The fascinating story of the Hungarians’ homeland conquest

Hungary is a small country with barely ten million inhabitants. Hungarian is the 62nd most widely spoken language in the world. 15,000,000 people speak Hungarian worldwide. Without written sources, only through archaeology, linguistics and ethnography, can we reveal the origins and prehistory of the Hungarian people.

The origins of the Hungarian people

Archeological professor Gyula László proposes the idea of a double occupation. According to his theory, Hungarians occupied the Carpathian Basin in two separate stages. László states that the first wave of occuption was around 670. The more well-known invasion was happening during the 9th century. This is the second conquest that professor László points out, the one under the leadership of Árpád.

The Uralic people are living near the Ural Mountains and the Ob River. The Hantis are, according to science, the linguistic relatives of the Hungarians. They count: kat, hurum, nyatö, vet, hut, husz. This is very similar to how Hungarians count. We can deduce the fishing and hunting lifestyle of our ancestors from the Uralic words fish, net, bow, arrow, etc. The ancestors of the Finns and Estonians, who lived on the western side of the Urals, migrated towards the Baltic. Meanwhile, the Ugric people settled around the rivers of Irtis, Tobol and Isim, tells the Finno-Ugric department of ELTE. A thousand years later, the Ugric people also split. A group of people emerged from the migrants and headed to the south, and that is how the Hungarian language was formed.

Our ancestors shifted to a nomadic pastoral lifestyle on the hilly steppe south of the Ural Mountains. During spring and summer, they used to graze their sheep or cattle along the rivers. In August, on their way back to their winter quarters, they would arrive at well-protected riverside reed beds where they could survive the frosts. Here they met the Old Turks and Bulgarians, from whom we derive 250 of our new words for agriculture and animal husbandry, such as ox, bull, hen, wheat and wine.