- Ötezer éves elolvasható dzsiroft turul a Turul-dinasztia szülőföldjén -
Hajime Inagaki, a researcher and former curator at Japan’s Miho Museum, has written outstanding studies on the iconography and symbolism of the stone and chlorite vessels of the third-millennium BC Jiroft culture in southeastern Iran. His studies were published under the title The Symbolism of Animal Designs in the Stone Artifacts of Southeastern Iran Bronze Age: Sacred Symbols from Ancient West Asia and Western Central Asia.
Figure 1. The Turul of the Jiroft culture, covered with Lyukó signs, has taken the form of the ancestral hieroglyph of the Székely script. Its reading is: Lyukó ancestor.
In the third part of this series, he presents an image of a Turul bird (1, Fig. 1). Comparable representations of the Turul can also be found in neighbouring cultures (Figs. 2 and 3). These, too, can be read using the signs of Hungarian hieroglyphic writing. This suggests that the readable Turul is a legacy of an ancient cultural community. This is particularly interesting for us Hungarians because our sign system and mythology indicate that we have connections with the wealth of symbols characteristic of this region and with this Turul. Either we drew on this cultural heritage ourselves, or we participated in its creation. (2)
The Turul shown in Figure 1 evokes the Hungarian myth of Emese’s dream. According to the myth, our ancestress Emese was impregnated by a Turul, and the rulers of the House of Árpád descended from her. We cannot ignore the fact that, according to genetic findings, the genome of the House of Árpád, referred to as the Turul dynasty, developed in the neighbouring BMAC culture. In the nearby Indus Valley culture, we also find all three word-signs of the Hungarian state coat of arms—the Árpád stripes, the double cross and the triple mound—among forty signs corresponding to Székely signs (Fig. 5).
The same three word-signs can also be found among the signs of the 7,000–8,000-year-old Halaf culture of Syria. These connections point to eastern links between Hungarian culture and the region 5,000–10,000 years ago.
Figure 2. A composite of Indus Valley signs depicting a Turul bird, based on the work of Ioannis Kenanidis and Evangelos C. Papakitsos, together with the corresponding Székely signs beneath its constituent elements.
The composite in Figure 2 is the script of a ritual invoking a deity. Its reading is: “Shine! Ak, sky, ancestor. You shone.”
Figure 3. An eleventh-century Seljuk bowl bearing a Turul with the ancestral hieroglyph (photographic illustration, centre). On the left, from top to bottom, are the hieroglyphs for radiant, Lyukó, sar, ancestor, and ten. On the right are the corresponding Székely signs for “r”, “ly”, “s”, “ancestor” and “ten”.
The Turul representations above contain a series of Hungarian-identical signs depicting the World Tree. The failure of the recently concluded debate about the World Tree also provides grounds for initiating research into the use of these signs and making use of the findings.
In the following sections, I have attempted to identify the Szabir-Hurrian cultural area that may have been the source of our sign culture, based on the distribution of shared signs. So far, however, this attempt has not produced convincing results because our signs are so widely distributed. The sign system of the 7,000–8,000-year-old Halaf culture may be closest to the ancient culture we are looking for, but this research cannot yet be considered complete. The following parallels show that signs corresponding to Székely signs are abundant in almost every case.
The earlier a culture is, or the more attention we pay to its earlier layers, the more parallels we find. This may mean that these ancient cultures took their signs—and, consequently, the foundations of their worldview, religion and concept of the state—from a prehistoric culture that spoke Hungarian or a language related to Hungarian.
The Jiroft Culture
The Jiroft culture was a highly developed Early Bronze Age culture that flourished in the third millennium BC, approximately 3000–1800 BC, in what is now Kerman Province in southeastern Iran, in the valley of the Halil River.
The culture was discovered only in the early 2000s, after devastating floods in the region washed ancient graves out of the ground and local people began selling large quantities of extraordinarily beautiful archaeological finds illegally. Official excavations were later led by the Iranian archaeologist Youssef Madjidzadeh.
Jiroft’s most distinctive feature is the abundance of luxury vessels and everyday objects carved from soft, dark greenish chlorite stone, also known as steatite or soapstone. Their surfaces are decorated with finely carved reliefs. Favourite motifs include eagles with outstretched wings, palm trees with drooping branches, snakes, leopards and mythological hybrid creatures, such as scorpion-men and bull-men.
Many of the carved recesses were inlaid with coloured gemstones, including lapis lazuli, carnelian and turquoise, as well as white limestone, indicating extraordinary wealth.
Jiroft was not a confederation of nomadic tribes but a large, organised urban civilisation. Its principal centre, the Konar Sandal archaeological site, contains two enormous mounds known as Konar Sandal North and South. Here, archaeologists uncovered one of the world’s largest and oldest mud-brick ziggurats, a pyramid-like platform structure whose base extended for several hundred metres. It served as a centre of religious and administrative life.
Excavations have also yielded elaborate bronze axes, daggers, copper objects and fine gold jewellery, demonstrating a high level of metallurgical expertise.
Because of its geographical position, Jiroft was one of the most important intermediary and trading networks of the Bronze Age world. This is particularly interesting to us because the Uralic language family developed along the settlements of the Bronze Age Seima-Turbino culture, a network associated with metal trading and ore prospecting. Based on the distribution of the Szabir ancestral sentence-sign, this culture was the work of a Szabir-Hurrian population indigenous to the area extending from Syria and southern Anatolia to Elam, and from there as far as Egypt and the Indus Valley.
The Uralic languages may have developed from the Hungarian language, or a language related to Hungarian, spoken by these people.
The Jiroft culture maintained connections with all the major civilisations of its time. To the east, it traded with the Indus Valley civilisation of Harappa, from which it imported carnelian and ivory. To the north, it traded with the BMAC, or Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, from which valuable lapis lazuli arrived. To the west, it was connected with Mesopotamia, Sumer and Elam.
The chlorite vessels carved in Jiroft were status symbols and reached royal tombs and temples in Ur, Uruk, Mari and Susa.
Jiroft had its own advanced administrative system, evidenced by clay tablets found at Konar Sandal. Two parallel writing systems were used: Linear Elamite, which may have recorded economic transactions, and a completely unique, undeciphered geometric script that represented an independent intellectual achievement of the culture.
The discovery of the Jiroft culture fundamentally changed the history of the ancient Near East. It demonstrated that Bronze Age development in the Near East was not confined to the Tigris and Euphrates valleys of Mesopotamia. To their east, on the Iranian plateau, an equally wealthy and spiritually complex civilisation flourished.
The Jiroft culture of the third millennium BC, in the Halil Rud Valley of southeastern Iran, is one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries of the ancient East. Its stone carvings, particularly its vessels made of soft chlorite stone, reveal a distinctive system of beliefs and symbols. Trees and birds of prey with mythological significance occupy a prominent place among its artefacts.
In Jiroft art, the tree represents the World Tree or Tree of Life, connecting the earth with the heavens. Given that the recent debate about the World Tree in our own country ended without a satisfactory result, research into these tree representations—and, above all, their interpretation—would be timely and justified. Without such research, Hungarian prehistory and ethnography remain vulnerable to unreasonable attacks by scholars such as Éva Pócs.
(3) According to archaeologist Youssef Madjidzadeh, eagle representations are closely connected with the later Mesopotamian myth of Etana, in which an eagle helps the king ascend to heaven.
The Szabir-Hurrian Relatives of Jiroft
On the basis of their sign usage and the presumed Szabir-Hurrian language, Göbekli Tepe, Aratta, Halaf and Tepe Yahya can be regarded as related to the Jiroft culture or as parts of it.
- Göbekli Tepe: Based on the three hieroglyphic inscriptions discovered there, Göbekli Tepe left us Hungarian sentences written with Hungarian signs. The occurrence of the Szabir ancestral sentence-sign suggests that the site may have had a Szabir-Hurrian population, a possibility also supported by its geographical proximity to Subartu.
- Aratta: Aratta appears in four major Sumerian epics: Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar and En-suhgir-ana, and two stories about Lugalbanda. Aratta is described as a mountainous country that is difficult to reach and lies beyond seven mountain ranges.
Enmerkar, the king of Uruk, sends an expedition or envoys to Aratta because Uruk lacks precious metals, chlorite stone and gemstones such as lapis lazuli. He requests these materials from the ruler of Aratta so that he can build temples for the Sumerian gods.
According to the myth, the goddess Inanna, the mistress of love and war, originally lived in Aratta. She later abandoned it and moved her seat to Uruk because the Sumerian king pleased her more. In the texts, therefore, Sumer and Aratta are two separate worlds: Sumer becomes the new centre of civilisation and divine favour, while Aratta is a mountainous kingdom rich in raw materials that ultimately submits.
Although the texts do not explicitly state this, several modern researchers, including Youssef Madjidzadeh, the archaeologist who excavated Jiroft, have noted the remarkable respect shown to this distant country in Sumerian sacred narratives.
Sumerian priests and architects requested craftsmen from Aratta to build their holiest temples, including the ziggurat at Eridu. This has led to the suggestion that the foundations of Sumerian religious and architectural culture may have originated in Aratta.
The Sumerian flood stories and the later biblical account, in which Noah’s Ark comes to rest on Mount Ararat, suggest that Mesopotamian civilisation began after people descended from the mountains to the plains. For this reason, many researchers believe that Aratta, the mountainous homeland—whether identified with Jiroft on the Iranian plateau or with Ararat in the Armenian Highlands to the north—survived in the collective memory of the Sumerians as a place of rebirth after the flood.
The Bible also recalls that some of Noah’s descendants settled east of Eden, possibly in the territory of present-day Iran, in Jiroft. It is therefore understandable, within this interpretation, that both the region of Eden and Jiroft to its east might have been associated with the name Aratta.
The Szabir-Hurrian territories may have been called Aratta, a name that has also been associated with Ararat, west of Jiroft. If we interpret the name Aratta in Hungarian as Úr atya (“Lord Father”), however, we may be dealing not with a single mountain but with an ancient concept shared by the inhabitants of the entire region.
- Tepe Yahya: This site is important to us because, thanks to János Makkay, we have previously had an opportunity to study its 6,000-year-old sign system. We were able to establish that its inhabitants used twenty signs corresponding to Székely signs a thousand years before the appearance of the Sumerians. The culture is particularly interesting because some scholars trace the origins of the Sumerians to this region, the Szabir-Hurrian territories.
The relationship between Tepe Yahya and the Jiroft culture is an important element of Bronze Age archaeology. The two sites are geographically very close. Tepe Yahya lies only about 75–90 kilometres west-southwest of Jiroft and the Halil Rud Valley, making close economic, cultural and political interaction between them almost inevitable.
Tepe Yahya became famous in both the ancient world and modern archaeology because workshops for working chlorite stone have been clearly identified at the site. While Jiroft, centred on Konar Sandal, was the region’s monumental royal and religious centre, with its enormous ziggurat, Tepe Yahya functioned as a production and mining centre.
The soft chlorite vessels carved and mined there—the luxury objects known as the international style—were exported through Jiroft’s trading network to Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Persian Gulf.
The motifs on the carvings found in Tepe Yahya’s IVB layer are identical to those on vessels discovered in the Jiroft Valley. If the Tepe Yahya sign system is characterised by twenty signs corresponding to Hungarian signs, this supports the identification of the Jiroft Turul in Figure 1 and its proposed Hungarian connection.
Correspondences Between the Tepe Yahya and Hungarian Sign Systems
The two sites are also connected by the emergence of writing and administration. A significant number of Proto-Elamite administrative clay tablets and seal impressions were found in the IVC archaeological phase at Tepe Yahya, dated to approximately 3100–2800 BC. This early written culture is a direct precursor or parallel to the Linear Elamite inscriptions discovered at Jiroft.
According to archaeologists, Tepe Yahya was an important administrative stop on the trade route connecting Susa, the capital of Elam, with the Jiroft Basin to the east.
Tepe Yahya and Jiroft formed part of the same civilisational fabric. Tepe Yahya was where craftspeople worked the stone and produced the goods, while Jiroft was the sacred and political centre where those goods accumulated and from which power and the use of symbols were coordinated.
Jiroft’s Neighbours
Jiroft, representing a territory with a Szabir-Hurrian population, was not an isolated oasis but one of the Bronze Age world’s major commercial and cultural crossroads. Its vessels and motifs travelled extraordinary distances. Its sign system is consistently and closely connected, in my interpretation, with the signs of Hungarian hieroglyphic writing.
- Sumer: Jiroft is often identified with Aratta, the fabulous and wealthy eastern country mentioned in Sumerian epics. Aratta was the mythical rival of wealthy Uruk and the sacred homeland of precious stones and the goddess Inanna. Modern researchers regard it as a possible cradle of Sumerian cultural and religious traditions. Luxury chlorite vessels carved in Jiroft reached Sumerian temples and royal tombs, including those in the city of Ur.
The presence of signs in Jiroft corresponding to Hungarian signs can be explained, in this interpretation, by the fact that more than twenty such correspondences can also be found among the earliest Sumerian signs (Fig. 4). These signs are connected to the Hungarian sign system not only through their shapes but also through similarities in meaning and phonetic form. Simo Parpola classified Sumerian among the Uralic languages.
Figure 4. Correspondences between early Sumerian writing signs and the Hungarian sign system.
- Elam: Elam lay to the west of the Jiroft cultural area and maintained exceptionally close cultural, linguistic and economic ties with it. Elam occupied what is now southwestern Iran, particularly Khuzestan and Fars provinces, and its principal centres were Susa and Anshan, immediately adjacent to Mesopotamia.
According to a proposal by Youssef Madjidzadeh, the archaeologist who discovered the Jiroft culture, Jiroft was an independent Bronze Age civilisation that served as a geographical and cultural bridge between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley civilisation to the east.
Although the two regions were politically separate, their most fascinating interaction may be found in the history of writing. Some of the clay tablets discovered at Jiroft, at Konar Sandal, bear inscriptions that appear to represent an early form of Linear Elamite. Several researchers have suggested that Elamite writing and language may actually have originated in Jiroft, farther east, and subsequently spread westwards towards Susa. If this is correct, Jiroft may have been one of the earliest roots or cradles of Elamite culture.
Although both peoples may have spoken agglutinative languages and built ziggurats, the French archaeologist Jean Perrot, who investigated both Susa and Jiroft, emphasised that Jiroft’s art, iconography and chlorite vessels reflected a distinctive worldview that could be distinguished from those of both the Sumerians and the classical Elamites.
- The Indus Valley civilisation (Harappa/Meluhha): Jiroft maintained close connections with the Indus Valley culture, which flourished to the east in what is now Pakistan. Excavations at Konar Sandal, the centre of Jiroft, uncovered white marble seals and inscriptions bearing Indus Valley signs and motifs. Jiroft supplied chlorite to the east, while the Indus Valley provided carnelian and other gemstones in exchange.
As in Jiroft, the Indus Valley culture also contains what I identify as Hungarian hieroglyphs. More than forty signs corresponding to Hungarian word-signs were used there, including all three word-signs of the Hungarian state coat of arms (Fig. 5).
Figure 5. Signs in the Indus Valley cultural repertoire that correspond to Hungarian signs, based on the work of Ioannis Kenanidis and Evangelos C. Papakitsos.
- The BMAC (Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex): Active trade also connected Jiroft to the Oxus civilisation to the north, in the territories of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Mythological hybrid creatures, including beings with lion bodies and human heads or dragon-like forms, constitute a shared repertoire of motifs in the two regions.
The BMAC culture is notable not only because, according to the interpretation presented here, the genetic ancestry of the House of Árpád emerged in this region, but also because its sign usage is closely connected with Hungarian sign usage.
For example, a counterpart of our Ten sign, meaning “god”, occurs here.
- Hatti and the Hittites
Figure 6. Hittite (Luwian) and Hungarian sign parallels.
Notes
(1) The Turul is an important figure in the ancient religion, alongside the Miraculous Stag, the world model, the World Tree and representations of deities. These figures can be identified by the presence of signs corresponding to Székely runic characters, which are regarded here as symbols of a Stone Age religion. In the case of the Turul, these signs help distinguish it from other birds of prey, following the principle that “a sacred subject requires a sacred sign”.
(2) Mainstream academic historical linguistics generally classifies Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Hattic, the Indus Valley language(s), possibly Dravidian, and Urartian as members of independent language families or as language isolates. Their direct genetic relationship with Hungarian, a member of the Uralic language family, is not considered methodologically proven.
To this, we may add that the discovery of a new body of source material can justify the development of new explanations. Such a new source group consists of short texts written in Hungarian hieroglyphic script that can be read in Hungarian, together with numerous word-signs corresponding to Hungarian signs among the inscriptions of the period and region. The academic community has not yet paid attention to these, despite their considerable quantity. Until a better explanation is found for the striking Hungarian connections of these short hieroglyphic texts, this remains, in my view, the latest well-founded proposal in the field.
The methods of academic “science” do not, in any case, always deserve our special respect. Serious errors, harmful dogmas and flawed practices can also be found within it.
For example, Simo Parpola, Angela Marcantonio, Otto von Sadovszky, Sándor Csőke and László Matrácz have reached very different conclusions while applying conventional scholarly methods.
- Simo Parpola classified Sumerian, which had long been regarded as a language isolate, among the Ugric languages. He remarked that the relationship had escaped earlier researchers because nobody was interested in the facts. In another case, involving a late medieval badge from Budapest, the surface of an object bearing a Hungarian inscription in runic script was barbarously filed away after the object had mistakenly been identified as Hunnic. The inscription, whose existence had initially been acknowledged when the object was acquired, was subsequently denied.
Such serious methodological errors in academic research justify continuing the investigation and considering new perspectives.
- László Marácz, a Hungarian linguist and associate professor at the University of Amsterdam who lives and works in the Netherlands, is a well-known critic of the theory of Finno-Ugric linguistic kinship. In several works, including his 1995 book Magyar fordulat (Hungarian Turn), he criticised what he regarded as dogmatic assumptions in Hungarian academic linguistics and supported the idea of Hungarian as an ancient or primordial language, along with alternative approaches, including those based on the Czuczor–Fogarasi dictionary.
- Angela Marcantonio (1951–2018) was a professor of historical and Uralic linguistics at Sapienza University of Rome (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”).
Her major work, The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics, published in 2002, reassessed Finno-Ugric studies from a methodological perspective. She concluded that, under the strict rules of historical linguistics, conclusive scientific evidence was lacking to prove that the Uralic languages genuinely formed a family descended from a single common ancestor.
She devoted a separate volume to the Hungarian question, A történeti nyelvészet és a magyar nyelv eredete (Historical Linguistics and the Origin of the Hungarian Language, 2006). She argued that the structural and lexical similarities between Hungarian and the other Finno-Ugric languages were insufficient to prove a genetic relationship, and maintained that political and ideological influences had also shaped the Finno-Ugric model in the nineteenth century.
In her later research, including works published posthumously in 2021, she was strongly interested in the relationship between Hungarian and Turkic languages. She suggested that mainstream academic linguistics had tended to classify the numerous Turkic elements in Hungarian simply as “loanwords”, whereas Hungarian might in fact have much closer structural and historical connections with the Turkic world than with the Uralic one.
Because Marcantonio criticised Uralic theory not as an amateur outsider but as a scholar working from an established Western European university position and using the tools of comparative linguistics, her work provoked heated debate in Hungarian academic circles, including among researchers at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. Nevertheless, she remains one of the most important international points of reference for critics of the Finno-Ugric theory.
The mathematical probability calculations carried out with the assistance of Tibor Nemetz demonstrated, according to the author, that the world’s writing and sign systems developed from a single common Stone Age ancestor. The same, he argues, applies to languages.
Mathematicians have already pointed out that using the word “chance” in science is inappropriate, because chance does not exist. What we call chance is something whose cause we do not know, or do not wish to discuss. In light of this observation, applying the word “chance” to similar words or other linguistic phenomena found in distant languages is, in the author’s view, a serious methodological error.
There is no reason to be overwhelmed by the mistaken conclusions of academic pseudo-science when they are based on a methodology burdened with serious errors.
The linguistic and historical-writing phenomena presented above demand explanation. Science cannot simply ignore them, because its task is to satisfy our curiosity, not to defend a preconceived idea designed to serve a political purpose.
(3) Organising further research and reassessing the situation should be the responsibility of the authorities, institutions and research groups working in the cultural field. Among the editorial offices that organised the initial rounds of the debate, Mandiner has already been swept away by the latest change of government. The editors of Ethnographia and Valóság, however, may still be able to preserve the nation’s honour—if they take action to save it.
References
- Inagaki Hajime: The Symbolism of Animal Designs in the Stone Artifacts of Southeastern Iran Bronze Age: Sacred Symbols from Ancient West Asia and Western Central Asia.
- Ioannis Kenanidis and Evangelos C. Papakitsos (2025): An Estimate of the Indus Valley Language Phonology, Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, August, Quest Journals. DOI: 10.35629/9467-1308171194.
- Varga Géza (2022): An Eleventh-Century Seljuk Bowl with a Turul Bird Bearing the “Ancestor” Hieroglyph.
- Éva Pócs (2023): The World Tree of the Conquering Hungarians in the Light of Researchers’ Illusions, reconstruction, construction, deconstruction. In Dániel Bárdos and Ádám Tamás Tuboly (eds.), Emberarcú tudomány. Áltudományok és összeesküvés-elméletek szorításában, pp. 283–324. Budapest: Typotex Publishing.
- Varga Géza (2024): The Professional Weakness of the Academic Onslaught Responding to Éva Pócs’s Article.
- Varga Géza (2024): Unique Hieroglyphs Depicting the World Tree.
- Varga Géza (2026): A Comparison of Indus Valley and Hungarian Sign Forms.
- Varga Géza (n.d.): The World Tree Debate.
