The Early Hungarians [antikvár]

PROLOGUE The rough road of Hungarian Ancient History Hungarian Ancient History deals with that period of the national past which begins around 3000 B.C. and ends in 895 A.D. when the last Magyar ethnic wave arrived and settled in the Carpathian basin. This delimitation is mainly based upon a longstanding tradition, but is justified by methodological considerations as well. Indeed, in the elaboratign of ancient history, the so-called subsidiary studies of History play a considerably greater role than in more recent periods, on account of the scarcity of written documents, which are the usual sources of historical knowledge. The most helpful of such subsidiary studies are, first, linguistics and archaelogy, then mythology and paleography, to which most recently, the science of place-names or toponymy was added. This many-sided approach renders the task of the historians more difficult. The importance of their researches is however great, since the results have a strong bearing upon the national consciousness. Because of this. Ancient History is usually exposed to strong political interferences. 1. When modern historiography was born, in the middle of the XlXth century, Hungarian scholars found themselves before a difficult alternative: they had to adopt either the Finno-Ugrian con-