Texts on the Early Hungarians in the Ǧayhānī tradition (original) (raw)

The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic

The work under review deals with an account of the Magyars in the ninth and tenth centuries, mainly before their arrival and final settlement in their present-day habitat in Central Europe. It is part of a succinct description of the peoples of Eastern Europe which has come down to us in several, slightly differing versions in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. It is generally assumed that they all derive from an Arabic work composed by the wazīr Ǧayhānī in Buḫārā in the Sāmānid Emirate around the beginning of the tenth century, the original of which has not survived. The present work is the English translation of a volume originally published in Hungarian in 2005 (Zimonyi 2005a). It was also published in German in 2006 (Zimonyi 2006). It deals first with the Ǧayhānī tradition, presenting an account of Ǧayhānī's person, his activities, his sources and the works which preserved his account of Eastern Europe. Then follow the versions of the Magyar chapter in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, accompanied by English translations. An interpretation of the contents of the Magyar chapter follows sentence by sentence, with a detailed philological analysis, in essay form, of the questions involved. Finally, the author offers a tentative reconstruction of the original textin English translationwith a