Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages

Description
Table of contents
Reviews

András Róna-Tas is Professor of Altaic Studies and Early Hungarian History at József Attila University, Szeged, Hungary and has published over 300 papers, monographs and reviews. In 1996 he received the prestigious German science award, the Humboldt Prize.

Lavishly illustrated, the book contains seventy five historical maps and colour plates which visualize the historical background of Hungary and introduces its early history to a broader readership. The early history of Hungarians is embedded into the history of Eurasia and special attention is given to the relationship of the Hungarians with the Khazars and the Bulghar-Turks.

The first part deals with methods and sources which can be used for elucidating the ancient history of the Hungarians, relying on research into linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and natural history. The second part traces how the Hungarians came into the Carpathian Basin and answers such questions as: who are the Magyars, from where did they come and how did they conquer the land? It reconstructs and examines their early political and social structure, the economy, and religion, and compares the Hungarian medieval process with the ethnogenetic processes of the Germanic, Slavic and Turkic people.

Preface

Part I: Introduction

Part II: The sources

Part III: The relatives

Part IV: The neighbours

Part V: Eurasia in the 9th and 10th centuries

Part VI: The names of the Magyars before the foundation of the state

Part VII: Urheimats and migration

Part VIII: The conquest

Part IX: The Magyars in the Carpathian Basin

Part X: The integration of the Magyars within Europe

Part XI: Summary overview, recent research

Part XII: Overview of the study of ancient Hungarian history

Part XIII: The Levedi question and the earliest Hungarian chronicle

Part XIV: Historical traditions

Part XV: The East Magyars, the Bashkirian tribal names and Yugria

Part XVI: The Székely Runiform script

Appendices

English Historical Review

"It would be hard to find another scholarly work in which so many disciplines are employed, from linguistics to archaeology, religious studies to numismatics, and so on... the digestion of a lifetime's research..."

Austrian History Yearbook

"The author, whose erudition is formidable, has spent his life mastering the ancient and modern inner European languages essential for unraveling the mysteries of his subject."

Choice

"The text reads like a finely polished lecture, but it is dense with linguistic, archaeological, and historical minutiae while carefully avoiding the use of later Hungarian mythology about the origins of the Magyars or their movement west."

Dalhousie Review

"This is a major work which synthesizes a vast range of scholarship, including the author`s own research over four decades into the ethnography of central Asian peoples and historical linguistics. Róna-Tas handles new material expertly, as he does more traditional source material."

Medieval Review

"Various studies of the Hungarian scholars are hardly accessible to foreign readers because are written in Hungarian. The author summarized the results of most of them into a comprehensive reference book."