The Magyars are extraordinary. We can seek their origins among those Uralic speakers who remained in their ancient hunting grounds near the Urals and developed the Ugric language branch ... What set the Magyars on a different track? We can find clues in the Hungarian language. Turkic vocabulary was acquired, as we might expect if the Magyars were trading with the Volga Bulgars. Magyar trappers could have supplied furs to the thriving Bulgar market. They seem to have lived close by, on the left bank of the Volga, in what was later called Magna Hungaria. What induced a section of the Magyars to take to a semi-nomadic life on the Pontic steppe c. AD 800 is unclear, but it preserved their distinct ethnic and linguistic identity, even within the expanded Khazar Khaganate. ...
On the steppe the Magyars were cattle-herders and slave-raiders. They were a formidable force, by contemporary accounts. Yet attacks from the fierce Turkic Petchenegs led them to look for pastures new.
In the years around AD 900, the Magyars moved up the Danube and conquered the Carpathian Basin, founding the Principality of Hungary. Hungarian tribal names included some that were Turkic and Iranian. Some renegade Khazars joined the movement.
Slavs were already living in the Carpathian Basin. The Principality was an ethnic mixture from the start. How were the Hungarians able to retain the Magyar language? The Magyars certainly migrated in numbers that enabled them to terrify Europe. As the historian Peter Heather writes:
An orgy of equine-powered aggression saw Magyar raiding parties sweep through northern Italy and southern France with a ferocity not seen since the time of Attila.
Why then do the modern Hungarians appear genetically much like their Slavic neighbours? Genome-wide testing detected only a low level of an Asian element. They show little of the Y-DNA haplogroup N1c1a (M178) found in other Uralic-speaking populations – only around 0.5 per cent. Is this the result of the many population changes since the arrival of the Magyars? Or did the Magyars not carry this marker? One study set out to answer this question. The team looked at 10th-century Hungarian bone samples from rich graves typical of the conquerors. Two out of four carried the marker for N1c. This is a striking result. It is too small a sample to rely upon statistically. In other words we should not assume that exactly half of the incomers were N1c bearers. What it does prove is that N1c was among the haplogroups that arrived with the Magyars. Significantly a newly discovered marker, N-L1034, seems characteristic of both the Hungarian N1c and that carried by the Mansi, who speak the closest relative of Magyar.
Another Magyar burial with a horse yielded the East Asian mtDNA N9a, also found in two earlier Sarmatian burials in Hungary. This was exceptional though. Most other mtDNA haplogroups from that period in Hungary fall into Western Eurasian lineages. Overall the picture is of the Magyars imposing their rule upon a Slavic population. Subsequent immigration from neighbouring countries would further dilute the Magyar input.
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Originally Posted by Maximilian
