JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES

October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4.
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these terms are included in the same language family. The language of the Huns has been compared
mainly with Mongolian and Turkic. The Hun words that can be found in Chinese chronicles have been
reconstructed on this basis. Siratori was the first to take up this question. After him, several sinologists
tried to do the same thing. Pulleybank and Ligeti hypothesized that the Hun language survived in the
small languages of Siberia. Of course in the Siberian languages, Hun words may appear because these
peoples were also part of the Hun Empire. This theory is easy to falsify, however, because the so-called
Hun words in these small Siberian languages also appear in Mongolian and Turkic. This is not
surprising because the Huns dominated the whole of the northern territories as well. Hence, aspects of
their language are preserved by the peoples from this area as well. Recent linguistic research
unambiguously demonstrates that Ancient Turkic and Ancient Mongolian are rooted in the age of the
Hun Empire and that the Hun language was the ancestor of languages presently spoken in Eurasia.
The heritage of the Huns can be found all over the Steppes of Inner Asia. The sacred places of the
Huns were adopted by the peoples succeeding them. Batsaihan refers to the fact that the holy mountains
of the Mongols, including Burkan-Kaldun, Otgon-tenger and Silin-bogd, might have been ancient ritual
centers of the Huns. It is uncertain whether these places were used by the Huns, who became
independent in the first century A.D., or whether these cult places are much older, maybe originating in
the Bronze Age. The historic continuity is even observed in the case of some of the towns. The Hun town
of Gua-Doc was first conquered by the Turkic tribes and then by the Mongols. In this town, Genghis
Khan had a palace-residence and the diets electing a new khan were held in this town. The valley of the
Central Mongolian Orhon River was first a center of the Hun rulers. Afterwards, it served the same
purpose for the Turkic and Uygur rulers. From 1220, it was the seat of Genghis Khan. There is still a lot
of research going on in order to find the seat of Atilla in the Carpathian Basin. It is documented that the
ancient seat of the Hungarian kings of the Árpád Dynasty, the so-called White Castle that was based on a
Roman fortification, was located somewhere in the Pilis Mountain area. The early Hungarian chronicler,
Anonymus, has written about this. Of course the seat of Atilla or his summer residence could have been
somewhere else, maybe in the region between the Danube and the Tisza Rivers, where the Avars settled
and, later, the dynastic center of the Magyars was erected. In Transylvania, the oral tradition informs us
about Budvár (Budcastle), near Székelyudvarhely that was one of the centers of the Huns, after the Huns
moved from Wallachia toward Transylvania.
A number of eastern researchers hold the opinion that the Turkic peoples inherited a coherent system
of runic writing. Hence, the system must be much older than the Turkic peoples themselves. A lot of
short runes have survived in Hun excavations and rock paintings. These runes have been collected by
several Mongolian researchers, like Csuluunbaatar, Szumiyabaatar and Batsaihan. The latter compared
the Hun runic writing with the Chinese Yin-Zhou script and he discovered a number of similarities.
Most of the Mongol researchers have adopted the results of Perlee, who states that the runic writing
originates from cattle-branding. The Hun writing system seems to be the result of an internal
development in any case. It can not be a borrowing from abroad. The signs of the writing may be
different, depending on time and space, due to the enormous territory, in which they lived. The runic
writing is used today in daily life by two peoples, the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin and the
Crimean Tatars. For the latter, the runic writing functions as a bringer of good luck or as a preventer of
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