Book Review: Türk Attila: Az Uráltól A Kárpátokig: Régészet És Korai Magyar Történelem. Szegedi Középkortörténeti Könyvtár 30 / Studia Ad Archaeologiam Pazmaniensia 30 / Magyar Őstörténeti Kutatócsoport Kiadványok 8. Budapest, 2023. Pp. 526

Abstract

This review is devoted to Türk Attila's monograph Az Uráltól a Kárpátokig: régészet és korai magyar történelem, published in 2023. The author of the monograph summarises and characterises the research on the ancestral origins of the Hungarian people, drawing also on his earlier research, namely his dissertation A magyar őstörténet és a szaltovói régészeti kultúrkör, which he defended in 2011 at the University of Szeged. There are many works devoted to the origin of Hungarians both in Russian and in Hungarian. In that monograph the author already in the introduction asks a quite reasonable question: how can we clarify the areas of settlement of the early Hungarians known from the data of history and linguistics in the light of the latest findings? And which territories from the Urals to the Carpathians should be labelled as related to the early Hungarians? Attila Türk emphasises that the picture of early Hungarian history generally accepted by Hungarian researchers has changed little in comparison with the 60s and 70s of the XX century, when the Soviet Union conducted major excavations of early medieval monuments which at that time gave valuable information about the history and archaeology of Eastern Europe in general and about the early Hungarians in particular. The reviewed monograph summarises the results and outlines further prospects for research on the topic, paying special attention to the Hungarian-Saltovo interactions, because from the early historiography the role of the Khazars in the history of the Hungarians was traditionally considered high until the conquest of the homeland. In the presented work, the Hungarian path from the Urals to the Carpathians will be shown mainly precisely in the light of the Saltovo interactions. The monograph comprises more than 500 pages and is divided into an introduction, chapters-sections which are split into sub-chapters and even smaller chapters, at the end there is a conclusion, an English extract including four smaller chapters, and an album of illustrations occupying more than 150 pages.