A 9-10. századi magyarság életmódjáról : írott forrásaink tanúsága

The conquering Hungarians' way of life has been a debated issue in the research for a long time. The quick changes of their dwelling territories, their migration from the dry steppes of the Aral-Ural region to the humid fields of the Don river, and after that to the Carpathian Basin, in just a century, makes it very difficult to examine the problem. The Aral-Ural region was the classical territory of the real nomadism, where the several tribes moved after the green grass, taking hundreds of kilometres. In contrast to this, the area of the Don river offered ideal conditions to the agriculture. Although the Turkish loanwords of the Hungarian language borrowed from the agrarian Ogur tribes of Eastern Europe refer to similar lifestyles, the written sources prove something else. The Greek and Latin sources reported more phenomena of the nomad behaviour regarding the contemporary Hungarians. The researchers have been disputing this contradiction in the last half century. My study seeks to display this debate, to explore the possible causes of this controversy, and to provide an acceptable solution for the problem. I think that the contradiction between the sources of different disciplines is well explainable with the variable way of life of the conquering Hungarians. The Hungarians have not simply migrated between several territories that provided completely different environmental conditions; they have been in contact with the population of their new homelands, and later mixed with these peoples