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CHAPTER 6
Origins and Cultural Contacts
1 The East and the Steppe Lands
Contact with the east was emphasised in the research of Avar archaeology
from its very beginnings but mostly without any definition of ‘Orient’ or pre-
cision as to what exactly was meant by eastern contact. The archaeology of
the ‘Migration Period’ of the Carpathian Basin usually uses this term for the
steppes, not recognising that the steppes region is not historically uniform,
geographically nor culturally. Later some authors also included the Middle
East (including Sassanian Iran), Transoxiana and the Far East, under the term
‘Orient’, many of which were also deeply influenced by the steppes, despite
being basically settled civilisations. The term Orient, however, is a deriva-
tive of the 19th century perspective of ‘orientalism’, and is the opposite of
European.1 As well as these eastern contacts, there were also connections with
the Eurasian Steppes, the oasis civilisations of Central Asia (like Transoxiana
or Khorasan),2 and with Sassanian and Early Islamic Iran, all of which should
rightly be addressed separately.
Research on the eastern origins of Avar material culture was much empha-
sised in Hungarian archaeology from its beginnings, partly as a consequence of
the eastern origins of the Hungarians themselves and the national mythology
constructed around it, and also because according to written sources the Avars
arrived in the Carpathian Basin from Inner Asia, chased by the Ancient Turks,
and as a result artefact types of Inner Asian origin were usually dated to the
first generation of Avars in the Carpathian Basin.
The study of the steppes in Hungarian archaeology started with the expedi-
tions of Béla Pósta,3 whose work was continued by Gyula László4 and Nándor
Fettich.5 After World War II and the political changes that saw Hungary
1 This approach originated from both European romanticism and colonialism, and regarded as
‘Orient’ everything that lay beyond the borders of Christian Europe (Said 2000).
2 In Russian literature there is a clear distinction between ‘Центральная’ and ‘Средняя Азия’,
the latter meaning the area south of the Sir-Darya river, which is mainly characterised by
settled oasis civilisations.
3 Pósta 1905.
4 László 1955.
5 Fettich 1926a, 1–14; Fettich 1937; Fettich 1951.