Ugrians and the Bashkirs

Baskirs:

The Bashkirs is a Kipchak group formed in the early medieval period in the context of the Turkic migrations. They speak the Bashkir language, pertaining to Kypchak branch of the Turkic languages. The Bashkirs are mainly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi madhhab.

They are indigenous to Bashkortostan extending on both sides of the Ural Mountains, on the place where Europe meets Asia. Groups of Bashkirs also live in the republic of Tatarstan, Perm Krai, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, Samara and Saratov Oblasts of Russia, as well as in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and other countries.

Besides their Turkic ancestry, Ugrian and Iranian contributions have also been discussed in Russian ethnographic literature. Genetically, R1b1a1 (2011 name) has been found to occur with comparatively high frequency among the Bashkirs in Bashkortostan (62/471 = 13.2%).

Accordance with all paleontological and anthropological findings presume the roots of the Bashkir people likely to the Andronovo culture. Recent studies regard Turkic and Ugrian theories as the most possible ethnogenesis of the Bashkirs.

Ugric or Ugrian languages are a hypothetical branch of the Uralic language family. The term derives from Yugra, a region in north-central Asia. They include three subgroups: Hungarian (Magyar), Khanty (Ostyak), and Mansi language (Vogul). The last two have traditionally been considered single languages, though their main dialects are sufficiently distinct that they may also be considered small subfamilies of 3–4 languages each.

A common Proto-Ugric language is posited to have been spoken from the end of the 3rd millennium BC until the first half of the 1st millennium BC, in Western Siberia, east from the southern Ural mountains.

However, recent reconstructions of Uralic have not generally found support for Ugric. Of the three languages, Khanty and Mansi have traditionally been set apart from Hungarian as Ob-Ugric, though features uniting Mansi and Hungarian in particular are known as well.

The largest of the Ugric people are Hungarians numbering 14,500,000. Hungarians live in the Carpathian Basin, where they have independent state – Hungary. Khanty (21.000) and Mansi (12.000) peoples live in the Ob river area of Russia, mostly in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. There is also a significant Khanty population in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Khanty and Mansi together are called Ob-Ugrians.

The Hungarian language is traditionally classified in a Ugric branch of the Uralic languages, though the Ugric similarities may be due to an areal influence that also included Samoyedic. The Uralic languages may have separated sometime around 4000 to 2000 BC.

Climate changes around 1300 BC resulted in the northward expansion of the steppes which compelled several groups within the proto-Ugric people to turn to the nomadic lifestyle. This change was strengthened by the several proto-Iranian groups living south of them who had been practicing pastoral nomadism and whose influence on the proto-Ugric people can be proven by several loanwords in their languages. The formation of the Hungarian language occurred around this time (between 1000 BC and 500 BC) and can be localized to the southern regions of the Ural Mountains.

Following a further climate change around 800 BC that caused the expansion of the taiga, the nomadic proto-Ugric groups (probably the ancestors of the Magyars) had to move southward; thus they separated from the ancestors of the Khanty and Mansi peoples.

The Hungarian Urheimat (Hungarian: magyar őshaza) is the theoretical original homeland of the Magyars. The term urheimat comes from linguistics and tends to be reserved for discussion about language origin. As applied to national origin, it refers to the area where ancestors of the Magyars formed an ethnic unity, speaking a language ancestral to Hungarian, and practising Nomadic pastoralism. There is a consensus that the Hungarian urheimat in this ethnogenetic sense must have been located somewhere in the steppe zone south of the Ural Mountains.

One view states that the Magyar Urheimat is the same as the Ugric language group’s urheimat on the western side of the Ural Mountains. The territory of Yugra tends to be identified as the Ob-Ugric languages urheimat and not the earlier Ugric period; and thus the western side of the Urals in the vicinity of the Kama river is considered to be the Ugric language urheimat.

It is believed that the Magyars emerged from this western Ural Urheimat, based upon early language influence from Permic peoples. Herodotus in the 5th century BC probably depicted the ancestors of Hungarians when mentioning the Yugra people living west of the Urals.

Another view claims that the urheimat is roughly the same area as Yugra to the east of the Ural Mountains, where the Khanty and Mansi peoples live today. The time when the proto-Magyars moved westwards from the regions east of the Ural Mountains and settled down in Bashkiria (around the region where the Kama River joins the Volga) is still under debate.

Their movement may have been caused by new migrations of peoples in the 4th century AD, but it may have also connected to the appearance of a new archaeological culture (Kushnarenkovo culture) in the region in the 6th century AD.

Approaches based on “map-stratification” have compared burial sites, ornamental motifs (tulips, cranes), leather and felt garments, mythological images, sacrificial cauldrons, folk poetry, folk music, lullabies, together with written documents and genetic findings to narrow down the most likely Magyar urheimat to the grassy land surrounded by four freshwater lakes (Caspian, Aral, Balkhash, and Baikal).

From this land the migration of proto-Magyars progressed west, probably by more than one route, mainly via the Yekaterinburg-gap of the South-Ural mountains (indicated by cemeteries), to Levedia and later to Etelköz where they became the allies of the Khazars. Genetic evidence has linked early Magyars eastward as well to the Uyghurs, living in East-Eurasia around the town of Ürümqi (today in China).

The origin of the “Magyar” expression (the self-definition of the Hungarians) could prove the period when the separation of the proto-Hungarians and the groups speaking proto-Ob-Ugric languages took place, but there are several theories on its origins; the word may be composed of two parts (magy and ar) or it may have been borrowed from a proto-Iranian language.

Words similar to the proposed magy element of the word are also used by the Khanty and Mansi peoples (referring to one of their groups /mos/ or to themselves /mansi/ respectively) which suggest that it is of Ugric origin and it possibly means “those who speak”. The assumed ar element of the word may be either of Ugric or Turkic origin and it probably means “man”.

Those who assume that the expression ar originated from a Turkic language, also think that it may refer to a Turkic tribe that joined to a group of the proto-Ugric peoples and thus the two groups formed the Magyar people.

The linguistic heritage of the Hungarians comes from Finno-Ugric peoples. A branch of Uralic speakers migrated from their earlier homeland near the Ural mountains and settled in various places in Eastern Europe, until they conquered the Carpathian Basin between the 9th and 10th centuries.

Genetically, the present-day Hungarian population preserves much of an older European genetic makeup. The vast majority of the Hungarian population in the 10th and 11th centuries, according to genetic and palaeoanthropological studies, showed features of European biological descent.

During the 4th millennium BC, the Uralic-speaking peoples who were living in the central and southern regions of the Urals split up. Some dispersed towards the west and northwest and came into contact with Iranian speakers who were spreading northwards.

From at least 2000 BC onwards, the Ugrian speakers became distinguished from the rest of the Uralic community. Judging by evidence from burial mounds and settlement sites, they interacted with the Andronovo Culture, furthermore, the type of Hungarians of the Conquest period shows related features to that of the Andronovo people.

In the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the Hungarians moved to the west of the Ural Mountains to the area between the southern Ural Mountains and the Volga River known as Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) and Perm Krai.

In the early 8th century, some of the Hungarians moved to the Don River to an area between the Volga, Don and the Seversky Donets rivers. Meanwhile, the descendants of those Hungarians who stayed in Bashkiria remained there as late as 1241.

The Hungarians around the Don River were subordinates of the Khazar khaganate. Their neighbours were the archaeological Saltov Culture, i.e. Bulgars (Proto-Bulgarians, Onogurs) and the Alans, from whom they learned gardening, elements of cattle breeding and of agriculture. Tradition holds that the Hungarians were organized in a confederacy of seven tribes. The names of the seven tribes were: Jenő, Kér, Keszi, Kürt-Gyarmat, Megyer, Nyék, and Tarján.

Saltovo-Mayaki is the name given by archaeologists to the early medieval culture of the Pontic steppe region roughly between the Don and the Dnieper Rivers. Their culture was a melting pot of Onogur, Khazar, Pecheneg, Magyar, Alan, and Slavic influences. During the ninth century the Saltovo-Mayaki culture was closely associated with the Khazar Khaganate, and archaeological sites from this period are one way that historians track the geographic scope of Khazar influence.

Around 830, a rebellion broke out in the Khazar khaganate. As a result, three Kabar tribes of the Khazars joined the Hungarians and moved to what the Hungarians call the Etelköz, the territory between the Carpathians and the Dnieper River, (today’s Ukraine). The Hungarians faced their first attack by the Pechenegs around 854, though other sources state that an attack by Pechenegs was the reason for their departure to Etelköz.

The new neighbours of the Hungarians were the Varangians and the eastern Slavs. From 862 onwards, the Hungarians (already referred to as the Ungri) along with their allies, the Kabars, started a series of looting raids from the Etelköz into the Carpathian Basin, mostly against the Eastern Frankish Empire (Germany) and Great Moravia, but also against the Balaton principality and Bulgaria.