EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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given place. Present-day Mongolians, who live in the Gobi Desert need to move from settlement to
settlement often, e.g. monthly, but those tribes, who live in the northern part of the country, are able to
stay on a particular territory longer, some half a year. Among Huns, as other people in that region, ought
to be craftsmen, traders, who lived in settled places and were involved with their profession only in
order to satisfy the domestic trade and military requirements.
We need to consider some very important expressions, which were widespread among the steppe
people: bow-stretching in the Hunnic era and yurt-walled tribes in the Mongolian period. They
designated only those ones, who lived in tents on the steppe and moved between the settlements
periodically, but also those ones, who settled down, lived in cities or villages, though they preserved
their ancient traditions. 16 The above mentioned expressions help us to identify some tribes. For example,
when Maodun captured the cities along the Silk Road in the course of the 2 nd century BC, the population
of the 26 cities and countries were not considered as foreign ones, but they called them as
“bow stretching” people, who had been incorporated into the Hunnic Empire as relatives, and got equal
rights with the Huns. They belonged to Sakas or Yuezhi tribes or people, who shared the same
civilisation with the Huns. Hence, they did not belong to Indo-Europeans, as most scientist thought. 17 If
we consider the Hunnic ideology, and later their successors, e.g. the Mongolians, the foreign civilisations
must be captured and ruled over, but the relatives must be treated as their own tribes.
The steppe people kept track of ancestors orally, and then when literacy spread among them, they
recorded tradition in written form. It was an elementary need of the whole community, in order to keep
count line of the legal king, who rules for the benefit of all. Among the leading tribes, which originated
directly form the Hunnic royal clan – or Maodun in Asia and Attila in Europe, a man had the chance to
become the emperor. If we follow the line of Hunnic shanyus in the history, as Friedrich Hirth did, we
can see that Attila and the later Hungarian leading clan, Árpád, belonged to Maodun’s clan. 18
When we analyse the nomadic society, we must clarify a further issue. These empires contained lots
of ethnic groups, who differed from each other anthropologically. When we talk of the leading tribes of
the empire, we must concentrate on the leading allied tribes, which concluded agreements and assigned
the characters of the empire, and chose the emperor from among themselves. The whole community got
its name after the leading clan or tribe. 19
16 A later sample perceived the Eastern approach of invasion or union. When the Mongols (in Hungarian sources: Tatars)
launched a campaign in Europe, they had a knowledge of Hungarians, they were yurt-walled people in the past, that is why
they offered Béla IV the possibility to conclude an alliance with them. It was so unbeliable to Mongolian scholars, why Batu
Khan sent 30 letters to the Hungarian King. In most cases they sent only one.
17 Unfortunately, in the scientific world the various nations are classified in language groups. This method extended even to
such historical people, who had no written sources. The Scythians had been listed among the Indo-European one, while Huns
“became” Turkic. But the historical sources and archaelogical findings proved their close relationship.
18 Hirth, 1901.
19 The Mongolian and Inner-Mongolian scholars, moreover the Hungarian linguistics like Rásonyi László and Czeglédi Katalin
state that the name of a tribe originated from a personal name; it reflected their big leader. The ancient historical sources
underscore this theory. As Herodotus recorded, the Scythians got their name after their ancestor, Skolotos. Byzantine sources
emphasized, that the Avars were previously Huns, but after their leader, got the name Avar. The Hungarian chronicles state
that Hungarians had an ancestor, Magor.
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