EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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into the hands of our Slavonic neighbours, who fostered definite animosity towards Hungarians. After
the Second World War, we suffered at the hands of the Soviet bear, while the shadow of Communism
was projected not only on the hearts, but also on the minds. The soul of the Hungarian people could not
bear this oppression for long. They gave evidence of their superhuman strength and vitality springing
from sacral depths when, in 1956, they revolted against Russian tanks and local servants of the Russians,
who were in numerical superiority. Our bloody, but clean revolution – for the umpteenth time – fell, and
the slow erosion of souls and memory continued to a greater extent than ever.
Just like plants, nations are also damaged fatally if their roots are eaten away by some disease. The
Austrians knew Talleyrand’s famous saying well (“If you want a nation to be your servant, take its
past.”), and from the end of the 18 th century they methodically set out to erode, then later to transform
totally our ancient history. Thus, the pre-conceived Finno-Ugric theory was born, which broke away
from all the former traditions of Hungarians, and outlined a totally new theory of origin, which
presented the Hungarians as underdeveloped as possible.
While our myth of origin, the legend of the Miraculous Deer connects the Hun and Magyar nations to
Hunor and Magor (Magyar), King Nimród’s twin-sons; while all our Medieval chronicles consider our
Hun origin unequivocal, even obvious; while Great King Atilla is respected as the King of Hungarians
and his family-tree is traced back to Hunor in 33 steps, the Saxon, Paul Hunsdorfer and the German,
Joseph Budenz, who could not even speak Hungarian in the beginning, as members of the Hungarian (!)
Academy of Sciences, after the suppression of the 1848–49 War of Independence, under orders from the
Hapsburgs, worked out a theory about a nation which never existed, and unfortunately, since then, this
has been taught as Hungarian ancient history, beginning in primary school.
While the resemblance between our greatest kings was undeniable – the herma of “Shaman king”
Saint László from the 11 th century and the sculptures of the Parthian princes from more than a thousand
years ago show startling similarity –; while King Mátyás the Just, in the 16 th century, considered himself
Atilla’s reincarnation, the Finno-Ugric theory is still trying to link the ancestors of the Hungarians to
such primitive people as the Voguls and the Ostyaks, living far in the North, who are now becoming
extinct.
Rejecting the settled life-style of the stock-raising Scythians the Finno-Ugric theorists developed an
image of a nomadic people of hunter-gatherers, consisting of hordes of tribes, which did not even have
its own language; the majority of their words consisting of loan-words picked up during their
wanderings. This theory is, even today, exclusively the official theory in the field of Hungarian
linguistics, due to the efforts of the enthusiastic followers of Hunsdorfer and Budenz (paid by the
government), who – in the interest of their own scientific careers – keep alive this old-fashioned distorted
theory, which was obviously born for political reasons.
It is thought-provoking, however, that Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke 58 languages
(among them Hungarian), ranked our language “before all others, on the same level as Greek and Latin”;
that, at the beginning of the 19 th century, world-famous researchers, such as Jules Oppert, Francois C.
Lenormant, Archibald H. Sayce and Anton Deimel, considered Sumerian to be related to Hungarian and
that in the 1950’s the Finnish Ministry of Education officially rejected the theory of Finnish–Hungarian
relationship. In the last decade, several scientific studies have been published (by non-Hungarians),
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