this differently.

20

I was intrigued by the theory advanced by Professor Pulleyblank that the Hunnic language belonged to the Yeniseian language family. A small family in central Siberia, along the Yenisei River, now nearly extinct. All the Yeniseian languages but one (Ket) are extinct, and Ket’s on the way out. :frowning: Yeniseian is now famous for having been demonstrated to be related to the Na-Dene languages of America. So Hunnic and Navajo and Apache may be distant cousins. Unfortunately, Pulleyblank’s theory never caught on and no one believes it any more, probably not even him. I just wanted it to be true… but honestly, as far as I’m aware, Hunnic has never been successfully classified.

There is a widespread opinion that it’s r-Turkic, and Hunnic has actually been the name given by some to the r-Turkic branch. (There’s also a theory that r-Turkic isn’t even Turkic, it’s a separate branch of Altaic that’s closer to Mongolian or something, which would account for the cognates shared between Hungarian and Mongolian…)